Template:Weekly Top 100 Energy Stories
This template can be included to other pages of the wiki. If you update this page make sure that you use the same formattings as done before and that you add the replaced contents to the Stories' archive.
March 1st - 7th 2010
Nuclear quagmire!!! The last week of news continues to escalate. Its taken several hours more than usual to put this newsletter together. Obama’s change wasn’t what a whole lot of us were expecting. So the fallout continues to escalate worldwide as both Russia and Canada have announced new economic investment plans. The volume of news continues to grow and in a whole lot of unexpected directions.
Let’s start with Mordechai Vanunu, official refusal to accept a Nobel Peace prize. Follow that up with Nuclaire Sortir release of documents that threatens to blow the lid off of EDF/Areva’s EPR reactor design. The U.S. flip-flop on letting Pakistan into their version of the new nuclear club. The Paris nuclear conference. Sweden’s concern about the safety of their new repository geology, a new earthquake faultline near PI’s heated debate over Bataan. How dare I even mention the fact that Chile was in the middle of promoting the development of reactors just as the largest earthquake to hit the planet in a very long time hit! New opposition to the UK’s nuclear push emerged in the form of a biography by the former head of BFNL. Then there was the astounding news out of Palestine about how the U.S. lost three armed nuclear weapons during the Gulf war and continues to hide the story from the world. I’m not even gonna get into news out of Japan… Poland get’s financial support to start construction of reactors. South Africa, which recently abandoned its PBMR reactor project is now pushing new reactors down the throats of a pristine coastal community. Its not every week that so many major issues hit around the world! And oh my favorite in the bunch, There been a tripling of cancers near the community of Fallujah Iraq, and the media is starting to actually cover the story a bit that broke months ago. But wait…
The DOE finally filed for the formal closure of Yucca Mountain! That was followed days later with Washington state dems screaming where’s the science at Chu! I can imagine how Steve was laughing backstage after failing to present Nevada’s version of the science vs. DOE’s. A lot of interesting news out of Georgia. NPR did an excellent tech talk show with Lester Brown on Friday. It seems at least a couple of people finally got some of the Yucca story right. Washington was given $55 million by a federal court over the Yucca closure. But the idea of drilling super deep bore holes and dropping spent fuel down kind of sounds like a new way to seed volcanic activity to me… We are now seeing pro-nuclear conspiracy stories out there that there are, nor ever has been any danger of nuclear waste(I had to post it). Then over to one of the other favorite dumping grounds of the nuclear industry, Utah. The first of 16 million tons of the Moab tailings pile has been moved away from the Colorado River. A report by HEAL and IEER point to the likelyhood that Energy Solutions may have taken in wastes that were not allowed at their Clive facility. Thus, we are watching the fifth major Utah battle to be won in the last decade to happen there, as the DU waste dumping issue is now red hot. Speaking of Energy Solutions, they are having a bit of a hard time these days as a serious fire at their Tennessee facility finally made the news.
Then we have the death of a DOE worker at Hanford (not radiation), new plans to help workers get help, a push to force cooling towers at Oyster Creek, NJ, while California is considering blocking all seawater cooling for nukes or any other facility. Vermont’s IOU’s Entergy continues to make all kinds of bribes in its attempts to spin off a new nuclera company in New York, as a poll shows that 70% of Vermont responders don’t like the nuke anymore. Nationally a poll shows the public worried about waste, with numbers showing a drop in support. Attempts to reverse Minnesota’s nuclear moratorium died in committee. And oh, my has there been an explosion of op-ed pieces from P-Moore and more.
I can’t sumarize everything that happened, but one article jumped out at me and that was a story out of DOE’s Oak Ridge blog about how they are working on ways to streamline the NRC’s license process. What the hell!
Almost too much for anyone to even wrap their heads around this time. Triage is a tough to do!
The Weekly Top 100 Energy Stories are provided by abalone AT energy-net.org[1]
- ↑ For protection against automatical email address robots searching for addresses to send spam to them this email address has been made unreadable for them. To get a correct mail address you have to displace "AT" by the @-symbol.
