By Jim Green, Australian national anti-nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth - "About two-thirds of the uranium in the United States is on indigenous lands. On a worldwide scale, about 70 percent of the uranium is either in Aboriginal lands in Australia or up in the Subarctic of Canada, where native people are still fighting uranium mining." ‒ Winona LaDuke, a Chippewa by birth, is a leading indigenous expert on uranium mining on US reservations, a political organizer and journalist.
"The Government would not listen and forced the Ranger uranium mine on us,
but the old people were right and today we are dealing with everything they
were worried about." ‒ Yvonne Margarula,
Mirarr Senior Traditional Owner, Northern Territory, Australia.
"I believe this uranium business will give the
Anglo-Saxons such tremendous power that Europe will become a bloc under
Anglo-Saxon domination. If that is the case, it will be a very good thing. I
wonder
whether Stalin will be able to stand up to the others as he has done in the
past." ‒ German nuclear physicist Werner
Heisenberg, August 1945.
"The brutal truth is that no one has yet managed to work out a way of getting
nuclear reactors to burn uranium as effectively as they burn money." ‒ Tom
Burke, 2005.
“Uranium is the raw material of a power-elite who has taken Mother Earth’s every
living creature hostage.” ‒ The late Petra
Kelly, German Greens Party.
"We extract ... uranium from the formation and
send it to atomic reactors, so we are actually purifying the subsoil from heavy
metals." ‒ Kazatomprom
manager Kalilallo
Baytasov, 2013.
"This is like a water clean up project, and we are going to sell the by-product
on." ‒ Powertech manager Mark Hollenbeck on the Dewey-Burdock ISL uranium project
in South Dakota.
- Mark Hollenbeck / Powertech,
South Dakota Public Broadcasting, 5 Apr. 2010.
"We're taking the uranium out of the ground,
we're exporting it to be used for productive purposes, so we should be getting
a medal for cleaning up the environment." ‒ Neville Huxham, Paladin Energy Africa, operator
of the Kayelekera uranium mine, 2009.
"Mining is a 24 hour operation and cannot be stopped as a result of a shortage
of available dust masks." ‒ Johan De Bruin, geology superintendent at
Paladin's Kayelekera
uranium mine in Malawi, 2010.
"The beauty of the uranium product and nuclear waste is that you can put your
hands around it, you can control it and you can manage it." ‒ Brian
Reilly, Minerals Council of Australia, November 2016.
"Again and again it has been demonstrated here and overseas that when problems
over safeguards prove difficult, commercial considerations will come
first." – Former South Australian Premier Mike Rann, 1982, Mike
Rann, 1982, 'Uranium: Play It Safe'.
"You can guarantee that mining uranium will lead
to nuclear waste. You can't
guarantee that uranium mining will not lead to nuclear weapons." – Anthony Albanese,
Australian Labor Party MP, 2006.
"For eight years in the White House, every weapons-proliferation problem we
dealt with was connected to a civilian reactor program. And if we ever got to
the point where we wanted to use nuclear reactors to back out a lot of coal ...
then we'd have to put them in so many places we'd
run that proliferation risk right off the reasonability scale. And we'd run
short of uranium, unless they went to a breeder cycle or something like it,
which would increase the risk of weapons-grade material being available." ‒
Former US Vice President Al
Gore, 2006.
"The splitting of the atom has changed everything
save our mode of thinking, and therefore we drift toward unparalleled
catastrophe. The solution to this problem lies in the heart of mankind. If only
I had
known, I should have become a watchmaker." – Albert Einstein, 1946.
Diversification! "A minerals exploration company is trying to position itself
to become Australia's first legal medicinal marijuana grower." ‒ ABC,
April 2015. The share price
of uranium explorer Capital Mining doubled following the announcement.
"In Western Australia, United Uranium, which holds several uranium exploration
licences, has decided to get out of uranium exploration and instead focus on
property development. The company said its strategic review "underlined a
consistent theme, that junior resource companies and in particular uranium
focussed companies, are currently 'unloved' by the investment community". ‒
Mining Australia, 2014. Vicky Validakis, 6 June, 2014, 'Price
collapse sees junior miner ditch uranium to focus on property development',
"As investors try to predict what will happen next, analysts at RBC Capital
Markets are advising clients to go overweight on fertilizer equities and
underweight on uranium and precious metals equities in the
fourth quarter." ‒ Financial
Post, 2014.
Uranium industry downturn
"[L]ess clued-up people continue to buy uranium penny dreadfuls rather than
do something sensible, like bet the house (the wife and the kids) on the horse
carrying the jockey wearing pink polka dots in the fourth at Ascot next
Saturday." ‒ The
West Australian, October 2005.
"[T]he uranium industry is definitely in crisis, I believe, and is showing
all the symptoms of a mid-term paralysis if this situation does not demonstrably
change." ‒ [Then] Paladin Energy chief executive John
Borshoff, November 2013.
"[Uranium] is the worst-performing mined commodity this year." ‒ Wall
Street Journal, July 2016
"Uranium executives radiate sunny optimism at the start of each year when
pitching their new project. This then disappears by the summer ... This time
even that optimism has gone. All the executives I spoke to looked about as
miserable as England football fans in the second week of a major tournament.
What’s to be done? Can this ever change? There is so much potential, but we
never perform, why can’t we be put out of our misery? Is it Wayne Rooney’s
fault?" ‒ RFC
Ambrian, September 2016
"[U]ranium bulls know how Moses felt when he was destined to wander forty
years in the desert and never get to see the Promised Land." ‒ Christopher
Ecclestone, March 2016
"There is too much of nearly every commodity in the world today. Then there
is uranium. The outlook for the element that powers nuclear reactors may be
worse than for any other, and there is almost no
prospect for improvement soon. Unlike other commodities, low prices won’t
stimulate demand. No commodity faces the unique pressure that uranium and
nuclear fuel do and there is little prospect of a near-term recovery." ‒ Wall
Street Journal, September 2016
"It has never been a worse time for uranium miners." ‒ Alexander
Molyneux, CEO of Paladin
Energy
"The days of nuclear power based upon uranium-based fission are coming to
a close because the fear of nuclear proliferation, the reality of nuclear waste
and the difficulty of managing it have proven too
difficult over time." ‒ Former
Shell executive John Hofmeister
"There
has indeed been a nuclear winter verging on an Ice Age over the last few
years with bad news heaped upon bad news within the context of a pretty dismal
financing situation for mining all around. ... The yellow mineral had made
fools and liars of many in recent years, including ourselves."
‒ Christopher Ecclestone / Hallgarten & Company, 2014
"What gets us excited and what gets us out of bed in the morning are the long-term
fundamentals of the uranium market." ‒ Brian Reilly, Minerals Council
of Australia, November 2016
Nuclear news, opinion & analysis, Wednesday 14/12/16
2
Jim Green
Taiwanese energy firm rejects minister’s claim it would help set up South Australia’s nuclear waste dump
14 Dec 2016 - TAIWAN’S state-owned energy company has bluntly rejected Investment and Trade Minister Martin Hamilton-Smith’s claim the country would consider paying to help set up a nuclear waste dump in South Australia, saying in a letter that it “hereby declares this is a false information”.
Just days after Premier Jay Weatherill’s citizens’ jury last month overwhelmingly dumped on plans for nuclear storage in SA, amid concerns about trust, Mr Hamilton-Smith insisted he had met with Taiwanese officials who expressed a “clear message” of interest in investment.
“There’s clearly a demand and our neighbours may be in a position to put hundreds of millions, if not billions, into infrastructure and then paying to dump waste on an ongoing basis,” he said.
However, correspondence from state-owned power company Taipower and the country’s Atomic Energy Council to government party MP Su Chih-Feng rejects Mr Hamilton-Smith’s claim.
While they note there was a meeting with Mr Hamilton-Smith on November 10, Taipower says his spin of the events in Adelaide three days later was “a false information”.
The translation from Mandarin to English was done by a Taiwanese NGO and provided to The Advertiser by antinuclear activists Friends of the Earth Australia. It states Taipower was interested in using a dump which had been established, but not paying to help set one up.
“A foreign solution is one of the options for Taipower. However, foreign solution is also sensitive case in terms of international relationships,” the letter states.
“Therefore, foreign solutions should carefully consider both domestic and foreign regulations.
“Foreign solutions is a sensitive case with a lot of uncertainties.
“Taipower will consider to be a ‘customer’ after the country has developed a disposal facility.”
Taiwan’s Atomic Energy Council also said Mr Hamilton-Smith’s claim was “a false information”.
“We also notice that the Citizen Jury in Australia deny the proposal,” it states. “Without the understanding and support from Australian ... nuclear waste storage cannot be developed.”
One of the major criticisms of the SA nuclear proposal by the SA Liberals and green groups has been the risk of spending state taxpayer money up front with no certainty of future revenue.
Nuclear Fuel Cycle Royal Commissioner Kevin Scarce found in his report that countries may be willing to provide a cash precommitment to SA to fund the building of enabling infrastructure.
Mr Hamilton-Smith said Friends of the Earth were “distributing information which talks down the market for storage of low-medium or high level waste”, as studied by the Royal Commission.
“Until that debate is put back on track with bipartisan support, there will be no progress,” he said. “It’s clear however from the informal discussions in November that I and other senior officers of the State Government had that there is interest and potential to work together to better secure the world’s nuclear waste. Storage and investment were both informally discussed but no official position was sought or offered. To get to that stage, we would have to continue the discussion on the Royal Commission’s work and determine a position of our own.”
Opposition treasury spokesman Rob Lucas said Mr Hamilton-Smith “stands condemned for misleading everyone” about Taiwan’s views, if the translations were accurate.
Friends of the Earth Australia nuclear campaigner Jim Green said Mr Weatherill should now “have the good sense to swallow his pride and to dump the dump proposal”.
By "Libby"
Trump Picks Former Texas Governor Perry for Energy Chief Position
December 14, 2016. U.S. President-elect Donald Trump has decided to name a one-time political foe, former Texas Governor Rick Perry, to head the country's Department of Energy, a sprawling agency Perry once said should be abolished as wasteful.
Bill Gates is heading a $1 billion clean energy venture fund. He's got several billionaire pals on board.
(Check out the Breakthrough Energy Coalition web site at: http://www.b-t.energy/coalition/. Read about the Breakthrough Institute's plans to deliver reliable, affordable, zero-carbon energy to the world at: http://www.b-t.energy/landscape/electricity/ - note development of next-generation nuclear fission and nuclear fusion technology included in the list of Breakthrough Energy technical quests.)
Iran to work on nuclear-powered boats
December 13, 2016. Iran's president says that in response to a US violation of a global atomic deal he has ordered scientists to start working on
nuclear-powered boats.
Why is climate-conscious Vietnam choosing coal over nuclear?
December 12, 2016. Rising costs and environmental fears bring an end to Vietnam's nascent nuclear power program, forcing the climate-conscious country back into the embrace of coal.
Jim Green
Media Release ‒ Friends of the Earth, Australia ‒ 15 December 2016*
EXPOSED: NUCLEAR WASTE DUMP PROPAGANDA
Documents released by Friends of the Earth today reveal that:
·Taiwan will not pay SA to accept high-level nuclear waste if that requires investing in waste storage and disposal infrastructure.
·Taiwan would not send nuclear waste to Australia unless and until a repository is built and operating.
·Taiwan would not send nuclear waste to Australia in the face of widespread public opposition.
Dr Jim Green, national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia, said: "Taiwan's power utility Taipower states clearly and repeatedly that Taiwan will not pay for nuclear waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA. Yet foreign investment in that infrastructure is central to the state Labor Government's plans.
Preliminary and exploratory studies could cost up to $2.4 billion and Premier Jay Weatherill must now come clean on whether he intends to gamble billions of dollars of taxpayers' money on this project."
Taipower's statements are directly at odds with statements made by Martin Hamilton-Smith. Opposition treasury spokesman Rob Lucas is quoted in this morning's /Advertiser/ saying that Hamilton-Smith “stands condemned for misleading everyone” about Taiwan’s views.
Dr Green continued: "Taiwan would not send nuclear waste to Australia unless and until a repository is built and operating. Yet the Final Report of the Royal Commission clearly states that unless nuclear waste is imported prior to the establishment of a repository, the project would not be profitable." /[See p.300 of the Royal Commission's Final Report.]/
"Taiwan will not send nuclear waste to Australia in the face of widespread public opposition. A clear majority of South Australians oppose the nuclear waste dump plan. A statewide consultation process found 53% opposition compared to just 31% support. A recent poll commissioned by the Sunday Mail found just 35% support. Two-thirds of the Citizen Jurors rejected the dump plan 'under any circumstances'. The Premier himself has acknowledged the 'overwhelming opposition of Aboriginal people'.
"It is unlikely that any country would send nuclear waste to SA in the face of widespread public opposition and overwhelming opposition from Aboriginal people. It is unlikely that any country would pay for waste storage and disposal infrastructure in SA. It is unlikely that any country would send waste to SA in the absence of a built, operating repository. The Labor Government's plan fails on all three counts.
"South Australians opposed to the dump will be spoilt for choice at the March 2018 election with the Liberal Party, the Nick Xenophon Team and the SA Greens all opposed to the Labor Government's plan to turn SA into the world's high-level nuclear waste dump. The Premier should have the good sense to swallow his pride and to dump the dump before he puts the Labor Party in an unwinnable position leading up to the state election," Dr Green concluded.