Tag Archives: environment

This week in Washington, D.C. the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s “DC Days” attracted anti-nuclear activists from around the nation. Representatives from Utah included Vanessa Pierce from HEAL Utah and Mike Fife, a member of HEAL.

The Deseret News reports:
Pierce met with Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell on Tuesday, who expressed the same disinterest in PFS that Bodman did with Hatch.
The two Utahns also met with Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and staff members of the rest of the delegation to talk about the PFS project and other nuclear matters.
Pierce’s main goal was to encourage Utah’s senators to support an existing bill that would expand a federal program designed to compensate those ill from radiation exposure to government testing to northern Utah.
The compensation program has been around for almost two decades but only includes the 10 most southern counties in Utah, she said.
Pierce and Fife also wanted the delegation, particularly Bennett who has a seat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that writes the energy spending bill, to reject funding for the Energy Department’s new nuclear power proposals.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is pushing for the building of more nuclear power plants to be built in the U.S. The “bait” is that fuel can be reused. But, according to Pierce, nothing could be further from the truth.
It can actually create more waste and not much of the reprocessed fuel can be used again safely.
“It delays the day of reckoning and just create a bigger price tag,” she said.
Pierce fears that if Private Fuel Storage (PFS) moves forward and reprocessing becomes a reality Utah will become “a nuclear waste version of California’s Silicon Valley” with companies popping up that would want to reprocess waste stored at PFS or more types of waste going to EnergySolutions.

Other nuclear waste storage issues were discussed at the conference and are mentioned in the article.

Needless to say, I’m unhappy with this Deseret News headline:
New nuclear threat for Utah? Britain may be creating, testing weapon in West.

There is suspicion that Britain’s sub-critical test at the Nevada Test site last month (named “Krakatau” on Feb 23) is leading to further testing there.

Let me get this straight (A—GAIN):
U.S. – nukes o.k.
Iran – nukes not o.k.
Britain – nukes o.k.
India – nukes o.k.
Korea – nukes not o.k.
Iraq – nukes not o.k.
Israel – nukes o.k.
France – nukes o.k. (french fries….not)

There’s something wrong with this picture.

Kevin Rohrer, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada Site, told the Deseret Morning News that nothing in the test was designed “to help develop a new weapon.”
But Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project in Utah and a longtime opponent of nuclear testing in Nevada, believes the British press reports — and is worried by them, and about U.K.-U.S. mutual defense agreements that allow testing in Nevada.
“We have never fielded a brand-new design for a warhead without nuclear testing it first,” Erickson said.
“They’ve crossed a crucial threshold with that last test,” Erickson added. “With it, we charge that they have moved into weapon development as opposed to stockpile sustainment. . . . Why are we doing this to help the British?”
Erickson worries that underground nuclear tests could occur again, but not the open-air tests that led to cancer downwind in Utah. Congress later apologized for those tests and created a compensation fund for some downwind cancer victims.

The Times of London, however, quoted unnamed British defense officials saying they figured they would need to develop new warheads without full nuclear testing because of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They said they instead likely would have to depend on “subcritical” tests coupled with analysis by supercomputers.

How is this keeping in adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty????

The Deseret News states that “underground tests are safer” (but can still leak radiation).

SAFER FOR WHAT AND FOR WHOM???? There is no such thing as a safe nuclear test. No matter the form of the test, it is UNSAFE FOR OUR PLANET.