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Crunch time for the nuclear lobby’s biggest lie (Small Modular Nuclear Reactors)?

22 July 2026, https://theaimn.net/crunch-time-for-the-nuclear-lobbys-biggest-lie-small-modular-nuclear-reactors/

There could be a big drama now, about Small Modular Nuclear Reactors sort of not really going to happen in the UK. But I don’t think so. The nuclear lobby is adept at twisting a negative outlook into a sorta positive one. And I’m sorry to say, but I think that Andy Burnham might just co-operate in this process.

At the moment, the UK, and the world, are waiting for the UK’s new progressive poster boy, Andy Burnham, to declare his policies on all sorts of things. His general theme is “left of centre”, socially progressive, with the emphasis on economic reform – “business-friendly socialism”. Most likely, Burnham’s approach to the big issues of climate and nuclear will be a cautious “business-as usual.” Those who are deeply concerned about climate and nuclear issues can hardly blame him. Unfortunately, the reality is that Burnham could never have got where he is now, if he bucked the prevailing system, with Labour now a kind of weaker Tory party.

At the moment, the UK, and the world, are waiting for the UK’s new progressive poster boy, Andy Burnham, to declare his policies on all sorts of things. His general theme is “left of centre”, socially progressive, with the emphasis on economic reform – “business-friendly socialism”. Most likely, Burnham’s approach to the big issues of climate and nuclear will be a cautious “business-as usual.” Those who are deeply concerned about climate and nuclear issues can hardly blame him. Unfortunately, the reality is that Burnham could never have got where he is now, if he bucked the prevailing system, with Labour now a kind of weaker Tory party.

What has this got to do with Small Modular Nuclear Reactors?

Well, as I have written before, the global nuclear lobby now depends on the UK to kick off the new nuclear renaissance, with a fleet of small nuclear reactors in the UK, as promised by the previous Prime Minister with his Great British Energy – Nuclear. The stated purpose is to provide the UK soon, with cheap, plentiful, clean, climate-friendly, proven technology, safe, community-welcomed, waste-free, peaceful electricity. In that statement there are already 10 lies. Of all those lies, I would say that “soon” is the biggest whopper of them all.

SOON

The most “exciting” SMR plan, that of Poland-based SGE (Synthos Green Energy), promises 14 SMRs in operation by 2034. That would provide about the same amount of electricity as one large nuclear reactor. However, SMRs that each provide 300 MW would provide very much more – but then they would have to be larger, and no longer qualify as “small”. Either way, that would be only a beginning – many, many more SMRs would be needed to meet the UK’s electricity needs. And, let’s not forget – the coming wave of data farms for artificial intelligence is going to probably double that need.

So, even in the most optimistic scenario, SMRs are not going to cut the mustard for showing the world that soon Small Modular Nuclear Reactors will power a nation. Of course the promise of “soon” also relates to the claim that SMRs are needed for action on climate change. Clearly, they are going to be irrelevant, too late for reducing greenhouse gas emissions, whereas we have renewable energy right now. And of course, but rarely mentioned – energy efficiency, energy conservation – the really effective way to reduce greenhouse emissions.

CHEAP

The next biggest whopper about Small Modular Nuclear Reactors is the statement that they would be cheap. Here we get into the minefield of deliberate obfuscation about the financial facts. The cost of building SMRs is likely to be astronomic, and the only practicable way is to build them en masse. That would mean that the company building them would need to have big orders, not just for one or two reactors. Big orders bring with them a heap of problems. Like an IKEA cupboard, these “modular” items are all the same – if you buy a whole lot of them they’d better all work out perfectly – no chance really to just try out one. Buyers are reluctant, and so are investors.

Of course, the argument will be that SMRs will provide cheap electricity. Well that absolutely would necessitate economies of scale. That was the reason that the idea of small reactors was abandoned in the past. Simply, a large reactor producing a huge amount of electricity has got to produce it more efficiently and cheaply. The proponents of SMRs never talk about the accompanying costs – insurance, the security staff required, the transport and disposal of toxic long-lasting wastes. The truth is, those proponents absolutely know that their product is in fact very expensive. And that is why the subservient corporate media consistently baffle us with convoluted arguments that minimise the cost to tax-payers. They know damn well that the only way that SMRs could possibly be developed is by government funding. Keir Starmer backed a Rolls Royce plan that would be blatantly funded by the tax-payer. The SGE plan purports to be privately funded, but it’s tangled up with various government-funded schemes.

These were 2 lies – but there are 8 more to go.

Plentiful? – well, apart from Russia and China’s 2 duds – SMR’s don’t actually exist – quite the reverse of plentiful.

Clean? They are still part of a dirty production system, starting from uranium mining, with its workers exposed to radiation, and its piles of radioactive tailings.

Climate-friendly? There is a whole chain of steps from mining through to waste disposal that involve fossil fuel energy.

Proven technology? Well, they don’t even exist.

Safe? SMRs can’t melt down in the same way as big reactors, but still contain radioactive material, a target for theft, terrorists or military attacks Can still have accidents releasing radiation.

Community-welcomed? This really is a big one, with a lack of proper consultation on plans – There’s strong resistance from some local groups, such as Radiation Free Lakeland.

Peaceful? The hidden military pressures behind the new push for small nuclear reactors.

Wastes? Stanford-led research finds small modular reactors will exacerbate challenges of highly radioactive nuclear waste.

Now that Starmer, with his big promises, has gone, it’s probably no longer up to the UK’s Prime Minister to lead the global charge on small nuclear reactors. Andy Burnham has to negotiate the whole troubled energy scene, try to be progressive, placate the fossil fuel lobbies, and the nuclear lobby. He has been very quiet on nuclear policy, but he is committed to the existing defence and AUKUS nuclear agreements. So for “peaceful” nuclear, he’s most likely to go for a compromise – SMRs, supporting just a few, rather than the much-touted “fleets” of them.

So, no doubt the USA will take up the torch – One Year After Executive Orders, U.S. Nuclear Energy Renaissance is in Full Swing.

The media is awash with the wonder of new nuclear reactors, in concert with the AI data farm boom. The few voices who call for restraint, and point out the problems, are drowned out by the cacophony of handouts from the companies promising SMRs, handouts faithfully regurgitated by the corporate media, and by those universities which have bought into the propaganda.

There are the many good, decent people, whose living depends on their work within the uranium-nuclear-defence industries. And communities that are caught up in the nuclear industry, and its associated government bonuses. And many professionals, especially journalists, who, if they paused to look at the whole picture, might see the folly and the danger and the lies, of this so much touted technology. And of course, politicians who would be out of a job if they opposed the sacred cows of new energy and nuclear defence. So the whole SMR juggernaut moves on, bit by bit, and has itself become one big lie.

July 23, 2026 Posted by | Christina's notes, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, UK | Leave a comment

Are Trump and AI driving a nuclear power boom?

July 20, 202 By Berly McCoy, Geoff Brumfiel, Regina G. Barber, Rebecca Ramirez, https://www.npr.org/2026/07/20/nx-s1-5884889/are-trump-and-ai-driving-a-nuclear-power-boom

A race started by President Trump is leading to the rapid construction of new, experimental nuclear reactors. If they work, they could power data centers for artificial intelligence. But critics worry that the breakneck pace is compromising safety and public trust. NPR correspondent Geoff Brumfiel talks about the potential risks and benefits, and whether this may lead to a new nuclear age.

Red, white and glowing blue: Trump’s push for new reactors reaches the finish line

June 29, 2026, Geoff Brumfiel, https://www.npr.org/2026/06/29/nx-s1-5847944/new-nuclear-reactors-america-250-safety-concerns

A little over a year ago, President Trump set an ambitious goal: He wanted to see American companies build at least three new experimental nuclear reactors by July 4, 2026, the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence.

Shortly after Trump signed an executive order enshrining his goal, the Department of Energy launched its Reactor Pilot Program. The program is designed to help companies build and run test reactors quickly, in part by radically cutting back on the regulations required for such reactors.

That program has sparked a nuclear race, and with less than a week to go, two companies have already reached the goal of switching on their reactor (“going critical” in nuclear-speak).

On June 4, Antares Nuclear announced it had gone critical, and Valar Atomics said it went critical on June 18 and is now producing tens of kilowatts of heat from its new reactor core, which is operating out of a tentlike structure in the Utah desert.

Other companies are getting close to making the deadline, and all this happened in less than the span of a year.

“We haven’t done anything this fast, basically ever,” said Nick Touran, chief nuclear officer at Ocean Atomics, which seeks to put nuclear power onto civilian ships. His company isn’t part of this program, but he has been tracking it closely.

He says this pilot program could jump-start America’s nuclear industry.

“I’m just excited that we’re now actually building these little reactors and trying it out and we’re going to look at what the economic story is and find out if there’s a market,” he said. “It’s going to be so much better than sitting there talking about it like we did for the last 40 years.”

But for others, the speed sparks alarm. The race is “essentially an exercise in public relations,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. And, he added, the slashing of regulations undoes decades of safety lessons learned in the nuclear industry.

“This is taking us back to the 1950s, and that is not progress,” he said.

Building the core

A lot of the action is happening at the Department of Energy’s Idaho National Laboratory, where several of the companies have set up shop. One of them is Radiant, which hopes to build small reactors for everything from disaster relief to data centers. Rita Baranwal, the firm’s chief nuclear officer, said they are assembling their reactor inside a special secure building called the DOME.

“By July 4, we’re tracking to get the reactor into DOME and to initiate the testing,” she told NPR this month.

Initiating testing isn’t quite the same as going critical, and Baranwal said Radiant probably won’t be critical by the July 4 deadline. But she does expect that Radiant’s reactor will be running soon. “The only thing we will not be doing at [Idaho National Laboratory] this summer is generating electricity,” she said.

Radiant’s reactor looks radically different from the massive reactors that exist today. It’s far smaller, and its nuclear fuel takes a different form. In a modern power reactor, nuclear fuel is loaded into long tubes, but Radiant’s reactor uses little nuclear fuel balls filled with grains of uranium. “Do you remember gobstoppers?” Baranwal said

These nuclear gobstoppers can operate at higher temperatures and are more resistant to melting down. Radiant and several other companies plan on using this type of fuel along with other tech to build a bunch of smaller, more mobile reactors.

“We have broken ground on our factory to mass-produce reactors. We’re targeting around 50 per year,” she said. (Currently, 96 reactors are operating in the United States.).

Safety worries

To get the reactors built this quickly comes at a cost. This year, NPR reported that the Energy Department completely rewrote its safety and security standards to make it easier for companies to win regulatory approval. The department has said that the cut regulations were “unnecessary” and that safety hasn’t been compromised.

The department consulted with the companies but not with the public. It also exempted the new reactors from environmental reviews.

And that has some skeptics of the program worried.

“Yes, of course, if you bend all the rules, you can do things quickly,” said Lyman, referring to the Energy Department’s decision to rewrite its rules for the program.

The test reactors might be working, he said, “but that should not be confused with anything related to a nuclear power reactor that’s capable of producing electricity in a stable and safe way.”

Lyman said he worries that deregulation will erode standards for things like how much security is required or how much environmental monitoring should be done, at a time when these mass-produced little reactors could start popping up at locations all over the country.

July 23, 2026 Posted by | politics, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Ceases to be a nuclear power’: The high-stakes deal the new UK PM inherits

SBS News,  21 July 2026 By Yasmine Alwakal

Andy Burnham has inherited a major AUKUS commitment with Australia. Whether Britain can deliver it is another question

IN BRIEF

  • On Monday, former Manchester mayor Andy Burnham succeeded Keir Starmer as the United Kingdom’s prime minister.
  • Experts say the change in leadership could impact the UK’s investment in defence but is unlikely to impact AUKUS.

Labour leader Andy Burnham has become the United Kingdom’s seventh prime minister in a decade — but experts say it remains unclear how the former mayor of Greater Manchester will approach the country’s most important strategic partnership with Australia.

Newly departed UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer suffered a high-profile split with his defence secretary, John Healey, over a perceived failure to properly fund the department.

Burnham now inherits Starmer’s £298bn ($573b) defence spending commitment over the next four years, £4.7b ($9b) of which is unfunded and will need to make up part of Burnham’s first budget.

Experts have said that, while Burnham is unlikely to renegotiate the AUKUS agreement, defence is likely to play a central position in the new UK leader’s job description, given the growing threat of Russia to NATO members.

Jennifer Parker, a non-resident fellow at the Lowy Institute, told SBS News that policymakers in Australia will be watching Burnham’s approach to foreign affairs closely.

“I think there are broader questions about the implications of Andy Burnham’s views on defence and the defence investment plan in the UK … [but] in many ways, AUKUS is critical for the UK,” Parker told SBS News.

The UK, alongside Australia and the United States, entered into trilateral AUKUS security agreement in 2021.

The deal is divided into two key pillars: Australia’s acquisition of conventionally-armed, nuclear-powered submarine capability and the development and delivery of advanced capabilities such as underwater drones.

In July 2025, Australia also entered into a bilateral agreement with the UK dubbed the Geelong Treaty. The 50-year agreement enables the cooperative design, building, operation, sustainment, and disposal of nuclear-powered submarines known as SSN.

Will Burnham deliver on the UK’s AUKUS commitments?

Since 1968, the UK has been a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and is recognised as one of the five permanent members of the United Nations Security Council.

Parker said since the end of the Cold War the UK has operated ballistic missile submarines called SSBNs:

“Now, you need to have SSN’s — attack submarines — to be able to protect your ballistic missile submarines. AUKUS, for the UK makes designing, building and operating SSN’s cheaper. So, it makes it easier.”

That’s why she believes the UK, whether led by current UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer or the incoming Burnham, will continue to uphold its AUKUS commitments.

“If the UK can’t achieve AUKUS … the long-term impact is quite significant in terms of the UK ceases to be a nuclear weapons power. Which really changes its global status.”

According to the Australian government, the UK will deliver its first SSN’s by the late 2030s. Defence Minister Richard Marles said the first class of Australian-built submarines is intended to enter service by the early 2040s…………………………………………………………………..

Parker from the Lowy Institute also believes the Australian government will watch to see if the UK takes “strides” to address what she described as capability constraints facing UK submarine industrial bases………….

“As much as I’m confident they’ll make it [AUKUS] work, whether they’ll make it work within the stated time frames is genuinely an open question.”

The UK’s defence committee has launched an inquiry into its military resilience and preparedness. It follows a July report by its defence ministry, which found that 47 out of 49 major defence projects in the UK were delayed or over budget.

In a statement, Dan Jarvis, the newly appointed defence secretary, said:

“Many projects had been announced with insufficient or no funding at all. The consequences were profound: limited availability of warships and aircraft, an army facing a recruitment crisis, morale weakened and renewal of our nuclear deterrent delayed.” https://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/andy-burnham-aukus-submarine-deal-australia/j38e9qzzf

July 23, 2026 Posted by | politics international, UK | Leave a comment

UK’s nuclear plants face risks of AI-powered cyber-attacks and insider threats

17 Jul, 2026 By Tom Pashby, https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/uks-nuclear-plants-face-risks-of-ai-powered-cyber-attacks-and-insider-threats-17-07-2026/

Civil nuclear power plants in the UK now face cyber-attacks enhanced by artificial intelligence (AI) and insider threats, according to the government’s National Risk Register 2026.

The National Risk Register (NRR) is the annual, public-facing version of the government’s National Security Risk Assessment, it “includes a summary of all but the most sensitive, classified risks,” according to Cabinet Office minister of state Darren Jones.

Jones informed parliament and the public of the publication of the 2026 edition of the NRR in a written ministerial statement on 14 July.

The NRR attracts attention because it explains the government’s assessment of the likelihood and severity of a broad range of risks, including terrorism, cyber threats, geopolitical and diplomatic risks, accidents and systems failures.

The 2026 edition covers 95 risks. Of relevance to the civil engineering and infrastructure sector, “cyber-attack water infrastructure” was added as a new risk to reflect learning “from reported cyber-attacks targeting the water sector,” the NRR said.

It also added, “accidental damage on the National Gas Transmission Network – to explore damage to the gas transmission network as a result of agricultural digging.”

In her foreword to the 2026 NRR, Cabinet Office security minister Angela Eagle said: “This government is committed to sharing risk information as openly as possible, to support all those working to build the UK’s resilience with their planning, preparation and response activity.

“Greater transparency also means that people can scrutinise our assessments, and challenge us to do things differently when needed.”

She added: “A whole of society approach is required to increase resilience; therefore, I encourage all risk and resilience professionals to consider the risks in this publication, and join our collective endeavour to make the UK more prosperous and secure.”

While the 2025 edition included “conventional attack” and “cyber-attack” against civil nuclear as two distinct risks, the 2026 edition removed the cyber-attack risk profile and instead covered cyber risks facing civil nuclear into “malicious attack: civil nuclear”, in its “state threats” grouping.

Within the new malicious attack: civil nuclear profile, the NRR 2026 said: “AI can automate the process of launching cyber-attacks, making them faster, more efficient and lower the barrier for entry.”

Reacting to the 2026 NRR, cybersecurity firm e2e-assure CEO Rob Demain told NCE: “Nuclear plants have always planned for physical threats and human error. What’s new is the assumption that the attacker may already have a way in, that someone with legitimate access can do real damage without ever needing to break down a fence.

“AI is exacerbating the threat. The National Risk Register itself says AI can automate attacks, making them faster, cheaper and easier to attempt without much skill.

“Elsewhere it goes further, describing how AI makes fake messages harder to spot and helps attackers find weaknesses faster. That’s a very different risk to plan for, than a lone bad actor.”

Demain added: “For the people who design, build and maintain this infrastructure, the message is simple: security can no longer be something bolted on afterwards, or left entirely to IT.

“It has to be built into how these sites operate, day to day, alongside the safety systems engineers already take for granted.”

Also responding to the “malicious attack: civil nuclear” risk profile, an EDF spokesperson told NCE: “As the risk from cyber-attack on UK critical national infrastructure continues to evolve, EDF continues to further refine its defences, with horizon scanning for developing threats and a constant series of system improvements to make it harder for those attempting to damage our systems.

We note that the National Risk Register does not propose a scenario of a safety risk but one that ‘results in a disruption to normal operations until investigations have demonstrated nuclear safety and security critical systems remain unaffected’, and that ‘the disruption is not a direct result of the attack’.”

Demain told NCE earlier in July that critical national infrastructure assets are now more at risk of cyber-attacks due to the deployment of newer, more powerful artificial intelligence (AI) tools like Anthropic’s Mythos.

July 23, 2026 Posted by | safety, UK | Leave a comment

A Seat Cushion Triggered One Of History’s Strangest Nuclear Accidents And A Geopolitical Scandal That Lasted Decades

A cushion, a crash, and a Cold War cover-up.

Tom Hale,19 July 26, https://www.iflscience.com/a-seat-cushion-triggered-one-of-historys-strangest-nuclear-accidents-and-a-geopolitical-scandal-that-lasted-decades-84141

There have been 32 known incidents where the US has accidentally detonated, misfired, or lost nuclear warheads (at least those that the public is allowed to know about). Just one of these accidents, however, became an international scandal and environmental disaster thanks to a cozy seat cushion for someone’s ass.

The incident unfolded in early 1968, a time when The Beatles were blasting on the radio, the Vietnam War was raging, and the threat of full-blown nuclear war between the US and the USSR was still very much on the cards.

Ever paranoid about the atomic threat, the US had launched an airborne patrol of up to 12 nuclear-armed bombers to constantly patrol the skies. Known as Operation Chrome Dome, the fleet of planes flew 24/7, non-stop from 1961 to 1968.

The operation’s routes regularly shifted to keep the USSR on its toes, but many of the flights cruised around the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, a nice vantage point from which the US could hop over the Soviet Union and casually obliterate a few million people.

The incident unfolds, then explodes

On the morning of January 21, 1968, a B-52 bomber loaded with four B28FI thermonuclear bombs flew out of Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York to take up its shift policing the skies.

It was mid-winter and temperatures were achingly low as the giant plane headed northeastwards into the Arctic Circle by mid-afternoon. In a struggle to keep warm, some of the crew had reportedly covered parts of the cabin with cushions. Unbeknownst to them, they had been placed over a heating vent that was blasting hot air from the overheating engine. The cushions turned into a smoldering tinder, and flames slowly engulfed the aircraft. 

As the plane headed near the US Thule Air Base in Greenland, the crew bailed. Six of the seven successfully parachuted to safety, but one crew member, co-pilot Leonard Svitenko, attempted to escape through the lower hatch and sustained a fatal head injury.

They drifted down to the ice-covered expanse below, watching the plane turn into a fireball as it nosedived towards Wolstenholme Fjord. The plane exploded on impact, rupturing the nuclear warheads and spreading radioactive debris for miles around like a dirty bomb. 

It was about to become a very long day for the US State Department, to say the least. First, they had to find the bombs and the nuclear debris, then they had to consider how they were going to clean up the mess. To make matters even more complicated, nukes weren’t technically allowed in Greenland, a territory under Danish control, and Denmark was keen to maintain its reputation as a nuclear-free zone (at least in public).

“Aircraft carried four repeat four nuclear weapons,” reads a telegram between the State Department and the US Embassy in Denmark. “Wreckage covers five mile area. Difficult climate conditions and lack of daylight hampering search operations. Special USAF team being sent.”

What followed was a nine-month cleanup operation, one of the largest and strangest in Cold War history. Hundreds of US airmen and Danish workers spent the sunless Arctic winter traveling via dog sleds and scraping contaminated ice, snow, and wreckage off the fjord by hand. Greenlandic Inuit people reportedly joined the charge, building a village of igloos to shelter the crews when the wind and chills became too much to bear. 

Eventually, some 600 containers of contaminated snow had been gathered and were shipped to the US. Three of the nuclear bombs were accounted for, but the fourth was never fully recovered, presumably buried somewhere in ice.

“Thulegate”

Dealing with the contamination was one thing, but the political fallout was just as tricky to traverse. Publicly, the US and Denmark claimed the B-52 had been diverted over Greenland because of an unexpected in-flight emergency. But both governments were lying.

In the 1990s, declassified documents and journalistic investigations revealed that nuclear-armed bombers had been routinely flying over Greenland throughout the 1960s, unbeknownst to the Danish public. It became a political scandal dubbed “Thulegate” that deepened when it was revealed the Danish government had secretly signed a deal with the US to hold 50 nuclear weapons at the Thule base between 1958 and 1965. 

Almost six decades later, Washington’s interest in Greenland hasn’t cooled with President Trump’s repeated demands to acquire the territory, one way or another.

Hopefully, a chilly pilot won’t threaten to turn tempers nuclear once again.

July 23, 2026 Posted by | ARCTIC, history, incidents, Reference, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

New energy policy for Burnham?

, RENEW EXTRA WEEKLY

The soon to be UK Prime Minister, Andy Burnham, is being portrayed as a ‘new broom’ that could, or might, adopt better polices in all areas. Well, what about the energy sector? It’s in a mess, economically, driven by high fossil gas prices, with retail electricity prices at an all-time high, despite renewable energy doing well (65 GW so far) with its wholesale price mostly being low. It’s in a mess technologically, at risk of undermining the crucial next stage of its important renewables programme by diverting cash to support major high-cost nuclear and fossil carbon capture and storage projects.

Both of these programme involve multi-billion funding. The much delayed Hinkley Point nuclear plant may end up costing £40-50bn, inflation adjusted, when it finally gets completed, probably in 2030. Its follow-on project, Sizewell C, may not do much better, despite promises about learning from Hinkley, and despite the investment risks being met by a consumer levy.  There are already construction issues. A late 2030s start up at best? By then we might also be seeing some outcomes from the very speculative funding for small modular reactors and even maybe some results from the even more speculative fusion funding, with £2.5bn set aside for it.

Is any of that good value for money?  Will it deliver anything useful on time?  On past performance, it’s very uncertain. Same for the £21.7 bn  Carbon Capture and Storage programme, the full cost of which has been put at possibly up to  £264bn by 2050. CCS is basically an attempt to allow us to keep burning fossil fuel.  Is that sensible? Or for that matter the controversial Drax wood pellet combustion plant– it got £1bn in subsidies last year.  Burning imported wood from forests does not seem to be a very sustainable option…

There are arguably so many more worthy projects, for example in green hydrogen production and storage, a vital new area for expansion.  Heat storage linked to local heat networks too. To be fair, some of these ideas are now getting a bit of funding. For example, pioneering green hydrogen producer ITM Power has received £86.5 m from Great British Energy and DESNZ. It will be used to expand ITM’s electrolyser production at its Sheffield plant to 1GW p.a. But we need more like that for the rapid expansion of short and long duration storage. Freed from drain of endless nuclear and carbon capture diversions, we could also accelerate the newer renewables, like tidal stream turbines, via expansion of the Contacts for Difference (CfD) system. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

What next? Hinkley Point C is about half-built, so a lot of capital has already been sunk in it, but there are yet more billions scheduled to be spent on it. Burnham is unlikely to be willing to halt it (he is, it seems, pro-nuclear) but he might be persuaded to ditch Sizewell C, work on which has hardly started.

And the big proposed CCS programme too, so as to release further billions. To soften the change of policy, he could keep some small projects going (an SMR perhaps, or a CCSU project) as ‘insurance’ options, much as some renewables were treated in the past (including, at one stage, offshore wind) when nuclear was seen as the main new UK energy option. 

More or less everyone, except some deadhead Reform supporters, now see renewables as that. The only debate seems to be on what backup might be needed. Large inflexible nuclear plants are not much use at that, nor are costly CCS fossil gas plants, while SMRs are as yet uncertain in terms of cost and viability.

But we don’t need any of this to deal with variable renewables. Storage, large and small scale, is part of the answer, along with improved transmission and flexible demand management plus smart grid systems, so as to balance local variable demand and variable supply efficiently.

We have to build a new system and that will inevitably be costly, although, arguably, not as much as trying to keep the old system going with dubious supply choices and carbon fixes. For example, on the basis of its latest LCOE data, Lazard says ‘Despite rising and inflationary cost pressures across all generation technologies, renewables remain the most cost-competitive form of new-build generation on an unsubsidised basis’.  

And economic cost is not the only issue. For example, if built, Sizewell C will produce around 40,000 kg of plutonium in its spent fuel over its 60-year lifespan. Plutonium has a half-life of around 25,000 years, with SMRs, if they ever work, also adding to the pile. Is that what we want to bequeath our far-off descendants? Along with other long-lived nuclear wastes? 

That’s a big challenge. Andy Burnham has made some commitments on energy and climate, but only so far mostly in a limited and cautious way. Will he now come up with something more radical? We will have to wait to see. Meanwhile, the latest data show that over 70% of DESNEZ expenditure is now nuclear related…   
https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2026/07/new-energy-policy-for-burnham.html?m=1

July 23, 2026 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

The Forgotten Jewish Movement That Rejected Zionism.

By Nadege Bizimungu, The Tea with Myriam François, Jul 21, 2026

Jewish mass movement that rejected the idea of a Jewish state ever existing was, for much of its history, more popular than Zionism. Here’s why almost nobody has heard of it.

Poland in the 1930s had the largest Jewish population in Europe, and the single most popular party among Jewish voters there wasn’t Zionist. It didn’t want a Jewish state at all.

It ran schools, published newspapers and even organized armed militias to defend Jewish communities. According to an analysis of Bund election results published in the Yiddish studies journal In geveb, the party won roughly 38 percent of the vote for Jewish parties in the last Polish municipal elections before the war, more than any single Zionist party, though the combined Zionist lists narrowly edged it out overall. Its members were fiercely opposed to Zionism and thought it was a fantasy, and they said so bluntly and often.

That party was the Jewish Labour Bund. Today, few people know its name, but at its peak it was one of the most important Jewish political movements in Europe. Its existence challenges a common idea about Jewish history: that Zionism was the only response to antisemitism. For decades, millions of Jews supported a different vision. They believed the answer was not a new country, but fighting for equality where Jews already lived.

The Bund was founded in October 1897, when thirteen young Jewish Marxists met secretly in an attic in Vilna, then part of the Russian Empire. That’s the same year Theodor Herzl convened the first Zionist Congress in Basel. Zionism argued that Jewish safety required leaving Europe and building a state. The Bund argued the opposite: stay, and fight for equality where Jews already lived, in solidarity with non-Jewish workers and socialist movements. The Yiddish word for this was doikayt, “hereness,” and it rejected the idea that Jewish life needed a single homeland at all.

The party grew fast, and contemporaries noticed. The Menshevik theorist Georgi Plekhanov reportedly called Jewish workers “the vanguard of the labor army in Russia.” Historian Bertram Wolfe later described the Bund as the largest and best organized body of workingmen inside the Russian empire. By 1906 its membership had reportedly reached around 40,000, briefly making it the biggest socialist organization in the empire, and by interwar Poland it had built an entire subculture: youth movements, sports clubs, a network of secular Yiddish schools. Jack Jacobs’s research on the interwar Bund treats it as a genuine mass institution, not a fringe faction.

None of this was naive pacifism. Bund militias organized armed self-defense against pogroms and antisemitic gangs on the streets of interwar Warsaw, decades before “Jewish strength” became coded as an Israeli idea. When the Nazis invaded, Bundists fought in the 1943 Warsaw Ghetto Uprising, the first urban revolt against Nazi occupation anywhere in Europe. One of its fighters, a Bundist teenager named Lusiek Blones, was thirteen years old.

The rivalry between Bundists and Zionists ran deep, and it was rooted in a real disagreement about what antisemitism demanded of Jews. Bundists argued that if European governments were insisting Jews were foreign and should leave, then Zionism, by proposing that Jews do exactly that, was conceding the antisemites’ premise rather than refuting it. Zionists saw it differently: as a response to the repeated failure of emancipation and assimilation to protect Jews anywhere in the diaspora. After the 1917 Balfour Declaration, in which Britain backed a Jewish “national home” in Palestine, Bundists increasingly viewed Zionism as bound up with imperial power rather than freed from it, a colonial project underwritten by the same empires that had failed to protect Jews in the first place.

The Bund wasn’t beaten in that argument, though. It was murdered. The Holocaust wiped out the working-class Jewish communities that had sustained the party for half a century. Historian David Slucki has documented how the postwar Bund never came close to rebuilding its prewar scale, plateauing at just a few thousand members worldwide by the late 1950s. Daniel Blatman’s research on the Bund’s final years in Poland, from 1939 to 1949, traces a parallel political defeat: Stalinist repression, including the 1942 murder of Bundist leaders Henryk Erlich and Victor Alter by Soviet secret police, finished what the Nazis had started.

Zionist institutions in Palestine, meanwhile, survived the war intact. In her new book, Here Where We Live Is Our Country, artist and journalist Molly Crabapple, whose account of the Bund this piece draws heavily on, argues that Zionist organizations controlled much of the rations, housing, and paperwork in the displaced-persons camps after the war, and used that leverage to funnel traumatized survivors toward Palestine. A movement with no population left to organize couldn’t compete with one that still had territory, infrastructure, and international backing behind it.

That imbalance is also why the Bund disappeared from memory rather than from relevance. It lost its people, not its argument, and a movement without survivors to carry its institutions forward simply stops being written about, no matter how large it once was.

The premise Zionism was built on, that Jewish safety requires a Jewish ethnostate, is now facing its sharpest public challenge in decades. Nearly three years into Israel’s war on Gaza, which the UN and earlier findings from Amnesty International and the International Association of Genocide Scholars, have described as genocide, support for Israel has fallen sharply, including among Jews themselves. Younger American Jews are significantly less likely than older generations to see support for Israel as central to Jewish identity, while nearly half of American Jews under 35 now say they would support a single binational state with equal rights for Israelis and Palestinians. In Britain, young Jews who identify as anti-Zionist or non-Zionist now roughly match those who identify as Zionist.Israeli historian Ilan Pappé, a longtime critic of his own government, has called this the “beginning of the end of the Zionist project,” pointing to internal political fracture, international isolation, and economic strain as evidence.

For Crabapple, this shift is also personal. She spent seven years writing Here Where We Live Is Our Country, much of it while Israel’s campaign in Gaza was underway. in an interview on Democracy Now!, she said there was something almost unbearable about reconstructing the destruction of Warsaw’s Jews while watching a country invoke the Holocaust to justify what was happening in Gaza. “It broke me,” she said, “in probably ways that I have difficulty expressing.”

What this history suggests, isn’t a clean answer to the hardest questions about what a just political future looks like after decades of occupation and violence. It’s something narrower, and maybe more useful: proof that at the exact moment Jewish nationalism was taking shape, a mass, organized, genuinely popular Jewish movement existed that rejected the idea that Jewish liberation had to come at another people’s dispossession. It didn’t lose that argument. It was destroyed by fascism, the Holocaust, and Stalinist repression, and its ideas went down with it, not because they were wrong, but because there was no one left alive to keep making the case.

July 23, 2026 Posted by | EUROPE, history, Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Hegseth Announces Testosterone Testing as Part of Push for “Lethal” Military

Hegseth has previously told servicemembers that troops will have to meet “the highest male standard.”

, By Chris Walker , Truthout, July 15, 2026

On Wednesday, Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth announced a new policy aimed at increasing testosterone levels for servicemembers — a move that has been discouraged by health experts.

In a social media post announcing the policy, Hegseth stated that the most “decisive tactical advantage” the U.S. military has “will always be the individual warfighter.”

“We have a sacred duty to maintain that advantage, which is why we must constantly look for new ways to optimize your performance, your resilience, and your long-term health,” the Defense Secretary stated. “To meet that commitment today, I’m authorizing a new screening program for testosterone deficiency for our service members, ensuring you have the right testosterone levels to operate at your absolute best.”

The new policy aims to provide, as part of yearly screening, mandatory testosterone level testing for servicemembers over the age of 30, with those under that age being allowed to request it. Hegseth emphasized that what happens next is up to the individual.

“If treatment is recommended, it’s entirely your choice to receive testosterone replacement therapy,” or TRT, he said.

But the overall message from Hegseth was clear: The military wants and is prioritizing higher testosterone levels in its soldiers.

“The modern battlefield is brutal and unrelenting. It requires and demands maximum psychological and mental readiness, and by addressing these health markers early, we’re keeping you on the leading edge of lethality and giving you the same level of support that you give this nation,” he said.

Hegseth noted that it is “well-established science that as we age, testosterone levels often naturally drop.” While that is true, the “drop” in levels isn’t significant for most people, and certainly not for those of military age — levels drop by about 1 percent per year for people over the age of 30.

While the program appears to be voluntary beyond testing, some servicemembers may feel pressured to take medical supplements after their test results come in (especially since Hegseth’s video message was accompanied by the words, “The High-T Department of War”). Hegseth’s push could also prompt servicemembers to take testosterone supplements before their testing, without proper guidance.

Indeed, Hegseth’s message may feed into the current epidemic of online misinformation, tying masculinity to higher testosterone levels.

“This is a huge problem,” endocrinologist Channa Jayasena, of Imperial College London, told The Guardian in November. “Hospital specialists are seeing patients coming in after having private blood tests, often arranged through influencers, perhaps, and then being told by inexperienced doctors or a wide range of healthcare professionals that they should start testosterone. The advice they are giving is wrong.”

Notably, the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) advises against testosterone replacement therapy unless there is a specific medical reason for it.

Health experts questioned Hegseth’s new initiative.

“I used to do testosterone research — testing for T levels in troops doesn’t make sense without a medical reason,” public health scientist and epidemiologist Eric Feigl-Ding said in a post on X reacting to Hegseth’s announcement. “T level is not associated with higher cognitive function. T can drop because of stress or exhaustion — but TRT doesn’t always improve physical performance.”

The result of TRT is “mixed at best,” Feigl-Ding added.

Testosterone is a naturally occurring sex hormone, commonly associated with being the major hormone for men, though it is present in everyone at varying levels, including women. Benefits of the hormone include increasing muscle size and strength, as well as bone growth.

But according to Harvard Medical School, artificially high levels of testosterone have also been associated with a number of health problems, such as:

  • Heart damage and a higher risk of heart attacks;
  • High blood pressure and increased cholesterol levels;
  • Higher risks for blood clots;
  • Liver disease;
  • Prostate enlargement;
  • Headaches;
  • Insomnia, mood swings, irritability, impaired judgment, and possibly overly aggressive behavior.

Hegseth’s announcement came with no similar statement of concern for the health of servicewomen, and is consistent with his past statements on (and apparent obsession with) creating a more “manly” military…………………..https://truthout.org/articles/hegseth-announces-testosterone-testing-as-part-of-push-for-lethal-military/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=c1d90ce474-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2026_07_15_09_13_COPY_01&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-cd76c245dc-650192793

July 23, 2026 Posted by | health, USA | Leave a comment

Anti-zionist Jew Exposes Zionism’s Best Kept Secret | Molly Crabapple

Dr Myriam François

July 23, 2026 Posted by | Religion and ethics | Leave a comment

Witness- A visit to Donald Morrison, a chief witness in the case of Willie McRae

 I took a trip to Benbecula to visit Donald Morrison, a chief witness in
the case of Willie McRae, a prominent Scottish lawyer who was found dying
of a bullet wound in a car that had gone off the road in 1985. Donald was
the last person to see Willie McRae alive and whenever I have spoken to him
on the phone about this, he has always urged me to visit. The case has been
bugging me and so eventually I decided to take him up on the invitation.


McRae was an SNP politician, activist-lawyer and anti-nuclear campaigner.
On a misty April night 41 years ago, his car went off a quiet road – it
must have been going at speed – and came to rest 90 feet away. It was
spotted by an eagle-eyed accident investigator and his wife the next
morning at ten am. They glimpsed the car, which was partially hidden by a
gully, turned back to check on it and found Willie unconscious but still
breathing.

Neither they nor the other passers-by they flagged down, who
included a doctor, nor the paramedics, nor the nurses who received McRae at
the hospital noticed a bullet wound. However, an MRI scan after McRae was
transferred to Raigmore revealed that he had been shot. The authorities
later said that McRae had committed suicide by shooting himself in the
temple. But it seems unbelievable that all of the professionals who cared
for him would have failed to wash the blood away and see a bullet wound if
it was in his temple. A nurse who treated McRae came forward later and said
that there was a small entry wound under the hairline at the back of his
neck.

This is much more consistent with an attempted covert murder than
suicide. Donald was a beat policeman who walked the streets of the centre
of Glasgow, sometimes chatting in Gaelic to other Highland cops. He had
frequent interactions back then with McRae, because of a series of
break-ins at his office

 Jackie Kemp 18th July 2026, https://substack.com/home/post/p-207141868

July 23, 2026 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

It’s Not Terrorism When We Do It

This is why a state was so crucial to the Zionist project. Before 1948, the groups that became the IDF, from the Haganah, to the Lehi and the Irgun were explicitly called terror groups. And their members were Jewish terrorists. These labels were widely used by western media, and the existence of Jewish terrorism was not controversial. In a 1948 Guardian editorial, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, the paper referred to “Jewish terrorists” who it said are “ruthless men corrupt by the sickness of the time, caring nothing for the sufferings of the individual Jews in Europe” for whom “every school boy’s jest is another argument for Zionism.”

But as soon as the Jewish Zionists got their own state, the terrorists were absorbed into the military arm of the state,

 July 18, 2026, Nate Bear Do Not Panic, https://scheerpost.com/2026/07/18/its-not-terrorism-when-we-do-it/

Yesterday Pete Hegseth triumphantly tweeted a picture of Iran’s Chabahar maritime port tower collapsing following an attack by the US regime. The image bore a striking resemblance to the collapse of the towers on September 11th.

Despite the fact this was, like most of the attacks on Iran, an attack on civilian infrastructure, it will not be labelled as such by the western media and political class. They will never call it terrorism or a war crime, despite the fact that it was both. Whether a civilian tower, a bridge, or a school full of children, western actions that result in mass murder will always simply be the product of a “strike.”

Benign language whenever the imperialist death machine starts slaughtering is a critical tool in maintaining consent for war crimes and state terrorism. And even though Hegseth literally tweeted a picture of this war crime, I‘ve yet to see an imperialist media outlet reproduce the image, because they know how bad it looks. This is a classic tactic we see over and over again: selective reporting and the omission of detail in order to bolster public support for state terrorism and war crimes abroad. Western media has already bundled this “strike” in with all the others in order to present a false equivalence between an illegal war of aggression on the one hand, and legitimate Iranian defence on the other (defensive actions which, by the way, are always labelled as “attacks.”)

The underlying psychology behind the double-standard is rooted in arrogance and supremacy: they’re the bad guys, and they do terrorism. We’re the good guys, and we “conduct strikes.”

And by we, I mean the forces of western imperialism, whether that’s the US or any other power that lines up behind the American regime, especially, but not exclusively, Israel. The use of the words “terror” and “terrorism” are also a critical rhetorical device, conditioning westerners to accept imperial violence as legitimate, and any resistance to that violence as illegitimate. This tendency was seen starkly of course after October 7th. Hamas does terrorism, while Israel merely strikes. Those strikes can be genocidal, they can reduce entire cities to dust, destroy hospitals, schools, universities, water treatment plants, grain silos and the means of life for two million people. They can kill tens of thousands of children in all manner of sadistic and gruesome ways, they can wipe out entire bloodlines, but they are never labelled terrorism. They are, and always will be, simply strikes. Because terrorism is bad, and we’re the good guys.

This is why a state was so crucial to the Zionist project. Before 1948, the groups that became the IDF, from the Haganah, to the Lehi and the Irgun were explicitly called terror groups. And their members were Jewish terrorists. These labels were widely used by western media, and the existence of Jewish terrorism was not controversial. In a 1948 Guardian editorial, in the aftermath of the King David Hotel bombing, the paper referred to “Jewish terrorists” who it said are “ruthless men corrupt by the sickness of the time, caring nothing for the sufferings of the individual Jews in Europe” for whom “every school boy’s jest is another argument for Zionism.”

But as soon as the Jewish Zionists got their own state, the terrorists were absorbed into the military arm of the state, and their violence, which months before was clearly identified as terrorism, was legitimatised by the recognition of a state. And this legitimisation of Israeli state terrorism went hand-in-hand with the decades-long campaign to legally designate resistance to state terrorism as the real terrorism, a campaign which led us inexorably towards the genocide of Gaza.

Genocide. Another word reserved by the hegemonic media only for the victims of the imperial enemy, and not for those slaughtered by the imperial ally.

So for the western media, terrorism isn’t terrorism, genocide isn’t terrorism, and it’s not even genocide. Despite the almost universal belief of genocide scholars, holocaust scholars, and international legal experts that what has taken place, and continues to take place in Gaza, is a genocide, the term is almost never used. The Guardian can even write an article with the title ‘Israel committing genocide in Gaza, world’s top scholars on the crime say’, and in the majority of its subsequent coverage, refer to it as a war. Their main hub for coverage of the genocide, ten months after that headline, is titled Israel-Gaza War. If they had the courage of their supposed progressive convictions, if the truly believed in experts, as all good liberals profess to do, they would accept the evidence they presented themselves, and refer factually to genocide.

They don’t because the western mind, in matters of imperialism requires dissonance. It requires references to “strikes” not terrorism, to “wars” not genocides and to “foreign policy,” not imperialism. This is especially true of the professional media mind which must filter, process and present the news from the imperial core. My guess is that some of the benign, consent manufacturing language is intentional, and some is simply the product of subconscious western supremacy and the dehumanisation of the periphery. Because to fully internalise the evil committed by the system you not only live within but help uphold would require the instant rejection of that system. And well, you’ve got bills to pay. The genocide can be the war if it means making that next installment on your mortgage.

As the terror attacks on Iran and Gaza continue, and as the genocide deepens, we’ll hear only of strikes and wars from a media class fully complicit in both.

July 22, 2026 Posted by | spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

World warned of ‘nuclear apocalypse’ after drone kills nuclear plant engineer in Ukraine

Russia has warned of ‘nuclear apocalypse’ after a drone strike allegedly carried out by Ukraine killed the chief engineer at the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest nuclear facility

Daily Star, Will Stewart Russia Correspondent and Adam Cailler Senior reporter and MSN lead, 16 Jul 2026

Russia has warned of a “nuclear apocalypse” following an alleged Ukrainian assassination of a senior engineer at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant. Alexander Yakovlev, 46, was killed in a drone attack between the facility and the nearby town of Enerhodar.

He was travelling in a service vehicle and perished alongside his driver, according to Russian reports. Yakovlev served as the chief engineer at the Russian-controlled Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant, Europe’s largest. Ukraine’s Mirotvorets website had branded him a “traitor to the motherland” and an “accomplice to terrorists and Russian occupiers.”

Through his work for the Russians following Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, he stood accused of “collaboration in the form of assisting the occupiers in committing acts of nuclear terrorism and blackmail”. Following the occupation of this section of Zaporizhzhia region, he obtained Russian citizenship.

Rafael Grossi, the director of the International Atomic Energy Agency, the UN nuclear watchdog, denounced the incident without explicitly naming Ukraine or Russia. The killing “represents an unacceptable attack on the plant and its management, seriously threatening nuclear safety.”

He demanded an “immediate end” to all strikes “on or near nuclear sites.” Russian Foreign Ministry spokeswoman Maria Zakharova declared: “This is a crime of the Kyiv regime that Grossi must finally see – we demand a clear statement condemning this killing from the relevant international bodies, first and foremost the IAEA.”

Alexei Likhachev, the head of Rosatom, stated: “We expect the IAEA to respond promptly, concretely, and clearly to this tragedy.” Russian forces took control of the plant in southeastern Ukraine during the initial weeks of Russia’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine………

Russian authorities initiated a criminal investigation into the killings. Ukraine has yet to respond.https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/world-news/world-warned-nuclear-apocalypse-after-37438323

July 22, 2026 Posted by | incidents, Russia, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Ministry of Defence (MoD) finally admits ‘extensive’ human radiation experiments on nuclear test veterans

“There’s no truth, no justice. We were labrats in a government experiment which they didn’t bother to keep the paperwork for. But worse is the cover-up which continues.”

Susie Boniface Reporter, 16 Jul 2026, https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/politics/nuclear-test-veterans-ministry-defence-37439854

The Ministry of Defence has finally admitted it ran an “extensive” programme of human radiation experiments on troops.

A two-year review has confirmed ministers and officials falsely denied that medical data was collected from servicemen and civilians at nuclear weapons tests for more than a decade. Worse, the MoD says it has been unable to locate the results – leaving veterans continuing to suffer after 70 years without answers.

The results were published online, with a host of other last-minute announcements, a few hours before kick off in England’s semi-final match against Argentina. John Morris, who has waited a lifetime to find out why his son Steven died in his cot aged four months, and why he he’s had cancer and a blood condition, said: “This is vindication, but there’s no relief.

“There’s no truth, no justice. We were labrats in a government experiment which they didn’t bother to keep the paperwork for. But worse is the cover-up which continues.

“They lied, hid it all behind national security, and have come clean now only because we forced them. People should go to jail for this.”

  • The review, ordered after the Mirror exposed the Nuked Blood Scandal in 2022, has found:
  • A secret hoard of 50,000 files that include nuclear veteran records but have not been examined
  • More than 5,000 nuclear test veterans deliberately excluded from government health studies
  • Veterans who applied for a war pension had their medical records permanently stripped, denying them proper diagnosis and treatment
  • Thousands of medical records were unlawfully destroyed, some as recently as last year

Prime Minister-in-waiting Andy Burnham has privately told staff to begin work on reparations, compensation and commemoration for the nuclear test programme, including setting up a special tribunal to determine the extent of government lies.

Criminal allegations of perjury, perverting the course of justice, fraud by false representation and misconduct in public office are being considered in a major crime review by Thames Valley Police. Officers have asked the Atomic Weapons Establishment to provide details of emails from 2014 which we reported this week, discussing a whistleblower report about fallout on inhabited areas, which was also covered up.

The review has not looked into how thousands of records were classified, why courts were told monitoring never happened, or why in 2018 Parliament was told by a minister that the MoD was “unable to locate any information” about blood testing. As recently as 2023, ministers said “only one blood test” existed.

It has also failed to look into the records of civilians, indigenous people, merchant navy crews and RAF units monitoring foreign nuclear weapons tests, who were all similarly monitored.

Lord Tom Watson, who as deputy Labour leader asked the first questions about the blood tests, said: “I am sure this report will deeply concern the new Prime Minister. It is extraordinary that veterans’ medical records were lost or destroyed, affecting their health and compensation claims. We now need to establish who knew what, when, and why nobody acted sooner.”

July 22, 2026 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Satellite images show damage inside Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant

Satellite images [on original] reveal strikes between July 7 and 12 on Iran’s largest nuclear power plant

By Al Jazeera Staff, 17 Jul 2026, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2026/7/17/satellite-images-show-damage-inside-irans-bushehr-nuclear-power-plant

Satellite imagery reveals new damage inside Iran’s Bushehr nuclear power plant complex following the latest wave of US strikes during renewed military escalation between Washington and Tehran.

A comparison of European Sentinel-2 satellite images captured on July 7 and July 12 shows newly formed impact scars inside the Bushehr complex, along with another apparent strike site within nearby support facilities.

The open-source unit of Al Jazeera Network compiled satellite imagery, field footage and official data from the US Central Command (CENTCOM) to map the locations of US strikes across Iran between July 7 and July 15.

Ehsan Jahanian, deputy governor of Bushehr province, had said on July 9 that several locations across the province had been struck, including areas surrounding the Bushehr nuclear power plant, a military site in Choghadak and a fishing port in the south of the province, according to Iran’s state news agency IRNA.

Jahanian later denied reports that the nuclear power plant itself had been hit, saying the reactor remained unaffected and continued operating normally.

The strikes came during a broader US military campaign against Iran. US Central Command (CENTCOM) said it struck about 90 military targets on July 7-8, including air defence systems, missile and drone storage sites, naval assets and military infrastructure along Iran’s southern coast.

The US did not identify Bushehr or any nuclear facility among the announced targets.

Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant

Bushehr is Iran’s only operating nuclear power plant. Located about 17km (11 miles) south of the city of Bushehr, the 2.5-square-kilometre (one-square-mile) complex includes reactor buildings, cooling-water channels connected to the ocean, assembly halls and a harbour used to receive equipment and materials for construction and reactor operations.

The site contains two reactor buildings, one operational and another that has remained unfinished for years.

According to the International Atomic Energy Agency’s Power Reactor Information System (PRIS), Bushehr-1 has a net electrical capacity of about 915 megawatts.

It was first connected to Iran’s electricity grid in September 2011 before entering commercial operation in September 2013.

Unlike uranium enrichment facilities such as Natanz or Fordow, the operating Bushehr reactor contains nuclear fuel and radioactive materials associated with power generation, making any damage to its cooling, power supply or containment systems significantly more sensitive.

Previous incidents

The July strike was not the first reported projectile incident near the Bushehr plant in 2026.

The IAEA event reports submitted by Iran’s nuclear regulator recorded multiple incidents, including projectiles striking inside the plant’s premises on March 17, March 24 and March 27, as well as another impact near the fence surrounding the reactor’s first unit on April 4. In each case, Iranian authorities reported that the reactor continued operating normally and that no damage to the reactor itself had been recorded.

The IAEA has repeatedly stressed that nuclear facilities should never become targets of armed attacks because of the potential consequences for people, the environment and regional nuclear safety.

July 22, 2026 Posted by | incidents, Iran | Leave a comment

‘Sip your coffee while watching the sunrise’: How Israel is colonizing the West Bank by selling Palestinian land to Jewish Americans

Israeli real estate companies are marketing land belonging to Palestinians in the West Bank to Jewish American buyers. We spoke to the Palestinians who are being displaced in order to make way for new Jewish settlement construction.

Mondoweiss By Majd Jawad  July 17, 2026 

In mid-May, protesters gathered outside a synagogue in Brooklyn to demonstrate against a real estate expo being held inside. The properties advertised for sale were not located in New York City, but in illegal Israeli settlements in the occupied West Bank, and the target clientele was members of the Jewish American community. 

The “Great Israeli Real Estate Event,” organized by the Israeli company, My Home in Israel, was one of many property fares held across the U.S., Canada, and the UK, targeting prospective Anglophone Jewish buyers. A recently scheduled London event carrying the same name drew widespread condemnation last June from human rights groups and over 100 British lawmakers.

The settlements at the top of the event’s promoted property listings included Ma’ale Adumim, Givat Ze’ev, Karnei Shomron, and Kfar Eldad. Each listed area is undergoing urban expansion and new construction, concurrent with seizure and confiscation orders targeting the Palestinian lands surrounding them  — a systematic process aimed at entrenching settlement dominance.

The promotional advertising for these settlements deploys seductive language to attract investment. An advertisement for a real estate project in Kfar Eldad, located within the Gush Etzion Regional Council southeast of Bethlehem, pitches a rural lifestyle “close to Jerusalem, far from the routine.”  The ad reads: “Time flows a bit differently around here. In the morning you can sip your coffee while watching the sunrise, and just 12 minutes later, before your coffee has even cooled, find yourself in Jerusalem. And in the evening, you’ll return to soothing tranquility. This makes Kfar Eldad the perfect alternative for those seeking reasonably priced housing close to Jerusalem, but away from the noise and traffic of city life.”

Behind the glossy brochures and manicured images of “modern residential communities” lie painful chapters of systematic Palestinian land confiscation — a process that has expanded in recent years to encompass nearly half of the total area that Israeli occupation authorities have declared “state lands” since the Oslo Accords were signed.

The “soothing tranquility” in the hills and open terrain of Bethlehem was, until recently, home to Palestinian and Bedouin communities who practiced seasonal farming and herding. Those original inhabitants were barred from accessing their land, which was confiscated under military orders decades ago, before settlement projects were built on it…………………………………………………………………………………………

Palestinians forced out, Jewish settlers brought in

……………………….At the start of this year, the Israeli government decided to confiscate approximately 700 dunams (70 hectares) of Palestinian land for the construction of a new settlement neighborhood in Karnei Shomron, built east of Qalqilya in the northern West Bank and overlooking the Mediterranean coastal plain 10 to 15 kilometers away.

This confiscation falls within what Israel calls its “Roof plan,” an all-encompassing agreement for expanding the settlement by adding 6,000 new housing units and accompanying infrastructure in the northern West Bank…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

How land goes from ‘state land’ to the real estate market

Khalil Tafakji, a researcher specializing in settlement and Jerusalem affairs and director of the cartography department at the Arab Studies Society, told Mondoweiss that Palestinian land is seized in a way that often takes roundabout legal avenues to strip Palestinians of their rights to it before it is offered for sale on the market.

“At that stage, the land is not offered for sale directly,” he explained. “Rather, it is excluded from the scope of private Palestinian ownership altogether.” The Israeli state does this by declaring the land “insufficiently cultivated to establish ownership,” Tafakji said, or by sealing it off and designating it a closed military zone reserved for army training. These areas are rendered  “state lands” under the administration of the Israel Land Authority.

The first administrative step in this designation process rests on Israel’s interpretation of Ottoman land law, which has historically governed land ownership in Palestine. . Only then are properties marketed to potential homebuyers ahead of construction. The state effectively leases the land to prospective homeowners, and what buyers acquire is the property, not the land itself. “A buyer can own the property for 99 renewable years, while the land remains in the state’s name under what is called a land leasehold arrangement,” …………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Jerusalem as a settlement magnet

In settlement promotional campaigns, proximity to Jerusalem is often a cornerstone of their marketing strategy, presenting settlement properties in the Gush Etzion bloc as a natural geographic and urban extension of the city. This falls under Israel’s “Greater Jerusalem” project, which has necessitated the ethnic cleansing of countless Palestinian communities stuck in administrative “no-man’s-lands” inside the West Bank. These areas technically fall under the jurisdiction of Israel’s Jerusalem municipality, yet receive virtually none of its services. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://mondoweiss.net/2026/07/sip-your-coffee-while-watching-the-sunrise-how-israel-is-colonizing-the-west-bank-by-selling-palestinian-land-to-jewish-americans/

July 22, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, Israel | Leave a comment

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