Mia Pepper on the failed nuclear renaissance in WA

In an important Op Ed piece in the West Australian this week (republished here in the excellent online WA publication The Stringer) anti-nuclear activist and campaigner Mia Pepper of the Conservation Council of WA shines the light on the myths and illusions that have contributed to the failed nuclear renaissance in Western Australia.

The Barnett Government has campaigned hard on its support for a strong uranium industry in WA. Its recent election victory has been praised by the uranium industry lobby, with the Managing Director of Toro Energy claiming that the election result sent a message to the uranium industry that WA is ready and open for business.

But as Mia Pepper points out the risks associated with uranium meeting, particularly the international conditions and the widespread opposition to uranium mining in WA, don't bode well for the industry's prospects in WA

Pepper writes:

Despite the past four years of a pro-uranium government in WA, 42 interested companies, 253 tenements with exploration drilling, and millions of dollars in subsidies, there has not been a single uranium mine approved.

BHP Billiton has sold Yeelirrie WA’s biggest uranium deposit; and dissolved its uranium division.
And the world’s largest uranium miner, Cameco, has put Kintyre, WA’s second biggest uranium deposit, on hold stating that development of the deposit is not economically viable. In early 2013 the company wrote down the value of the Kintyre project by US$168 million, and stated that the uranium price would need to jump from its current low to US$67 lb for the project to break even.

Paladin, a Perth based uranium miner has said the uranium price would need to be even higher at US$85 lb to justify any further investment in the industry, and in February 2013 it wrote down its uranium assets by US$123 million.

Despite this back-pedalling by experienced companies, there is no shortage of uranium hopefuls, like Toro Energy, who remain enthusiastic about the price of uranium recovering, despite the lack of evidence to support their optimism.

Toro Energy, a small company with no mines and no proven experience, is leading the charge with WA’s most advanced uranium proposal – Wiluna – a much smaller deposit than Kintyre or Yeelirrie. As its name suggests, Toro is bullish about pursuing this small deposit despite the shaky economics, the lack of investor interest and fierce public opposition.

There are few grounds to suggest that uranium prices will ever bounce back to the high prices seen in 2007. Long term projections do suggest a more modest recovery, but not to the levels that would make most uranium projects in WA economically viable. The demand for uranium is simply not there.
Uranium is different to other minerals. It pushes moral boundaries, it permanently pollutes country and it contributes to the global nuclear waste problem and proliferation risk. Uranium is unwanted, unnecessary, and uneconomic – altogether a bad way for mining investors to lose money.

How many people were harmed by the Fukushima nuclear disaster?

In an article in Counterpunch titled article Fukushima Nuclear Casualties  Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project writes that researchers must challenge proponents of the nuclear industry who deliberately minimize the harm to humans from the Fukushima nuclear disaster, which he suggests is the worst or second worst nuclear disaster in human history. 

Mangano writes:

 The full tally won’t be known for years, after many scientific studies. But some have rushed to judgment, proclaiming exposures were so small that there will be virtually no harm from Fukushima fallout.

Exactly two years after the Fukushima nuclear disaster, perhaps the most crucial issue to be addressed is how many people were harmed by radioactive emissions.

On the responsibility of researchers Mangano writes: 

It is crucial that researchers don’t wait years before analyzing and presenting data, even though the amount of available information is still modest. To remain silent while allowing the “no harm” mantra to spread would repeat the experiences after Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, and allow perpetration of the myth that meltdowns are harmless. Researchers must be vigilant in pursuing an understanding of what Fukushima did to people – so that all-too-common meltdown will be a thing of the past.

Mangano and Sherwin estimate that in the 14 weeks after  Fukishima there were a 21,851 deaths in US from fallout from the disaster.  Fukushima fallout arrived in the U.S. on March 16, 2011. They calculated the increase in deaths in 122 US cities for the period March  20 to June 25 2011 to be + 3.99 vs +  0.73 for the rest of the year. They used data from the US Centre for Disease Control data on deaths in the 122 cities.

In a recent article  titled Is the Increase in baby Deaths in the US a result of Fukushima Fallout Mangano and Janette Sherwin document the rise in infant deaths  on the West Coast of the USA immediately following the Fukushima disaster. They  document a “bump” in U.S. deaths in the 3-4 months after Fukushima, especially among infants – the same “bump” that occurred after Chernobyl. 

Mangano cites another recent study  in the Open Journal of Pediatrics which showed rising numbers of infants born with an under-active thyroid gland – which is highly sensitive to radiation – on the US West Coast, where Fukushima fallout was greatest.

A previous post on this blog here cited Mangano's earlier article on human casualties in Japan in which he concluded that  even though it will take years before the true extent of casualties are known an early estimate of 38,700 additional unexplained deaths in Japan in just one year must be taken seriously.   

Toro Energy, the terror of a nuclear future and the wisdom of Tsutomo Yamaguchi

Carbonized bodies face-down in the nuclear wasteland

all the Buddhas died,

and never heard what killed them.

Thinking of myself as a phoenix,

cling on until now.

But how painful they have been,

those twenty-four years past.

If there exists a GOD who protects

nuclear-free eternal peace

the blue earth won't perish.

Tsutomu Yamaguch, survivor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki 

(photo courtesy of Perth Now) 

The decision last week by the WA Environmental Protection Authority to approve the development of WA's first uranium mine means that this state is set to become a supplier of uranium to the powerful nuclear energy and nuclear weapons industry.  This is the first time in WA history that a recommendation has been made to support uranium mining and comes four years after the Barnett Government overturned its ban on uranium mining.

Toro Enery's proposal to mine uranium near Wiluna in WA's goldfields region makes a reality of  the Barnett Government's vision of making Western Australia a major supplier of uranium  to the nuclear energy and nuclear armaments industry. The EPA is assessing three other uranium mine applications in WA from BHP Billiton and Canada’s Mega Uranium and Cameco.

 Toro, who has no experience in mining uranium, plans to open-pit mine the Centipede and Lake Way uranium deposits and then truck the uranium oxide concentrate through the outskirts of Kalgoorlie and then to the WA and South Australia border. The mine is expected to produce around 1200 tonnes of uranium oxide concentrate each year over a life of 14 years.

The powder product will then make its way to an Adelaide port, and be shipped out together with other uranium products from existing uranium mines, such as BHP Billiton’s Olympic Dam.

As the WA Greens point out the EPA recommendation requires no specific conditions in terms of safety and radiation management,and sets a dangerously low standard for uranium mines.

Coincidentally, at the moment I am reading Craig Collie's riveting and shocking book Nagasaki: The Massacre of the Innocent and Unknowing, an eye witness history of the destruction and devastation caused by the dropping of the atomic bomb on the Japanese City of Nagasaki in August 1945. Collie's book is a reminder of the terrible reality of one possible "nuclear future".

Collie has crafted  a profound eye witness account- based on interviews, historical records and first person accounts- of the experiences of ordinary people in Nagasaki (and Hiroshima and Japan) at the time. The eye witness accounts  of the destruction and terror caused by the bomb in Nagasaki bomb are harrowing and shocking. They  describe the terrible suffering of ordinary people going about their daily lives.

One of those featured in Collie's book is Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a man who witnessed and survived both atomic bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Yamaguchi who died in 2010, was the only person recognized by the Japanese Government as an official survivor of both atomic bombings.
 

Tsutomu Yamaguchi  was in Hiroshima on a business trip when the first bomb dropped on 6 August 1945 and despite being badly burned he returned to his family in Nagasaki, over 180 miles away, where he arrived on the 8th August. He was in Nagasaki when the second atomic bomb was dropped  on the 9th August.

The effect on Yamaguchi and  his family was considerable. As well as almost total deafness in one ear, his skin wounds were bandaged for 12 years, and his wife was poisoned from the radioactive fall-out. She died in 2008, aged 88, of kidney and liver cancer. Their son, exposed to the Nagasaki radiation at six months old, died in 2005, aged 59.

Yamaguchi became a passionate anti-nuclear campaigner later in is life and gave talks about his experiences and often expressed the hope that nuclear weapons would be abolished: "I can't understand why the world cannot understand the agony of the nuclear bombs. How can they keep developing these weapons?".

He wrote poetry, books and songs about his experiences and appeared in a documentary, Nijuuhibaku, [Twice Bombed, Twice Survived], which was screened at the United Nations in New York in 2006, when he also addressed the UN, urging them to abolish nuclear weapons. A documentary. "Twice Bombed: The Legacy of Tsutomu Yamaguchi" has been made about his experience. 

In the vast Hiroshima
 Blazing and raging
 Dawn breaks and comes my way
 A human raft/
Charried by the river.
All men die
 Piled up and burned
Grease oozing out
 Spilled and spreading on the dirt
 Never to dry up
 If death is to come
 Peacefully my way
 What a pleasure it would be
 When the time to die is near
There is nothing but to die.

Tsutomu Yamaguchi

survivor of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki

10 lessons from the nuclear disasters at Fukishima and Chernobyl

Excellent article from the Miami Herald by David Krieger who is a councilor on the World Future Council and the chair of the executive committee of the International Network of Engineers and Scientists for Global Responsibility.

Here are 10 lessons from the Chernobyl nuclear disaster 25 years ago and the Fukushima disaster this year.

1. Nuclear power is a highly complex, expensive and dangerous way to boil water to create steam to turn turbines.

2. Accidents happen, and the worst-case scenario often turns out to be worse than imagined or planned for.

3. The nuclear industry and its experts cannot plan for every contingency or prevent every disaster.

4. Governments do not effectively regulate the nuclear industry to assure the safety of the public. Regulators of the nuclear industry often come from the nuclear industry itself and tend to be too close to it to regulate it effectively.

5. Hubris, complacency and high-level radiation are a deadly mix. Hubris on the part of the nuclear industry and its government regulators — along with complacency on the part of the public — has led to the creation of vast amounts of high-level radiation that must be guarded from release to the environment for tens of thousands of years.

6. The corporations that run the nuclear power plants are protected from catastrophic economic failure by government limits on liability. If the corporations that own nuclear power plants had to bear the burden of potential financial losses in the event of a catastrophic accident, they would not build the plants because they know the risks are unacceptable. It is only when government limits the liability, as the Price-Anderson Act does in the United States, that companies go ahead and build nuclear power plants. No other private industry is given such liability protection, which leaves the taxpayers on the hook.

7. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in space and will not stop at national borders.

8. Radiation releases from nuclear accidents cannot be contained in time and will adversely affect countless future generations.

9. Nuclear energy — as well as nuclear weapons — and human beings cannot coexist without the risk of future catastrophes. The survivors of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have long known that nuclear weapons and human beings cannot coexist. Fukushima, like Chernobyl before it, makes clear that human beings and nuclear power plants also cannot coexist.

10. The accidents at Fukushima and Chernobyl are a bracing reminder to phase out nuclear energy. We need to move as rapidly as possible to a global energy plan based upon conservation and various forms of renewable energy: solar cells, wind, geothermal, and energy that is extracted from the oceans and the tides and the currents.

Poet Maya Angelou once said, “History, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, but if faced with courage doesn’t need to be lived again.” We need the courage to abandon nuclear power. No one should have to experience the wrenching pain of another Chernobyl or another Fukushima.

Thinking the unthinkable: nuclear catastrophe

"Fukushima is trying to tell us something. We must heed its warning."
Christian Parenti

How many disasters -- either of the ecological or economic varieties -- will it take before people actively seek to reclaim their lost power?
Randall Amster

The worsening nuclear crises in Japan confronts us with the unthinkable- nuclear catastrophe.

The response of the Japanese Government, the private companies that own and run Japan's nuclear plants, the mainstream media around the world and the governments and corporate elite who support and profit from the nuclear industry and nuclear energy have consistently tried to downplay the seriousness of the crises and lied about the risks involved.

But the Japanese people well know the seriousness of the crises they face. They are fleeing as radiation spreads over large parts of the country. They are fleeing Tokyo and the country. The demand for passports is overwhelming.

Listen to them talk and they are angry and terrified. They no longer believe their government or the corporate spokespersons and spin masters who try to downplay the seriousness of the crises at Japan's nuclear plants.

As nuclear radiation reaches the West Coast of the USA Americans are having to confront the implications of  a nuclear catastrophe in light of their long history of nuclear energy.

Randall Amster asks a profound question How many disasters -- either of the ecological or economic varieties -- will it take before people actively seek to reclaim their lost power?

And now, for our troubles, we have a potentially runaway disaster in the making (yet again), which threatens to spread its misery over the hemisphere, conjuring those “ominous clouds” of nuclear toxification in the process. The powers that be will assure us that all is well, but of course the same thing was said about the Gulf oil spill, just to take one recent example. On the question of nuclear dangers in particular, the government has a sordid history of knowingly exposing the populace to grave risks in the name of “national security” or some other oxymoronic invocation.. ....

Despite repeated official declarations that the levels of radiation expected to reach the U.S. are perfectly safe, Physicians for Social Responsibility cautions that “no threshold exists for a ‘safe’ level of exposure to radioactive particles.”

Clearly there is cause for concern about the possible effects of a large-scale nuclear disaster such as the one emerging in Japan, even when the brunt of it is borne thousands of miles away. Radiation can dissipate over time and distance, yet its effects can also linger and become embedded in food and water supplies as well.


Obviously the dangers ahead are real, and that’s true regardless of how the situation in Japan plays out. Those nascent “ominous clouds” wafting in from the west are merely the tangible blowback of lifestyles that have been increasingly out of balance with the life-sustaining capacities of the biosphere. We can only cheat this inherent logic of interconnectivity for so long before the net products of our consumptive ways return the burdens back to us. Someone, somewhere makes those gilded cages for us, and whatever they are exposed to will ultimately become part of our ecology as well. We simply cannot outsource misery and treat toxicity as an externality any longer. How many disasters -- either of the ecological or economic varieties -- will it take before people actively seek to reclaim their lost power?

Christian Parenti has also written about the implications of the catastrophe, particularly for the US.

At press time, the nuclear crisis in Japan is out of control: three reactors are in partial meltdown, two are leaking radiation, at least one pool full of eighty tons of “spent” uranium fuel rods may be burning, two other such pools are getting very hot. Three major explosions have destroyed much of the Fukushima plant’s basic infrastructure, like cranes, monitors and mechanical controls.

Japanese officials have prevaricated, fumbled and have now largely retreated; the distressed plant is just too hot. Their understanding of the crisis is fragmentary. What they tell the public is even more limited. In total desperation they bombed the site with water dropped from helicopters but aborted that plan when radiation exposure proved too dangerous. Radioactive fallout is already sickening people. And this is just the beginning. Fukushima is a grave warning.

.............The message is clear: systems fail; the unthinkable happens.