Beyond Nuclear International
EDF’s fishy behavior
Nuclear plant builder seeks to avoid installing fish deterrent
From Stop Hinkley and Together Against Sizewell C with additional contributions from the Beyond Nuclear International editor
As Hinkley Point C (HPC) power plant is being built in South West England by Électricité de France (EDF), hundreds of thousands of fish living in the Severn estuary, including protected Atlantic salmon, are under threat from the plant’s cooling turbines. The UK Environment Agency (EA) has decided that this wholesale slaughter is perfectly okay.
On August 1, the EA announced that it had removed the requirement to install an acoustic fish deterrent (AFD) at the head of its seawater intake in the Bristol Channel.
“In doing so, the EA has condemned millions of fish and other marine creatures to their fate of impingement, injury and death adding to the many millions of fish fry, fish eggs, small fish and other marine biota that will be killed when entrained in the cooling system of the plant,” said Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) in a press statement. An identical two-reactor EPR project is targeted for the Sizewell nuclear site in Suffolk.
The HPC Pressurized water reactors will need vast amounts of cooling water for their steam power generation. The intake indiscriminately sucks in huge amounts of living creatures, ranging from marine mammals, crustaceans, fish, eggs and their larvae, most of which won’t survive the journey through 3km of pipe work at high pressure to the condenser and the discharge back to the Estuary.
Consequently, EDF was required in its 2013 Development Consent Order to meet a number of conditions, including the installation of an Acoustic Fish Deterrent (AFD) that generates sound waves to deter sound-sensitive fish away from the water intakes. Although EDF originally proposed the installation of the AFD as part of their environmental protection package, they then proposed to avoid it, despite the fact that the Severn Estuary supports up to 110 fish species, with fish nurseries serving the whole of the Bristol Channel and Celtic Sea and an average of 74,000 wintering birds each year.
EDF claimed the AFD would be too costly and impractical. But rather than evaluating other methods to cool the power plant, EDF instead reduced its original estimates of fish losses to suggest the AFD speakers wouldn’t make much difference after all, so that construction should be allowed to continue without them. It claimed the speakers would add a “minimal benefit” to wildlife and its construction would prove a “safety risk to workers”. Bear in mind that the amount of fished killed by Hinkley B station was 2.05 tonnes per day. Hinkley C is likely to kill far more. Apparently, the EA agreed.
Removing this piece of environmental protection will threaten the biodiverse ecosystem of the UK’s largest estuary and designated Special Area of Conservation. It could also set a precedent for future projects like Sizewell nuclear power stations in Suffolk.
Read MorePoisoning the planet
Radioactive water dump is just latest example our reckless destruction of habitat
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Much has been made — and rightly so — about the potential impact on human health and the Japanese fishing industry if Japan moves forward with its proposal to dump 1.2 million cubic meters — that’s 1.3 million tons —of radioactively contaminated water into the Pacific Ocean from the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant site.
Unfortunately, this looks likely to happen sometime this month or next despite the worldwide outcry. But when I say “happen”, that rather suggests a one-off dump. Instead, the discharge of these liquid nuclear wastes could go on for at least 17 years according to the Atomic Energy Society of Japan, but likely longer as decommissioning work at the site is expected to take at least 30-40 years.
It is perfectly right and reasonable that the Japanese fishing community sees its livelihood under threat from this proposal. Indeed, it has already taken a hit, as imports of Japanese fish stock to South Korea were down by 30% in May, before the dumping even began. This was clearly driven by jitters around the on-going safety of Japanese fish supplies once those radioactive discharges get underway.
And Pacific Island nations, along with an international team of scientific experts, have equally decried the plan as premature, unnecessary and in need of far greater confidence and further study before such discharges are executed, if ever.
But there is a greater moral issue here, one that speaks to humankind’s reckless and selfish behavior on planet Earth ever since mechanization and the various so-called industrial revolutions began.
For almost three centuries in the developed world, we have continuously and wantonly destroyed vast areas of precious habitat for numerous species. We have clear cut forests, sliced the tops off mountains, broken open the earth to mine minerals, exploded atomic weapons, spewed mercury and carbon into our air, drilled for oil, sprayed pesticides at will and filled the oceans with plastics, to name just a few environmental atrocities.
The toxic mess these activities leave behind has been dumped into rivers, streams, lakes and oceans, or on the lands where the less influential and powerful amongst us live — in the United States almost always in communities of color or on Native American reservations.
Read MoreRevisiting the “inalienable right”
Austria cautions against nuclear power in the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty
The following is a statement delivered by George-Wilhelm Gallhofer, diplomat at the Austrian Mission to the United Nations, on behalf of the Government of Austria, on 8 August 2023, during the First Session of the Preparatory Committee for the 2025 Review Conference of the Non-Proliferation Treaty in Vienna, Austria.
Austria fully respects the inalienable right of all Parties to the NPT to develop research, production and use of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. At the same time, Austria calls on all States to limit “the further development of the applications of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes” to those applications not raising concerns for possible military applications. This is specifically laid out in Art. IV of the NPT, which simultaneously requires conformity with Article I and II.
In this regard, we see the use of nuclear power differing significantly from any other application of nuclear energy for peaceful purposes. Any expansion of nuclear power necessarily increases the risk of proliferation while applications in health, agriculture, imaging and physical measurement do usually not raise this risk.
For this reason, full scope safeguards and ideally an Additional Protocol must accompany each nuclear program.
Let me also caution against advertising nuclear power as an appropriate source of electricity to combat negative climate effects and answer to the climate crises. The comparatively low CO2 emissions of nuclear power do not compensate for disadvantages inevitably connected to nuclear power. Let me give you three examples:
1) The safe and permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel is still unresolved. To date, not a single repository for such waste is in operation worldwide. Even if such repositories were to become operational in the foreseeable future, today’s knowledge cannot guarantee the safe enclosure required for hundred thousands of years.
2) We cannot completely exclude severe accidents from nuclear power plants involving large and early releases of radionuclides with significant adverse consequences, including contamination even on the territory of other countries.
3) There is only a limited supply of uranium and thorium available and a nuclear “fuel cycle” does not exist so far. If there would be such a cycle, it would trigger more challenges regarding safety, security and safeguards.
This list is by far not exhaustive but underlines my previous point: Austria does not consider nuclear power to be compatible with the concept of sustainable development. In our view, reliance on nuclear power is neither a viable nor a cost-efficient option to combat climate change. Both the polluter-pays principle and the precautionary principle are grossly violated in nuclear power use.
Read MoreThe choice to bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki
Dehumanizing of “others” began but did not end with Japan
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The debate about whether the United States “needed” to drop atomic bombs on Japan will likely be waged indefinitely. Was it to end the war, save American lives, test the bomb or send a message to Stalin?
Amidst all the theories, some of which are disputed and a few disproven, one over-riding motivation remains: racism.
After the bombing of Pearl Harbor, a highly effective propaganda campaign was waged in the US to paint Japanese people as sub-human or worse. The Japanese were depicted as predators and vermin. During reporting from Iwo Jima, Time magazine, pronounced the Japanese people “ignorant” and went on speculate: “Perhaps he is human. Nothing. . . indicates it.”
Today, the posters and rhetoric in circulation then would be considered abhorrent hate speech. But in the 1940s, it instilled enough revulsion in the American public to justify the annihilation of at least 200,000 human beings in Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
And it was only the beginning. After World War II, the newly emergent atomic powers began testing their weapons of annihilation on Indigenous communities far away. The Americans bombed the Marshall Islanders; the British targeted Aboriginal lands in Australia and the islands of Micronesia; the French went to Algeria and then Polynesia; the Soviet Union chose Kazakhstan.
The Marshallese, like the Japanese before them, were characterized as subhuman. They were deliberately experimented on, to see what would happen to human beings living in a highly radioactive environment. This included returning the people of Rongelap to their atoll just three years after they were removed to make way for the enormous and disastrous Castle Bravo test on March 1, 1954. They were returned, because, said, Merril Eisenbud, director of the U.S. Atomic Energy Agency’s health and safety laboratory, “That island is by far the most contaminated place on Earth and it will be very interesting to get a measure of human uptake when people live in a contaminated environment.”
Much of this was celebrated by the US military brass. The Marshallese victims of atomic tests were brutally denigrated as uncivilized, albeit they were, conceded Eisenbud in one his most appalling statements, “more like us than mice”.
Courting controversy
Famed director misses the fact that further spending on nuclear power wastes billions of dollars that should go to renewables
By John Dudley Miller
Nuclear Now, the latest documentary from controversial writer/director Oliver Stone, argues that an undetermined large number of new nuclear power plants must be built quickly to power the world with clean energy, or it will not be possible to halt global warming at 2 degrees Celsius above preindustrial levels by 2050. If we exceed that limit, devastating climate changes will strike, causing killing heat, monster hurricanes, record-setting droughts, and the displacement of millions of people.
Over the years, Stone has drawn criticism for allegedly misstating historical facts in his movies (“Platoon,” “JFK,” “Natural Born Killers”), creating conspiracies where detractors claim there really were none. Appropriately, this new film begins by claiming a conspiracy against nuclear power. It asserts that nuclear has always been criticized unfairly, particularly by the oil industry, which it alleges has long exaggerated the harm that radiation from nuclear power plants causes.
The evidence the documentary presents to support its anti-nuclear conspiracy claim is thin and mixed: It tells viewers that in 1969 the CEO of the Atlantic Richfield oil company donated $200,000 to start Friends of the Earth, which is an anti-nuclear environmental group. The documentary calls that anti-nuclear bias.
But on the other hand, the next year the same man helped finance the first Earth Day, which was not and still is not anti-nuclear. That leaves it ambiguous whether his gift to Friends of the Earth was intended explicitly to oppose nuclear power or merely to support the environment.
Read MoreDo right by the whales
Nuclear sub base expansion ignores precious species; missiles could destroy us all
Background: The U.S. Navy has released a Draft Environmental Assessment for the homeporting of the Columbia Class submarines at Naval Submarine Base (NSB) Kings Bay.
The Navy proposes to establish facilities and functions at NSB Kings Bay to support the homeporting of Columbia Class submarines as replacements for the retiring Ohio Class submarines currently homeported at NSB Kings Bay. Under the Proposed Action, the Navy would construct eight facilities, modify five facilities, and demolish three facilities across three locations on NSB Kings Bay.
Facility changes and development activities would be phased over a period of five years and completed coincident to the first Columbia Class submarines in 2028.
Nuclear Watch South has prepared comments opposing this development. The following article is drawn from their statement and comments recently submitted to the U.S. Navy.
Georgia’s 100 miles of Atlantic Ocean coastline is a globally unique, fertile, and fragile marshland environment of barrier islands, freshwater tidal forests, maritime forests, and endangered longleaf pine forest. Georgia’s vast salt marshes support a staggering diversity of plant and animal life nurturing the eggs and hatchlings of countless sea creatures and providing significant nesting and migration habitat for 200 bird species.
Kings Bay, near the Georgia-Florida state line, is home base for six Trident submarines and deploys 25% of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. A Trident submarine is the most expensive and deadly nuclear weapons system on Earth. The only other nation to possess a similarly powerful system is the United Kingdom, a longtime United States ally. The Trident has been controversial since its inception as it upsets the so-called MAD (Mutually Assured Destruction) power balance, fueling a dangerous and costly international arms race.
The Navy conducted an Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) in 1977 when Kings Bay Naval Submarine Base was first proposed. The EIS was performed to fulfill environmental and public accountability requirements of the newly instituted National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA) of 1969.
In 1979, construction began on Kings Bay. In 1984, it was first discovered that the base had unwittingly intruded upon the (previously unknown and apparently only) birthing waters for the critically endangered North Atlantic right whales in the Cumberland Sound.
Read More
Beyond Nuclear International 