福島原発廃炉に外国人労働者、「使い捨て」の声 via 論座

Posted on 2019/04/30 by yukimiyamotodepaul

構内はほとんどが放射線管理対象区域、人手不足解消に新しい在留資格を利用
青木美希　朝日新聞社会部記者

「貧しいから出稼ぎに来ているのに、ここで働いて持って帰る金は、その後の治療費にも満たないだろう」

あるベトナム人男性はネットに書き込んだ。東京電力が福島第一原発の廃炉作業に特定技能の外国人労働者を受け入れると決めたことに対してだ。ベトナム人らからは「使い捨てにされる」との声が上がっている。

（略）

外国人労働者の受け入れを拡大するため、政府は技能実習生から移行できる新たな在留資格「特定技能」を4月に始めた。外国人労働者の廃炉作業は、2つの大きな問題をはらんでいる。

一つは、技能実習生が置かれている最低賃金割れや不当な残業、外出制限などの劣悪な環境が、そのまま特定技能に移行して引き継がれる恐れがあることだ。廃炉作業の現場は、ゼネコンの多重下請けによって下請け作業員が搾取される構図にある。53％の業者が労働関係法令に違反しているという調査結果が出ている。もともと日本語で声を上げづらい人たちが、さらにつらい立場におかれかねない。

もう一つは、廃炉作業の安全性だ。1日約４千人が働く現場だが、全面マスクをつけた上での高線量の現場がある。昨年9月の東電のアンケートでは1185人が「全面マスクで見にくい、聞こえにくい」と回答した。日本語が母国語の人同士ですら会話が難しいのに、言葉が不十分な外国人に的確な指示を伝えられるかどうか。4月24日には衆議院で「安全管理教育が多言語化対応できていない」と指摘された。帰国後に被曝の影響でがんを発症しても、労災申請のハードルは高い。医療が整っていない国も多い。

ベトナムの20代の男性が「建設機械・解体・土木」を学ぶために、盛岡市の建設会社に技能実習生として来たが、福島県郡山市で除染と知らずに作業につかされた。2015〜16年のことだ。その後、川俣町や飯舘村など住民が立ち入れない線量の高い現場で解体工事に従事し、危険手当1日2千円が渡されるようになったという。「自分は危険な仕事をしているんですか」と尋ねたところ、こう言われたという。「いやなら帰れ」

　男性ら実習生を支援してきた労働組合書記長の佐々木史朗さんは「危険手当は6600円あったが本人には2千円しか渡らず、放射線管理手帳も渡されていなかった。実習生たちからは『残業代未払い』『長時間労働』『休憩がとれない』『暴言暴力』『労災隠し』『強制帰国の脅かしにあった』という相談ばかり。人権が守られていない」と訴える。法務省はこの業者を実習生受け入れ停止5年の処分とした。

ほかにも3社が実習生に除染作業をさせていたことが明らかになり、うち１社を受け入れ停止3年とした。鉄筋施工や型枠施工の名目で実習生を受け入れながら除染地域の表土のはぎ取りなどをさせていたという。佐々木さんは福島第一原発について、「一瞬で高線量を被曝する可能性があり、除染よりさらに過酷な現場だと思う。被曝限度は法で決められ、いつまで働けるかもわからない」と警鐘を鳴らす。

（略）

福島第一原発では18年5月、敷地内の焼却炉工事に実習生6人が従事していたと東電が明らかにした。放射線管理対象区域外だったものの、確認が不十分だったという。法務省はこのとき、第一原発内で東電が発注する事業について「全て廃炉に関するもので、一般的に海外で発生しうるものではない」とし、国際貢献を目的とする技能実習生が従事することはできないと発表した。

　だが特定技能について東電が法務省に問い合わせた結果、「新資格は受け入れ可能。日本人が働いている場所は分け隔てなく働いてもらうことができる」（東電広報担当）と判断したという。法務省は「建設など特定技能の対象職種14種に該当すれば問題ない」としている。構内は現在、ほとんどが放射線管理対象区域だ。

（略）

4月14日、安倍晋三首相は東京電力福島第一原発を約5年半ぶりに視察した。記者団に対し「現場の皆さんの大変な御努力によって廃炉作業が一歩一歩着実に進んでいます」と語った。「スーツ姿でマスク無し」の姿がテレビや新聞写真に登場し、「初めて防護服やマスクを着けずに視察」「廃炉に向けた作業が進んでいることを国内外にアピール」と報じられた。

　しかし東電によると、首相がマスク無しでいたのは、見学や移動の際にマスクを不要とした一部地域。構内の大部分は使い捨て防塵マスク以上の装備が必要で、作業が多い建屋内や建屋周辺の高線量の現場は半面マスクや全面マスクとなっている。

2014年から15年まで下請け作業員として廃炉作業に従事し、「福島原発作業員の記」の著書がある池田実さん（66）は「いろいろ心配です」と話す。最初は建屋の中のごみを集める作業だった。そのあと消火器の解体やごみを小さくする作業と次々にかわった。その都度、紙で説明があった。「装備が作業のたびに変わる。エプロンをつけたり、化学防護手袋をつけたり。紙の説明を理解できるか、ですよね」

雇用条件についても心配だという。池田さんはハローワークから申し込んだ。求人票には「健康保険、厚生年金加入」とあったが、社長に「社会保険はどうなっていますか」とおそるおそる尋ねると「給料が多い方がいいでしょう」と加入しないことを告げられた。それまでは除染作業の二次下請けで1日1万7千円（危険手当1万円）を得ていた。第一原発では三次下請けで、1日1万4千円（危険手当4千円）と少なかった。池田さんは「どうしてより線量の高い現場で危険手当が減るんだろう」と疑問に思った。上の会社の人に給料を言うと驚かれ、「よほど中抜きされているんだと思った」。

被曝によるがんの労災基準は、白血病で年5mSv（ミリシーベルト）以上となっている。池田さんは7mSv以上を浴びた。仕事をやめてからも健康が心配だ。東京電力は昨年9月、福島第1原発の作業員約5千人にアンケートを実施。42％が第1原発で働くことに「不安を感じている」と回答した。健康への影響や収入の不安定さを挙げた人が多い。福島労働局が昨年、廃炉作業をする290業者を調べたところ、賃金の支払いや労働条件の明示などの違反が53％にあった。被曝量を遅滞なく知らせていなかった違反もあった。

2018年度に第一原発で放射線業務に従事した作業者は1万1306人。この期間に876人が10～20mSv、939人が5～10mSvの被曝をしている。1年の平均線量は東電社員が1.04mSvなのに対し、下請けを含む協力企業は2.64mSvと2.5倍多く被曝していた。原発労働者の被曝限度は「5年で100mSvかつ年間50mSv」と法令で定められている。これまで第一原発で働いた作業員6人が被曝によるがんで労災認定された。昨年は肺がんで死亡した男性が労災認定されている。

外国人労働者が帰国後に発症して亡くなった場合、遺族が日本語をまったくわからなくても労災申請ができるのか。政府は被曝による労災について伝えるリーフレットを日本語版しか作成していない。

全文は福島原発廃炉に外国人労働者、「使い捨て」の声

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甲状腺サポート事業「全員甲状腺がん」は誤りと謝罪〜実態は不透明via OurPlanet-TV

Posted on 2019/04/29 by nfield

福島県が実施している甲状腺検査で、治療が必要となった患者に支給している「甲状腺サポート事業」をめぐり７日の常任委員会で、県の佐藤宏隆保健福祉部長は「医療費を交付した２３３人は全て甲状腺がん（または疑い）」との１２月議会の答弁が誤りだったと謝罪した。

また１２日の委員会でも、佐藤部長は、「極めて重要な検査の数値の答弁を誤った」のは、「決して小さくない」「本来あってはなならいこと」と弁明した。一方、医療費を交付している２３３人のうち、手術を受けた８２人以外が、どのような患者なのかについては明らかにしなかった。

甲状腺検査サポート事業の交付実態、不透明なまま
１２月議会で、「２３３人全てが甲状腺がん」と回答した鈴木陽一保健福祉課課長。議会終了後のOurPlanetTVの取材に対し、「甲状腺サポート事業は、福島県民健康調査の甲状腺検査とセット。検査が、甲状腺がんのみを対象としている以上、交付対象も甲状腺がん疑いに限定しているのは当然。それは最初から変わっていない」と述べていた。

[…]

また、OurPlanetTVが、日本甲状腺学会誌に掲載された論文「甲状腺結節取り扱い診療ガイドライン」に掲載された「甲状腺結節の組織学的分類」を示しながら、交付対象となる内容を確認した際も、手術後の病理診断まで確定診断が難しい「濾胞腺腫」を除き、「悪性腫瘍」以外には交付されないと回答していた。

全文

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Does the nuclear industry have a back door into its regulator? via Beyond Nuclear International

Posted on 2019/04/29 by nfield

By Linda Pentz Gunter

[…]

In December 2017, the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory (PNNL) released a report  which it posted on its website, and that of the Office of Science and Technical Information (OSTI) — a division within the Department of Energy. The abstract was posted to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) website where the links to the PNNL and OSTI report postings are now dead.

In its report, PNNL said that the “autopsy” of a closed nuclear power plant should be “required.” The idea is that when a nuclear power plant is permanently shut down, the decommissioning process provides access to key reactor safety systems, structures and components. With the reactor closed, these parts can — and should — be materially examined to assess the condition and reliability of those same parts in still operating reactors. Indeed, PNNL concluded that such strategic “harvesting” of actual aged samples was a “high priority,” if the government was to continue issuing extensions to reactor operating licenses.

The PNNL report —Criteria and Planning Guidance for Ex-Plant Harvesting to Support Subsequent License Renewal — was then abruptly removed from both the PNNL and OSTI websites. But not before Paul Gunter at Beyond Nuclear had downloaded it.

Why was it removed? Beyond Nuclear learned in our pre-hearing oral argument before the NRC Atomic Safety and Licensing Board on March 27, 2019, that the PNNL report was “just a draft.” NRC counsel, Kayla Gamin, told the court that PNNL posted the report on its website “by mistake.” Presumably the DOE and IAEA made the same error.

Beyond Nuclear was arguing its case against the Second License Renewal of Exelon’s Peach Bottom nuclear plant in Pennsylvania, two reactors that are the same GE Mark I boiling water reactor design as those at Fukushima-Daiichi. As part of our arguments against extending the Peach Bottom operating license out to 80 years, Beyond Nuclear says that closed GE Mark I reactors, such as Vermont Yankee and Oyster Creek, should be autopsied during decommissioning, and laboratory analysis should be conducted on the effects of aging and degradation on safety systems. This would provide essential information when considering whether reactors like Peach Bottom should continue to operate at all, let alone for a total of 80 years, twice as long as the original license anticipated.

Just days after Beyond Nuclear raised objections in court to the PNNL report’s removal, (having already flagged its disappearance in our written statement), a revised version of the reportmagically reappeared, dated March 31, 2019, and this time on the NRC’s public information site known as ADAMS — but not on the PNNL or OSTI sites.

Paul immediately did a side-by-side comparison of the two reports, and the real reason for taking down the original quickly emerged. Paul found that the NRC had gone through and removed every reference to “required”, “may require”, or “likely require”. The revised report was considerably condensed, down from 52 pages to 42. There was also substantial removal or replacement of the term “knowledge gap,” which appeared 18 times in the December 2017 report and only once in the March 2019 version.

The report is still in PNNL’s name with the same five authors listed. There is no mention of editing by the NRC but a disclaimer at the beginning says “This document supersedes and replaces the previous harvesting criteria and planning guidance (PNNL-27120), which was inadvertently released while still under development.”

This isn’t a redaction, it’s tampering with someone else’s work to suit the NRC’s  — or rather the nuclear industry’s — agenda.

The PNNL had apparently prematurely decided that reactor autopsies should be “required” and then the NRC decided that they shouldn’t.

Read more.

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The even madder plan to build a new nuclear plant on the beach via Beyond Nuclear International

Posted on 2019/04/29 by nfield

By Linda Pentz Gunter

In December 2018 we ran an article — The mad plan to store nuclear waste on the beach— which has become one of our most read stories. Now, as the climate crisis worsens, here comes a possibly even madder plan — a new nuclear power plant on a beach with a shifting coastline famous for erosion.

[…]

The Sizewell reactors sit on a windswept beach just yards from a sea that has already consumed ancient villages as the coastline changed and eroded over the centuries. Now the sea level rise that will come with climate change promises in time to drown a few more, most likely including the Sizewell nuclear site. Undeterred, the French government nuclear company, EDF, insists it will build a new reactor at Sizewell — one of its ill-fated EPR design that is already struggling at Flamanville, Olkiluoto and Hinkley. Just from a climate change point of view, it is an exercise in insanity. But there is so much more at stake.

The local activist group, Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) has been challenging the EDF plan for years, even as Sizewell sits permanently second in the queue behind the ever more delayed and ever more exorbitant sister site at Hinkley C in Somerset, where EDF is attempting to build two EPRs. Despite the technical problems, cost over-runs and the obscene strike price EDF scored off the UK government — which would almost triple current electricity rates — the company insists in can build Sizewell C more cheaply than Hinkley C and that construction could start within the next three years. It’s a pretty tall order and, arguably, total French farce.

[…]

Read more.

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Climate Change Could Unleash Long-Frozen Radiation via Popular Mechanics

Posted on 2019/04/29 by nfield

Atomic bombs, Chernobyl, Fukushima—radiation has traveled and frozen all over the world. Global warming is changing that.

By David Grossman

[…]

[…]

The international team studied 17 icy locations across the globe, including the Arctic, the Antarctic, Iceland, the Alps, the Caucasus mountains, and British Columbia. While radiation exists naturally, the scientists were looking for example of human-made radiation. It was common to find concentrations at least 10 times higher than levels elsewhere.

“They are some of the highest levels you see in the environment outside nuclear exclusion zones,” says Caroline Clason, a lecturer in Physical Geography at the University of Plymouth, speaking in a press statement.

When human-made radiation is released into the environment, be it in small amounts like the Three Mile Island accident of 1979 or larger quantities like the Chernobyl disaster of 1986and the Fukushima Daichii accident of 2011, it goes into the atmosphere. That includes elements like radioactive cesium, which have been known to make people sick to the point of death across the globe.

After Chernobyl, clouds of cesium traveled across Europe. Radiation spread without regard for borders, reaching as far as England through rains. But when rain freezes, it takes the form of ice. And within ice, it can lay trapped. 

“Radioactive particles are very light so when they are taken up into the atmosphere they can be transported a very long way,” Clason tells the AFP. “When it falls as rain, like after Chernobyl, it washes away and it’s sort of a one-off event. But as snow, it stays in the ice for decades and as it melts in response to the climate it’s then washed downstream.”

What does that response look like? Humanity is starting to find out, Clason says. She points to wild boar in Sweden, who in 2017 were found to have 10 times the levels of normal radiation.

Traces of human-made radiation last a famously long time. Ice around the globe contains nuclear material not just from accidents involving nuclear power plants, but also man’s use of nuclear weapons.

“We’re talking about weapons testing from the 1950s and 1960s onwards, going right back in the development of the bomb,” Clason says. “If we take a sediment core you can see a clear spike where Chernobyl was, but you can also see quite a defined spike in around 1963 when there was a period of quite heavy weapons testing.”

Elements within radiation have different life spans. Perhaps the most notorious of these, Plutonium-241 has a 14 year half-life. But Americium-241, a synthetic chemical element, has a half life of 432 years. It can stay in ice a long time, and when that ice melts will spread. There isn’t much data yet on its ability to spread into the human food chain, but Clason called the threat of Americum “particularly dangerous”.

A term popular in science these days is the Anthropocene, which refers to the idea that humans have permanently altered the very core of how the Earth functions as a living ecosystem. Looking for radiation buried within icy soil and sediment could offer stronger proof of those changes.

[…]

Read more.

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Japan’s nuclear horror relived as people return to Fukushima’s ghost towns via Mirror

Posted on 2019/04/29 by yukimiyamotodepaul

It is eight years since a devastating tsunami caused three reactors to meltdown at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station on the north-east coast of Japan

ByEmily RetterSenior Feature Writer

[…]

Radiation leaking in fatal quantities forced 160,000 people to evacuate immediately, and most to this day have not returned to their toxic towns and villages.

[…]

The government is keen residents return as soon as it is safe, and this month around 40% of the town of Okuma, which sits just west of the plant, was declared safe for habitation thanks to ongoing decontamination efforts carried out on an superhuman scale.

The official mandatory evacuation order was lifted, and while reports reveal just 367 residents of Okuma’s original population of 10,341 have so far made the decision to return, and most of the town remains off-limits, the Japanese government is keen this be seen as a positive start to re-building this devastated area.

“This is a major milestone for the town,” Toshitsuna Watanabe, mayor of Okuma, told Japanese news outlets, as six pensioners locally dubbed ‘The Old Man Squad’, who had taken it upon themselves to defy advice and keep their town secure, finally ceased their patrols.

“It has taken many years to get to where we are now, but I am happy that we made it.”

[…]

The government is particularly keen to show progress before the 2020 Olympic Games in Tokyo.

Six Olympic softball games and a baseball game will be staged in Fukushima, the capital of this prefecture, which is free of radiation.

The torch relay will even begin at J Village, which was once the base for the crisis response team. Hearteningly, it is now back to its original function, a football training centre.

But the truth is, it is mainly older residents who have decided to return to their homes.

[…]

Work to make the rest of Okuma safe is predicted to take until 2022. The area which was its centre is still a no-go zone.

In the years following the disaster, 70,000 workers removed topsoil, tree branches, grass and other contaminated material from areas near homes, schools and public buildings.

A staggering £21billion has been spent in order to make homes safe.
Millions of cubic metres of radioactive soil has been packed into bags.
By 2021 it is predicted 14million cubic metres will have been generated.

[…]

But residents understandably want it moved out of Fukushima for good.

As yet, no permanent location has agreed to take it, but the government has pledged it will be gone by 2045.

At Daiichi itself, the decontamination teams are battling with the build up of 1m tonnes of radioactive water.

[…]

Decommissioning the plant entirely is expected to take at least four decades.

Read more at Japan’s nuclear horror relived as people return to Fukushima’s ghost towns

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福島の汚染土再利用　住民の反対根強く 国・東電に負担軽減の思惑 via 日本経済新聞

Posted on 2019/04/29 by yukimiyamotodepaul

東京電力福島第1原子力発電所事故で出た汚染土壌の処分計画がつまずいている。国は昨年末、汚染土を除染して長期間保管した後でほぼ全量を再利用する方針を打ち出したが、住民の反発で思うように進まない。計画にこだわる背景には処分費用を抑えて国や東電の負担を減らす思惑が垣間見える。

（略）

福島第1原発事故ではセシウムなどの放射性物質が大量に放出され、汚染が広がった。国は汚染土を集める除染を進め、放射線量を毎時0.23マイクロ（マイクロは100万分の1）シーベルト未満まで下げ、住民を帰還する計画をまとめた。

汚染土壌の総量は1300万立方メートル。除染作業は7市町村に残る帰還困難区域を除き18年3月で終え、福島県内の10万5千カ所に仮置きする。国は12年7月に閣議決定した「福島復興再生基本方針」で福島第1原発近隣（同県大熊町・双葉町）の中間貯蔵施設で長期間保管し、貯蔵開始から30年以内に福島県外で最終処分する計画を立てた。

ただ1300万立方メートルもの土壌を集約した後、再び県外の別の場所に運ぶのは現実的ではなく候補地のあてもない。国の検討会で座長を務める東京農工大学の細見正明名誉教授は「再利用で量を減らさないことには最終処分は到底できない」と指摘する。こうした専門家の意見を踏まえ、国は汚染土を最大99%再利用する方針に踏み切った。
再利用は放射線量が1キログラム当たり8千ベクレル以下まで下がった汚染土。農地や公園などの造成、高速道路や防潮堤の公共工事に利用を見込む。環境省は再利用で、最終処分する汚染土の量が最大99%削減できるとしている。

17年3月に住民の避難指示が解除された同県飯舘村では再利用が始まった。低地を汚染土で埋め立てバイオマス燃料の原料作物を栽培する。原子力規制委員会の初代委員長を務めた田中俊一氏は同村に移住。汚染土を再利用した場所で放射線量を調べ安全性の確認を続ける。田中氏は「科学的に見れば食用作物を育てても問題はない。（収益面を考慮して）住民の要望もある」と話す。

（略）

同県二本松市でも約200メートルの市道整備で汚染土を活用する計画を市議会で説明したが、反発が相次いだ。住民の反対署名運動まで広がり計画の中止を余儀なくされた。

なぜ国は住民の反対が強いにもかかわらず汚染土の再利用を進めるのか。除染費用を抑えて東電などの負担を減らす意図が見え隠れする。

政府は16年12月、福島第1原発の処理にかかる費用が約21.5兆円に達するとした。これは原子炉の廃炉や住民などの賠償も含むが、中間貯蔵建設も入れた除染費用は5.6兆円にのぼる。当初は3.6兆円だったが、すでに2兆円膨らんだ。
除染費用は事故後に購入した東電株の売却などで充てる計画だったが、それでは足りず中間貯蔵施設の費用では税金の投入も決まった。これ以上、除染費用を膨らませたくないというのが国の本音だ。最終処分地を新たに作れば莫大なコストがかかる。再利用できれば費用が大幅に減る。

長崎大学の鈴木達治郎教授は「国民負担は不可避となっており、政府は費用の内訳や見通しを説明し、透明性を確保すべきだ」と語る。

（安倍大資）

全文は福島の汚染土再利用　住民の反対根強く 国・東電に負担軽減の思惑

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「控訴審で勝利を」/福島原発訴訟原告団が総会via しんぶん赤旗

Posted on 2019/04/28 by nfield

　「生業（なりわい）を返せ、地域を返せ！」福島原発訴訟原告団は２７日、福島県二本松市で第５回総会を開きました。

　総会は、仙台高裁の控訴審で勝訴を勝ち取るために▽公正判決を求める署名運動に取り組む▽諸団体、個人、自治体、議員との協働を強化する▽支部活動を活性化し、地域に根を張る取り組み▽事務局体制の強化―の四つの方針を決めました。

　また「この国の為政者と原発を進めてきたすべての勢力に対して、自らの過ちを認めて甚大な被害に対する十分な償いをさせるまで、そして原発ゼロの完全な勝利まで福島県内および全国でたたかうすべての原発事故被害者と力を合わせてたたかい続けることを宣言します」とのアピールを採択しました。

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Joanna Macy: A Wild Love for the World via On Being with Krista Tippet

Posted on 2019/04/28 by nfield

[…]

Tell me about how that awakening came in your life.

Ms. Macy:Well, it came about very naturally. I was always responsive to issues when they arose. And then in the ’70s, it became quite vivid for me and quite compelling as through my son — my second son — through a papery road [a paper he wrote?] in his environmental engineering course at college that I learned about what nuclear power generation was doing in even the thermal pollution, let alone the radioactive contamination. And so, side by side with him, I stepped into direct activism, going together to occupy the Seabrook reactor before it could open and protesting down at the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

I learned piles there. And that had a great spiritual teaching for me too, Krista, because it led me into fascination, if not obsession — I’ll say obsession — with long-term radioactive contamination through our processes of making weapons and generating power that insisted that I open my mind to reaches of time that had stretched both my heart and my intellect.

In other words, I realized that we were, through technology, having consequences with — our decisions had consequences or a karma, as we could say, that reached into geological time — and that what in industry and government choices that we make under pressure for profit or bureaucratic whatever, that we are making choices that will affect whether beings thousands of generations from now will be able to be born sound of mind and body.

Ms. Tippett:Something that’s very present for me as I’m reading about you and the passion you’ve had for this for a long time is you also were always very aware of a sense of grief as you realized …

Ms. Macy:Oh, yeah. Grief got me into it.

Ms. Tippett:Yeah. And you really work with people to hold on to that, to take their grief seriously, right?

Ms. Macy:Or not to hold on to it so much as to not be afraid of it, because that grief, if you are afraid of it and pave it over, clamp down, you shut down. And the kind of apathy and closed-down denial, our difficulty in looking at what we’re doing to our world stems not from callous indifference or ignorance so much as it stems from fear of pain. That was a big learning for me as I was organizing around nuclear power and around at the time of Three Mile Island catastrophe and around Chernobyl.

It relates to everything. It relates to what’s in our food, and it relates to the clear-cuts of our forests. It relates to the contamination of our rivers and oceans. So that became, actually, perhaps the most pivotal point in — I don’t know — the landscape of my life: that dance with despair, to see how we are called to not run from the discomfort and not run from the grief or the feelings of outrage or even fear — and that, if we can be fearless, to be with our pain, it turns. It doesn’t stay static. It only doesn’t change if we refuse to look at it. But when we look at it, when we take it in our hands, when we can just be with it and keep breathing, then it turns. It turns to reveal its other face, and the other face of our pain for the world is our love for the world, our absolutely inseparable connectedness with all life.

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Uranium Miner Coaxed Government to Water Down Extinction Safeguards via Guardian UK

Posted on 2019/04/28 by nfield

By Adam Morton

[…Cameco did not have to show if WA mine would lead to extinction of tiny fauna before its approval on 10 April

 multinational uranium miner persuaded the federal government to drop a requirement forcing it to show that a mine in outback Western Australia would not make any species extinct before it could go ahead.

Canadian-based Cameco argued in November 2017 the condition proposed by the government for the Yeelirrie uranium mine, in goldfields north of Kalgoorlie, would be too difficult to meet.

The mine was approved on 10 April, the day before the federal election was called, with a different set of conditions relating to protecting species.

Environmental groups say the approval was politically timed and at odds with a 2016 recommendation by the WA Environmental Protection Authority that the mine be blocked due to the risk to about 140 subterranean stygofauna and troglofauna species – tiny animals that live in groundwater and air pockets above the water table.

A Cameco presentation to the department, released to the Greens through Senate estimates, shows the government proposed approving the mine with a condition the company must first demonstrate that no species would be made extinct during the works.

Cameco Australia said this did not recognise “inherent difficulties associated with sampling for and describing species”, including the inadequacy of techniques to sample microscopic species that live underground and challenges in determining whether animals were of the same species. It said the condition was “not realistic and unlikely to be achieved – ever”.

The condition did not appear in the final approval signed by the environment minister, Melissa Price, which was made public after being posted on the environment department’s website on 24 April.

Instead, the government said the company should develop a groundwater management program, limit groundwater extraction in some places to 50cm and have evidence from a qualified ecologist that work in part of the area affected by the mine would not lead to extinction. All would need to be submitted to the environment minister for approval.

Mia Pepper, from the Conservation Council of WA, said the change to the conditions showed mining companies had a disproportionate influence in what was a flawed environmental approvals process.

She said a clear condition to stop extinction had been replaced with convoluted requirements that shifted the onus for stopping species loss from the company to the government.

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