Sachs on U.S. Power in Freefall: “The Most Dangerous Country in the World”
May 4, 2026 , https://scheerpost.com/2026/05/04/sachs-on-u-s-power-in-freefall-the-most-dangerous-country-in-the-world/
The global economy is no longer wobbling — it’s splintering. In a sweeping, unsparing conversation, economist Jeffrey Sachs describes a world pushed to the edge by Washington’s wars with Iran and Russia, its economic confrontation with China, and its attempt to reassert dominance across the Western Hemisphere. The pillars that held the global system together for decades — stable trade routes, energy flows, technological exchange, and financial integration — are being weaponized or dismantled outright. Europe, Sachs argues, has “cut itself off from its main natural resource provider” and is now “completely adrift economically,” while Asia accelerates toward deeper integration and long‑term advantage. The United States, meanwhile, is “irrational, poorly led, and desperate to keep control over what it no longer controls,” creating a world that is both fragmented and profoundly unstable.
The global economy is entering a period of rupture, not turbulence. That is the central warning from economist Jeffrey Sachs, who argues that Washington’s simultaneous confrontations with Iran, Russia, and China — combined with its efforts to dominate the Western Hemisphere — have pushed the international system to a breaking point. What once looked like temporary disruptions now resemble structural fractures.
Sachs begins with the U.S.–China relationship, which he says is “never going to be what it was 10 years ago,” noting that the era of “dynamic… mutual investments in both directions” is over. The same is true for Europe’s ties to Russia, which he describes as “damaged perhaps to the point of no return in our generation.” These ruptures are not cyclical; they are foundational.
A Fragmented World Takes Shape
According to Sachs, the world is reorganizing into regional blocs because long‑distance trade has become too risky. Asia is deepening its internal economic ties, Africa is likely to follow, and Europe — having severed its energy lifeline to Russia — is “completely adrift economically.” The continent, he argues, is now dependent on an “unstable, nasty and disdainful United States,” a strategic position that leaves it weaker than at any point since the end of World War II.
These shifts are not abstract. They are already reshaping global markets, supply chains, and political alignments. And Sachs warns that the situation could deteriorate rapidly if the United States “resumes the war with Iran,” a scenario he puts at “50% or higher,” with “devastating” consequences for the global economy.
Washington’s New Economic Doctrine: Hegemony First
Sachs traces the current crisis to a profound shift in U.S. thinking. For decades, economics was understood as a tool for mutual benefit — a view rooted in classical ideas about open trade. But as China rose and the U.S. share of global output declined, Washington’s foreign‑policy establishment reframed economics as an instrument of geopolitical control.
He describes how “international relations people… view the world not as win‑win but as win‑lose,” and how economic policy has been reoriented toward “preserving American hegemony.” This shift, he argues, has produced a 20‑year campaign to weaponize trade, technology, and finance — from semiconductor restrictions to sanctions to the freezing of sovereign assets.
The result is a world in which the basic scaffolding of globalization is being dismantled. Sachs rejects the claim that globalization “failed,” insisting instead that it “provided the basis for worldwide economic progress,” especially in developing economies. What failed, he says, was Washington’s expectation that it could remain permanently dominant.
Europe’s Strategic Blindness
Europe, in Sachs’s view, is the biggest loser in this new order. He argues that the continent “played along completely with the U.S.” in severing ties with Russia, despite decades of American pressure to prevent closer German‑Russian integration.
The result is a self‑inflicted wound: shuttered industries, soaring energy costs, and a political class that “bought into a completely failed economic and geopolitical strategy.” Sachs sees no path to recovery until Europe produces new leadership capable of recognizing geographic and economic realities.
The Return of Blockades and Piracy
One of the most alarming trends Sachs identifies is the resurgence of maritime coercion. He notes that Trump recently boasted that the U.S. is “essentially pirates now,” a statement that aligns with years of tanker seizures, sanctions‑driven blockades, and naval pressure campaigns.
Sachs calls this “shocking,” pointing out that freedom of navigation has been a bedrock principle of international order. He warns that if Europe participates in efforts to “contain” Russian shipping, “there will be war between Europe and Russia and Europe will be devastated.”
The United States, he argues, lacks both the naval capacity and the geopolitical support to sustain blockades against major powers. China, in particular, now possesses a “formidable navy” and a rapidly advancing military that makes U.S. dominance in Asia increasingly untenable.
A Dangerous Gap Between Ambition and Reality
Sachs’s most sobering claim is that the United States has become “the most dangerous country in the world” — not because of its strength, but because of the widening gap between its ambitions and its actual capabilities.
He describes a political class that is “irrational, very poorly led, rather desperate to keep control over what it no longer controls,” and a public that overwhelmingly believes the country is on the wrong track.
The danger, he argues, lies in the attempt to enforce global dominance through military and economic coercion at a moment when the U.S. lacks the power to achieve those aims. This mismatch creates instability, escalation risks, and the potential for catastrophic miscalculation.
Asia Ascendant
In contrast, Sachs sees Asia — particularly China — as the likely long‑term winner of the global realignment. Regional integration is accelerating, technological capacity is expanding, and the U.S. has limited leverage to disrupt these trends. “The closer one gets to Asia,” he says, “the less relevant the United States becomes.”
A World in Transition
The picture Sachs paints is stark: a fragmented world, a declining West, and a United States whose pursuit of hegemony is destabilizing the very system it once built. Whether the coming years bring a managed transition or a series of crises may depend on whether Washington can accept a multipolar world — or whether it continues to fight a losing battle to preserve the unipolar moment.
Britain is creating a mountain of nuclear waste it doesn’t know what to do with
The UK is expected to accrue enough waste to fill four Wembley Stadiums
Jonathan Leake, Energy Editor. 03 May 2026
For Ed Miliband, these were the announcements he’d been wanting
to make for years. Britain was entering a new “golden age of nuclear”,
he said earlier this year. The Energy Secretary pledged to strip away
planning delays, committing to building a generation of small modular
reactors (SMRs).
The industry was delighted. Rolls-Royce was signed up by
Miliband to build the first mini nuclear reactor on Anglesey in Wales.
Rivals began planning their own SMRs across Britain.
But amid the “golden
age” branding and political hype, one major issue remains embarrassingly
unresolved. If all the planned new reactors get built, as well as the giant
ones under construction at Hinkley in Somerset and Sizewell in Suffolk, the
UK will have to work out what to do with a mountain of radioactive waste.
Some 137,000 cubic metres of waste across dozens of UK sites – including at
Sellafield, Britain’s main nuclear waste facility on the Cumbrian coast –
awaits a ministerial decision on how best to dispose of it. A significant
portion of that waste – enough to fill the Royal Albert Hall 1.5 times over
– has been sitting around since the 1960s.In the next few decades, the
level of waste is expected to swell to 4.5 million cubic metres, a 30-fold
increase, as current and past nuclear stations are decommissioned. That’s
enough to fill four Wembley Stadiums.
For the hottest waste – about 750,000
cubic metres worth – the plan is to bury it in a geological repository.
This will probably be tunnelled into the seabed off Cumbria. The Nuclear
Decommissioning Authority admits it is a job that will take until at least
2130 and cost a fortune.
SMRs and the planned advanced modular reactors may
generate more waste for a given power output, experts claim. The physics is
simple. Smaller reactors have a proportionately larger surface area – so
more of the internal radiation escapes. As it strikes surrounding equipment
and buildings, they too will become highly radioactive. A recent research
paper co-authored by Prof Alison Macfarlane, the former chairman of the US
Nuclear Regulatory Commission, included a warning that SMRs “will
increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal by
factors of two to 30”.
Paul Dorfman, a Sussex University radiation expert
who advises the Ministry of Defence on dismantling nuclear submarines, says
this is not happening. He points out that the Department for Energy
Security and Net Zero (DESNZ)’s waste inventory omits waste that will arise
from the new Hinkley and Sizewell nuclear stations and from any SMRs that
are built.
Nuclear Waste Services, the government body charged with
building the repository, expects to start construction of a geological
disposal facility around 2040, beginning operations in the late 2050s and
operating through to 2200. Industry experts are sceptical of that
timetable. Insiders warn that this relies on Treasury approval for the
massive cost – which will always be a struggle. It is a cost that is only
likely to rise. In 2024, the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority estimated
Britain’s nuclear waste clean-up operation would cost £199bn. Last year, it
increased that to £216bn. However, the real cost – once a century of
inflation is added, along with waste from a new generation of reactors –
will be far beyond that.
Telegraph 3rd May 2026, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/03/britain-creating-mountain-nuclear-waste-doesnt-know/
Rapid escalation
the immediate battlefield risks are only part of the problem. The deeper concern lies in the erosion of the international arms control architecture that has historically constrained nuclear competition.
At the same time, the normalization of military solutions to nuclear disputes is becoming more pronounced. Pre-emptive strikes, once viewed as extreme measures, are increasingly framed as legitimate tools of non-proliferation.
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/05/03/rapid-escalation/
With arms control agreements weakened and diplomatic safeguards fading, nuclear-armed conflicts are no longer an abstract possibility, warns Paul Saoke
The ongoing confrontation involving the United States, Israel, and Iran has created a moment of extraordinary danger for the international system. Public debate has largely focused on conventional escalation, missile strikes, drone warfare, and air campaigns. Yet beneath these visible dynamics lies a far more consequential risk: the steady erosion of the global nuclear restraint regime.
In today’s geopolitical environment, where arms control agreements have weakened and diplomatic safeguards are fading, nuclear escalation is no longer an abstract or distant possibility. It is becoming structurally conceivable.
Recent developments across the Middle East, including intensified exchanges and tensions around strategic chokepoints such as the Strait of Hormuz, illustrate how rapidly regional conflicts can acquire global significance. Military actions intended to degrade capabilities are increasingly entangled with broader strategic calculations, extending the scope and stakes of confrontation.
One immediate concern is the status of Iran’s enriched uranium stockpile. Estimates suggest that Iran retains significant quantities of highly enriched uranium, potentially sufficient for weaponization if further processed. Reports that external actors are considering operations to secure or neutralize these materials underscore a dangerous reality: when nuclear assets exist within active conflict zones, the margin for miscalculation narrows dramatically.
If a state perceives that its nuclear capabilities or infrastructure are at imminent risk of destruction, the incentive to escalate pre-emptively increases. In such environments, actions intended as defensive or preventive can be interpreted as existential threats, triggering unpredictable responses.
Yet the immediate battlefield risks are only part of the problem. The deeper concern lies in the erosion of the international arms control architecture that has historically constrained nuclear competition.
For decades, global nuclear stability depended on a network of agreements that limited arsenals, enhanced transparency, and reduced uncertainty between rival powers. Today, many of these frameworks are weakening or have collapsed altogether. The deterioration of arms control arrangements between major nuclear powers, including the United States and Russia, threatens to remove the remaining constraints on the world’s largest nuclear arsenals.
This breakdown has direct implications for the Middle East. In the absence of clear frameworks, states increasingly plan for worst-case scenarios. Nuclear modernization accelerates. Strategic distrust deepens. Channels for managing escalation become fragile or disappear entirely.
Equally concerning is the collapse of diplomatic mechanisms designed to prevent nuclear proliferation. The unraveling of the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action removed a key constraint on Iran’s nuclear program. In its absence, military pressure has intensified, but so too has Iran’s perceived need for strategic deterrence.
This reveals a fundamental paradox: efforts to eliminate nuclear threats through force can inadvertently strengthen the incentive to acquire them.
The risk is not limited to deliberate nuclear war. It lies in miscalculation.
Wars involving nuclear-adjacent infrastructure introduce unique escalation dynamics. A strike on a nuclear facility may be intended as a tactical operation, but it can be interpreted as an attempt to eliminate a state’s long-term deterrent capability. Under such conditions, responses may escalate beyond initial intentions.
At the same time, the normalization of military solutions to nuclear disputes is becoming more pronounced. Pre-emptive strikes, once viewed as extreme measures, are increasingly framed as legitimate tools of non-proliferation. Yet such actions carry significant long-term risks, potentially accelerating proliferation rather than preventing it.
Political rhetoric has also shifted. Language emphasizing “all options on the table” has become routine, reflecting a broader change in how nuclear risk is conceptualized. Nuclear weapons are no longer confined to the realm of last-resort deterrence; they are increasingly embedded within strategic thinking about escalation, coercion, and dominance.
This shift is reinforced by broader trends. Nuclear modernization programs are expanding across major powers, including the China and others. Arms control treaties that once symbolized cooperation are giving way to competition. The institutional foundations of nuclear restraint are weakening at precisely the moment when they are most needed.
The danger, therefore, is cumulative.
It is not that a nuclear weapon will necessarily be used in the current conflict. Rather, it is that repeated crises without effective diplomatic resolution normalize brinkmanship. Each episode reinforces the perception that escalation can be managed and that nuclear thresholds remain stable.
History cautions against such assumptions. The Cuban Missile Crisis demonstrated how quickly miscalculation can bring nuclear powers to the edge of catastrophe. Today, the institutions that helped manage such risks are weaker, and the geopolitical environment is more fragmented.
What makes the present moment particularly dangerous is the convergence of three trends: regional conflicts involving nuclear-capable actors; the erosion of arms control frameworks; and the weakening of diplomatic mechanisms for managing escalation.
Individually, each of these factors increases risk. Together, they create a system in which nuclear catastrophe becomes more conceivable than at any point in recent decades. The lesson is clear.
Military escalation cannot resolve nuclear disputes. Long-term stability depends on rebuilding the architecture of restraint: renewing arms control agreements, strengthening verification mechanisms, and restoring sustained diplomatic engagement between rival powers.
Without such efforts, the world risks returning to a strategic environment in which nuclear weapons are central instruments of geopolitical competition.
The tragedy of nuclear weapons lies not only in their destructive power, but in the illusion of control they create. States may believe they can manage escalation, dominate conflict, or contain risk through superior capability. History repeatedly demonstrates that such confidence can be dangerously misplaced.
Today, the world stands at a similar moment. The greatest danger is not only the conflict unfolding in the Middle East. It is the quiet dismantling of the safeguards that once made nuclear catastrophe less likely.
If those safeguards are not rebuilt, the world may discover too late that it has been sleepwalking toward the unthinkable.
Paul Saoke, IPPNW Kenya, is the author of Africa’s Atomic Odyssey: A Continent’s Encounter with Nuclear Power.
Israeli Attack on Flotilla Violated the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
James Marc Leas. May 02, 2026, https://cancelf35.substack.com/p/israeli-attack-on-flotilla-violated
On Thursday, April 29, Israeli military forces illegally attacked vessels of the Global Samud Flotilla (GSF) while they were sailing on the high seas. Israeli commandos unlawfully seized 21 boats and abducted 177 flotilla participants, according to Nicole Schellekens, a Belgian GSF land-support person.
On May 1, the BBC reported that Israel released all but two of the detained participants in Greece. Thiago Avila and Said Abu Keshek remain in Israeli custody, and Israel has stated that it is transporting them to its territory.
Schellekens passed on a report that 34 of the abductees were physically abused by Israeli commandos while protecting the two men. The 34 were hospitalized, and 4 of them remain in the hospital at Heraklion on the Island of Crete. See the video by Elly Van Reusel, a medical doctor on “Magic,” one of the 22 seized boats.
The GSF condemned Israel’s actions as an act of piracy and called for the immediate release those still held by Israel.
The flotilla was engaged in a legal and peaceful mission aimed at breaking the internationally condemned Israeli siege of Gaza—a siege that imposes collective punishment on Gaza’s civilian population. The mission seeks to end Israel’s illegal policy of starvation, a policy that stunts the physical and cognitive development of children.
The flotilla was necessary only because, after destroying farms and fishing boats, Israel restricted or closed all land routes for aid into Gaza, and governments worldwide have so far failed to use their legal and political powers to force an end to the illegal siege.
The U.S. government has gone further than any other nation in collaborating with Israel’s illegal assault on Gaza’s civilians—the US provides the funds, bombs, F-35 jets, and bulldozers, along with the diplomatic cover that grants the Israeli government impunity.
US states have done little. Rather than adopt human rights promoting purchasing and investment legislation, Vermont has gone so far as to train its Air National Guard with 115-decibel F-35 jets low over one of the state’s most densely populated cities, where political and military leaders knew the flights would cause suffering to working-class and ethnic minority children. This location was deliberately selected to prepare the unit to target civilians. It was foreseeable that the Trump Administration would call the Vermont F-35 unit up, first to bomb in Venezuela, and now poised to resume their bombing in Iran.
The Israeli Assault on the Flotilla Violated International Law
Although Israel is not a party to the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea (UNCLOS), the core provisions of the treaty are recognized as customary international law and are legally binding on all countries.
• Article 92 grants a vessel’s flag state exclusive jurisdiction, effectively making the vessel sovereign territory of that country. By boarding the flotilla’s vessels without permission, abducting passengers, and seizing the boats, Israeli commandos violated the sovereignty of each of the flag states.
• Article 87 guarantees freedom of navigation on the high seas. Freedom revoked by Israeli commandos.
• Article 110 specifically prohibits warship personnel from boarding a foreign ship on the high seas except under narrowly defined circumstances—none of which applied in this case.
• Article 88 reserves the high seas for peaceful purposes.
• Article 301 requires states to refrain from any threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state. Which includes the vessels of any state.
Israel violated all of these provisions.
nforcement of the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea
Previous violations of the law of the sea have led to enforcement actions, including:
• Ordering the prompt release of vessels
• Awarding compensation
• Banning the perpetrator from accessing ports
• Freezing the perpetrator’s assets
• Restricting trade with the perpetrator
• Banning the transfer of military goods to the perpetrator
• Establishing a tribunal to investigate and prosecute those responsible
Enforcement Action Is Needed Now
Similar enforcement actions must be taken in response to Israel’s gross violations of the Law of the Sea. If flag states fail to act, they effectively grant impunity to the Israeli perpetrators, invite further violations, and they encourage even more extreme illegal actions by Israel.
Demand that your government officials take enforcement action now.
Ukraine drone attacks hit nuclear power plant, Baltic port
President Volodymyr Zelenskyy hails ‘successful destruction’ of the port, as Russia warns of oil price rises.
By AFP and Reuters 3 May 20263 May 2026
Ukrainian drone attacks have targeted the Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in southeastern Ukraine and a Russian Baltic Sea port, as Kyiv and Moscow accuse each other of killing civilians in overnight air raids.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) said a drone had targeted the external radiation control laboratory, a part of the plant located outside the nuclear power plant’s perimeter, on Sunday. It said it was not yet clear if there had been injuries.
“IAEA team at the site has requested access to the lab,” agency chief Rafael Grossi said. He reiterated that attacks near nuclear sites pose nuclear safety risks – both sides have repeatedly targeted nuclear infrastructure
Earlier on Sunday, Ukrainian forces also launched an attack on the Russian Baltic Sea port of Primorsk, Russian and Ukrainian authorities said,
The attack on Primorsk, a major oil-exporting outlet, did not result in an oil spill but it caused a fire in the town that was extinguished, Leningrad Governor Alexander Drozdenko said.
More than 60 drones were downed overnight over the northwestern region, he added.
Ukraine confirmed the attack on the port, with Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy claiming it as a “successful destruction of the facilities of the port of Primorsk”.“The missile ship ‘Karakurt’ was hit, as well as a patrol boat and another tanker of the shadow oil fleet,” the Ukrainian president said in a post on Telegram.
“Significant damage was also done to the infrastructure of the oil loading port,” Zelenskyy also claimed………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/5/3/ukraine-drone-attack-hits-russian-baltic-port-governor-says
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Israel is making Palestinians disappear in more ways than one.
At least 2,842 Palestinians had ‘evaporated’ … [which] civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively ‘vaporise’ human bodies
Belen Fernandez 4 May 2026 , https://www.middleeasteye.net/opinion/israel-making-palestinians-disappear-more-ways-one
Reports of missing children and ‘evaporated’ bodies reveal a widening pattern of erasure in Gaza, where entire families are killed, lost under rubble or reduced to biological traces
n 23 April, the Israeli newspaper Haaretz reported that “dozens of children go missing each week” in the Gaza Strip “against the backdrop of the postwar chaos” – a curious euphemism, no doubt, for the ongoing US-backed genocide in the Palestinian territory, which proceeds apace despite the ceasefire that was ostensibly implemented last year.
The article begins with four-year-old Mohammed Ghaban, who disappeared in early April in northern Gaza: “[H]e had been playing with his brother in front of his displaced family’s tent. He went inside, asked for a hug, put on his sandals and went out.” And then he was gone.
The author cites an estimate from the Palestinian Center for the Missing and Forcibly Disappeared that 2,900 children “disappeared during the war”, with 2,700 bodies thought to be trapped under the rubble and the remaining 200 simply missing.
Such statistics are in keeping with the modus operandi of the Israeli military, which, according to the official fatality count, has killed more than 72,500 Palestinians in Gaza since the launch of the genocide in 2023, with thousands more still missing and presumed dead under the rubble.
United Nations special rapporteur Francesca Albanese warned back in September that the true death toll might already have been more in the vicinity of 680,000.
Speaking of disappearances, an Al Jazeera Arabic investigation revealed in February that at least 2,842 Palestinians had “evaporated” in the Gaza Strip since the start of the war – a phenomenon Gaza’s civil defence teams attribute to Israel’s use of US-manufactured thermal and thermobaric weapons, which effectively “vaporise” human bodies.
The gruesome tally was quickly eclipsed by the deranged US-Israeli war on Iran and wider regional catastrophe, which has monopolised the news for the past two months. But the topic remains as sinisterly relevant as ever.
In remarks to Al Jazeera at the time, civil defence spokesperson Mahmoud Basal outlined the process for determining the number of vaporised victims at homes targeted by Israeli strikes: “If a family tells us there were five people inside, and we only recover three intact bodies, we treat the remaining two as ‘evaporated’ only after an exhaustive search yields nothing but biological traces – blood spray on walls or small fragments like scalps.”
Vaporised bodies
Upon publication of these macabre findings, the Israeli military got its panties into a genocidal bunch and issued a huffy communique to allegedly set the record straight.
Rejecting Al Jazeera’s “false claim of the evaporation of Gazan bodies”, the army insisted that it “uses only lawful munitions” and that it “strikes military targets and objectives in accordance with international law and takes all feasible measures to mitigate harm to civilians and civilian property to the extent possible.”
It’s not clear, of course, why a military that has been accused of potentially killing nearly 700,000 people – and that wipes out entire families and neighbourhoods without so much as batting an eye – took such particular offence at the whole “evaporation” matter.
Granted, disappearing bodies into thin air is a pretty good way of hiding the true extent of mass slaughter.
And while the vaporisation of Palestinian bodies may not fit the official legal definition of enforced disappearance, it is quite literally exactly that.
According to the website of the Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “an enforced disappearance is considered to be the arrest, detention, abduction or any other form of deprivation of liberty by agents of the State or by persons or groups of persons acting with the authorization, support or acquiescence of the State, followed by a refusal to acknowledge the deprivation of liberty or by concealment of the fate or whereabouts of the disappeared person, which place such a person outside the protection of the law”.
In light of Israel’s explicit disappearing act in Gaza, however, a considerable expansion of that definition would seem to be in order.
And yet Israel is guilty of the traditional variety of enforced disappearance, as well. Last August, UN experts denounced reports that starving Palestinian civilians – including a child – were being forcibly disappeared from aid distribution sites run by the notorious Gaza Humanitarian Foundation.
Backed by Israel and the US, the foundation also specialised in massacring desperate folks who had gathered in search of food and other necessary items for survival.
Meanwhile, in both Gaza and the West Bank, Israel’s enforced disappearances of medical personnel, journalists and all manner of other humans have flourished since the onset of the genocide – not that this hasn’t always been par for the course.
Global pattern
For its part, the US has had a hand in enforced disappearances in a whole lot of places around the world, including by aiding and abetting bloodthirsty right-wing regimes throughout Latin America during the Cold War.
Tens of thousands were disappeared in Argentina, Guatemala and beyond as the US and its buddies nobly went about making the hemisphere safe for capitalism.
In Mexico, more than 130,000 persons have been disappeared, the vast majority of them following the launch in 2006 of the US-backed “war on drugs”, which would be more aptly characterised as a war on the poor.
But from Mexico to the Middle East, the number of disappeared hardly conveys the extent of victimisation. The families of the missing are victims, too, condemned as they are to indefinite psychological limbo in the absence of concrete information regarding the fate of their loved ones – without which it is impossible to commence the grieving process or obtain the emotional closure that is necessary to move on with one’s life.
In the case of Israel’s “evaporation” of Palestinians in Gaza, it’s hard to say whether the knowledge that your loved one has been vaporised is concrete enough to enable eventual closure. After all, there’s nothing very concrete about being forcibly vanished without a trace.
Indeed, Al Jazeera quotes Palestinian father Rafiq Badran on the almost inconceivable psychological torment that attends Israel’s sinister new spin on the theme of enforced disappearance: “Four of my children just evaporated,” Badran said, holding back tears. “I looked for them a million times. Not a piece was left. Where did they go?”
Now, with regional war raging as the arms industry rakes in big bucks, it has become even easier for global audiences to tune out the unique plight of the Palestinians – which means that the genocide is effectively being disappeared from the spotlight, as well.
In the end, of course, the Israeli goal is nothing less than to forcibly disappear the very idea of a Palestinian people. But unfortunately for Israel, its blood-drenched legacy will not be so easily concealed.
Not so quiet death – the US orders to kill the Iranian Navy’s Dena and its crew
The deliberate killing of survivors at sea represents one of the most clearly defined war crimes in international humanitarian law, with prohibitions stretching back more than a century and codified in multiple treaties and military manuals. The fundamental principle underlying these prohibitions is that individuals who are hors de combat � out of combat due to shipwreck, wounds, surrender, or other incapacitation � must not be made the object of attack. This principle applies universally in armed conflicts and represents a core tenet of the laws of war that balances military necessity with humanitarian considerations.
John Helmer, Dance with Bears, Sat, 02 May 2026 , https://www.sott.net/article/506075-Not-so-quiet-death-the-US-orders-to-kill-the-Iranian-Navys-Dena-and-its-crew
In the early morning of March 4, Sri Lanka time, the Islamic Republic of Iran Ship (IRIS) Dena was attacked by the US submarine USS Charlotte with two torpedoes.
The first destroyed the Dena’s propeller shaft and stopped her dead in the water. Her position was at coordinates 6.0073 degrees North, 79.8654 degrees East: that was nine nautical miles (nm) outside Sri Lanka’s territorial waters; 19 nm (35 km) west of the harbour of Galle, a port on the southwestern coast of the island.
At the 30-knot speed the Dena had been moving, she was 18 minutes from the safety of Sri Lankan territory. Immobilized, however, the Dena captain, Abuzar Zarri, gave the crew the order to assemble on the aft deck in full visibility of the Charlotte, and prepare to abandon ship. As the crew mustered, a second torpedo was fired by the Charlotte to sink the Dena and kill the crew.
The torpedo warhead explosion broke the keel; the Dena sank in less than five minutes.
Of the crew’s 180-man complement, 32 were rescued from the water by the Sri Lankan coast guard, including Zarri and the first officer; 87 bodies were recovered; 61 were lost. Altogether, 148 were killed.
On the Charlotte, submerged at a distance from the Dena of less than 10 nm (18 km), there was an interval of approximately ninety minutes between the first fire order and the second, the kill order. A close-range film of the second torpedo strike, recorded by the Charlotte, was released to the press by the Pentagon.
https://www.youtube.com/embed/DkUkQ5pzSlc?wmode=opaque
Four men participated in the chain of command through which these two strike orders were requested; decided; transmitted; executed.
They are CommanderThomas Futch (lead, left), commander of the USS Charlotte; CaptainJeffrey Fassbinder (second left), chief of the Submarine Squadron 7 of the US Pacific Fleet; AdmiralStephen Koehler (centre), Commander of the US Pacific Fleet; and Peter Hegseth (right), the US Secretary of War (Defense).
Hegseth announced in a Pentagon briefing on March 4 what he wanted the public to believe he had done. “Yesterday in the Indian Ocean, and we’ll play it on the screen there, an American submarine sunk [sic] an Iranian warship that thought it was safe in international waters. Instead, it was sunk by a torpedo, quiet death. The first sinking of an enemy ship by a torpedo since World War II.”
Hegseth was deceiving. He knew two torpedoes had been fired; it was the second which sank theDena. He knew theDenadid not “[think] it was safe in international waters”. This was because US intelligence had been reporting to the Pentagon and the US Navy’s Pacific Fleet command that the Iranian Navy had been requesting safe haven for theDenaand its two escorts,IRIS LavanandIRIS Bushehr, in Sri Lanka, then India, for more than seven days before the March 4 attack.
Admiral Koehler knew because he had met with Sri Lankan officials in Colombo between February 19 and 21 to deter them from taking Iran’s side. “We stand with Sri Lanka in facing shared security challenges — from maritime domain awareness to countering transnational threats”, the US Embassy announced. On March 4, the Sri Lankan newspaper Tamil Guardian editorialized: “Did Washington’s Sri Lanka visit precede a secret naval strike? Questions grow after Iranian frigate sunk.”
In the new article just published in the Tehran Times, the evidence of the Dena attack has been summarized and the political implications weighed – for the US and for the governments of Sri Lanka and India, which joined the US in the preliminaries, before the attack of March 4, and in the aftermath.
Click to read: https://www.tehrantimes.com/news/525994/IRIS-Dena-sinking-Survivors-testimony-diplomatic-delays-and
Comment: From the link:
What happened off the coast of Sri Lanka, Iranian officials argue, was not simply an attack on a warship. It was the deliberate destruction of a disarmed and disabled vessel and its evacuating crew prevented from reaching safety — and a test of who in the region chose neutrality, and who did not.
War on the high seas have strict rules. There are rules of engagement and even in French, there is the rule of being hors de combat (out of combat).
In the case of the Dena being torpedoed twice and her crew of 148 lost, there seems to be a Naval case to be made for when there are Orders to Kill Survivors at Sea:
The deliberate killing of survivors at sea represents one of the most clearly defined war crimes in international humanitarian law, with prohibitions stretching back more than a century and codified in multiple treaties and military manuals. The fundamental principle underlying these prohibitions is that individuals who are hors de combat � out of combat due to shipwreck, wounds, surrender, or other incapacitation � must not be made the object of attack. This principle applies universally in armed conflicts and represents a core tenet of the laws of war that balances military necessity with humanitarian considerations.
The codes of war come with Article 60 (and 71) that state:
Article 60 of the Lieber Code states unequivocally that “it is against the usage of modern war to resolve, in hatred and revenge, to give no quarter.” Article 71 went further, prescribing the death penalty for anyone who “intentionally inflicts additional wounds on an enemy already wholly disabled, or kills such an enemy.” These principles were subsequently incorporated into the 1899 Hague Regulations, which prohibited killing or wounding “an enemy who, having laid down arms, or having no longer means of defence, has surrendered at discretion.”
Does Peter Hegseth need to answer for this, and what of the Commander, Admiral and Captain?
Chernobyl at 40: Belarus took the brunt
April 28, 2026, https://beyondnuclear.org/chernobyl-at-40-belarus-took-the-brunt/
A report from Olga Karatch, Belarussian founder in exile of Our House:
On April 26, it marked 40 years since the largest nuclear technological disaster in history — the explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant. Although the plant is geographically located in Ukraine, Belarus suffered the greatest damage due to weather conditions.
The Chernobyl disaster resulted in radioactive contamination of nearly 150,000 km², while around 5,000 km² became an exclusion zone with the strictest restrictions.
The distance from Chernobyl to the Belarusian border is only 11 km. To Minsk — about 330 km. To Vilnius, where the action took place — less than 490 km.
In 1986, an RBMK reactor exploded at the plant. This type of reactor used graphite rods to control the reaction, as well as water. At a certain point, water could interfere with the insertion of the graphite rods.
These rods function as the reactor’s brakes. When the brakes fail, disaster becomes inevitable — and it did.
Similar reactors were operating at other plants, including the Ignalina nuclear power plant in Lithuania.
According to the IAEA report INSAG-7, as early as 1983 a so-called positive feedback effect (positive scram effect) was identified — later becoming one of the key factors in the Chernobyl disaster.
The RBMK reactor itself was considered high-risk: incidents occurred at the Leningrad plant (1975), at Chernobyl (1982, 1984), and at Ignalina.
Nuclear power plants are often presented as environmentally friendly, but this is an oversimplification.
In the Soviet Union, the nuclear sector was part of a closed system, overseen by a separate ministry.
Nuclear power plants did not exist in isolation: they were part of a broader industry, one of whose end products was weapons-grade plutonium and uranium.
Information about radiation accidents was often concealed. Victims were misdiagnosed and forced to sign non-disclosure agreements. People died, and even doctors sometimes did not know the real causes — because of secrecy.
Today, safety standards have improved, but the risks have not disappeared.
Moreover, the economic efficiency of nuclear energy is increasingly questioned. In some cases, the cost of decommissioning a plant exceeds the profits generated during its operation.
Belarus continues to pursue nuclear projects while serious concerns remain regarding safety and transparency.
During the construction of the Belarusian NPP:
— a reactor vessel was dropped (2016)
— equipment was damaged during transportation
After launch, shutdowns, disconnections, and periods of downtime have been repeatedly reported.
The Lithuanian regulator (VATESI) has repeatedly pointed to recurring failures and a lack of transparency.
Conclusion
Due to the clear mismatch between high risks and questionable benefits, “Our House” advocates phasing out nuclear energy.
We will continue to participate in public actions and speak about these issues openly.
Dangers to the Fourth Estate: The 2026 World Press Freedom Index
5 May 2026 Dr Binoy Kampmark, https://theaimn.net/dangers-to-the-fourth-estate-the-2026-world-press-freedom-index/
Scribblers, scribes, authors and publishers – all of these are facing ever worsening conditions in pursuing their work in battling the goons of secrecy and impunity. The Reporters Without Borders (RSF) World Press Freedom Index has rotten news on that score. For the first time since the index came into being, RSF states that “over half of the world’s countries now fall into the ‘difficult’ or ‘very serious’ categories for press freedom. In 25 years, the average score of all 180 countries and territories surveyed in the Index has never been so low.”
In reaching its scores on press freedom, RSF uses five contextual indicators: political context, legal framework, economic context, sociocultural context and safety. The political context evaluates, among other things, the extent of support and respect for media autonomy regarding political pressure from the state or various political actors. Factors important to legal matters include the extent of censorship, judicial sanctions and restrictions on freedom of expression. The economic dimension takes account of such factors as the difficulties of establishing news media outlets, blighting corruption, the allocation of state subsidies, and the interest of media owners. The sociocultural context covers such issues as “denigration and attacks on the press based on such issues as gender, class, ethnicity and religion” and cultural restraints against reporting. Safety focuses on the ability of journalists to identify, gather and disseminate news without facing bodily harm, psychological or emotional distress, and professional harm
There are various reasons postulated by the group for the precipitous decline in press freedoms. Armed conflict plays its inevitable, corrosive role. Iraq (placed at 162), Sudan at one spot above, and Yemen at 164, are cases in point. The ongoing battle between Israel and the Palestinians has been disastrous for press freedom, not least because of the killing, since October 2023, of over 220 journalists in Gaza by the Israeli Defense Forces. 70 of the slain were killed while carrying out their work.
The authoritarian regimes have done little to move up the index. China remains confidently oppressive of reporters at 178, with North Korea stoutly taking the spot below. Eritrea completes the bottom at 180. Russia, at 172, continues to blot its copybook in targeting journalists (as of April 2026, 48 remain in prison), a situation not helped by its ongoing war in Ukraine. The Iranian regime (177) maintains its studied viciousness against journalists. Saudi Arabia, despite its gaudy, kitschy efforts at modernisation headed by the petulant princeling Mohammed bin Salman, has not softened on the issue of press freedom. On June 14 last year, the Saudi journalist Turki al-Jasser was executed after a seven-year spell of arbitrary imprisonment. Al-Jasser had been accused by the Saudi authorities of operating the X account named Kashkool, one inclined to post material linking the House of Saud with human right abuses and corruption.
Of all the states recorded, Niger, at 120, registered the most dramatic fall (down 37 spots). This, according to RSF, underscored “the wider decline in press freedom in the Sahel region seen in recent years as attacks by armed groups and ruling juntas have suppressed the right to balanced information from diverse sources.”
The organisation despairingly notes that the Index’s legal indicator has registered a sharp fall in 2026. “This score deteriorated in more than 60% of states – 110 out of 180 – between 2025 and 2026.” Journalism has been systematically criminalised, a practice “rooted in circumventing press law and misusing emergency legislation and common law.”
Resorting to national security laws and regulations is a favourite. Mention terrorism as a charge, as happened to the journalist Frenchie Mae Cumpio, and a prosecution, however baseless, becomes elementary and successful. (In Cumpio’s case, the shoddy charge was that of financing terrorism.) In Türkiye, the net on national security is drawn widely to include charges of “disinformation”, Article 299 of the country’s Penal Code covering insults of the President, and the charge of “denigrating state institutions.” States, in claiming to use the law appropriately, resort to strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs). RSF underlines Bulgaria (71) and Guatemala (128) as practitioners of the art. Not to be left out, political and business plutocrats make use of laws to curb exposure of their antics in the press. Indonesia (129), Singapore (123), and Thailand (92) are seen as experts in this regard.
Protections for journalists from legal or physical threats was also found to be woeful, with more than 80% of countries having “non-existent or ineffective” measures. Even the European Media Freedom Act (EMFA), seen as sound armour for the independence and sustainability of media outlets, has been weakened by domestic legislatures. Hungary (ranked 74), only recently rid of its long serving Prime Minister Viktor Orbán, excelled in this regard, though RSF also notes the programs of such countries as Slovakia (37) and Lithuania (15).
To round up the inglorious list are the United States (64), Argentina (98) and El Salvador (143). US President Donald Trump continues to hound and harry the Fourth Estate, with RSF taking particular issue with cuts to the US Agency for Global Media (USAGM) responsible for the drastic slimming of personnel at the Voice of America (VOA), Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty (RFE/RL), and Radio Free Asia (RFA).
Rankings, in themselves, are cold measures. They can also prove vague. But there is nothing vague about the insatiable appetite towards persecution shown by states of all political persuasions when attacking reporters and publishers. The dictates of the national security state and its desperation in controlling narratives and holding the line on mendacity and the exposure of bad behaviour, remains that most threatening of diseases to the Fourth Estate.
NewsReal: Energy Wars on the High Seas – Trump Admits “US Navy Like Pirates!”
Sott.net Sun, 03 May 2026 https://www.sott.net/article/506082-NewsReal-Energy-Wars-on-the-High-Seas-Trump-Admits-US-Navy-Like-Pirates
Typically, the American president has blurted out ‘the plain truth’ about what his government is doing around the world – from the Caribbean to the Arctic to the Black Sea and Indian Ocean: behaving like pirates. This week we review, taking into account Richard Medhurst’s excellent dot-connecting in his documentary ‘The Petrogas-Dollar: The Secret US Strategy Behind the Iran War’, the string of US and Israeli government moves this year to effectively ‘ring-fence’ the global flow of oil and gas.
As we’ve been warning for over a decade, the US was never going to just roll over in the face of Russian defiance regarding Crimea, Iranian resistance against Israeli expansionism, and Chinese ‘win-win’ geoeconomic strategy towards a multipolar world. They hatched a ‘counter-attack’, and Trump is playing his part to ‘make America great again’, which is really just to do whatever the US can to forestall or prevent the end of its currency’s status as ‘global reserve currency’.
Nuclear Scaling Requires Discipline. SMRs Deliver Fragmentation.
the evidence does not support treating SMRs as a broad, near-term, commercially validated solution
Michael Barnard, Clean Tecnica 28th April 2026, https://cleantechnica.com/2026/04/28/nuclear-scaling-requires-discipline-smrs-deliver-fragmentation/
When I wrote in 2021 that small modular reactors were mostly bad policy (peer reviewed version, CleanTechnica version), the argument was not that nuclear fission could not produce useful low-carbon electricity. It was already doing so every day. The United States had about 98 GW of operating nuclear capacity, and the global fleet was a major source of firm generation. The question was whether the SMR policy proposition matched the conditions under which nuclear power had scaled in the past. It did not then. The evidence since then has made the problem clearer.
The original SMR case rested on a simple promise. Make reactors smaller, build more of them in factories, reduce capital at risk, shorten construction schedules, serve more sites, and avoid the large-project failures that had damaged recent nuclear construction in liberalized electricity markets. It was an appealing story because it pointed at real nuclear problems. Large reactors are expensive to finance. They take a long time to build. A single failure can consume a utility’s balance sheet and a government’s political patience. A smaller unit sounds easier to manage.
But the promise depended on a condition that was often treated as background noise. SMRs only make economic sense if the sector converges on a few designs and builds them many times. Factory manufacturing does not create a learning curve because the word factory appears in a presentation. Learning curves come from repeated production of the same or similar products, with stable tooling, stable suppliers, stable inspections, stable quality assurance, stable training, and steady demand. Solar panels, batteries, and wind turbines became cheaper because the world made huge numbers of related products in shorter production cycles. Nuclear reactors are different. Each design carries a safety case, a fuel qualification pathway, licensing work, site work, security, emergency planning, operator training, waste arrangements, and decades of liability.
That was the central weakness in the SMR story in 2021. In that earlier assessment, I counted 57 SMR designs and concepts across 18 broad types, and none could be considered dominant. That was already far too fragmented for a credible manufacturing-learning argument. Since then, the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency’s SMR dashboard has tracked more than 120 SMR technologies worldwide, with roughly 70 to 80 included in recent dashboard editions after filtering out some paused, inactive, unfunded, or non-participating designs. The sector has not moved from many concepts to a few winners. It has become more crowded.
This matters because nuclear design proliferation is not cheap experimentation. In software, a hundred teams can try different approaches, fail fast, and leave lessons behind. In nuclear, each credible design requires scarce engineering, regulatory, fuel-cycle, owner, and supply-chain attention. A light-water SMR, a high-temperature gas reactor, a sodium fast reactor, a molten-salt reactor, and a microreactor are not minor variations around a shared product platform. They create different materials questions, fuel requirements, operating temperatures, inspection regimes, safety cases, and licensing pathways.
The EIA’s April 2026 Today in Energy article is useful because it lays out that diversity. It groups U.S.-relevant SMRs and microreactors into light-water reactors, high-temperature gas reactors, molten-salt reactors, sodium-cooled reactors, and other designs. It identifies applications such as AI loads, data centers, industrial sites, remote areas, microgrids, and military or federal facilities. It points to DOE programs, pilot pathways, and fuel-chain efforts. As a map of activity, it has value. As a test of whether the SMR proposition is becoming a real deployment class, it is much weaker.
The EIA article does not ask the questions that matter for scaling. It does not ask whether the order book is large enough to support factory learning. It does not ask whether design proliferation undermines standardization. It does not ask whether the credible projects are really small, or whether they are drifting back toward conventional power-station scale. It does not ask whether remote sites, mines, and islands are large enough markets to sustain a reactor manufacturing industry. It does not ask whether HALEU will be available at scale on the timelines implied by advanced reactor plans. It describes activity and optionality. It does not demonstrate convergence.
The historical conditions for nuclear scaling are not mysterious. Nuclear built at scale where it was treated as a national strategic program, where the state played a strong role, where designs were standardized or semi-standardized, where large reactors spread fixed costs over a lot of output, where experienced nuclear owner-operators existed, where training and safety culture were centralized, and where governments sustained programs for decades. France, South Korea, and China did not scale nuclear power by letting dozens of small reactor startups compete for scattered boutique sites. They scaled, to the extent they did, through alignment among state policy, utilities, vendors, regulators, finance, and workforce.
SMRs were sold as a way around these conditions. The actual market is rediscovering them. The projects that look most likely to be built are tied to existing nuclear sites, state-backed strategic sites, experienced utilities, military or laboratory settings, or large industrial anchors with public support. That does not mean they are worthless. It means they are not validating the broad SMR pitch. They are validating the old lesson that nuclear needs strong institutions.
The most credible projects are also getting bigger. Ontario’s Darlington project is the clearest Western example. Ontario Power Generation has a license to construct one GE Hitachi BWRX-300 at Darlington, with four units planned. Each unit is about 300 MW. This is a serious project, but it is not a small reactor scattered into a new class of sites. It is a 300 MW boiling water reactor at an existing nuclear site, backed by an experienced provincial nuclear operator with grid interconnection, cooling access, security culture, political support, and a long-term system need. If it succeeds, it will matter. But it will not prove that SMRs can escape nuclear’s institutional requirements.
China’s Linglong One, the ACP100 at Changjiang in Hainan, is another real project. At about 125 MW, it is closer to the traditional idea of a small reactor, and it has moved through construction and testing milestones. But it exists inside China’s state-led nuclear program. China can choose, license, finance, build, and integrate nuclear projects in ways that liberalized markets struggle to copy. That makes Linglong One important, but it does not make it proof that a global commercial SMR market has arrived.
TerraPower’s Natrium project in Kemmerer, Wyoming, is serious as well, with a construction permit issued by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and non-nuclear site work underway. But Natrium is 345 MW, with storage-boosted output advertised around 500 MW. It sits above the old 300 MW SMR threshold and depends on sodium cooling, HALEU fuel, major public support, and a coal-site transition narrative. It may become a useful advanced reactor demonstration. It is not evidence that small, repeatable, low-risk nuclear products are ready for broad deployment.
Rolls-Royce makes the size drift even more obvious. Its reactor is about 470 MW. Three units at Wylfa would total about 1.4 GW, which is a large power station by any normal electricity-system measure. The unit is small only compared with the largest conventional reactors. It may fit the United Kingdom’s industrial strategy if the government commits to a fleet. But at 470 MW, the project is better understood as a medium reactor with modular construction ambitions than as the small product implied by early SMR rhetoric.
Holtec’s design history points the same way. The SMR-160 became the SMR-300. NuScale’s module moved from 50 MW toward 77 MW, and the commercial plant concept became a multi-module station approaching conventional plant scale. X-energy’s Xe-100 is about 80 MW as a module, but Dow’s proposed Seadrift project packages four units into about 320 MW. The pattern is clear. The more serious the customer discussion becomes, the more the sector tries to put several hundred MW behind a single site, operating organization, licensing file, security plan, and grid connection.
That is not an accident. Nuclear has large fixed costs that do not shrink in proportion to reactor size. A 50 MW reactor does not need one-twentieth of the licensing effort, one-twentieth of the security analysis, one-twentieth of the operator training, one-twentieth of the emergency planning, one-twentieth of the quality assurance, or one-twentieth of the waste arrangements of a 1,000 MW reactor. Some hardware costs scale down. Many institutional costs do not. Smaller reactors start with a scale penalty. Factory repetition is supposed to overcome it. But repetition requires a narrow set of designs and a large order book. The current market offers neither.
After years of SMR hype, the likely-build list remains short: Darlington, Linglong One, Natrium in Wyoming, TVA’s Clinch River, Dow’s Seadrift project, Holtec’s proposed Palisades units, Rolls-Royce at Wylfa, and Russian RITM-based Arctic or floating projects. That is not nothing, but it is not a broad commercial market. It is a small order book of state-backed, utility-backed, or strategic projects, often tied to existing nuclear or heavy-industrial sites, often larger than the original SMR story implied, and often dependent on public risk absorption. By contrast, the press-release order book is filled with memoranda of understanding, technology selections, data-center announcements, export discussions, remote-site narratives, and vendor road maps. Those are not reactors. Nuclear projects have a long valley between interest and electrons.
HALEU sits near the center of the problem, not at the edge of it. Several advanced reactor designs require higher-assay low-enriched uranium, enriched above the 3% to 5% U-235 common in today’s light-water reactor fuel but below 20%. HALEU can support smaller cores, longer operating cycles, higher burnup, and reactor designs that standard low-enriched uranium cannot support. That is why developers want it. It is also why it is a bottleneck.
The United States does not yet have a mature, large, domestic HALEU supply chain. Russia has been the major commercial source, which is now a strategic and political problem. Rebuilding a domestic chain requires conversion, enrichment, deconversion, fuel fabrication, transport packages, licensing, inspections, safeguards, workforce, and customer commitments. Each link needs facilities, capital, permits, contracts, and time. This is not a paperwork problem. It is an industrial-base problem.
There is a circular dependency at the heart of it. Reactor developers need HALEU to make credible deployment commitments. Fuel suppliers need credible reactor demand to justify investment. Customers need confidence that both reactor and fuel will be available. Regulators need data on fuel behavior and safety. Government can break pieces of the loop by funding fuel production and demonstration quantities, but that confirms that the strategy is government-led. It does not show that advanced SMRs are market-ready.
HALEU also makes design proliferation more damaging. A narrow reactor program using a common fuel form creates a clearer demand signal. A market with many designs, fuel forms, enrichments, geometries, claddings, coolants, and operating conditions creates a harder investment problem. Fuel suppliers are not being asked to serve one standardized fleet. They are being asked to prepare for a moving set of possible reactor futures. If HALEU is a gating condition for deployment, then public policy should be narrowing the field, not celebrating breadth.
This is where U.S. energy policy becomes confused. The United States has a rational nuclear policy layer and a speculative nuclear policy layer. The rational layer is preserving safe existing reactors, extending licenses where appropriate, uprating existing units, restarting recently retired units where the equipment and economics support it, and strengthening the workforce and fuel system. Existing plants have grid connections, trained operators, known safety records, community relationships, cooling systems, and regulatory histories. Keeping a safe reactor operating can avoid large volumes of fossil generation with much less uncertainty than a first-of-a-kind new build.
The speculative layer is treating a fragmented SMR sector as if it were already a deployable answer to new load growth. DOE’s UPRISE initiative, which emphasizes uprates, restarts, license extensions, and improvements to existing reactors, belongs largely in the practical bucket. A $900 million Gen III+ SMR funding opportunity belongs in the option-value and industrial-policy bucket. It may help one or two designs move forward. It may produce learning. But it is not proof that the commercial case exists.
Read more: Nuclear Scaling Requires Discipline. SMRs Deliver Fragmentation.AI has become the new accelerant for this policy story. Data centers want large amounts of firm power, often on fast schedules. U.S. policymakers are concerned about electricity demand growth from AI, data centers, and advanced manufacturing. Nuclear advocates see an opening. The problem is timing. Data centers are being planned and built on two-year to five-year horizons. First-of-a-kind nuclear projects move through design completion, licensing, site work, supply-chain development, fuel procurement, construction, testing, and commissioning on longer timelines. Existing nuclear plants can serve some corporate procurement needs. Restarts and uprates may help in some places. SMRs are not close enough to be the main answer to near-term AI load.
Data centers are a shaky foundation for SMR strategy in any event because the AI electricity panic has already started to look familiar. As I argued in a January 2025 CleanTechnica piece, every wave of digital growth has produced claims that data centers were about to overwhelm the grid, from the dot-com boom to cloud computing, streaming, remote work, blockchain, and now AI. The pattern has been repeated concern, then hardware, software, architecture, and market optimization. U.S. data centers were about 1.5% of electricity consumption in the 2006 EPA report and only about 1.8% in 2014, despite the internet becoming central to daily life. Even with AI, the article noted data centers at about 4.4% of U.S. electricity demand in 2022, material but not world-ending.
Data centers are a shaky foundation for SMR strategy in any event because the AI electricity panic has already started to look familiar. As I argued in a January 2025 CleanTechnica piece, every wave of digital growth has produced claims that data centers were about to overwhelm the grid, from the dot-com boom to cloud computing, streaming, remote work, blockchain, and now AI. The pattern has been repeated concern, then hardware, software, architecture, and market optimization. U.S. data centers were about 1.5% of electricity consumption in the 2006 EPA report and only about 1.8% in 2014, despite the internet becoming central to daily life. Even with AI, the article noted data centers at about 4.4% of U.S. electricity demand in 2022, material but not world-ending.
That is the core policy failure. U.S. SMR policy is confusing aspiration, option value, and industrial strategy with deployment readiness. Policymakers want SMRs to support AI growth, military resilience, export competition, coal-site redevelopment, industrial heat, fuel-cycle rebuilding, and decarbonization before the sector has demonstrated cost, schedule, fuel readiness, repeat construction, or customer depth. That is misguided boosterism. It takes a category that should be treated as a narrow, risky, publicly supported technology option and presents it as if it were a near-term pillar of energy strategy.
Microreactors and remote-site claims should be separated from utility-scale SMRs. Military bases, national laboratories, and research campuses are credible early niches because they have strategic reasons to accept higher cost, unusual risk, and federal procurement structures. Project Pele at Idaho National Laboratory, a 1 MW to 5 MW transportable reactor demonstration for the Department of Defense, fits that category. It is strategic procurement. It is not evidence of normal commercial electricity competitiveness.
Remote communities, mines, and islands are weaker as broad markets. They have real energy problems, including high diesel costs, reliability challenges, fuel logistics, and limited grid access. But the alternatives are improving and being built now. Mines in Western Australia have deployed hybrid systems with solar, wind, batteries, controls, demand management, and gas or diesel backup. Gold Fields’ Agnew project has delivered roughly 50% to 60% renewable energy over the long term. Liontown’s Kathleen Valley project targets more than 60% renewable power from startup. Those systems are modular, financeable, serviceable by normal industrial contractors, and expandable in pieces. They do not require nuclear licensing, nuclear operators, HALEU supply, nuclear waste arrangements, or a nuclear security regime.
The same logic applies to islands and remote communities. Solar, wind where resources are good, batteries, thermal storage, demand response, efficiency, heat pumps, and retained backup can reduce fuel imports and improve resilience without importing the full institutional weight of a nuclear facility. A microreactor may make sense for a sovereign military site, a national laboratory, or a nuclear-capable jurisdiction with a strategic reason to pay for it. That is different from a scalable business model. When an energy technology retreats to remote sites as a leading commercial story, it is often no longer arguing that it is broadly competitive. It is arguing that unusual constraints may hide its disadvantages.
A rational policy would stop treating optionality as progress. If governments believe SMRs are strategically necessary, then they should fund discipline. Pick one or two designs for fleet deployment. Put them at nuclear-capable sites first. Require transparent cost and schedule reporting. Separate first-of-a-kind cost from claimed nth-of-a-kind cost. Tie public support to standardization, real orders, fuel readiness, and repeat construction. Do not count MOUs as demand. Do not pretend that every data-center press release is a reactor order.
Licensing reform can help, but it is not a substitute for a market. The ADVANCE Act and related U.S. efforts to make NRC processes more timely and predictable are reasonable in principle. Regulators should be efficient while maintaining safety and security. But if dozens of designs seek attention, faster licensing does not solve the deeper problem. The bottleneck moves to design maturity, fuel, supply chain, owner capability, financing, construction execution, and public acceptance.
The policy mistake is not supporting any SMR development. Governments often buy option value, and there can be reasons to maintain nuclear engineering capacity, preserve strategic fuel-cycle skills, support a few demonstrations, and keep an export option alive. The mistake is presenting a fragmented, fuel-constrained, thinly ordered technology class as if it were a central answer to near-term electricity demand, AI growth, or industrial decarbonization. That is boosterism, not rational energy policy.
The update to the 2021 conclusion is straightforward. The success conditions have not been met. The sector has not consolidated. The credible projects are getting larger. The real builds are mostly attached to existing nuclear sites, state-backed programs, or strategic industrial contexts. HALEU remains a hard constraint. Remote-site narratives remain niche claims. Small, modular, advanced, factory-built, flexible, and deployable are claims that have to survive contact with licensing, fuel, siting, security, staffing, waste, construction, financing, and repeat orders. Some reactors will likely be built. Some may be useful. But the evidence does not support treating SMRs as a broad, near-term, commercially validated solution. It supports the older and less exciting conclusion that nuclear scale requires focus, standardization, strong institutions, mature fuel supply, and a long program. The SMR sector is still moving in the opposite direction.
The Plague of Plastic: The other Petroleum Curse
Scientists have recently detected microplastics in human blood, breast milk, heart arteries, lungs, testicles, brains and placentas, foreboding serious human health consequences.
H. Patricia Hynes, 05/03/2026, https://www.juancole.com/2026/05/plague-plastic-petroleum.html
Greenfield, Mass. (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – Microplastics, those miniscule particles smaller than 5 millimeters which plastics physically break down into, have now infiltrated every part of the planet – from the highest point of the Himalayas; to the deepest depths of the sea; to the snow of Antarctica. They penetrate all layers of ocean and are often mistaken for zooplankton and consumed by fish. Consequently, people of coastal countries and islands who are highly dependent on the sea for food are consuming microplastic contaminated fish.
Scientists have recently detected microplastics in human blood, breast milk, heart arteries, lungs, testicles, brains and placentas, foreboding serious human health consequences.
A 2024 study found that 99 percent of seafood samples in stores and West Coast fishing boats were contaminated with microplastics. Plastics, made from oil and gas and toxic chemicals and manufactured largely in poor, communities of color in Texas and Louisiana, are a major source of greenhouse emissions and air pollution. Plastic recycling is a master myth, given 5-6 percent are actually recycled in the U.S. as of 2021, despite a century of existence.
When I first learned that plastic flakes filled my lightweight winter jacket, I thought “great” – recycling plastic rather than throwing it away. But I have since learned what Judith Enck, author of The Problem with Plastics, and other critics prescribe: the best thing we can do is Reduce the use of plastic in our lives, if we are ever to bring our planet back from this runaway pollution. Yes, we can re-use as much as certain plastic allows, which is not back to itself like wood, paper, metal, and glass. It is “down-cycled” at best, like the filling in my jacket, before disposed in a landfill, or incinerated, or dumped unconscionably in a poor, developing country.
Invented a century ago, plastic is now ubiquitous, having increased from about 2 million tons annually in 1950 to one half billion tons a year today, and projected to triple by 2060. Plastics are derived from fossil fuels, which are converted into chemical components such as ethylene and propylene – the building blocks for plastics. They were first manufactured as nylon and PVC, then boosted by use in WWII and subsequently Increased by the middle-class love affair with single-use products, such as straws, coffee cups, and water bottles. Agricultural fields are polluted with plastic through the use of plastic-contaminated sewage sludge. irrigation water, and plastic films to suppress weeds. These then decompose into microplastic and enter streams, rivers and, ultimately, the ocean.
With the growth of renewable technologies replacing fossil fuels, oil and gas corporations are aggressively promoting plastics, such that greenhouse gases from plastics are poised to surpass those of coal. Because of the plethora of toxic chemicals added to it, plastics are now associated with the rise of non-communicable diseases such as diabetes, reproductive cancer and cardiodiseases.
The plastics industry aims to account for one-half of oil and gas demand by 2050, unless (and that is a questionable unless) the world’s countries can reverse the failed 2025 Plastics Convention.
What we can do
Stop using single-use plastics, which constitute some 40 percent of plastics today. This would immediately reduce throwaway plastic, greenhouse gas emissions, our exposure to hundreds of toxic chemicals in plastic, and diminish ocean pollution. Further, critics advocate never using plastic to package food because research shows that chemicals can migrate from plastic food packaging into food.
One thousand strategies with tens of thousands of people in the lead advocating for city, state and federal bans on single-use plastics are needed. Surveys indicate that the public (both Republicans and Democrats) support ‘a pause’ in new manufacturing facilities and legislation to protect oceans from further plastic pollution.
Beyond Plastics provides a guide for Meals on Wheels, restaurants and dry cleaners to reduce use of throwaway plastics and also invites organized groups to join them as an affiliate and to use the model legislation they provide.
Women lead the charge against plastics. Author Judith Enck recounts the story of nearly a dozen women, some from Cancer Alley and the Gulf Coast, whose unstinting activism has blocked plastic industries from their neighborhoods.
For decades the US and higher-income countries have exported much of their plastic waste to low-income countries – an environmental injustice on a massive scale. Researchers found that poor people living in more than 25 developing countries burn the flammable plastic waste to cook and heat their home, making plastic pollution a “daily health and survival issue.” Women in poor countries., responsible for all the household chores and childcare, inhale disproportionately these toxic plastic fumes. Additionally, smoke from chimneys in packed slum neighborhoods contaminates everything: people, water sources, soil and crops.
Plastics, “the terrible debris of progress,” is an immense environmental injustice. We must stop this juggernaut.
Starmer plan to relax nuclear regulation opposed by Holyrood
“The weakening of environmental protection is a slippery slope opening the way for increased radiation doses to members of the public and the workforce.” – Pete Roche, Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace
UK Government plans which could “weaken” oversight of nuclear safety in Scotland have been rejected by the Scottish Government.
Rob Edwards, May 03 2026, https://www.theferret.scot/starmer-nuclear-regulation-holyrood/
The prime minister Sir Keir Starmer’s plans to reform the regulation of nuclear power and weapons to make new developments easier have provoked “serious concerns” within the Scottish Government, according to emails obtained by The Ferret.
The Scottish energy minister, Gillian Martin, wrote to the UK nuclear minister, Lord Vallance, in March, rejecting the suggestion that Scotland could “reap the benefits” of the reforms in helping to build new nuclear reactors.
She also expressed worries that proposals for a “lead regulator” system designed to simplify and speed up the handling of nuclear projects would threaten the independence of the Scottish Environment Protection Agency.
Campaigners warned that the “weakening” of nuclear safety regulation could lead to workers and the public being exposed to more radiation, which can cause cancer. They stressed that Scotland did not need nuclear power and its “toxic legacy”.
The UK Government said that Starmer would “like to see benefits delivered across the UK”. But it promised to work with the Scottish Government “in good faith without presuming an outcome”.
Nuclear power has become one of the most contentious issues in the run-up to the Scottish Parliament elections on 7 May.
Scottish Labour has repeatedly attacked the Scottish National Party (SNP) for “blocking” the building of new nuclear power stations, which it argued would bring jobs, investment and energy security.
The SNP has maintained the move would drive up electricity prices, create long-lived radioactive waste and undermine renewables, which offer Scotland a better energy future.
In February 2025, Starmer announced plans to “rip up rules to fire up nuclear power”, and set up a nuclear regulatory taskforce to “deliver new projects more quickly”. The Ferret reported in May 2025 that in doing so, he had ignored warnings from his nuclear safety watchdog that regulation was not to blame for delays.
The taskforce, headed by business expert John Fingleton, published its final report in November 2025. It recommended a “radical reset” introducing a “lead regulator” followed by a new regulatory commission to reduce “risk aversion” and “accelerate delivery”.
The report covered both nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and suggested that the civil safety watchdog, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, and the Ministry of Defence’s internal watchdog, the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator, should be merged “to reduce duplication”.
Starmer published his full response to the taskforce in March 2026, accepting all its recommendations. The aim, he said, was to “build a Britain that reclaims its place as a leading nuclear nation”.
His response acknowledged that the taskforce had not made recommendations for the Scottish Government and other devolved administrations. But it promised to “work closely with them to ensure that they too can reap the benefits of these reforms”.
The UK Government was “committed to nuclear across the UK”, the response said. It highlighted government involvement in plans for a new fleet of so-called small modular reactors at Wylfa in Wales.
These statements were highlighted by Scottish minister Martin in an email on 13 March 2026 to UK minister Vallance, released in response to a freedom of information request from The Ferret.
Martin expressed “concerns” that the UK Government was making commitments to take forward the taskforce’s recommendations in Scotland, despite having promised not to. The Scottish Government was yet to be convinced that there was “any merit” in adopting Westminster’s proposals, she said.
“We need to ensure we are reaching our full renewables potential rather than ploughing billions of pounds into a nuclear industry that will leave a long and toxic legacy for future generations.” – Patrick Harvie, Scottish Greens.
Martin pointed out that Scottish ministers had “a longstanding position on new nuclear energy in Scotland and matters of environmental regulation remain devolved to Scottish ministers and the Scottish Parliament.”
She also said that the Scottish Environment Protection Agency (Sepa) had been invited to a meeting in London on 26 March 2026 to discuss the UK Government’s plans for a “lead regulator” for nuclear projects.
“We have serious concerns about a lead regulator model and the impact that would have on Sepa’s independence,” Martin warned. She sought clarification “on how the implementation of this will be done in a way which does not impact on areas of devolved competence.”
Another email released to The Ferret is from an unnamed Scottish Government official to the UK Department for Energy Security and Net Zero on 12 March. It complained that Starmer’s response to the taskforce “impinges on devolved issues without the agreement of Scottish ministers” and was “problematic”.
“Ministers will have to be robust on this with language and next steps,” the email said.
Other files disclosed that Martin had an online meeting with Vallance to discuss the nuclear regulatory taskforce on 25 February. According to Martin’s pre-meeting briefing from officials, there were “significant issues” with what the taskforce recommendations would mean for Sepa.
Another Scottish Government email to Westminster back in February 2025, when the nuclear regulatory taskforce was announced, said there had been “no engagement with, or agreement from, Scottish ministers”. It suggested that ministers “should not be part” of the taskforce’s work.
“The weakening of environmental protection is a slippery slope opening the way for increased radiation doses to members of the public and the workforce.” – Pete Roche, Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace
Vallance responded to Martin’s email raising concerns on 18 March. Starmer would “like to see benefits delivered across the UK”, he said, but the “recommendations apply only to England”.
The UK Government’s intention was to work with the Scottish Government to “discuss what reforms they may wish to echo or engage with”, he added. “We want to do so in good faith and without presuming an outcome.”
Vallance pointed out that regulatory reform was not just about building new nuclear reactors, but also covered the dismantling of defunct reactors. Major nuclear decommissioning projects, expected to take decades, are under way at Hunterston in North Ayrshire and Dounreay in Caithness.
“We do not consider that it implies an intention for the development of new nuclear power in Scotland,” he stated. Vallance also insisted that he “respected” Sepa’s independence.
“None of the measures in the government’s response are intended to, or would, cut across Sepa’s statutory remit or independence of judgment,” he said.
The plan for a “lead regulator” did not give legal powers to that regulator, he maintained. “It simply seeks to facilitate collective, consensus-based decisions.”
The Scottish Campaign to Resist the Atomic Menace backed the Scottish Government’s concerns. The UK Government seemed to be following president Trump’s lead in relaxing nuclear safety regulation, warned the campaign’s spokesperson, Pete Roche.
The story of the cooks of Chernobyl, 40 years later
Vikram Doctor, ET BureauLast May 03, 2026,
https://economictimes.indiatimes.com/magazines/panache/the-story-of-the-cooks-of-chernobyl-40-years-later/articleshow/130728007.cms
Synopsis
Forty years ago, a nuclear disaster struck Chernobyl. Women from Rivne Nuclear Power Plant were sent to cook for clean-up crews. They faced radiation and health problems. Food meant for workers was often wasted or contaminated. Some food was smuggled out. Decades later, these women fight for promised pensions. Their experiences offer insight into the disaster’s lasting impact.
When Raya heard of a nuclear power plant accident, she turned to Ukraine’s Rivne Nuclear Power Plant close by: “We looked at our gherkin barrels — that’s what we call our power plant chimneys — and we could see there was nothing wrong with them.” But then the truth emerged: The accident was at their sister plant in Chernobyl, 180 miles east, and Raya had to go there to cook.
It has been 40 years since the world’s worst nuclear disaster and so much has been written and filmed about Chernobyl. But Polish writer Witold Szablowski found a little-known story for his book What’s Cooking in the Kremlin, a history of Russia through food. Szablowski knew how, even in the worst disasters, those working to save the situation had to eat, so someone had to cook for them. He found seven women alive, out of a group of 15 sent from Rivne after the disaster.
All the women suffered health issues, though not being in the actual plant spared them a bit. Dosimeters, to measure radiation, were placed at the entrance of the canteen, and when clean-up workers came from the plant, their buzzing became frantic and continuous. “It was a dreadful sound,” recalled Valentina, the head of the group.
Finally, the dosimeters were removed. Why remind people about radiation, when nothing could be done? The countryside around Chernobyl was abandoned. Raya recalled cows “mooing pitifully, because the people had been taken away and there was no one to milk them”. The canteen had also been abandoned. An earlier group of cooks were so terrified, they fled through the forest. That act had probably sealed their death warrants since Chernobyl’s forest was one of the worstaffected areas.
Food shortages were the norm in the latter days of the Soviet Union, but a guilty state ensured Chernobyl’s workers were given the best meats, dairy and fruit from across the country. “There was a whole sea of produce there,” Luba, another cook, recalled. “Little cubes of butter, full-fat cream — it sounds funny, but in those days, under Gorbachev, that was a real delicacy.” Workers had to drink glasses of cream, perhaps in the hope that its calcium would counter the depletion in their bones ..
Yet this food, which would normally have been the stuff of fantasies for people, was mostly wasted. Workers just wanted fruit juices and vodka. “They were burning up Witold. Burning up from inside,” Olga said. It was hard for the cooks to see such food disregarded. By habit, Luba would tell workers to take chocolate and give it to a kid, if they didn’t want it for themselves. Then she realised the food was contaminated by just being there, and no kid should have it.
Inevitably, some food was smuggled out. In Nobel Prize winner Svetlana Alexievich’s Voices from Chernobyl , one woman tells her how, in the months of fear afterwards, she only bought the most expensive meats to be safe: “Then we found out it was the expensive salami that they mixed contaminated meat into, thinking, well, since it was expensive, fewer people would buy it.” It is almost grimly comic how quickly the usual compromises and corruptions of life reasserted themselves.
Decades later, Valentina is fighting for the special pensions they were promised. An agent says she’ll arrange it for a thousand dollars — and tells an outraged Valentina that it’s a discount: “She charged those who hadn’t been in Chernobyl several thousand.”
Chernobyl’s 40th anniversary has been marked by articles lamenting how it set back nuclear power for decades. Sam Dumitriu, a British policy analyst, notes with some puzzlement that polls show women are far less likely to support nuc ..
1 B1_ The billion-dollar boondoggle: how Vogtle became the US’s monument to nuclear folly
by Paul Hockenos, 29 Apr 2026, https://energytransition.org/2026/04/the-billion-dollar-boondoggle-how-vogtle-became-the-uss-monument-to-nuclear-folly/#more-30303
In the quiet scrubland of Waynesboro, Georgia, two enormous concrete domes rise from the landscape. Vogtle Units 3 and 4, the first new nuclear reactors built in the US in more than 30 years, were once touted as the rebirth of US American nuclear ambition. Instead, they have become a monument to mismanagement and cost overruns – conclusive evidence that nuclear power is a nonstarter. Paul Hockenos reports.
The story of Vogtle is a cautionary tale illustrating that nuclear power cannot be delivered cheaply, quickly and reliably in democratic societies with up-to-scratch regulatory systems. Time and again, from South Korea’s reactors at Shin Kori and Shin Wolsong to Finland’s Olkiluoto-3 and France’s Flamanville EPR, on-the-ground experience has proven otherwise. Vogtle belongs squarely in that lineage, but with a uniquely US American twist: the financial burden has been shifted almost entirely onto the backs of ordinary consumers.
A promise of renaissance
The Georgia Public Service Commission approved the project in 2009: two Westinghouse AP1000 reactors, at a cost of USD 14 billion in total, online by 2016 and 2017. Clean, reliable emissions-free baseload power – an answer to climate change that didn’t depend on fickle solar output or fossil gas.
But by the time the reactors finally limped into commercial service – Unit 3 in July 2023 and Unit 4 in April 2024 – the price tag had swollen to more than USD 36.8 billion, cementing Vogtle’s place as the most expensive power plant ever built in human history. Not even the notorious cost spirals of European nuclear megaprojects come close: Finland’s Olkiluoto-3 ballooned to €11 billion, meaning that Vogtle surpassed that threefold.
This is not simply a cost overrun but rather a systemic indictment of the nuclear construction model: slow, labour intensive, technologically rigid and utterly incompatible with modern energy economics.
Ratepayers foot the bill
The primary victims of this financial misadventure are Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers, many of whom were compelled to subsidize the reactors long before they produced a single kilowatt-hour of electricity. Thanks to a legislative instrument called Construction Work in Progress, households were effectively forced to act as involuntary venture capitalists, paying roughly USD 1,000 per household in advance charges.
Georgia Power collected USD 17 billion in profits during the construction period, while shareholder losses were capped at around USD 3 billion. Ratepayers, meanwhile, will carry billions in future costs for decades. This is why they pay the highest power bills in the US.
Now that the reactors are online, the financial pressure has only intensified. Residential electricity rates have jumped roughly 24 per cent, with new hikes expected. Analysts estimate that electricity from the new units is five times more expensive than equivalent capacity from solar plus battery storage – an astonishing figure in a region with some of the best solar potential in the US.
A cascade of failures
To understand how Vogtle spiralled into a USD-22-billion cost-overrun fiasco, one must examine the full sequence of missteps – a textbook example of how nuclear megaprojects fail globally.
One of the most consequential errors occurred before construction even began. Westinghouse launched the project without a completed reactor design, a mistake so fundamental it borders on negligence. This error echoed Europe’s nuclear struggles at Olkiluoto and Flamanville, where partially completed designs led to cascading construction problems. In 2017, Westinghouse – burdened by the Vogtle AP1000 debacle – filed for bankruptcy.
That collapse forced Vogtle’s owners to take over the direct management of the project, a role for which they were ill-prepared. What followed was a sprawling mess of renegotiated contracts and design revisions. Independent monitors documented that Georgia Power repeatedly provided ‘materially inaccurate cost estimates’, undermining any possibility of regulatory oversight. Nevertheless, the Public Service Commission allowed construction to continue and rejected its own staff’s recommendations to cancel the project – decisions that are costing Georgians billions.
Then came the workforce crisis. Because the US had not built a nuclear reactor in decades, the skilled labour pipeline had atrophied. Vogtle thus became a crash-course training ground for thousands of inexperienced workers. Attrition among electricians reached 50 per cent. Component failure rates hit 80 per cent at times, necessitating extensive and costly do-overs.
The result is damning: a project lost in its own complexity, burdened by the weight of an entire industry that had forgotten how to build what it claimed to champion.
What Georgia could have had instead
What makes Vogtle’s story especially tragic is not merely what Georgians must now pay, but what they could have had. The nearly USD 37 billion could have financed a diversified portfolio of renewable energy: solar farms, battery storage and energy efficiency upgrades that would have delivered more capacity at lower cost and in far less time.
Renewable energy has evolved into something antithetical to nuclear power: decentralized, modular and increasingly affordable systems that can be scaled rapidly without the all-or-nothing risks of nuclear megaprojects. Just about everywhere in the world, solar and wind are being installed in record volumes precisely because they are nimble, predictable and financially transparent. Nuclear, by contrast, requires vast upfront capital, long construction timelines and political intervention to remain viable.
Georgia, with its abundant sunshine and growing distributed-energy ecosystem, could have led the US South into a new era of affordable clean power. Instead, its utility regulators locked the state into a nuclear future that its customers regret.
The lessons of Vogtle
Vogtle Units 3 and 4 were marketed as a blueprint for America’s nuclear future. In reality, they have demonstrated that the economics of traditional nuclear construction in the US are fundamentally broken. Not broken at the margins, but broken at the core – structurally, financially and technologically.
This project, like so many others, depended not on engineering brilliance but on regulatory leniency, optimistic accounting and public subsidy. Its failures are not the product of unfortunate circumstance, but of a model that no longer fits the realities of modern energy infrastructure.
The legacy of Vogtle is thus a warning to policymakers, regulators and utility executives: nuclear power, in its large-scale conventional form, cannot compete in the contemporary energy economy – not on cost, not on time and not without burdening the very people it claims to serve.
For ratepayers, Vogtle is a generational misfortune. For the nuclear industry, it is another nail in the coffin of the ‘renaissance’ that never arrives. And for everyone concerned about climate change, it is a reminder that the clean energy transition cannot afford fantasies, wishful thinking or vanity megaprojects.
One would think the lessons of Vogtle incontrovertible. But in May 2024, the Biden administration’s energy secretary Jennifer Granholm attended a ribbon-cutting ceremony for the recently connected units. Her conclusions were very different: she predicted that 198 more such large-scale reactors will join the Vogtle units, which she considered a success story.
What Georgia has built is not a triumph of American ingenuity but rather a fraud that should speak the final word on nuclear power in the US.
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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