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Following the latest spill of radioactive material at ERAs Ranger uranium mine he ABC has an opinion piece wondering if it is time to decommission the industry - Is time up for Australias uranium industry ?.

IN THE EARLY HOURS of December 7, a crack appeared in a large leach tank in the processing area of the Ranger uranium mine in Kakadu National Park. The area was evacuated, the tank completely failed, the containment system was inadequate and one million litres of highly acidic uranium slurry went sliding downhill — taking Energy Resources of Australias credibility with it.

The spill has left traditional owners who live and rely on creeks only kilometres downstream angry and "sick with worry" and raised profound concerns about the management culture and integrity of infrastructure at the mine.

Operations at Ranger are now halted. The mine operates inside Kakadu National Park — Australias largest park and a dual World Heritage listed region. It, and its people, deserve the highest standards of protection, but sadly Ranger is a long way short of this.

The Australian uranium industry has long been a source of trouble. Now it is increasingly in trouble. The commodity price has collapsed, projects across the country have been stalled, deferred or scrapped and the recent Kakadu spill has again raised community attention and concern.

At least the absence of a nuclear power industry in Australia means we dont have stories emerging like this one from the US - U.S. Dumped Tens of Thousands of Steel Drums Containing Atomic Waste Off Coastlines .

More than four decades after the U.S. halted a controversial ocean dumping program, the country is facing a mostly forgotten Cold War legacy in its waters: tens of thousands of steel drums of atomic waste.

From 1946 to 1970, federal records show, 55-gallon drums and other containers of nuclear waste were pitched into the Atlantic and Pacific at dozens of sites off California, Massachusetts and a handful of other states. Much of the trash came from government-related work, ranging from mildly contaminated lab coats to waste from the country’s effort to build nuclear weapons.

Federal officials have long maintained that, despite some leakage from containers, there isn’t evidence of damage to the wider ocean environment or threats to public health through contamination of seafood. But a Wall Street Journal review of decades of federal and other records found unanswered questions about a dumping program once labeled “seriously substandard” by a senior Environmental Protection Agency official…

The Climate Spectator has a look at the potential for reducing infrastructure costs associated with meeting demand peaks by market based demand shaving mechanisms - Its time to reform the NEM.

Ross Fraser chairs a company called Energy Response, which makes money by encouraging large energy customers to cut their electricity consumption at times of peak load. It is the country’s only Australia-wide demand aggregator of electricity, but it shouldn’t be. And it can’t even operate on a daily basis in any other state than Western Australia, because the National Electricity Market (NEM) won’t allow it.

Energy Response has contracts with commercial and industrial business that account for 73MW of capacity in WA, and has the rights to another chunk about the same size. Basically the deal is this: when peak load soars and puts stress on the network and on wholesale prices, these consumers agree to reduce their demand by the agreed amount. Fraser won’t say how much they get paid, but it’s clearly lucrative, because it’s likely to be around 10 times more than what they are paying for the electricity if they were consuming it, and it is lowering costs for other energy consumers.

Fraser says about 2200MW of supply-side capacity exists in the NEM only to service the maximum peak loads that occur on just a few days of the year. It costs $2 billion to build that capacity and much more to put it into operation. “Why do we invest $1 million per MW to meet these occasional peaks when there is 3000MW of commercial and industry capacity that is already built and could be and reliably available if we have the right market mechanism?” he asks.

The NEM, a market that has been widely praised for delivering cheap and reliable energy, is now criticised because it is inflexible, is skewed towards suppliers simply producing more energy, and worst and most ironic of all – it adds unnecessarily to rising electricity costs. “There is no environmental objective and no demand management objective in the national electricity law, and that’s quite surprising,” says Mark Lister, head of the Alliance to Save Energy.

Fraser, who was the project leader in the implementation of the NEM, says even the efficiency of the NEM is now in doubt. “I don’t see how you can call it efficient,” he says. “It is simple for generators to build new generators and supply new energy. But it is not efficient for the end-use consumer – they are having to cope with the cost of this waste each year.” And the scale of this “waste” is enormous: around $6 billion in costs – a quarter of the annual retail cost of electricity, which is caused by servicing the extreme peaks in wholesale prices and network demand for just 40 hours a year.

EHS News points to an interesting wind map of the US, at the time the Oklahoma tornado occurred recently - A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in... Energy map?.

A humbling map of real-time wind patterns in Tornado Alley

"Wind Map" is a stunning interactive datavisualization that presents wind patterns across the continental U.S. in real time. Picture above is what it looked like last night at 10:59 CDT, in the aftermath of yesterdays devastating Oklahoma tornado."