Plutonium mess: SC wrangling with DOE over nuclear waste facility, Russia grows angry
RT | April 8, 2016
Despite concessions from the Department of Energy, South Carolina has no intention of dropping its lawsuit against the DOE for failing to build a nuclear waste disposal plant. The delay is also scuppering a deal the US made to treat Russia’s plutonium.
Approved by Congress as far back as 1998, the Savannah River Site’s Mixed Oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility, or MOX, is designed to turn weapons-grade plutonium into power plant reactor fuel. Moscow and Washington signed a deal in 2000 under which 34 tons of nuclear waste would be shipped from Russia and then processed at the facility.
Since then, everything has gone wrong for MOX. The project’s cost was initially estimated at $1.7 billion, but by 2013 it had risen to $7.7. In addition, approximately $5 billion, three times the original estimate, has already been spent since construction began in 2007. South Carolina Senator Lindsey Graham and contractors working on the project say it is currently 70 percent complete.
However, MOX was never favored by the Obama administration. When the US president came to power, he ordered the closure of the proposed facility to make way for an alternative plant in New Mexico, which would use a cheaper processing method known as dilution and disposal. The DOE also maintains that MOX is only 40 percent complete and would cost $1 billion a year to operate.
“We are in a situation where the MOX approach has extreme uncertainties,” Energy Secretary Ernest Moniz told a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee last month. Moniz said previously that the Russian contract could be moved to the New Mexico facility.
The stakes were raised after a clause in the contract between the state and the federal government was activated at the beginning of the year, when the government failed to remove one ton of plutonium from South Carolina as stipulated. The fine for the delay is $1 million per day, with a cap of $100 million.
South Carolina is now lodging a lawsuit to recover the money from the federal budget and make sure that MOX is completed.
The DOE has attempted to compromise by offering to remove 6 tons of plutonium unrelated to the Russian deal, but South Carolina Governor Nikki Haley says the state will not abandon its legal claim, as “the DOE has not lived up to promises made in the past.”
‘Not what we agreed on,’ says Putin
While South Carolina squeezes from one side, Washington is also facing mounting pressure from Russia on the other.
On Thursday, Vladimir Putin voiced Moscow’s growing frustration, both with the delay and the US’ decision to turn to dilution and disposal.
“We signed an agreement that the plutonium will be processed in a certain way, for which facilities would be purpose built,” the Russian President said during a media session. “We have met our commitments, and constructed the necessary facilities. The US has not.”
For Russia, the use of a cheaper processing method constitutes a breach of contract.
“With the dilution and disposal method, the nuclear fuel retains its breakout potential, so it can extracted, processed and weaponized again. That is not what we agreed on,” said Putin, who personally oversaw the signing of the original deal during his first term as the Russian President.
Despite Putin’s unequivocal rhetoric, Washington officials have been maintaining their best poker faces so far.
“Accommodating a new US method would not require renegotiation of the agreement. We will not speculate on Russian intentions behind the reported remarks,” said State Department spokesperson Jennifer Bavisotto on Friday.
Ukraine to boost nuclear energy production despite ageing reactors
RT | March 30, 2016
Australia and Ukraine are about to agree delivery of uranium for Ukrainian nuclear power plants, according to Australia’s Foreign Minister Julie Bishop. But experts question the safety of Ukraine’s plans to increase nuclear energy production.
The contract will be signed before the Nuclear Security Summit in Washington. “Ahead of the Summit I will sign a cooperation agreement to supply uranium to Ukraine for use in power generation. This complements similar agreements Australia has with countries including Canada, China, France, India, Japan, ROK, Russia, the UK and the USA,” Bishop said in a statement.
Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko has said Kiev is going to increase the share nuclear has in the country’s energy sector.
“Just a year ago, nuclear power accounted for 48 percent and was steadily falling. In less than a year we have increased it to 56 percent,” he said in January.
Ukraine is heavily dependent on nuclear energy, with 15 reactors generating more than half of its electricity. Kiev gets most of its nuclear services and nuclear fuel from Russia.
Germany’s Environment Minister Barbara Hendricks has warned Ukraine against expanding nuclear energy, saying it should understand the dangers. Germany is planning to shut down its last nuclear plant by 2022.
According to Ukrainian energy expert Aleksey Pasyuk, the planned service life of the majority of the nuclear power plants in Ukraine is over, but they are still being used. Some of them are running experimental fuel in reactors, he said. Pasyuk added that such experiments could lead to a catastrophe.
“Rather than focus on projects that could produce alternative types of generation, the government has plans to invest in costly projects to support the operation of nuclear power units on the verge of operational capabilities,” Pasyuk told Korrespondent.net.
“Their operation is already an experiment. Furthermore, the South Ukrainian nuclear power plant is using Westinghouse fuel. So many experiments at the same time is too much,” said the expert.
Ukraine’s 1986 Chernobyl meltdown was one of the worst nuclear power plant disasters of all time. More than 300,000 people were evacuated from the town of Pripyat near to the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant because of nuclear contamination.
Honduran protesters clash with police over activist killing
Press TV – March 5, 2016
Fresh protests have broken out in Honduras during a mourning ceremony for an indigenous environmental activist who was recently shot dead after receiving numerous death threats.
More than 1,000 people converged on Friday at the memorial service for renowned environmentalist Berta Caceres as her coffin was turned over to her family at a labor union headquarters.
The ceremony, however, turned into a protest rally, with the participants shouting “Justice!”
Reports say clashes erupted between the protesters and security forces, who intervened to disperse the crowd.
The demo came less than a day after rock-throwing students clashed with riot police at the University of Honduras in the capital Tegucigalpa amid outrage over the government’s failure to protect the high-profile activist who had repeatedly been threatened with assassination.
She was shot dead in the early hours of Thursday at her home in the western town of La Esperanza.
A 45-year-old mother of four, Caceres gained prominence for leading the indigenous Lenca people in a struggle against a hydroelectric dam project that would have flooded a massive region of native lands and cut off water supplies to hundreds of local people.
She continued with her efforts against the project despite receiving numerous death threats, winning the 2015 Goldman Environmental Prize.
The family of Caceres has accused government officials of trying to mask her death as a random murder, insisting that she was assassinated due to her efforts against environmental destruction by major mining and hydroelectric companies.
Meanwhile, the Civic Council of Indigenous and People’s Organization (COPINH), which was founded by Caceres, revealed that other members had received death threats from “hit men” allegedly hired by energy company DESA, whose hydroelectric project is being opposed by the group.
“In the past six months, Berta had been the target of constant, intensifying threats, shots fired on her car, and verbal and written threats from the army, the police, the mayor (in the project site) and DESA,” the COPINH said.
Demonstrators in Guatemala City carry a sign reading “Berta Caceres lives and will flourish” after news of her assassination and in solidarity with Honduran movements on March 3, 2016. Photo:EFE
Radioactive Contamination from Nuclear Waste Site Spreads in Washington
EPA alarmed by uncontrolled exposure risk
Sputnik – 23.02.2016
In November 2015, workers began excavating concrete drums filled with high-level radioactive nuclear waste that had been discarded after uranium fuel fabrication work in the 1960s. The site of the excavation, now a burial ground, is in the notorious town of Hanford, in the state of Washington, near the public highway, and known to be one of the most radioactive areas in North America.
The workers at the burial ground detected specks of highly radioactive material at the site on November 16. With windy weather forecast for the following day, the workers aimed to contain the spread of contamination. The team applied a fixture called “rhino snot,” designed to keep radioactive specks from going airborne.
However, the winds that struck on November 17th were worse than predicted. Gusts to 120 km/h (75 mph), radioactive particulates mixed with airborne dust in the air of the town creating a scenario ripe for nervous and respiratory health danger. Notably, the aerosolized radioactive material, which has a 100 year half-life, can have compound carcinogenic impacts if particles become lodged in the alveoli, the small air sacs in the lungs.
The exposure, according to official reports from the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, predates a November 2015 incident when nearby residents were thought to have been exposed to radioactive particulates over a period beginning summer 2014.
Nonetheless, Bryan Foley, US Department of Energy (DoE) deputy project director for the site, reassured the public, saying that, “The workers and public were not at risk of exposure because of the spread of contamination.” The Washington State Department of Health echoed these assurances, stating that, to date, the spread of contaminated particulates is not a threat to the public, but that concerns persist of a later, more serious, spread of contamination due to the containment failure.
Environmental Protection Agency Hanford program manager, Dennis Faulk, took the DOE assurances to task, noting that, “the waste had high levels of radioactive isotopes.” Faulk questioned the diligence of DOE control measures, noting that high level waste, “does not bind well with grout.” The EPA has stated that the contamination “is a matter that is alarming and requires further investigation and discussion.”
The EPA has given the DoE six weeks to report on the contamination, the environmental factors that led to the event, and both preventative and remedial measures to limit public and environmental danger.
PA seizes Israeli truck loaded with chemical waste
MEMO – February 16, 2016
The Environmental Quality Authority yesterday seized an Israeli truck full of chemical remains heading to illegally unload in occupied Palestinian territories, Quds Press reported.
The truck, which left the Israeli settlement of Karnei Shomron, was seized between the Palestinian villages of Kafr Thulth and Azzun near the West Bank city of Qalqilya.
The truck was to be offloaded near a residential compound in Qalqilya, a statement by the Environmental Quality Authority revealed.
The load included remains of several chemical industries, including paint.
The authority said it handed the truck and driver over to the District Coordination Offices.
A senior official in the authority said a complaint regarding this Israeli violation would be filed to the Secretariat of the Basel Convention, which is in charge of the transport of dangerous goods.
He also said that the Palestinian contractors, who were involved in this issue, would be prosecuted.
Environment expert George Karzam told Quds Press: “The Israeli occupation recently closed a number of its dumps and facilities related to treating solid and chemical waste in the lands occupied in 1948 [Israel] moving them to new sites in the West Bank, mainly in the Jordan Valley.”
This was because of the poisonous substances which were being discarded as well as the odors coming from the dumps, Karzam explained.
Israel has also been putting pressure on the Palestinian Authority to open new waste sites for illegal settlements in the West Bank, he added.
Documents Point to US Base for Polluting Okinawa Water Supply
Sputnik – 11.02.2016
Documents obtained by Muckrock under the Freedom of Information Act have revealed that chemical leaks at the US Kadena Air Base in Okinawa may be the culprit behind the contamination of local drinking water.
Not content with poisoning just their own citizens with contaminated water, it seems that an array of accidents and acts of “vandalism” at the US base over the past 15 years have deployed at least 21,000 liters of fire extinguishing agents — some of which are toxic.
The Okinawa Prefectural Enterprise Bureau announced last month that from February 2014 through November 2015, high levels of toxic Perfluorooctanesulfonate (PFOS) — an ingredient found in many fire extinguishing agents — was found in waterways that supply drinking water to seven municipalities. They reported finding levels of 80 nanograms per liter (ng/L) at its Chatan Purification Plant and 1,320 ng/L in the Dakujaku River.
PFOS have a half-life of up to nine years and is easily absorbed orally and accumulates in the blood, kidneys, and liver.
Last May, a drunk US Marine reportedly activated a fire fighting system, filling a hangar with 1,500 liters of JET-X 2.75 percent — a foam classified by the U.S. government as hazardous, the Japan Times reports. Despite the fact that the agent ran into waterways, officials mistakenly labeled the chemical as nontoxic and the military did not report the incident to residents or the Japanese government.
“Okinawa Prefecture and municipalities near the base should conduct an independent investigation into the leaks. Moreover the Japanese government should require the U.S. military to notify it of any potentially harmful leakage — regardless of the amount. To decide the significance of a leak should not be left up to the U.S. military,” Manabu Sato, a political science professor at Okinawa International University, told the Japan Times.
A Nuclear Story
By Karl Grossman | CounterPunch | February 1, 2016
The class action lawsuit—begun 20 years old—that charges Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) with contaminating neighborhoods adjacent to it will be moving ahead again in New York State Supreme Court this month.
Court action is scheduled for the last week in February. Since it was first brought in 1996, the lawsuit has gone back and forth between the State Supreme Court and the Appellate Division several times, as BNL has fought it.
In July the Appellate Division—the judicial panel over the Supreme Court in New York State —ruled the case can move towards trial. It declared that “the causes of action of the proposed intervenors are all based upon common theories of liability.” In other words, it stated that the plaintiffs could sue for damages.
But, outrageously, the radioactive contamination caused by BNL—documented in the 2008 book “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town” and focused upon by the award-winning 2012 documentary “The Atomic States of America”—can no longer be part of the case.
The argument of lawyers for BNL lawyers was accepted by the Appellate Division which, as it put it in its July decision, ruled that “the nuclear radiation emitted by BNL did not exceed guidelines promulgated by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission.”
Further, the BNL radioactive pollution will not be allowed to be considered despite the federal government in recent years paying out millions of dollars to BNL employees in compensation for their getting cancer after exposure to radioactivity at BNL. In addition, families of those BNL workers who died from cancer after exposure to radioactivity have been paid.
The pay-outs to former workers and their families for cancer from BNL radioactive exposure—what neighbors of the lab are now being barred from litigating about—come under the federal government’s “Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program.”
Instead, the non-employee victims are now being limited in the class action lawsuit to suing for other BNL pollution, largely chemical.
The “Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program” covers not only BNL but the string of U.S. national nuclear laboratories including Los Alamos, Livermore, Oak Ridge labs, as well as federal nuclear facilities including its Savannah River Plant and Hanford.
According to a Power Point presentation given at BNL in 2012 by the U.S. Department of Labor, some $8.2 billion has been set aside under the program for pay-outs, with $111.7 million of that for exposure to radioactivity and consequent cancer at BNL
Joseph B. Frowiss, Sr., based in Rancho Santa Fe, California has been handling many of the cases involving former workers at BNL—and other government nuclear facilities—and their families. As he says on his website—“in the past seven years 1,800 of my clients have received over $300 million and hundreds more are in the pipeline…A diagnosis of one of 23 ‘specified’ cancers and typically 250 work days in a specified timeframe are the basic requirements.”
An “independent claims advocate,” Mr. Frowiss has run full-page advertisements in Long Island newspapers: “Brookhaven National Lab Employees With Cancer,” they are headed. They note that “BNL employees… are likely now eligible for lump sum tax free base awards of $150,000, possibly to $400,000, plus medical benefits.”
The case against BNL by non-employees who are now not being allowed the compensation of BNL employees and their families for exposure from BNL radioactivity originally specified damages caused by BNL radioactivity.
The suit is titled Ozarczuk v. Associated Universities, Inc.
Associated Universities is the entity that managed BNL, at first for the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) which set BNL up in 1947 at Camp Upton, a former Army base on Long Island, to do atomic research and develop civilian uses of nuclear technology.
The AEC was eliminated in 1974 by Congress for having a conflict of interest with its mission of both regulating and at the same time promoting nuclear technology in the United States. Its regulatory function was given to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and promotional activities to a Department of Energy which took over operating BNL and the other federal nuclear labs and the other nuclear facilities.
The defendants in the action—Associated Universities—managed BNL from its start until 1998 when it was fired by the DOE because of widespread contamination at BNL and DOE’s determination that it was a bad overseer of BNL operations. The two nuclear reactors at BNL were found to have, for many years, been leaking radioactive tritium into the underground water table on which Long Island depends for its potable water supply.
Associated Universities—which continues with other activities for the federal government—includes Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Cornell and Johns Hopkins Universities, University of Pennsylvania and University of Rochester and Massachusetts Institute of Technology. DOE replaced Associated Universities in running BNL with a partnership of Stony Brook University on Long Island and Battelle Memorial Institute of Ohio.
The lawsuit is named for Barbara Osarczuk who lived just outside the BNL boundary in North Shirley and developed breast and thyroid cancer that she attributes to BNL pollution.
The lawsuit charges that “actions of the defendant were grossly, recklessly and wantonly negligent and done with an utter disregard for the health, safety, well-being and rights of the plaintiffs.” It further accuses BNL of “failure to observe accepted industry standards in the use, storage and disposal of hazardous and toxic substances” and BNL itself of being “improperly located on top of an underground aquifer which supplies drinking water to [a] large number of persons.”
Initially brought by 21 families, the lawsuit now has 180 families as plaintiffs.
The attorneys representing them are led by two prominent lawyers, A. Craig Purcell of Stony Brook, Long Island, a former president of the Suffolk County Bar Association, and Richard J. Lippes of Buffalo who represented Lois Gibbs and the Love Canal Homeowners Association in landmark litigation. That lawsuit took on the massive contamination in the Love Canal neighborhood of Niagara Falls caused by the Hooker Chemical Company which resulted in widespread health impacts to residents of the area. It led in 1980 to the creation of the federal Superfund program to try clean up high-pollution sites in the United States.
Mr. Purcell said that after the many years of back-and-forth court rulings, the plaintiffs have the judicial go-ahead to sue for “loss of enjoyment of life, diminution of property values and the cost of hooking up to public water.”
Mr. Lippes said that “the lab was supposed to monitor anything escaping from it—and didn’t do it.” The attitude of BNL, he said, was that “every dollar spent for safety or on environmental issues was taking away from research.” The lawsuit “should have been resolved years ago, but there has been intransigence of lab administrators not wanting to be held responsible.”
BNL was designated a high-pollution Superfund site in 1989. The large amounts of radioactive tritium—H30 or radioactive water—were found to have been leaking from BNL’s High Flux Beam Reactor in 1997. That nuclear reactor was closed by the DOE and then a smaller reactor was found to be leaking tritium too and was shut down.
There are now no operating nuclear reactors at BNL.
Still, BNL remains closely connected to nuclear technology. In 2010, BNL set up a new Department of Nuclear Science and Technology with a multi-million dollar yearly budget.
BNL’s announcement at the time quoted Gerald Stokes, its associate director for Global and Regional Solutions, as saying: “BNL’s long involvement and considerable experience in nuclear energy make it a natural place to create such an organization.” On BNL’s website currently is a page headed, “Exploring Nuclear Technologies for Our Energy Future” which discusses the department.
Long Island environmental educator and activist Peter Maniscalco says: “The Brookhaven scientific culture still doesn’t understand the interrelationship between humans and the natural world and the lethal consequences their work in nuclear technology imposes on the population and environment of the world. They still don’t understand that nuclear power is a polluting, deadly technology.”
The book “Welcome to Shirley: A Memoir from an Atomic Town” by Kelly McMasters links widespread cancer in neighboring Shirley to radioactive releases from BNL. She taught in the Columbia University writing program and Graduate School of Journalism and is an assistant professor and director of publishing studies at Hofstra University on Long Island.
Her book tells of how the government sought a nuclear facility “built far from any heavily populated areas.” She writes that the AEC “and the scientists themselves could have taken a look around and realized the…homes and neighborhoods sprouting up around their compound were too close to chance the radioactive nature of the work they were conducting…But none of this happened.”
The book was short-listed by Oprah Winfrey. Her magazine, O, said of it: “A loving, affecting memoir of an American Eden turned toxic.”
“The Atomic States of America,” based on the book, received among its honors a special showing at the Sundance Film Festival. It got good reviews.
The review in Variety noted that Shirley “was in unhappy proximity” to BNL “around which skyrocketing cancer rates were written off as coincidence or an aberrant gene pool.” It noted the appearance in “The Atomic States of America” of Alec Baldwin, “a lifelong Long Islander,” who in the documentary calls BNL scientists “liars and worse.” The review said that “in following McMasters’ work, the film builds a convincing case about cancer and nukes,”
In the first book I wrote about nuclear technology, “Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power,” published in 1980, I reprinted pages from BNL’s safety manual as an example of dangers of radioactivity not being taken seriously at BNL.
The manual advised that people “can live with radiation.”
“Is Radiation Dangerous To You?” it starts. It tells BNL employees: “It can be; but need not be.” It states: “If you wear protective clothing, wash with soap and check your hands and feet with instruments, you are perfectly safe.”
Attorney Purcell said that a “conference date” for Ozarczuk v. Associated Universities, Inc. is scheduled for February 22 in New York State Supreme Court in Riverhead, Long Island and a “court date” for February 25.
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College of New York, is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
Seattle sues Monsanto over chemical contamination of river
RT | January 26, 2016
The City of Seattle is suing Monsanto over allegations that the agrochemical giant polluted the Lower Duwamish River and city drainage pipes, becoming the sixth city to file a lawsuit against the company.
The complaint was filed in federal court on Monday by two firms, Baron & Budd and Gomez Trial Attorneys, on behalf of Seattle. The lawsuit claims that the industrialized Lower Duwamish River was contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs), and that Monsanto continued to produce the chemicals despite knowing about the health and environmental risks that they pose.
“Long after the dangers of PCBs were widely known, Monsanto continued its practice of protecting its business interests at our expense,” City Attorney Pete Holmes said in a statement. “The City intends to hold Monsanto accountable for the damage its product wreaked on our environment.”
Monsanto produced PCBs – chemical compounds used in applications such as paints, caulks, electrical equipment and building materials – in the United States from the early 1930s until the late 1970s, when Congress banned their production over worries about health.
Seattle’s suit contends that Monsanto concealed information that the chemicals were “a global contaminant,” and in fact increased PCB production after the company found out about the extent of their polluting qualities.
PCBs have been detected in 82 percent of drainage pipes in the Lower Duwamish drainage basin. The chemicals are associated with cancer, nervous system illness and reproductive illnesses in humans, and can lead to the destruction of fish habitats.
Seattle is the sixth city to file a suit against Monsanto for PCB contamination, joining the California cities of San Jose, Oakland, Berkeley and San Diego in California, as well as fellow the Washington city of Spokane
The Lower Duwamish is considered an Environmental Protection Agency Superfund site, meaning that it is so polluted that the federal government has stepped in to help with cleanup. The EPA estimates that the final cost of all cleanup efforts in the river will cost $342 million, according to The Stranger.
“The City will incur significant costs to remove PCBs from stormwater and wastewater effluent flowing into the Lower Duwamish, costs that should not be borne by the City or by its taxpayers but by the company that knew its product would cause this contamination,” John Fiske of Gomez Trial Attorneys said in a release.
Great Lakes Nuclear Waste Dump: The Battle Continues
By Joyce Nelson | CounterPunch | January 15, 2016
Opposition to the proposed nuclear waste facility by Lake Huron continues to grow. By the end of 2015, at least 182 communities (representing more than 22 million people) on both sides of the U.S.-Canada border have adopted resolutions opposing the plan by Ontario Power Generation to build a deep geological repository (DGR) for storage of low- and intermediate-level radioactive nuclear waste.
A Canadian federal panel approved the nuclear waste dump in May 2015, accepting testimony that Lake Huron would be large enough to dilute any radioactive pollution that might leak from the DGR.
The immediate outcry on both sides of the border prompted the Conservative government of Stephen Harper to postpone any decision until Dec. 1, 2015, after the Oct. 19 federal election – in which they were booted out of office. The new government of Liberal Justin Trudeau then pushed that decision to March 1, 2016, after a dozen members of Michigan’s congressional delegation urged the new prime minister to deny the construction permits necessary for the storage facility to be built.
Meanwhile, American efforts to engage the International Joint Commision (IJC), which oversees boundary waters’ issues, have come to naught. As the IJC’s Public Information Officer Frank Bevacqua told me by email, both the Canadian and U.S. federal governments would have to ask the IJC to intervene on the issue. “The IJC does not review proposals for site-specific projects [like the DGR] unless asked to do so by both governments,” he said.
That means a final decision on the DGR may reside with a small First Nations community.
First Nation Decision
The proposed DGR would be located on the territory of the Saugeen First Nation, which is in the process of evaluating the proposal. The Saugeen First Nation has a promise from Ontario Power Generation to not proceed without their support. As Saugeen Chief Vernon Roote told Indian Country Today Media Network (ICTMN) in December, “Ontario Power Generation had given us their commitment that they will not proceed unless they have community support. That’s a letter that we have on file.” [1]
Saugeen First Nation negotiator (and former Chief) Randall Kahgee told ICTMN that “we are starting to build some momentum on the community engagement process.” The Saugeen leaders are determining how to gauge the community voice, whether by polling or by vote at public gatherings, and have already held some engagement sessions on the issue. [2]
Randall Kahgee told ICTMN, “For the communities, this is not just about the deep geological repository but also about the nuclear waste problem within our territory. We have always insisted that while this problem is not of our own design, we must be part of shaping the solution. Gone are the days when our people, communities and Nation are left on the outside looking in within our own territory. These are complex issues that will force us to really ask ourselves what does it mean to be stewards of the land. The opportunity to be able to shape the discourse on these matters is both exciting and frightening at the same time.” [3]
The Saugeen First Nation is especially concerned about simply moving the proposed facility into somebody else’s backyard. “We might not be the best of friends when we push nuclear waste on our brothers’ and sisters’ territory,” he told ICTMN.
Nuclear Expansion
The proposal by provincial Crown corporation Ontario Power Generation (OPG) is for at least 7 million cubic feet of nuclear wastes from Ontario nuclear power plants to be buried in chambers drilled into limestone 2,231 feet below the surface and under the Bruce nuclear site at Kincardine, Ontario. The waste to be entombed in the DGR would come from the Bruce, Pickering and Darlington nuclear sites in Ontario – currently home to 18 Candu reactors.
The eight nuclear reactors at the Bruce site (the world’s largest nuclear station) are leased from OPG by a private company called Bruce Power, whose major shareholders/partners include TransCanada Corp. – better known for its tarsands pipeline projects. (TransCanada earns more than one-third of its profits from power-generation.) Bruce Power pays OPG for storage of nuclear wastes, which are currently stored and monitored above-ground on site. [4]
In December, Bruce Power announced that it will invest $13 billion to refurbish the Bruce site, overhauling six of the eight reactors on Lake Huron beginning in 2020. [5] Just weeks later, OPG announced a $12.8 billion refurbishment of four nuclear reactors at Darlington, while extending the life of its ageing Pickering nuclear power plant on Lake Ontario. [6] The Pickering move requires public hearings and approval from the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, but Ontario’s Energy Minister Bob Chiarelli has voiced his approval and touted the nuclear industry as “emissions-free,” while ignoring the issue of nuclear wastes.
OPG, Bruce Power, and the Ontario government are obviously onside with the Canadian Nuclear Association lobby, whose president and CEO John Barrett is using the COP21 Paris Climate Agreement to push for nuclear expansion. In an op-ed for The Globe and Mail, Barrett declared that “it is time to recognize the contribution – current and potential – of nuclear power in curbing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions worldwide,” and he stated that Canada, with its uranium mining and nuclear reactor technology, is “ready to play an international leadership role on climate change.” [7]
Barrett, in turn, is onside with the billionaires now pushing nuclear energy expansion worldwide: Richard Branson (Virgin Group), Peter Thiel (PayPal co-founder), Bill Gates and Paul Allen (Microsoft co-founders), and Jeff Bezos (Amazon) have all endorsed nuclear energy as the solution to climate change. [8] As well, scientists James Hansen, Kerry Emmanuel, Ken Caldeira and Tom Wigley have recently called for building 115 new reactors per year as “the only viable path forward”. [8] They dismiss nuclear waste as “trivial” and claim that there “are technical means to dispose of this small amount of waste safely.”
In that case, the resulting nuclear waste should be stored in their basements and under the billionaires’ mansions, rather than near bodies of water like the Great Lakes, which provide 40 million people with their drinking water.
Footnotes:
[1] Konnie Lemay, “Saugeen Nation May Be Final Word in Nuclear Waste Storage Next to Lake Huron,” Indian Country Today Media Network, December 11, 2015.
[2] Ibid.
[3] Ibid.
[4] Joyce Nelson, “Nuclear Dump Controversy,” Watershed Sentinel, Sept.-Oct., 2015.
[5] Robert Benzie, “Bruce Power to invest $13 billion to refurbish nuclear station on Lake Huron,” Toronto Star, December 3, 2015.
[6] Rob Ferguson, “Ontario Power Generation to spend $12.8 billion refurbishing four Darlington nuclear reactors,” Toronto Star, January 11, 2016.
[7] John Barrett, “Nuclear power is key to decarbonization, and Canada can lead the way,” The Globe and Mail, December 16, 2015.
[8] Emily Schwartz Greco, “A Big Fat Radioactive Lie,” Other words.org, December 4, 2015.
Joyce Nelson is an award-winning Canadian freelance writer/researcher working on her sixth book.
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Blood Passover, English Version
The Bloody Satanic Sacrifice Rituals of the Jewish Race
Ariel Toaff | 2016
The following translation was performed free of charge to protest an injustice: the destruction by the ADL of Ariel Toaff’s Blood Passover on Jewish ritual murder. The author is the son of the Chief Rabbi of Rome, and a professor of Jewish Renaissance and Medieval History at Bar-Ilan University in Israel, just outside Tel Aviv.
Dr. Toaff is uniquely qualified to write this book, being thoroughly familiar with the derivative literature in English, French, German and Italian, as well as the original documentary sources in Latin, Medieval Italian, Hebrew and Yiddish. This is not something he worked on in secret. On the contrary, he worked on it openly with his university students and colleagues in Israel for several years; one of his students was even going to publish a paper on the subject. The author is extremely careful about what he says, and his conclusions must be taken seriously. It reads like a detective story.
If it had been published in Israel, in Hebrew, no one would have cared. There are large bodies of literature in Hebrew that Jews do not wish Gentiles to know about. But Dr. Toaff’s announcement of its publication in Italy, in Italian, raised a worldwide firestorm of fury.
Under unbearable pressure, the book was withdrawn from publication. Come in out of the darkness, and strike a blow for the light.
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- Decrypted Data From UAV Shot Down in Novgorod Region Handed Over to US Side
- Russia treating latest drone attack on the Putin residence as more sinister than just another terrorist attack
- Two dozen killed in Ukrainian strike on Russian New Year’s celebration – governor
- Did Netanyahu just ask Trump for another war — and get it?
- As Israel bans aid orgs in Gaza, notorious mercenary firm seeks “Targeter”
- The Bari Weiss Playbook: How a Zionist Operative Conquered American Media
- How Intelligence, Politics, and Foreign Interests Shaped America’s Religious Movements
- If Americans Knew
- Counting the cost of another year of genocide in Gaza – Not a ceasefire Day 83
- Tikvah Fund Secures $10.4M Grant From Trump, Pushes for Censorship to Advance Zionism
- Did Netanyahu just ask Trump for another war — and get it?
- Israel suspends operations of multiple humanitarian organizations in Gaza, including Doctors Without Borders
- Cold kills another Palestinian baby in Gaza as Israel continues to block shelter aid
- AIPAC Is Retreating From Endorsements and Election Spending. It Won’t Give Up Its Influence.
- Gaza health officials report outbreaks of water-borne illnesses, flu – Not a ceasefire Day 82
- TCN Warns – “ISRAEL FIRST: U.S. May Attack Iran Again”
- Hamas calls on Israel to allow impartial investigation into 7 October attacks
- Indiegogo Withholds $51K In Donations From MintPress in Financial Censorship Crackdown
- No Tricks Zone
- Welcome To 2026: Europe Laying Groundwork For Climate Science Censorship!
- New Study Finds A Higher Rate Of Global Warming From 1899-1940 Than From 1983-2024
- Meteorologist Dr. Ryan Maue Warns “Germany Won’t Make It” If Winter Turns Severe
- Merry Christmas Everybody!
- Two More New Studies Show The Southern Ocean And Antarctica Were Warmer In The 1970s
- Der Spiegel Caught Making Up Reports About Conservative America (Again)
- New Study: 8000 Years Ago Relative Sea Level Was 30 Meters Higher Than Today Across East Antarctica
- The Wind Energy Paradox: “Why More Wind Turbines Don’t Always Mean More Power”
- New Study Reopens Questions About Our Ability To Meaningfully Assess Global Mean Temperature
- Dialing Back The Panic: German Physics Prof Sees No Evidence Of Climate Tipping Points!
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