‘No place for dirty coal in Burma’: activists

(DVB)By KO HTWE
Published: 25 January 2012

Environmental activists in Burma have sought to capitalise on a recent decision by the government to suspend a massive coal-fired power plant in the country’s south by demanding a moratorium on all existing and planned coal projects.
The 4,000 MW plant in Tavoy would have produced enough power to support construction of a 200 square-kilometre industrial complex and buoy neighbouring Thailand’s energy needs. But after widespread grassroots opposition at the likely environmental and health impacts of the project, the government in early January scrapped the plan.

Ban all coal-fired power plants in Burma: environmentalists

Tuesday, 24 January 2012 13:30 Mizzima News
(Mizzima) – Environmentalists are calling for a full moratorium on all existing and planned coal-fired power plants in Burma, following the announcement early this month that a proposed 4,000-megawatt coal-fired power plant in Dawei was terminated.
 
The coal-fired power plant near Tigyit village. Photo: PYO
Burma’s Minister of Electricity No.2 Khin Maung Soe announced that the plant in the Dawei Special Economic Zone would be cancelled due to the potential environmental impacts.

သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာ

ပအိုဝ္းလူငယ္အစည္းအရုံးႏွင့္ ရွမ္းသဘာဝပါတ္ဝန္းက်င္အဖြဲ႔အစည္းတို႔မွ သတင္းထုတ္ျပန္ေၾကျငာခ်က္

၂၄ ရက္၊ ဇန္နဝါရီလ၊ ၂၀၁၂

သဘာဝပါတ္ဝန္းက်င္ဆုိင္ရာလွဳပ္ရွားသူမ်ားမွ ျမန္မာႏိုင္ငံရွိ ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသုံး လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပး စက္ရုံမ်ားအားလုံး ရပ္တန္႔ရန္ေတာင္းဆို

သန္႔ရွင္းစြမ္းအင္အတြက္ ပထမအဆင့္ေျခလွမ္းသာရွိေနေသးေသာ ထား၀ယ္ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုးလွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါအားေပးစက္ရံုရပ္တန္႔ျခင္းဆံုးျဖတ္ခ်က္

လက္ရွိအစိုးရမွ မဂၢါဝပ္ ၄၀၀၀ ထြက္ရွိမည့္ ထား၀ယ္ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုးလွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပးစက္ရံု တည္ေဆာက္ရန္ လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္ကို ရပ္တန္႔မည္ျဖစ္ေၾကာင္း
ဇန္န၀ါရီလအေစာပုိင္းတြင္ ေၾကျငာခဲ့ ျပီးေနာက္ သဘာ၀ပတ္၀န္းက်င္ဆိုင္ရာ လွဳပ္ရွားသူမ်ားက လက္ရွိျမန္မာႏုိင္ငံတြင္လည္ပတ္ေနေသာ ေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုး
လွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပး စက္ရံုမ်ား အားလံုး ႏွင့္ အျခားေက်ာက္မီးေသြးသံုးလွ်ပ္စစ္ဓါတ္အားေပးစက္ရံုတည္ေဆာက္ေရး လုပ္ငန္းစဥ္မ်ားအားလံုးကို ရပ္ဆုိင္းရန္ေတာင္း ဆိုသည္။

Press release from Pa-Oh Youth Organization and Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization

Press release from Pa-Oh Youth Organization and Shan Sapawa Environmental Organization

January 24, 2012

Environmentalists call for full moratorium on coal-fired power plants in Burma

Decision on Dawei coal plant only first step toward clean energy

                                                                       

Enivornmentalists today are calling for a full moratorium on all existing and planned coal-fired power plants in Burma following the announcement earlier this month canceling the proposed 4,000 Megawatt coal-fired power plant in Dawei.

Burma’s Minister of Electricity No.2 Khin Maung Soe announced on January 9 that the proposed 4,000 Megawatt coal-fired power plant in the Dawei Special Economic Zone would be cancelled due to the potential environmental impacts of the plant.

Burma currently has plans to construct seven coal-fired power plants across the country; two are currently operational. The largest is the 120 MW Tigyit plant in southern Shan State, which emits clouds of poisonous gases and produces over 100 tons of toxic fly ash per day. A report released last year detailed how air and water pollution in Tigyit is threatening the agriculture and health of nearly 12,000 people.

According to the Electricity Minister, the government may still build a 400 MW plant in Dawei, over three times the size of the Tigyit plant.

Another coal-fired plant by the main developer of the Dawei project, Italian-Thai Public Company Limited, is underway in eastern Shan State without public scrutiny. The Mong Kok plant will produce 369 MW and export power to Thailand.

“If the government is really concerned about the impacts of coal, it should stop all coal plants in Burma” said Khun Myo Hto of the Pa-Oh Youth Organization. “However ‘small’ a coal plant is, we know how deadly it can be for local communities.”

Burma lacks a comprehensive energy plan that addresses environmental and social impacts and local energy needs and despite chronic energy shortages, exports vast energy resources to neighboring countries. This includes the export of natural gas, which is much less polluting than coal.

“Why is the government selling off our country’s natural gas and leaving us to choke on the toxic emissions of dirty coal?” said Khun Myo Hto.

For further details about coal projects in Burma, see www.paohyouth.org/ and www.shansapawa.org

Contact: Khun Myo Hto (Pa-Oh Youth Organization)

Phone: 085 7099 026, Email: office@paohyouth.org

Contact:  Sai Tueng Leng Aung (Shan Sapawa Organization)

Phone: 083 3217 985, Email: shansapawa@gmail.com

Pollution in China

30 Mar 2011 By Francis Wade

 Four years ago a World Bank report landed on the desk of the Chinese health ministry containing shocking statistics on pollution-related deaths in the country, so much so that Beijing promptly engineered the removal of a third of it over fears that the findings, if they went public, could spark “social unrest”. Around 750,000 people die each year of pollution-related illnesses, the report said, many of whom fall victim to China’s distinction as the world’s leading coal consumer. The findings were smothered for years, with the final report, “Cost of Pollution in China”, resorting to abstract gauges such as the economic burden of premature deaths, rather than the cold, hard figures.

Russian MIG 29 Jet used as a threat against SSA-N to protect Russia Investments

Written by PYO | August 29, 2011

MIG 29 Jet photo

http://mmmilitary.blogspot.com/

MIG 29 Jets – produced in Russia – were deployed by the Burmese Army as a threat against the Shan State Army North (SSA-N). As reported by Shan Herald Agency for News (SHAN) on 13 July 2011 two MIG 29 Jets, and on August 9 2011 four MIG 29 Jets flew over the SSA-N - Burmese Army battlefields.

World Youth Day in Taunggyi interrupted by Authority

Written by PYO | August 22, 2011

The World Youth Day in Taunggyi organized by young people from various youth groups in Shan State was interrogated by authority.

The event took place at the stadium of Pa-Oh National Day in outskirt of Taunggyi on 12th August 2011; a remarkable event to show the solidarity of youth in Burma.

Toxic waste from Burma's largest coal project could displace 12,000

Katharine Helmore

20th January, 2011

http://www.theecologist.org/ 

Despite wreaking havoc on the health of local villagers and the environment, Burma's military regime is doing nothing to reduce the impact of the Tigyit power plant and mine

Toxic waste and ash from Burma's largest coal-fired power plant and the nearby lignite coal mine are devastating the health of local communities and could displace up to 12,000 people, say Burmese researchers.

According to a report released by the Pa-Oh Youth Group, the Tigyit Power Plant is producing up to 150 tonnes of toxic fly ash daily and is enveloping nearby villages in the southern Shan State in a toxic cloud, causing widespread health problems.

Shan Coal Mine Affecting Local Health, Report Says

By KO HTWE Thursday, January 20, 2011

 http://www.irrawaddy.org

The agriculture and health of nearly 12,000 people living within a five-mile radius of Burma’s largest coal mine and coal-fired power plant are threatened with air and water pollution, according to a report titled “Poison Clouds” that was complied by the Pa-Oh Youth Organization (PYO) and the Kyoju Action Network (KAN).

According to the report, the power plant, which is located near Tigyit in Pinglaung Township in southern Shan State, releases 100 to150 tons of toxic ash containing mercury, lead and arsenic into the atmosphere every day.

Major coal mine 'poisoning rivers'

By Francis Wade
Democratic Voice of Burma
21 January 2011
Burma's biggest open-cast coal mine is polluting waterways and causing displacement of communities on an alarming scale, a new report warns.

Digger works on the Tigyit mine in Shan state - Source: PYO

The Tigyit mine close to Shan state's Inle Lake produces some 2000 tonnes of lignite, often referred to as brown coal, each day. The Poison Clouds report by the Pa'O Youth Organisation (PYO) claims that it is damaging the health of locals there.
Problems with transporting lignite mean that it is often burned in power plants close to its source which produce much higher carbon dioxide emissions than black coal.
Images released by PYO show hazardous coal dumps forming veritable mountain ranges close to inhabited areas. The run-off from these can work its way into rivers that feed into Inle Lake, Burma's second-largest, with knock-on effects for farmers and fisherman palpable.