Beyond Nuclear International
Interview: Essais nucléaires en Polynésie
Hinamoeura Cross veut «éduquer et dénucléariser les mémoires»
Par Jean-Tenahe FAATAU, outremers 360°
Du haut de sa trentaine, Hinamoeura Cross se bat contre une leucémie. Une maladie qu’elle porte et qui fait partie de sa vie, depuis ses 25 ans. Comme un électrochoc, cette leucémie a forgé la vocation militantiste de la Polynésienne qui depuis, n’hésite pas à monter aux tribunes internationales pour dénoncer les trente années d’essais nucléaires et leurs conséquences que subit son pays depuis 1966. Dernièrement, Hinamoeura Cross s’est rendue à Vienne à la réunion du Traité d’interdiction des armes nucléaires organisé par l’ICAN. Et alors que la Polynésie commémore ce 2 juillet le premier des 193 essais nucléaires qui déchirèrent son ciel et ses lagons, elle raconte son engagement, sa maladie et son combat pour « éduquer et dénucléariser les mémoires » polynésiennes.
Outremers360: Vous avez participé, à Vienne, à une réunion sur le traité d’interdiction des armes nucléaires. Pouvez-vous nous expliquer quel était le but de cette réunion ?
Hinamoeura Cross: J’ai été invité par ICAN, une organisation internationale qui réunit plusieurs autres organisations et qui défend l’abolition des armes nucléaires. J’ai été plus précisément invité par ICAN France, représenté par Jean-Marie Collin, et en fait son idée, c’était d’avoir une personne qui puisse représenter la Polynésie française, parce que la Polynésie française a été le terrain d’essais nucléaires de 1966 à 1996.
Quand bien même on parle d’abolition des armes nucléaires, ce traité comporte deux articles (les art. 6 et 7) qui exigent que tous les territoires victimes du nucléaire doivent avoir un accompagnement médical adapté. Et c’est en ce sens que pour moi, c’était intéressant en tant que Polynésienne d’y aller et de dire que la France, quand bien même elle n’a pas ratifié le traité, ne respecte pas ces articles 6 et 7, car nous n’avons pas une médecine adaptée à ce que nous avons subi pendant 30 ans.
Effectivement, nous avons un hôpital et deux cliniques sur l’île de Tahiti. Mais encore aujourd’hui, des milliers de Polynésiens doivent se soigner en France, plus précisément à Paris. Et les centaines d’enfants atteints de leucémie y sont soignés. Je connais ici une personne mineure qui se fait soigner à Paris depuis bientôt quatre ans avec sa maman. Je trouve cela scandaleux qu’on n’ait pas un hôpital digne de ce nom, par rapport aux 193 essais nucléaires qui ont eu lieu en Polynésie. Je pense que toutes les personnes atteintes de maladies radio-induites devraient être soignées en Polynésie.
Je suis allé à Vienne pour dire aussi que la France ne reconnaît pas les maladies trans-générationnelles. Pour la France, tous les enfants malades après le 31 décembre 1998, ce n’est pas dû à la radioactivité, alors que dans d’autres pays, c’est une évidence. Personnellement, je m’inscris dans cette trans-générationnalité car ma grand-mère, ma mère et ma tante ont toutes eu un cancer de la thyroïde. Ma tante a même eu un cancer du sein en plus. Moi, je n’avais rien jusqu’à mes 24 ans, puis j’ai découvert que j’avais une leucémie que je combats encore aujourd’hui. Donc je m’inscris aussi par rapport à ce combat en tant que témoin, en tant que Polynésien, mais aussi en tant que victime des essais nucléaires français parce que ma maladie est une maladie radio-induite.
Read MoreAnother close call
Missile strike near Ukrainian nuclear plant raises new fears. But the real question is why is it there at all?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“What is Russia thinking?” asked CNN news anchor Ana Cabrera of her guest, retired Air Force colonel, Cedric Leighton, after reports that Russian missiles landed within 328 yards of the South Ukraine nuclear power plant on September 19.
But here’s the question that should have been asked — but rarely is: why are we still using such a profoundly dangerous technology to generate electricity? What are WE thinking? (We will leave aside here the conflicting accusations about who is shelling the reactors. The point is their very presence in a war zone and all that implies.)
Nothing has brought that risk into sharper focus than the Russian invasion of Ukraine, where 15 operational reactors at four sites are sitting duck targets that could release a radioactive nightmare if struck — whether accidentally or deliberately — by either side as battle rages.
When the invasion began on February 24, it was the closed Chornobyl site — scene of the world’s worst, and most notorious, nuclear power plant disaster in 1986 — that was first occupied. Although none of the four reactors there are operating any longer, there is a significant radioactive waste inventory on site. This was stirred up by Russian forces and their heavy equipment. Soldiers even dug sleeping trenches, apparently unaware of the radiation exposure risks that resulted.
This time around, however, Chornobyl is of lesser concern than the four other nuclear sites in Ukraine, although it remains a potential disaster scene largely due to the irradiated fuel stocks on site.
Read MoreOn the edge of the abyss
Calder Hall was the start of nuclear power. Zaporizhzhia should mark its end
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Personally, I am not a royalist Brit. But I’ve lived long enough in the US to understand the fascination — dare I say obsession — of Americans with the British royal family, much of it falsely romanticized and sugar coated, and of course fodder for addictive dramas and documentaries.
Now there is a new monarch — King Charles III — and one who has not been afraid in the past to speak his mind on all things environmental. We don’t know where Charles stands on nuclear power — and now that he’s king, we likely never will, as his views will be muzzled by protocol and tradition.
However, his mother expressed hers early in her reign when she was just 30 years old. Queen Elizabeth II, who died on September 8 at the age of 96, said then:
“This new power, which has proved itself to be such a terrifying weapon of destruction is harnessed for the first time for the common good of our community.”
Those doubtlessly scripted words, at once naively hopeful and wildly delusional, were spoken on the occasion of the official opening on October 17, 1956, of Calder Hall, the world’s first full-scale commercial nuclear power station.
This misplaced optimism about the benefits of nuclear power followed on from the immortal and equally mistaken pronouncement in 1954 by then Atomic Energy Commission Chairman, Lewis Strauss, who described the future of nuclear energy as “too cheap to meter.”
Queen Elizabeth lived long enough to see that ‘common good’ brutally shattered by the 1979 Three Mile Island nuclear accident; the explosion of Ukraine’s Chornobyl reactor in 1986; and the Fukushima nuclear disaster in 2011. And nuclear power of course turned out to be one of the most expensive ways to boil water.
She has now been spared living through what the rest of us currently fear most — a second nuclear tragedy in Ukraine as fighting persists around the 6-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant, embroiled in the Russia-Ukraine war.
And yet, such horrors have failed to deter most political leaders from clinging to these often deliberate delusions about nuclear power. With the same blindness — and fealty to fossil fuel corporations — that ignored the obvious warnings of climate peril, those who have the power to make change, instead tout similar false mantras about the utility of nuclear power for our ‘common good’.
Read MoreIs Zaporizhzhia safer now?
Cold shutdown reduces risk of disaster at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – but combat around spent fuel still poses a threat
By Najmedin Meshkati, University of Southern California
Energoatom, operator of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in the Ukrainian city of Enerhodar, announced on Sept. 11, 2022, that it was shutting down the last operating reactor of the plant’s six reactors, reactor No. 6. The operators have put the reactor in cold shutdown to minimize the risk of a radiation leak from combat in the area around the nuclear power plant.
The Conversation asked Najmedin Meshkati, a professor and nuclear safety expert at the University of Southern California, to explain cold shutdown, what it means for the safety of the nuclear power plant, and the ongoing risks to the plant’s spent fuel, which is uranium that has been largely but not completely depleted by the fission reaction that drives nuclear power plants.
What does it mean to have a nuclear reactor in cold shutdown?
The fission reaction that generates heat in a nuclear power plant is produced by positioning a number of uranium fuel rods in close proximity. Shutting down a nuclear reactor involves inserting control rods between the fuel rods to stop the fission reaction.
The reactor is then in cooldown mode as the temperature decreases. According to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, once the temperature is below 200 degrees Fahrenheit (93 Celsius) and the reactor coolant system is at atmospheric pressure, the reactor is in cold shutdown.
When the reactor is operating, it requires cooling to absorb the heat and keep the fuel rods from melting together, which would set off a catastrophic chain reaction. When a reactor is in cold shutdown, it no longer needs the same level of circulation. The Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant uses pressurized water reactors.
Death by a thousand red lines
The colossal failure of the 10th NPT Review Conference
By Cesar Jaramillo
The official record will show that Russia tanked the long-delayed and much-anticipated 10th Review Conference of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), that it was the sole NPT state party to block consensus on the outcome document, and that the disagreement was ultimately over references in the text relevant to the ongoing conflict in Ukraine. This is all accurate—but only part of the story.
The profound rifts that divided NPT states parties from the beginning and prevented even modest progress ran much deeper than the predictably contentious Ukrainian conflict. Well before the Russian delegation took the floor during the last session to indicate that it would not endorse the text of the final document, it was abundantly clear that the conference would not meet even modest expectations. Its main accomplishment: the further weakening of the NPT’s credibility as a framework for nuclear abolition.
Unmet expectations
Faced with a convoluted and fragile international security environment, the world needed this Review Conference, already delayed for two years, to make progress. To many states and civil society, progress primarily meant that nuclear-weapon states (NWS) that were party to the treaty (China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, the United States) should commit to implementing concrete disarmament measures and reporting regularly on progress made. Nuclear-armed states, however, had a different purpose.
As they had at previous NPT Review Conferences and Preparatory Committees, NWS attempted to justify the indefinite retention of their arsenals while still professing support for the goal of a world without nuclear weapons. They highlighted the centrality of nuclear deterrence in their security policies, spoke at length of the impossibility of committing to any type of nuclear disarmament schedule, and explained how international security conditions hindered implementation of their disarmament obligations. Seventy-seven years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki, more than 50 years after the entry into force of the NPT, and decades after the end of the Cold War, they continued to insist that undertaking disarmament measures was premature. With each statement, they lost credibility.
A cloud of discontent and frustration descended upon the conference as it neared its end. Earlier, several non-nuclear-weapon states (NNWS) had protested that their proposals were largely ignored in successive drafts of the outcome document, while most concerns of NWS were accommodated. As states stepped forward to announce their intention to support the outcome document, most also lamented its lack of ambition, expressed disappointment at the weakness of the commitments, and acknowledged that they were signing on mainly to preserve the NPT regime.
Read MoreLetting the sun shine in
Ex-Fossil Workers Convert Old Oilfields to Solar Farms After ‘Rapid Upskilling’ in Alberta
Primary Author: Mitchell Beer @mitchellbeer, The Energy Mix
A group of 15 trainees will be heading out into the field to begin converting two Alberta oilfield sites into solar farms, after graduating from a rapid upskilling program for fossil industry and Indigenous workers hosted by Iron & Earth and Medicine Hat College.
The inaugural training took place June 20-27, and the trainees gathered with funders and partners yesterday for a “celebratory course completion event” in Taber, Alberta, Iron & Earth said in a release.
The program included 24 hours of classroom work and 16 hours of hands-on training, with course modules on oilfield decommissioning and solar design and construction.
The two pilot sites near Taber, Alberta include Barnwell, a 1940s oilfield where past oil spills were never cleaned up, and Fincastle, a natural gas site that was drilled in 2008 and operated until 2014 when its owner went bankrupt, said RenuWell Project founder Keith Hirsche. Once the reclamation work is complete, the two sites will generate just over 2,000 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power 280 average Alberta homes or irrigate about 4,750 hectares/11,700 acres of farmland in an average year, the release stated.
That adds up to C$200,000 worth of electricity and 1,100 tonnes of carbon dioxide savings per year, for a project with an expected 25-year lifespan.
“It’s a capacity-building program,” said Iron & Earth Executive Director Luisa Da Silva. “We bring fossil fuel workers and Indigenous workers in to provide them with opportunities to gain real-world skills. By participating in the RenuWell program, workers can immediately see how their skills can be used in a real-world scenario. And there’s lots of opportunity.”
About 10% of the province’s estimated 170,000 abandoned wells are suitable for solar development, said Hirsche, a former fossil industry geoscientist who traces his interest in renewable energy to a family visit to Denmark in 2003. That 10% would translate into about 12,500 hectares/31,000 acres of solar installations, 6,200 megawatts of renewable energy capacity, more than 4.5 million tonnes of annual CO2 savings, $650 million in annual revenue, and 55,900 person-years of employment, at a total up-front cost of $11.1 billion.
Read More
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