Article: Asahi WebRonza (Japan): After the Paris-Agreement: Corporate Meltdown in the Nuclear Industry

The SaskParty Government of Saskatchewan just better give their heads a shake. Instead of going full out mining uranium which will leave a radiotoxic legacy for the northern people to bear, drop it and do the sensible things to ensure we actually have a future.

“The international nuclear industry had great hopes in the 21st Conference of the Parties to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change. The COP21 labelled Paris event in December 2015 was thought to boost the profile as low-carbon technology of an industry in great difficulty. It did not happen. Only a few months later, some of the largest nuclear companies in the world are facing a meltdown on the stock market.”

(Full article here)

Article: Why nuclear power will never supply the world’s energy needs

“…global power consumption today is about 15 terawatts (TW). Currently, the global nuclear power supply capacity is only 375 gigawatts (GW). In order to examine the large-scale limits of nuclear power, Abbott estimates that to supply 15 TW with nuclear only, we would need about 15,000 nuclear reactors. In hisanalysis, Abbott explores the consequences of building, operating, and decommissioning 15,000 reactors on the Earth, looking at factors such as the amount of land required, radioactive waste, accident rate, risk of proliferation into weapons, uranium abundance and extraction, and the exotic metals used to build the reactors themselves.”

(Full article here)

pdf format Prayer Paddle4

Please feel free to print/distribute the above poster, as well as the pamphlet below.

 

 

Article: IRS targets uranium producer Cameco as CRA tax dispute intensifies

“The U.S. Internal Revenue Service is demanding back taxes from Cameco Corp., adding to the miner’s ever-growing tax woes ahead of a crucial trial expected next year.

The IRS believes the revenue reported by Cameco’s Swiss subsidiary, Cameco Europe Ltd., is inadequate and that a portion should be taxed back in the U.S. at a much higher level. The claim is similar to the one made by the Canada Revenue
xAgency (CRA), which is trying to shift Cameco Europe’s revenue to Canada and apply a debilitating collection of back taxes and penalties.”

(Full article here)

 

Article: Germany to make nuclear power operators pay for nuclear waste repository

“This week, German Environment Minister Peter Altmaier was interviewed by N24 television, when he said that German nuclear power operators will be forced to bear the estimated $2.6 billion dollar costs of dealing with the nuclear waste they created.  “The cost of dealing with nuclear waste will be borne by those who produced it,” Altmaier said.

Germany has already spent more than $1.3 billion dollars of taxpayer money at the Gorleben site since the 1980s, where it once studied the benefits and risks of long term storage.  Altmaier said that he had pledged no further nuclear waste will be transported to Gorleben “while the search goes on,” and that Germany “will do everything to ensure that no German nuclear transport goes outside the country.””

(Full article here)

Article: Once Upon a Mine: The Legacy of Uranium on the Navajo Nation

“Decades of uranium mining have dotted the landscape across the Navajo Nation with piles of contaminated mine waste. The EPA has mapped 521 abandoned uranium mines on the reservation, ranging from small holes dug by a single prospector into the side of a mesa to large commercial mining operations.1 The Navajo people did not have a word for “radioactivity” when mining outfits looking for vanadium2 and uranium3 began moving onto their land in the 1940s, and they did not understand that radiation could be dangerous. They were not told that the men who worked in the mines were breathing carcinogenic radon gas and showering in radioactive water, nor that the women washing their husbands’ work clothes could spread radionuclides to the rest of the family’s laundry.”

(Full article here)

In Saskatchewan where physicians have been advocating for a base-line health study for decades without success we are facing the same soaring increases in cancer and non-HIV AIDS, like lupus. Both the government and the uranium industry have known of the health impacts since the 50’s yet, they continue to increase uranium production at an increasingly heavy cost to aboriginal people.

They studied the miners who they used to get the uranium but they refuse to study the local populations who are also getting sick and dying claiming that the populations are too small to get any definitive result. How can that be true if the number of miners studied was an even smaller number?

Article: 12 Nuclear Realities Whose Names Must Not Be Spoken

“It ended, with no apparent sense of irony, on April Fools’ Day.  Obama’s much-heralded ‘Nuclear Security Summit’ came to a close on April 1^st in Washington, D.C., having drawn representatives from about 50 countries…minus Russia, which declined to attend citing a “shortage of mutual cooperation” and the exclusion of some of its allies from the invitation list.

Compared to the lofty vision outlined in Obama’s famous 2009 Prague speech of a ‘world without nuclear weapons,’ the POTUS conference marked a sad measure of how far short of his stated intentions his actual accomplishments have fallen.”

(Full article here)