Apocalypse Now and Next: From Gulf Spill to Nuke Disaster
We just ignited a disaster beyond our technical control. Why are we on the brink of doing it again? Like Deepwater Horizon and Fermi, these new nukes could ignite disasters beyond our technological control—and our worst nightmares. Like BP, their builders would enjoy financial liability limits dwarfed by damage they could do. After 50 years, this industry can’t get private financing, can’t get private liability insurance and has no solution for its wastes. The Gulf gusher bears the simple lesson that technologies that require liability limits will rapidly exceed them, and must not be deployed. No US nuclear utility has sufficient capital resources to cover the damages from a reactor disaster, which is one reason taxpayers are targeted as the ultimate underwriters. By all accounts, despite the horrors of the Gulf, the administration still wants legislation that will expand deepwater drilling and atomic technologies that are simply beyond our control but that fund apparently unstoppable dividends for corporations like BP.
See http://www.alternet.org/environment/147162.
Dark Water
Uranium mining is scarring the landscape, harming the planet and posing dire health consequences in communities throughout the Southwest of the United States.
See the six minute video at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=640Gef94dVE.
Tenner Films
A unique documentary film project exploring the personal stories and social impacts of the world’s most controversial energy source – nuclear power.
See http://www.tennerfilms.com/.
Who wants nuclear power? Not Wales, or Scotland…they want renewables
The Welsh Assembly Government’s new Energy Policy Statement ‘A Low Carbon Revolution’, sets out an approach to accelerating the transition to a low carbon energy economy in Wales, focusing on efficiency measures and the use of indigenous renewable forms of energy such as marine, wind, solar and biomass. It claims that by 2025 around 40% of electricity in Wales could come from marine sources and a third from wind.
See http://environmentalresearchweb.org/blog/2010/06/who-wants-nuclear-power-part-1.html.
Church in Canada Calls for Ban on Nuclear Wastes
The United Church, Saskatchewan’s largest religious organization, has entered the debate on nuclear wastes. Its annual conference May 28th in Moose Jaw passed a resolution “prohibiting the transport or storage of high level nuclear waste across Saskatchewan”. This comes when the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) is looking for a “willing community” to take nuclear wastes; which seems orchestrated, as last year the government-appointed Uranium Development Partnership (UDP) recommended the same thing.
See http://oen.ca/index.php?mact=News,cntnt01,detail,0&cntnt01articleid=235&cntnt01dateformat=%25b%20%25d%2C%20%25Y&cntnt01returnid=75.
Support grows for Australian unions who have banned members from working in the nuclear industry
Largely unreported in the British press, the Victorian branch of the ETU has given its full support to the Queensland and the Northern Territories branches’ decision to ban members from working in uranium mines, nuclear power plants or any part of the nuclear fuel cycle. The Electrical Trades Union (ETU) says other unions have expressed strong support for the campaign against uranium, which it has labelled the “new asbestos” of the workplace. Dr Caldicott said Australia’s uranium export industry meant the nation was “selling cancer and we’re selling nuclear weapons.”
See http://www.getnoticedonline.co.uk/news/general-news/radiation-free-lakeland-backs-aussie-unions-nuclear-stance.html.