Plutonium

• Fluor Corporation (NYSE: FLR) announced today that the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) selected Hanford Tank Waste Operations & Closure, LLC (H2C) – a joint venture led by a subsidiary of BWX Technologies, Inc., together with Fluor and Amentum – to execute the Hanford Integrated Tank Disposition Contract.
• The new contract has an estimated ceiling of $45 billion over a 10-year ordering period for environmental management operations at the Hanford Site in Washington state.
• Fluor will recognize its share of earnings from this new contract using the equity method of accounting.
• The DOE is engaged in one of the great public works projects of this century at the Hanford Site.

• Yhonnie Scarce, a Kokatha and Nukunu artist, has emerged in recent years as one of Australia’s most significant contemporary artists.
• At the same time, it’s an opportunity for Western Australia’s art followers to see a range of works not previously assembled in Perth.

A translucent shower

The exhibition is installed across two levels, conjoined through an architectural void that invites spectacle. In this void, Scarce’s glistening Thunder Raining Poison (2016-17) hangs from the ceiling by hundreds of wires.
Scarce’s works are so steeped in the contemporary art idiom that, despite the centrality of glass throughout this exhibition, we might not at first consider her a “glass artist”. Yet in Thunder Raining Poison, and in her two other “cloud” works, Cloud Chamber (2020) and Death Zephyr (2016), the artist draws our attention to the fragility and beauty of the material.

• This potato-like tuberous root vegetable, which urban-dwelling Australians may not be familiar with, grows throughout the bush.
• The sensitivity of the exhibition’s themes, and perhaps the low lighting, seem to demand quiet in the space.
• Born in Woomera, Scarce is descended from the Lake Eyre Kokatha people and the Southern Flinders Ranges Nukunu people.

Nuclear colonialism

Australian nuclear colonialism is a recurrent theme in the exhibition, with the upstairs gallery including three of Scarce’s Glass Bomb works from the Blue Danube series (2015).
Perhaps the most poignant work with this theme is Fallout Babies (2016). Set in a corner space, this work is partially surrounded by a floor-to-ceiling photograph of a graveyard with the buried bodies of children from communities that were exposed to the fallout from the bomb testing. The bodies are metaphorically represented by bulbous glass plums, which speak of fertility and promise.
Hollowing Earth (2016-17) is made of materials quite literally infused with trace amounts of uranium. It glows a luminous green under the black-lit gallery. The glass vessels in Hollowing Earth represent bush bananas, another recurrent bush food in Scarce’s aesthetic cypher. The glass surfaces of many of these voluminous glowing bodies are torn while the glass is still hot and malleable.

Read more:
As the world pushes for a ban on nuclear weapons, Australia votes to stay on the wrong side of history

Bush bananas also appear in the work In The Dead House (2020), a work previously installed in the old mortuary in Adelaide Botanic Gardens as part the 2020 Adelaide Biennial of Australian Art. Laid out on a vintage mortuary trolley, fragile glass bodies are ripped wide open.
The work references early 20th century Adelaide coroner, Ramsay Smith, who profited from exporting Aboriginal remains to British museums. Smith is notorious for having decapitated the corpses – and the bush bananas echo heads and bodies that have been violently disgorged.

Moments of gentle beauty

• Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day includes some moments of gentle beauty found in the love of family and tragic ancestry.
• Both Remember Royalty (2018) and Dinah (2016) belong to stories of trauma, institutionalised racism and inhumane colonial abuse.
• But these are also moments in this exhibition that actively seek to restore pride that was once brutally taken.
• Read more:
  We sliced open radioactive particles from soil in South Australia and found they may be leaking plutonium

• Art of Peace receives a Linkage Project grant (LP210300068) from the Australian Research Council over three years (2023-2026).
• He is not involved in any way with the curation or exhibition of Yhonnie Scarce: The Light of Day at AGWA.

• GENEVA, Jan. 29, 2024 /PRNewswire/ -- Transmutex SA , a nuclear engineering company based in Geneva, Switzerland, announces a new round of financing to further develop its solution for a safer, lower-cost, proliferation-resistant nuclear energy technology.
• The Series A2 round is co-led by Union Square Ventures and Steel Atlas .
• Founded on 29 July 2019, Transmutex is reinventing nuclear energy with the design of a safer, non-self-sustaining reaction technology that will usher in a new era of lower-cost and proliferation-resistant, carbon-free baseload energy.
• This was further emphasized during COP28, where 22 countries vowed to triple their production of nuclear power ( link ).

• Japan’s decision to release water from the Fukushima nuclear power plant has been greeted with horror by the local fishing industry as well as China and several Pacific Island states.
• China – which together with Hong Kong imports more than US$1.1bn (£866m) of seafood from Japan every year – has slapped a ban on all seafood imports from Japan, citing health concerns.
• Japan remains steadfast in its assurance that the water is safe.

Contaminated water

• Since the accident, water has been used to cool the damaged reactors.
• But, as the reactor core contains numerous radioactive elements, including ruthenium, uranium, plutonium, strontium, caesium and tritium, the cooling water has become contaminated.
• Tritium is a radioactive form of hydrogen that forms water molecules with properties similar to regular water.
• To safely store the water that will continue to be contaminated over that time (some 100 tonnes of water each day), the plant’s operators will need to construct an additional 2,700 storage tanks.

Should we be concerned?

• However, much of this research has focused on organisms such as zebrafish and marine mussels.
• Interestingly, the zebrafish were exposed to tritium concentrations similar to those estimated to be in the storage tanks at Fukushima.
• Marine organisms within the discharge zone will experience consistent exposure to this low concentration over the next 30 years.

But that’s not everything

• The amount of tritium used in this study was over 3,000 times less than that used in the French study.
• But it still exceeded the levels being discharged into the Pacific Ocean from Fukushima by almost 250 times.