AUSTRALIA
Climate change and bushfires. This topic has divided Australia. On one side, there are our government leaders - PM Tony Abbott and Environment Minister Greg Hunt. Abbott has declared that any link between the two is "complete hogwash" and dismissed the United Nations' expert climate negotiator Christiana Figueres as "talking through her hat". While the Greens' Christine Milne deplored these statements, the Labor leader Bill Shorten was curiously silent. He said that he "didn’t want to speculate on the fires while people’s homes were still on the line" . Sadly, it is probable that a majority of Australians, fed by the Murdoch media, agree with them. Apparently the Labor Opposition agrees with the Liberal government that the bushfires are irrelevant to climate change and that it's bad taste to talk about any link.
Greens' MP Adam Bandt thought it was worse taste to just ignore climate change, Many others, including Victoria's Country Fire Authority take the link seriously. Clearly one can't identify a particular bushfire as caused by climate change. However, climate change has brought conditions of more intense heat, dryer vegetation, and bushfire seasons of earlier onset and longer duration.
Nuclear power. As Australia's Liberal government determinedly pursues a climate denial agenda, the nuclear lobby is publicly fairly silent. Australia's nuclear lobby bides its time, until the fuss subsides. Once all effective climate action has been dismantled by the government, it will no doubt become politically correct to again believe in climate change. Then the nuclear lobby can swing into action - promoting nuclear. power as the solution. The Liberal government will be all for it, Labor Senators Gary Gray, Mark Bishop and Alex Gallacher are among the Labor pro nuclear faction. We'll need to watch Bill Shorten, who is likely to even weaker on Labor's anti nuclear policy than he is on Labor's climate action. The ALP’s 2011 policy platform expressly forbids “the establishment of nuclear power plants and all other stages of the nuclear fuel cycle in Australia”.
INTERNATIONAL
United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) has just released publicly a statement that Infants and children can be more at risk than adults of developing cancers when exposed to radiation, for example from nuclear accidents, UNSCEAR said children and adults should be considered separately following exposure in order to predict risk more accurately. The full report was presented to the UN General Assembly. This is more important than it might at first sound, as it follows all that publiciity in May 2013, that UNSCEAR supposedly did not expect health harm from the Fukushima nuclear accident.
UK Government has finalised its deal with China, and EDF, for new untested nuclear reactors with a guaranteed price for these providers, of double the market price. The government has also already committed itself to providing financial guarantees of £10bn to cover the building of Hinkley Point, something not available to builders of solar or wind arrays. The European Union is studying this deal in view of the EU's rules against subsidising new nuclear power. Even pro nuclear George Monbiot condemns the deal as a farce. and says of the nuclear waste problem"No one should commission a mess without a plan for clearing it up"
Japan. The Fukushima radiation leaks continue. All observers anxiously await the operation, planned for November, of removing the spent nuclear fuel rods from their precarious pool above reactor No 4. It will be a very dangerous and difficult task, with the potential for a radiation catastrophe. Meanwhile the Japanese government has drafted a new law about state secrets, which may inhibit press freedom, and allow for the gaoling of whistleblowers for up to 10 years.