http://globalpublicsquare.blogs.cnn.com/2013/08/30/why-fukushima-is-worse-than-you-think/

August 30th, 2013

Why Fukushima is worse than you think

By Mycle Schneider, Special to CNN

Editor’s note: Mycle Schneider is an independent international consultant on energy and nuclear policy based in Paris. He is the coordinator and lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report. The views expressed are his own.

<snip>

Both comments are to the point, and although many inside and outside Japan surely did not realize how bad the March 11, 2011 disaster was – and how bad it could get – it seems clear now that we have been misled about the scale of the problem confronting Japan. The country needs international help – and quickly.

<snip>

TEPCO’s inability to stabilize the site, and the dramatic failure of the Japanese government, now majority owner of TEPCO, should come as no surprise. Indeed, so far, the Nuclear Regulation Authority has seemed too busy trying to help restart the country’s stranded reactors to put adequate attention on stabilizing the Fukushima site.

The fact is that the Fukushima Daiichi site represents challenges of unprecedented complexity. Maintaining the cooling of three molten reactor cores and five spent fuel pools in a disaster zone is a job of titanic proportions. That is why two weeks after the crisis first erupted I suggested the creation of an International Task Force Fukushima (ITFF) that would pull together the world’s experts in key areas of concern: nuclear physics and engineering, core cooling, water management, spent fuel and radioactive waste storage, building integrity and radiation protection.

Two and a half years on, the need for such a taskforce has only grown.

<snip>

Will the call for such a taskforce gain any traction? I have presented the basic concept to safety authorities of several countries, acting and former ambassadors, ministers and the European Commission. But while some officials have pointed to some ongoing limited bilateral assistance, so far, the main stumbling block appears to be the “pattern of denial” in Japan, a problem that has affected not only TEPCO, but apparently the Japanese government and the safety authorities as well.

<snip>

http://en.ria.ru/world/20130829/183040436/S-300-Missiles-for-Iran-Dismantled-Scrapped---Manufacturer.html

S-300 Missiles for Iran ‘Dismantled, Scrapped' – Manufacturer

29/08/2013


S-300 © RIA Novosti. Valeri Melnikov

ZHUKOVSKY, August 29 (RIA Novosti) – The S-300 advanced air defense missile systems that Russia refused to deliver to Iran have now been completely dismantled and scrapped, the CEO of the company that built them said Thursday.

“The equipment that was to have been delivered to Iran is no more,” Almaz-Antey Corporation’s CEO Vladislav Menshchikov said. “We have dismantled it completely. Some elements, which could be used, have been used. Some have been scrapped.”

<snip>

Russia signed a deal in 2007 to provide Iran four S-300 batteries. Russia annulled the contract in 2010 due to concerns over its nuclear program. Iran filed a $4 billion lawsuit for compensation over the failed deal, which is pending review in an international arbitration court in Geneva.

<snip>

S-300 is a family of air defense missile systems capable of engaging aerial targets from helicopters to cruise and ballistic missiles. The more capable variants of the system would be capable of engaging aircraft far inside the airspace of neighboring states to Iran, according to analysts.

<snip>

http://spc.agu.org/2013/lessons-of-volcanic-eruptions/

Lessons of Volcanic Eruptions
August 29, 2013


The side of Eyjafjallajökull during a field trip for the AGU Chapman Conference on Volcanism and the Atmosphere, 13 June 2012. Photo by Alan Robock.

Volcanic eruptions are the most important natural cause of climate change, and they teach us many lessons about the climate system. The cooling Earth experiences for a couple years after a big volcanic eruption, like that of Mt. Pinatubo in 1991, helps us calibrate the amount of warming we will suffer in the future from continued human emissions of greenhouse gases, such as carbon dioxide. By filtering out the episodic responses to large eruptions, or the cumulative impacts of small eruptions, such as those of the past decade, the global warming signal becomes clear.

Large volcanic eruptions create a cloud of sulfuric acid droplets in the stratosphere, the layer of the atmosphere above the troposphere where we live. Over the next couple years the sulfur falls out of the atmosphere. The layers of acid that are preserved in the Greenland and Antarctic ice caps serve as a record of past eruptions, and allow us to understand how and when these eruptions cooled Earth. In fact, we now understand that a series of large eruptions near the end of the 13th Century initiated the Little Ice Age, which only ended when humans started using the atmosphere as a sewer for the carbon dioxide resulting from burning coal, oil, and natural gas from the Industrial Revolution.

Noticing the cooling that occurs naturally from volcanic clouds, some have suggested that society create such a cloud permanently, with airplanes or hoses or artillery, to cool Earth and reduce or reverse global warming. This idea is called geoengineering or solar radiation management. While volcanic eruptions show that a stratospheric cloud would indeed cool the surface, reducing ice melt and sea level rise, they also make clear that a stratospheric aerosol cloud would produce ozone depletion, allowing more harmful ultraviolet radiation at the surface, reduce summer monsoon precipitation and even produce drought, produce rapid warming if geoengineering were suddenly stopped, reduce solar power, damage airplanes flying in the stratosphere, and degrade surface astronomical observations and remote sensing. This raises many issues about the wisdom of geoengineering, and there are many other reasons why geoengineering may be a bad idea, including that it could be used as a weapon or produce international conflict if different nations cannot agree on where to set the planetary thermostat.

There is another way that humans could produce a cloud in the stratosphere, made of black soot particles. Following a nuclear war, fires in targeted cities and industrial areas would pump smoke into the stratosphere, where winds would spread it around the world, remain for more than a decade, destroy ozone, and make it dark, cold, and dry at Earth’s surface, killing crops and producing famine. The use of only 100 nuclear weapons of the size that destroyed Hiroshima in 1945 could produce climate change unprecedented in recorded human history, which could produce significant decreases of agriculture in the main grain-growing regions of the world. Nuclear winter theory should never be tested in the real world, but volcanic eruptions are a close analog of all these impacts, validating climate model calculations of the effects of nuclear war.

Humans can do nothing to prevent future volcanic eruptions. But we can slow global warming and prevent nuclear war. We know that a combination of conservation, more efficient use of energy, and rapid shift to solar and wind power will avert the worst future impacts of global warming. While the world has banned cluster munitions, land mines, biological weapons, and chemical weapons, the worst weapons of mass destruction, nuclear weapons, are still not banned. They cannot be used, they do not serve as a deterrent, and their use would be suicide. We can rid the world of nuclear weapons so we have the luxury of working to address global warming without the fear of global catastrophe. For more information, please visit my website and join the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.

-Alan Robock is a Distinguished Professor of Climatology at Rutgers University, who has worked for his entire career on the climatic effects of volcanic eruptions, global warming, and nuclear weapons. He served as a Peace Corps Volunteer in the Philippines in 1970-1972 and as a Congressional Science Fellow in 1986-1987. He is a Fellow of the AGU and former President of the AGU Atmospheric Sciences Section.

Read more about this topic in Alan Robock’s recent article in Eos.

Aug 2012

bananas
Re: Re: Petition to unlock a thread: UPDATE: Japan C...

Mail Message
Try this link, works for me and I don't have a sunscription, seems to be the exact same text:
http://www.nasdaq.com/article/japan-can-eliminate-nuclear-power-by-2030-20120807-00476

> Hi, bananas,
>
> And I'm sorry, don't much like locking threads, but the hosts agreed on this one. Is there another source that you can use? It doesn't do much good if members can't read it, and that includes the LBN hosts. Meanwhile, I'll pass your request along to the other hosts and see what they say. Thanks for contacting me about this...
>
> Rhiannon
>
> > UPDATE: Japan Can Eliminate Nuclear Power By 2030 - METI Minister
> > http://www.democraticunderground.com/1014186971
> >
> > Reason:
> >
> > "Locking, sorry, but this is a feature story, more analysis than breaking news.
> > And folks here have to have a WSJ subscription to read it. "
> >
> > This is a major announcement by the head of METI and is big news.
> > The fact that it's behind a paywall doesn't change the fact that it's major news.
> >
> > I don't have a WSJ subcription but was able to read it in full because WSJ lets you read any article linked from http://news.google.com
> > The WSJ site checks the referrer header.
> >
> > The New York Times only allows a few articles per month without subscription, is the NYT off-topic for LBN as well?
> >
> >

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201308280071

Experts urge Japan to break away from ‘failed’ nuclear reprocessing program

August 28, 2013

By YASUJI NAGAI/ Senior Staff Writer

In a proposal submitted to The Asahi Shimbun, researchers at an international group of nuclear experts outlined steps they say Japan must take to break away from its “failed” nuclear fuel recycling policy.

Masafumi Takubo and Frank von Hippel of the International Panel on Fissile Materials noted that Japan currently has 44 tons of already separated plutonium, enough to make more than 5,000 Nagasaki-type atomic bombs, while it has no clear path toward disposal.

In the proposal titled, “Ending plutonium separation: An alternative approach to managing Japan’s spent nuclear fuel,” they said Japan’s reprocessing policy has “insignificant” resource conservation and radioactive waste management benefits.

It is also “becoming increasingly dysfunctional, dangerous and costly,” since weapon-useable separated plutonium is a “magnet for would-be nuclear terrorists,” the authors said. Japan’s program is also setting an ill example for countries interested in nuclear-weapon options, they added.

<snip>

The full-text of the proposal is available at: http://www.asahi.com/special/nuclear_peace/academic/August2013_english.pdf

http://ajw.asahi.com/article/behind_news/politics/AJ201308280071

Experts urge Japan to break away from ‘failed’ nuclear reprocessing program

August 28, 2013

By YASUJI NAGAI/ Senior Staff Writer

In a proposal submitted to The Asahi Shimbun, researchers at an international group of nuclear experts outlined steps they say Japan must take to break away from its “failed” nuclear fuel recycling policy.

Masafumi Takubo and Frank von Hippel of the International Panel on Fissile Materials noted that Japan currently has 44 tons of already separated plutonium, enough to make more than 5,000 Nagasaki-type atomic bombs, while it has no clear path toward disposal.

In the proposal titled, “Ending plutonium separation: An alternative approach to managing Japan’s spent nuclear fuel,” they said Japan’s reprocessing policy has “insignificant” resource conservation and radioactive waste management benefits.

It is also “becoming increasingly dysfunctional, dangerous and costly,” since weapon-useable separated plutonium is a “magnet for would-be nuclear terrorists,” the authors said. Japan’s program is also setting an ill example for countries interested in nuclear-weapon options, they added.

<snip>

The full-text of the proposal is available at: http://www.asahi.com/special/nuclear_peace/academic/August2013_english.pdf