New security leaders at Tenn nuclear weapons plant; protesters broke into high-security area

By Associated Press, Published: August 8

KNOXVILLE, Tenn. — The security contractor at a Tennessee plant that stores the nation’s supply of weapons-grade uranium has replaced its general manager almost two weeks after three protesters, including an 82-year-old nun, got into a high-security area.
Security firm WSI Oak Ridge confirmed to the Knoxville News Sentinel (http://bit.ly/MqW3ex) Wednesday that Steven C. Hafner is taking over the position from Lee Brooks.

Protesters on July 28 were found hanging banners in the dark, singing and offering to break bread with the security guards at Y-12 Oak Ridge National Security Complex in Knoxville. An affidavit said that before security guards apprehended them, they spray-painted the building with protest slogans and threw blood on it. They were arrested and officials say all nuclear materials are safe.

Afterward, security contractor WSI said it was looking at its procedures and it removed Brooks and Y-12 Protective Force director Gary Brandon from their posts. WSI named John Garrity to replace Brandon. Brooks and Brandon are awaiting reassignments by G4S Government Solutions, the parent company of WSI.
The newspaper reported that the halt to nuclear operations at the plant was still in effect. The plant originally said the stand-down was expected to be lifted by this week and that security personnel would undergo training and refresher instruction.
A spokeswoman for Y-12 did not immediately return a phone call to The Associated Press on Wednesday seeking comment.
The Y-12 plant also makes nuclear warhead parts and provides nuclear fuel for the Navy and research reactors worldwide. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s Production Office is responsible for oversight of the security contractors. Last month, WSI-Oak Ridge said it planned to cut as many as 51 jobs, including about 34 security police officer positions at the complex.
The plant produced the material used in the first nuclear bomb dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, on Aug. 6, 1945. At annual protests tied to the anniversary, a few protesters have staged deliberate acts of civil disobedience to provoke their arrests including blocking the road into the plant or defying trespassing signs by deliberately crossing a blue line that marks the beginning of federal property.
But on July 28, three protesters went much further, officials said. An affidavit was filed in federal court this week by the Department of Energy’s inspector general. The News Sentinel reported that the affidavit alleges that Megan Rice, a Roman Catholic nun, Michael Walli, 63, and Greg Boertje-Obed, 57, climbed a ridge before dawn, set off alarms as they used bolt cutters to get through three wire fences and made it to the exterior of the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility.
They have been charged with federal charges of trespassing, a misdemeanor, and willful and malicious destruction of property, a felony.
Federal energy officials and the two U.S. senators from Tennessee said the latest breach troublesome.
At previous protests, arrests peaked in 1989, when 29 people were charged with trespassing at the plant gates. Ten more were arrested in 1990. Then the arrests stopped, because the local district attorney declined to press state charges.
Arrests resumed in 1998 and over the next 10 years, less than two dozen were taken in annually and charged in state court with trespassing. The harshest punishments were fines or jail sentences of up to 10 days.
On New Year’s Day 2002, a few months after the 9/11 attacks raised terrorism worries, a dozen protesters made it onto the property carrying 14-foot flags and lighted candles. The activists told The Associated Press that they stopped three times for prayers and spent about a half-hour on the grounds before they were noticed and detained.
Department of Energy officials said the group in 2002 wasn’t a serious threat because they never reached sensitive areas.
The complex upgraded security, adding guards, building concrete barriers and adding intrusion detectors to meet standards described as three times tougher than before 9/11.
In 2002, authorities for the first time charged four protesters who crossed the blue line with federal trespassing, still a misdemeanor. They were convicted and sentenced to two months in prison.
At the largest rally ever at the plant, on the 60th anniversary of the bombing in 2005, more than 1,100 turned out and 15 were arrested on state charges. Arrests have dwindled since then.

U.S. Regulator Halts Nuclear-Plant Licensing

Court Rules That NRC Can No Longer Accept Assurances a Permanent Waste Repository Is Coming 

BY REBECCA SMITH AND RYAN TRACY

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it would stop issuing licenses for nuclear plants until it addresses problems with its nuclear-waste policy that were raised by a recent federal appeals court decision.
The move, while not expected to affect any nuclear plants right away, shows how the standstill in finding a permanent American nuclear waste dump could undermine the expansion of nuclear power, which is already facing a challenge from cheaper natural gas.
In June, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit said the NRC's approach to managing nuclear waste was inconsistent with federal environmental standards.

 

Doctors: Japan Nuclear Plant Workers Face Stigma

By MALCOLM FOSTER Associated Press

TOKYO August 5, 2012 (AP)

A growing number of Japanese workers who are risking their health to shut down the crippled Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear power plant are suffering from depression, anxiety about the future and a loss of motivation, say two doctors who visit them regularly.
But their psychological problems are driven less by fears about developing cancer from radiation exposure and more by something immediate and personal: Discrimination from the very community they tried to protect, says Jun Shigemura, who heads a volunteer team of about ten psychiatrists and psychologists from the National Defense Medical College who meet with Tokyo Electric Power Co. nuclear plant employees.
They tell therapists they have been harangued by residents displaced in Japan's nuclear disaster and threatened with signs on their doors telling them to leave. Some of their children have been taunted at school, and prospective landlords have turned them away.
"They have become targets of people's anger," Shigemura told The Associated Press.
TEPCO workers — in their readily identifiable blue uniforms — were once considered to be among the elite in this rural area 230 kilometers (140 kilometers) north of Tokyo. But after the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami set off meltdowns at the Fukushima plant, residents came to view them as "perpetrators," Shigemura said.
Many TEPCO families in the area now hide their link to the company for fear of criticism, local doctors and psychiatrists say.
Shigemura likens the workers' experience to that of U.S. Vietnam veterans returning home to hostility in the 1960s and early '70s.
"They both worked for (the good of) their countries, but they got a backlash," he said.
About a dozen nuclear workers approached by the AP declined to be interviewed for this report. Except in rare cases, TEPCO has repeatedly declined requests to interview workers, and the workers themselves have shunned virtually all media attention, so these doctors' accounts provide an unusual glimpse into their lives.
One former TEPCO employee who lived in the town of Tomioka, inside the 20-kilometer (15-mile) exclusion zone around the plant, told journalists during a rare visit to the Fukushima plant in February that she was frequently harassed by evacuees among the 100,000 displaced by the disaster.
"Many people who want to go home are getting frustrated and they often yell at me, 'How are you going to make it up to us?'" said Saori Kanesaki, a former visitor guide at the Fukushima plant.
More than a half-century ago, many Japanese survivors of the U.S. bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were stigmatized due to fears about their exposure to radiation. But the Fukushima disaster has thrown up a completely new kind of discrimination because of the workers' links to TEPCO, a company widely despised throughout Japan for its mishandling of the disaster.
Some 3,000 TEPCO employees and other contractors continue to labor daily at the plant in one of the world's riskiest jobs — keeping three melted-down reactor cores as well as spent fuel pools cool through a makeshift system of water pipes.
They face a long haul: Removing the fuel and completely shutting down the plant could take 40 years.

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Protesters demonstrate against nuclear power plants at Japan's parliament

Protesters hold placards and shout slogans as they march to form a 'human chain' around Japan's parliament in Tokyo, to demonstrate against nuclear power plants. Photograph: Kazuhiro Nogi/AFP/Getty Images

Tens of thousands of people protested against nuclear power plants outside Japan's parliament on Sunday.
The protesters, including pensioners, were pressed up against a wall of steel thrown around the parliament building. Some broke through the barriers and spilled onto the streets, forcing the police to bring in reinforcements and deploy armoured buses to buttress the main parliament gate.
The protest came as results from rural Yamaguchi showed that Tetsunari Iida, an advocate of renewable energy, had lost his bid to become governor. He was defeated by a candidate backed by the opposition Liberal Democratic party (LDP), which promoted nuclear energy during its decades in power, Kyodo news agency reported.
Iida, who wants Japan to give up nuclear power by 2020, had promised to revitalise Yamaguchi's economy with renewable energy projects and opposed a project to build a new nuclear plant in the town of Kaminoseki.
Energy policy has become a major headache for prime minister, Yoshihiko Noda. Weekly protests outside the PM's office have grown in size in recent months, with ordinary workers and mothers with children joining the crowds.
On Sunday, the protesters, holding candles, took their demonstration to parliament. Many had marched past the headquarters of Tokyo Electric Power Co, the company at the heart of Fukushima disaster, the worst nuclear crisis since Chernobyl in 1986.
"We are here to oppose nuclear power, which is simply too dangerous," said Hiroko Yamada, an elderly woman from Saitama prefecture near Tokyo.
"[Noda] isn't listening to us. He only listens to companies and Yonekura," she said, referring to Hiromasa Yonekura, the chairman of Japan's biggest business lobby.
An upset victory by Iida would have put pressure on the government which is considering an energy portfolio to replace a 2010 programme that would have boosted nuclear power's share of electricity supply to more than half by 2030.
Noda, who approved restarting two reactors recently, has said he would decide on a new medium-term energy plan in August, but reports said that decision could be delayed.
Experts have proposed three options: zero nuclear power as soon as possible, a 15% atomic share of electricity by 2030, or 20-25% by the same date compared to almost 30% before the Fukushima disaster.
Under pressure from businesses worried about stable electricity supply, Noda has been thought to be leaning towards the 15% option, which would require all of Japan's 50 reactors to resume operations before gradually closing older units.
The growing anti-nuclear movement, however, may make that choice difficult.
Multiple inquiries into the Fukushima nuclear disaster have pointed to the failure by authorities and energy companies to adopt strict safety measures and disaster response plans.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2012/jul/30/nuclear-protests-japan-fukushima-disaster

A series of important updates about the drought, with jokes

By Philip Bump

Let’s check in on our old friend the drought, shall we? Here’s the key takeaway, if you’re in a big rush:
It still exists.
Today, Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack added another 218 counties to the list of drought-afflicted disaster areas, meaning we’ve officially passed the halfway mark. Fully one out of every two American counties has been so designated. Here’s the current map.

Map via the USDA.

Just to save some effort, here’s our projection of that map a month from now.

(I made this one.)

To be fair, that’s not exactly a scientific assessment, but it will either be proven correct or the situation will be better than this. We did it that way because we like to aim high.
It’s climate change’s fault.
Surprising zero rational people, a scientist from UC-Santa Barbara outlined for Wired the ways in which the current drought is likely attributable to a changing climate.

“In any single event, it’s hard to really know if you’re just seeing a natural variation or climate change,” cautioned climatologist Chris Funk of the University of California, Santa Barbara. With that caveat, Funk said when asked if human activity exacerbated the drought, “Tentatively, the answer is yes. To some extent, it is.” …
La Niña generally produces dry spells in southern North America, but adding a warm-to-cool Pacific gradient generates what some scientists call “the perfect ocean for drought,” spreading it far and wide. …
“The 2011 drought in Texas was part of the La Niña effect, and we’ve carried it on here,” he said. “When background conditions in the tropical Atlantic and Indian Ocean are warm, it leads to the worst of all possible worlds for droughts in the mid-latitudes. I can’t confirm that’s been driving the conditions we’ve been seeing, but it’s a useful first guess.”
If that dynamic is at work, then fossil fuel pollution is implicated. “Some part of it is related to extra water vapor that wouldn’t be there” if not for human greenhouse gas emissions, Funk said. “If we didn’t have all that extra anthropogenic water vapor, the western Pacific would be cooler, and the gradient wouldn’t be as great.”

Again: Science cannot say definitively that climate change caused the drought, in part because science cannot say definitively what the manifestations of climate change should be when our atmosphere contains the amount of CO2 that it does. But I suspect if you gave those scientists $50 and put them at a betting window at the Flamingo, they wouldn’t put their money on “coincidence.”
Congress is told that it’s climate change’s fault, does nothing.
Another scientist made the long, lonely trudge up Capitol Hill this morning to put his money on “it’s our fault, idiots.” From the Guardian:

Drought, wildfires, hurricanes and heatwaves are becoming normal in America because of climate change, Congress was told on Wednesday in the first hearing on climate science in more than two years.
In a predictably contentious hearing, the Senate’s environment and public works committee heard from a lead scientist for the UN’s climate body, the IPCC, on the growing evidence linking extreme weather and climate change.
“It is critical to understand that the link between climate change and the kinds of extremes that lead to disaster is clear,” Christopher Field, a lead author of the IPCC report and director of global ecology at the Carnegie Institute for Science, said in testimony.
“There is no doubt that climate has changed,” he went on. “There is also no doubt that a changing climate changes the risks of extremes, including extremes that can lead to disaster.”

Sen. James Inhofe (R), whose home state of Oklahoma is having the hottest day in its history today, told everyone, “The global warming movement has completely collapsed.” He then laughed and led all the other Republicans in telling Field that his mother was a hamster and that his father smelt of elderberries.

“The US experienced 14 billion-dollar disasters in 2011, a record that surpasses the previous maximum of 9,” [Field] said. “The 2011 disasters included a blizzard, tornadoes, floods, severe weather, a hurricane, a tropical storm, drought and heatwaves, and wildfires. In 2012, we have already experienced horrifying wildfires, a powerful windstorm that hit Washington DC, heat waves in much of the country, and a massive drought.”
He went on to make a point of warning Texans that the future of farming and ranching could be put in jeopardy because of climate change.

At this point, Senate Republicans dropped a large wooden rabbit on his head.
Outside the Capitol, D.C. was setting records.
July 2012 was the second-hottest July in the recorded history of Washington, D.C. (The hottest? 2011. See! It’s getting cooler!)
The fantastic team at the Washington Post‘s Capital Weather Gang (seriously, it’s fantastic) delineates the key stats:

• July 2012 set the record for most days at or above 95 with 16
• July 2012 set the record for most days at or above 100 with 7
• July 2012 tied (with 1930) the record for most consecutive days at or above 100 with 4
• July 2012 ranked 2nd for most days with lows at or above 80 with 4 (2011 had 7)