In the never ending greed of corporations the world over, we have seen cultures and civilisations all but wiped out in the quest to maximise the use of every energy source known to man. Climate change, global warming and environmental damage to regions that these energy sources were wrested from have now been joined by the ‘self inflicted’ terminal wound of the Japanese nation. A government that aided and abetted the nuclear energy industry that now has repercussions we can only imagine. Hari-kari - a ritual suicide by disembowelment practiced by the Japanese samurai – is too good and above the honour of government officials and the nuclear power industry heads; perhaps better they be buried up to their shoulders and a slow death by passers by with the blunt saw will also be too quick when compared to what will now follow.

The world is becoming unlivable and Japan is the first major country to pay the ultimate price … the following two articles are a sad indictment on human nature …

Workers at Japan’s Fukushima plant say the ground under the facility is cracking and radioactive steam is escaping through the fissures. They also say pipes and at least one reactor were seriously damaged before the tsunami hit the area in March.

The allegations raise concerns that the facility was doomed even before the earthquake triggered the disaster. Problems with deteriorating pipes at the plant had been reported for years. The cooling system failed to stop reactors going into meltdown after it was hit by the 40-metre-high waves. The plant has been leaking radioactive material ever since, despite efforts to clean it up.The allegations raise concerns that the facility was doomed even before the earthquake triggered the disaster. Problems with deteriorating pipes at the plant had been reported for years. The cooling system failed to stop reactors going into meltdown after it was hit by the 40-metre-high waves. The plant has been leaking radioactive material ever since, despite efforts to clean it up.

http://rt.com/news/fukushima-doomed-reac…

“Fukushima is the biggest industrial catastrophe in the history of mankind,” Arnold Gundersen, a former nuclear industry senior vice president, told Al Jazeera.

…”The fuels are now a molten blob at the bottom of the reactor,” Gundersen added. “TEPCO announced they had a melt through. A melt down is when the fuel collapses to the bottom of the reactor, and a melt through means it has melted through some layers. That blob is incredibly radioactive, and now you have water on top of it. The water picks up enormous amounts of radiation, so you add more water and you are generating hundreds of thousands of tons of highly radioactive water.”

…”We have 20 nuclear cores exposed, the fuel pools have several cores each, that is 20 times the potential to be released than Chernobyl,” said Gundersen. “The data I’m seeing shows that we are finding hot spots further away than we had from Chernobyl, and the amount of radiation in many of them was the amount that caused areas to be declared no-man’s-land for Chernobyl. We are seeing square kilometres being found 60 to 70 kilometres away from the reactor. You can’t clean all this up. We still have radioactive wild boar in Germany, 30 years after Chernobyl.”

…”Units one through three have nuclear waste on the floor, the melted core, that has plutonium in it, and that has to be removed from the environment for hundreds of thousands of years,” he said. “Somehow, robotically, they will have to go in there and manage to put it in a container and store it for infinity, and that technology doesn’t exist. Nobody knows how to pick up the molten core from the floor, there is no solution available now for picking that up from the floor.”

http://english.aljazeera.net/indepth/fea…

In the USA, tens of thousands of tons of potentially lethal radioactive waste have been piling up across the nation for more than a generation, but the federal government has yet to decide how to get rid of it permanently.  After axing a multibillion-dollar plan to bury the waste beneath Yucca Mountain, Nev., President Barack Obama has asked an expert panel to recommend alternatives; however, the panel’s report isn’t due until January 2012 and the group’s recommendations aren’t binding on the White House or Congress.

In short, the country’s political leaders are no closer to a safe, permanent disposal plan for nuclear waste than they were a generation ago, when nuclear power became widespread and the Cold War was in full swing.

America’s accumulated 70,000 tons of extremely radioactive, “high level” waste — uranium and plutonium — has sat in “temporary” storage in 35 states since at least the 1950s.  “The country at large is beset by a whole host of problems, so it’s not surprising that they aren’t paying attention to this,” said nuclear expert Arjun Makhijani, president of the Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. “Everybody realizes that the collapse of the Yucca Mountain program means many years of on-site storage with no end in sight. Even the people who want nuclear power don’t want waste in their backyards.”

The waste will continue to pile up as the nation’s 104 nuclear power plants win license renewals from federal regulators. It’s expected to reach 153,000 tons by 2055, according to a November report from the Government Accountability Office, Congress’ investigative agency. Commercial nuclear waste, which is solid, is stored in deep pools of water at many power plants. Some of it also is stored in huge steel-and-concrete containers called dry casks, which cost about $1 million apiece, according to Rod McCullum, a waste expert at the power industry’s Nuclear Energy Institute. Jim Riccio, a nuclear energy analyst at the environmental group Greenpeace, said the Obama administration should tell the industry to move more of the fuel rods from pools, where they’re more vulnerable to terrorist attack, to dry casks.  “Dry casks are not perfect, but they are a heck of a lot better,” he said.

In addition to the commercial waste, about 91 million gallons of high-level liquid waste is stored at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site, Washington state’s Hanford Site and the Idaho National Laboratory. That waste comes from making fuel for nuclear weapons during the Cold War era.  The defense waste is slowly being converted into glass rods through a process called vitrification to allow for more efficient storage and transport. David McIntyre, a spokesman for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, said current on-site storage methods are safe and will contain the radiation for the foreseeable future.

So federal lawmakers feel they can put off making tough political decisions about what to do with the nuclear waste, said John Gervers, a nuclear-waste consultant in New Mexico. “It’s going to continue to pile up,” he said. “Ultimately, there has to be someplace (where) all that waste has to go. In my opinion, a permanent repository is the way to go.”  The White House says even if the expert panel recommends a permanent “geologic” resting place for the waste, such a repository won’t be built at Yucca Mountain, located about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas in the home state of Democratic Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid.

A 1982 law set a 1998 deadline for building a permanent disposal site, but it didn’t happen. It wasn’t until 2002 that Congress, acting on President George W. Bush’s recommendation, fixed up Yucca Mountain as the permanent site. Since then, taxpayers have spent more than $10 billion for exploratory work at the site, including building a deep tunnel.

Soon after becoming president, Obama announced he would cancel the Yucca Mountain project — a decision that South Carolina, Washington and some other local governments are fighting in federal court. Those state and local governments have teamed up with the nuclear industry to argue before the NRC that the administration can’t terminate work on the project, only Congress can.

The nuclear energy industry is pushing for an interim storage facility where spent fuel rods could be stored while a geologic repository is built. The government also should allow the industry to recycle the used fuel rods to extract all possible use from them, said McCullum at the Nuclear Energy Institute.

Though legal in France, such “reprocessing” has been banned in the U.S. since 1977. President Jimmy Carter outlawed the practice that year, citing the potential for countries to use the plutonium byproduct to make atomic weapons.

MORE ONLINE: www.gao.gov/new.items/d1048.pdf, to access the Government Accountability Office’s “Nuclear Waste Management” report, issued in November 2009.

Routine tests showed 55 employees from the plant in Kaiga in the state of Karnataka had increased levels of the radioactive element tritium, which is used in nuclear reactors.

B Bhattacharjee, a member of the National Disaster Management Authority, said someone had inserted contaminated water into a water cooler, according to the Press Trust of India.

The employees had not suffered any ill effects and had returned to work, plant officials told AFP. Atomic Energy Commission chairman Anil Kakodkar, speaking on the Headlines Today television network, blamed the sabotage on “an insider who has played mischief”.

Mr Kakodkar said security was “foolproof” and there was no chance of an outsider gaining access to the station.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India, which operates the country’s civil nuclear facilities, said in a statement that preliminary enquiries revealed no radioactive leak or security breach.

State ministers assured local residents that their health was not at risk.

The Kaiga plant was shut down in October for annual maintenance and is due to reopen shortly.

Although Australia has been given the perception that we come under the protection USA’s nuclear umbrella, clearly we have been lied to again and again (most recently with DU (depleted uranium war heads) weaponry in our country); America has a long list of countries / rulers it has supported until such time as the circumstances changed.

Call me an optimist, but I believe that Obama’s decision to immediately and aggressively pursue US ratification of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty is legitimate and not necessarily a smoke screen or capitulation to divert attention.

Australia put this on the agenda by taking it to the UN General Assembly back in the 1990s. Will the ‘villains’ down ‘dirty weapons’ tools in answer to this conciliatory effort by Obama to see an international effort to secure all vulnerable nuclear material around the world within four years is a question that may remain unanswered; however, Australia should take a lead in supporting this initiative, by cleaning up its act at home.

The troubling thing is, nuclear materials turned up last week in a police raid in Victoria, which proves inadequate control procedures and deficiencies in our workplace culture and those responsible for handling of uranium. Hopefully nuclear power will never see the light of day as the public becomes more aware of the costs and massive greenhouse gasses associated with the construction and commissioning of a nuclear power plant before it even cranks out one kilowatt of energy.

An increasingly short-tempered populace will not be party to the excesses of corporate wages or corporate ‘public works’ programs; the worn out platitudes and smoke and mirror ‘jobs, jobs, jobs’ is not easy to prove as unemployment goes up, in spite of the billions of $’s thrown by the federal government.

Malcolm Turnball may be feeling like a leper at present; as a once financially broke – divorced – parent, I know all too well that money can – in the short term – buy a lot of love, but when the money runs out (or in my case, my kids twigged), the population will soon see that they are being paid their children’s future and the effect then will have a great fall-out.

Despite Navy resistance, senior politicians have said they now want to extend the scope of nuclear steam-raising plant (NSRP) from cruisers to amphibious vessels.

Nuclear powered amphibious vessels disembarking marines and vehicles onto beaches; hardly the sort of vessel you’d want to be in when heavily attacked/mined by defending forces; the USA war machine must be expecting the price of oil to go really high.