Heatwave hell
Fires and droughts could not spell out more clearly why nuclear power is the worst kind of risk under climate crisis conditions, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
beyondnuclearinternational , August 16, 2026, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2026/08/16/heatwave-hell/
You would think after the last several weeks we just had, the promoters of nuclear power might be tempering their messages a little. Or even reconsidering their position if they haven’t yet drunk too many gallons of the nuclear Kool-Aid.
But what we are seeing instead is a continued and relentless propaganda campaign re-affirming the “milestones” and “breakthroughs” of new nuclear power projects.
For example, Deep Fission, with its plans to try to drop what could eventually be as many as 100 15MW micro reactors down mile-deep boreholes in the tiny community of Parsons, Kansas (population 9,600), crowed about a recent approval from the US Department of Energy.
What the DOE approved was the company’s Nuclear Safety Design Agreement for its Gravity™ Nuclear Reactor. Deep Fission described this as “a major regulatory milestone.”
What it really amounts to is permission to keep on doodling on the napkin, or, put less snarkily, that they may proceed with their reactor design.
Holtec, the New Jersey-based waste and decommissioning company announced late last month that with the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) having granted a License Termination Plan for the closed Oyster Creek Generating Station, the company can now move forward with plans to site four of its SMR-300 reactors at the site.
Collectively, this represents a bigger output than the old 650 MW Oyster Creek reactor, but of course SMR owners are claiming that because their reactors are so much smaller, there need be no emergency evacuation zone or other disaster preparedness beyond the property fence line.
Because after all, what kind of disaster could possibly occur?
Evidently, none of these reactor bros touting their scammy crypto-nukes have been watching the news, since they are just carrying on as if Nothing Happened.
So what didn’t they see? The Romanians dynamiting the Danube river in a desperate attempt to redirect the ever scarcer river water toward their lone Cernavoda nuclear power plant? One reactor there was already closed and now the second one is, as well, as the Danube suffered another drastic drop in water level.
That in turn has affected neighboring Moldova which “relies on Romanian power to cover up to 60% of its own electricity shortages,” according to reporting in The Guardian. The loss of Cernavoda could result in power outages, Moldovan authorities warned.
In Hungary, the Paks nuclear power plant was operating at around 10% of its 2,000 MW capacity at time of writing and the Hungarians, like the Romanians, were starting to sink large barges in what is left of the Danube to try to raise water levels and continue to cool the plant.
Then there was the scorched heathland and billowing smoke that obscured the view of the Sizewell nuclear power plant on the English coast just a few miles away. The raging wildfire close to the still operating Sizewell B reactor was a close call, another stroke of luck with the wind blowing the other way. That day.
The nearby precious Minsmere Nature Reserve hasn’t been so lucky, with the fires causing a massive loss of wildlife and habitat. But plans to proceed with the two French Sizewell C EPR reactors have not been abandoned and the UK government insanely granted Sizewell B a 20-year license extension on top of its existing one that would allow it to operate out to 2055.
The plant actually sits on the beach, never mind the fact that climate crisis-caused drastic sea-level rise is an empirical inevitability. And, apparently, never mind the wildfires either, which, with the United Kingdom now in its fifth scorching heatwave of the summer, are only likely to get larger and more frequent.
Maybe the nuke bros also missed the people fleeing for their lives across Europe while headlines reminded these hapless refugees and others roasting in cities, towns and countryside that their nuclear power plants would not be available to provide the much-needed electricity at a time it was needed most. Instead, people sweltered, and, in some cases, died, from the extreme heat, their villages in some places burned to the ground.
France had to power down and even close many of its reactors due to the extreme heat and then, of course, came the climate change-caused jellyfish swarm at Gravelines, now looking to be an annual event, causing those reactors to close. Jellyfish are a problem because they clog the cooling water intake system.
Meanwhile, parts of the US have been on fire, too, while smoke from Canadian wildfires a few weeks back enveloped a large swath of the Midwest and Northeast in a choking cloud of acrid smoke and falling ash.
So far, and fortunately, there have been no nuclear power plants in the paths of these fires — or some of the catastrophic flooding, including in Texas.
But it really doesn’t stretch the imagination too much to picture a very different scenario.
Nuclear power plants can’t operate well — or sometimes at all— in extreme heat or drought because they require water to cool them and that water needs actually to be cool in the first place. And available.
If the water is too hot or too scarce, nuclear power plants have to reduce power or even shut down altogether.
But when they do, it’s not like turning off a car engine. Because of the highly radioactive and thermally hot fuel inside nuclear reactors —and the fuel pools into which the irradiated fuel rods have been offloaded — they still need cooling. If you can’t cool them, they will eventually melt down. So water must continue to be available and so must electricity to get it there and power the plant.
That is why we have argued for years that nuclear power plants are not reliable, especially in extreme weather conditions. Instead, they are a liability. And with ever more violent weather conditions under the climate crisis, those risks are only going to get worse and disaster more likely.
The events on March 11, 2011 in Japan would have been infinitely less catastrophic, and a whole lot less expensive, if they hadn’t involved a triple nuclear meltdown along with the massive earthquake and tsunami. And, as with Sizewell, they would have been infinitely worse radiologically, had the wind been blowing the other way. Despite this, vast areas received radioactive fallout, complicating rescue efforts of those caught in the earthquake and/or the tsunami.
Fire is one of the biggest risks at a nuclear power plant, largely because of the lethal radioactive inventory on the site. “Irradiation produces a variety of fission products and actinides that multiply the radioactivity in the original uranium fuel by more than 100 million times,” according to The World Nuclear Waste Report (see page 27) published in 2019 by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. All of this waste currently remains at US reactor sites and at most such around the world, absent a safe, long-term storage solution.
If a raging wildfire engulfed a reactor site, the outcome could be catastrophic, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Another Chernobyl Zone could be born.
Fire is one of the biggest risks at a nuclear power plant, largely because of the lethal radioactive inventory on the site. “Irradiation produces a variety of fission products and actinides that multiply the radioactivity in the original uranium fuel by more than 100 million times,” according to The World Nuclear Waste Report (see page 27) published in 2019 by the Heinrich Böll Stiftung. All of this waste currently remains at US reactor sites and at most such around the world, absent a safe, long-term storage solution.
If a raging wildfire engulfed a reactor site, the outcome could be catastrophic, rendering vast areas uninhabitable. Another Chernobyl Zone could be born.
Is Trump’s Golden Dome Missile Defense System a Pipe Dream?
Hannah Bowlus, August 13, 2026, https://inkstickmedia.com/is-trumps-golden-dome-missile-defense-system-a-pipe-dream/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
US President Donald Trump’s highly touted ‘Golden Dome’ will cost taxpayers untold sums of money. Will it even work?
The Golden Dome for America is US President Donald Trump’s vision of an impenetrable shield protecting the entire United States from land, sea, air, and space against short- and long-range weapons armed with nuclear warheads or conventional munitions. It may not survive the Iran war. Regional missile defenses deployed by the US and Israel have failed at times. The Golden Dome relies on their success.
A year and a half and $25 billion since the president announced the Golden Dome, plans still remain classified, and the White House has backed off of the claim it will be virtually impenetrable.
Experts and congress members eyeing the $1.5 trillion defense budget — an additional $17.5 billion for the Golden Dome in a separate reconciliation bill, and an estimated $100 billion for the war on Iran — are now rethinking missile defense.
In March, the Cato Institute warned that the Golden Dome, “modeled on Israel’s Iron Dome and air and missile defense (AMD), rests on a system now showing clear vulnerabilities.” The think tank cited several instances of Iranian attacks breaking through Israeli defense systems. “If Israel’s shield can be tested this way, the lesson for the United States is clear: a similar effort risks wasting vast time, money, and resources on a promise that may not hold.”
The Congressional Budget Office estimates it could cost $1.2 trillion to build missile defenses that still couldn’t fully defeat a smaller salvo of missiles. A more robust (though still penetrable) dome might cost $3.6 trillion. The US Space Force says it will cost only $185 billion.
The best the Golden Dome could perform, even at the $3.6 trillion price tag, is an 80% interception rate, one report concludes, though it notes that is an unrealistically optimistic scenario. If Russia launched its nuclear arsenal with this Golden Dome in place, and 20% of their missiles evaded thousands of space-based interceptors, at least 75 million Americans could perish immediately. Some 1.4 billion would likely die globally in the ensuing famine and climate disaster within two years.
In May, US Representative Jim McGovern, a Democrat from Massachusetts, told a press conference on Capitol Hill that the Golden Dome was a “vanity project” for Trump that would cost Americans at a time when economic insecurity is rife. “We’ve got 48 million people in the United States of America, the richest country in the history of the world, who are food insecure or hungry,” McGovern said. “When you start going down this road of a new arms race, where there’s no end in sight … we’ll have nothing for anything else.”
Laura Grego, a research director at the Union for Concerned Scientists, suspects the Golden Dome is doomed like its progenitors. “I think we’ll spend a lot of money before we get there,” Grego told Inkstick.
Lockheed Martin, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, and General Dynamics were among the 12 companies selected to develop space-based missile interceptors, the costliest and most technically daunting piece of the Golden Dome. Each manufacturer has current missile defense systems operating on US bases and in Israel. These extraordinarily expensive systems of sensors and interceptors have repeatedly failed while the US and Israel waged war on Iran, and throughout Israel’s war in Lebanon.
Inkstick asked each company how they could guarantee a workable missile defense system in space when their weapons in conventional war failed. None responded.
Elsewhere, Lockheed Martin’s CEO has predicted the next few years will be a feast for contractors. Anduril’s CEO said the defense industry is more energized than ever.
Money is one motivation for pursuing the Golden Dome, Grego says, but there are also true believers in missile defense who take its enormous financial cost as proof of its legitimacy. It should and will work because the US has spent $500 billion on it.
Since the US first left the anti-ballistic missile treaty, government officials have claimed to currently own working defenses to “fix the problem of nuclear war.”
“My worry is that the people who should know better believe it,” Grego said.
Just this year, the Missile Defense Agency’s Lieutenant General Heath Collins testified to Congress that the ground-based midcourse defense system had “made the impossible possible, hitting a bullet with a bullet.” By its own evaluation, the program has a 55% intercept rate in highly scripted and uncomplicated tests.
n this and past wars, the Pentagon has exhibited a tendency to mislead the public on the efficacy and maturity of its weapons. Golden Dome details have been concealed, even to Congress, despite its members approving $25 billion toward it last year.
In May, General Michael Guetlein, the manager of the Golden Dome, claimed he had spoken to 400 potential defense contractors about the project. He said he expected the Golden Dome to be completed on time.
Elsewhere, concerns are mounting. Speaking in Congress in June, US Representative Bill Foster, a Democrat from Illinois, argued that the Golden Dome should be investigated for large-scale fraud. “The people getting federal taxpayer money for this have been caught repeatedly lying to Congress and to the public about what the technical status of those [weapons] are,” he said.
The backbone of the Golden Dome, a tranche of data relay and early warning satellites, has already been launched into low Earth orbit. It’s over-budget and behind schedule. The Government Accountability Office has urged the Space Development Agency to be more transparent about its progress.
Companies awarded contracts for the tranches of satellites were allowed to self-report on the technical readiness of their own products. They gave themselves high scores, inaccurately, GAO wrote in one assessment, potentially derailing the entire program in the process.
The bulk of the Pentagon’s request for an additional $17 billion in Golden Dome funding relies on another reconciliation bill that might never materialize. House Republicans recently drafted a supplemental bill with $60 billion earmarked to offset the cost of the war and cover immediate defense priorities.
US Representative Jodey Arrington, a Republican from Texas, blasted Democrats in July over reconciliation. He insisted that Democrats should support the bill in order to “support our troops in time of conflict.” He claimed it was about providing the armed forces with “baseline readiness — not Star Wars and Golden Dome and transformative modernizing of the military — just the bombs, bullets, and battlefield readiness for our men and women in uniform to finish the fight successfully and return home safely.”
In a recent hearing on missile defense, US Representative Seth Moulton, a Democrat from Massachusetts, questioned the logic of the Golden Dome when regional systems were falling apart. “What I don’t want to be doing is getting bogged down in a war in the Middle East that we’re losing while also spending hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars here at home” on the Golden Dome, he said.
Congressional appetite for the Golden Dome is flagging in the face of a more than $100 billion war. Iranian missiles have resulted in costly damage to American bases and military equipment across the Middle East, and recent reports have revealed that the US stockpile is dwindling fast. “There are lots of relatively cheap ways to circumvent a system or make it obsolete right away,” Grego explained.
A country could increase the number of its salvo, make its missiles faster, shoot decoys, attack sensors and interceptors. These are basic measures that would drive up requirements and costs of the Golden Dome.
In April and October of 2024, Israel claimed it intercepted 99% of projectiles fired by Iran. Trump subsequently praised Israel’s missile defense capabilities and, while announcing the Golden Dome, insisted that the US “is entitled” to the same kind of protection. Independent analysis, though, estimated that Israel’s interception rate was closer to 80 or 85%. Israel was able to destroy so many targets before impact because Iran’s missiles were relatively unsophisticated, armed without countermeasures, and aimed at less populated areas in a country 470 times smaller than the United States.
$1 Trillion And This Is All We Get?
Spending does not equal value when it comes to Pentagon contracting
Lisa Savage,Aug 16, 2026, https://went2thebridge.substack.com/p/1-trillion-and-this-is-all-we-get
More bad news for the Pentagon as another highly expensive warship goes dark.
“On July 24, 2026, while conducting routine operations in the Indo-Pacific, Arleigh Burke-class guided-missile destroyer USS Benfold (DDG 65) reported an engineering casualty involving its generators, causing a loss of power,” reads the statement. “There were no injuries to the crew, who demonstrated resilience, grit, professionalism and unwavering steadiness in their response.”
The loss of power meant sailors were without galley services, toilets and air conditioning. Potable water was also affected, Comer said. He did not respond to a question about how sailors handled waste.
I’ve already written about the woes of the USS Abraham Lincoln which is reportedly about to be replaced the the USS George Washington (without the USS Benfold in its entourage), leaving zero aircraft carriers in the waters around China for the first time in many years.
Military types have been less than impressed with the disrespect, gaslighting, and minimizing of the Commander in Chief and his minister of war about the Lincoln’s woes, a 5,000 person ship that must now be supplied from Diego Garcia 3,000 miles from Bahrain where Iran destroyed a crucial U.S. naval base.
Typical of a draft dodger’: Rep. Seth Moulton blasts Trump’s response to USS Lincoln crisis
“The U.S. had no plan going into this war”
Retired Maj. General Randy Manner on Friday accused President Donald Trump and Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth of “spewing lies” about the reportedly deplorable conditions aboard the USS Abraham Lincoln and its extended deployment in the Middle East
A professional military that sees national defense as a sacred calling and that embraces martyrdom if necessary it is up against a whiny Gen Z force that mostly thinks of the U.S. military as a job. My husband: “Probably the only job they could get.” He’s right if we’re talking jobs with benefits like health care and college tuition for high school graduates.
The leadership of this crack military force? They are focused on spending big, bigger, and biggest bucks on elaborate systems like Golden Dome that are highly unlikely to produce interception of hypersonic missiles as promised.
But military-industrial promises are made to be broken.
In the excitement over finally pulling Russia into war, General Dynamics promised to build artillery shells that U.S. proxy Ukraine was running through rapidly. GD took $533 million from taxpayers to equip a factory with state of the art robots purchased from Turkiye.
Those involved described a project that was rushed and ill considered from the start. Congress paved the way, removing government contracting guardrails — meant to ensure taxpayer money isn’t wasted — so that Ukraine-related defense projects could be funded quickly. The Army took advantage, handing General Dynamics lucrative no-bid awards without knowing whether the machines it planned to use could perform the desired work. The Army’s due diligence was inadequate, four former Army and General Dynamics officials told ProPublica.
Descriptions of the malfunctioning robots reads like bad sci-fi and suggests, at least to my mind, sabotage.
The robots, giant metal arms with clamps for hands, would end up drenched in oil, which would then — no surprise — combust as they moved steel blocks heated to 1,800 degrees into and out of a machine that periodically erupted columns of fire. One blaze that summer melted a robot’s cables, putting it out of commission for a week..
according to interviews with 12 former factory workers.. the flaming robot arms also kept smashing into things. They slammed into computer numerical control machines, breaking their windows and bending their doors. They knocked over shells. They bashed into safety fences. Workers talked about the arms going “rogue” and began calling one of them “Johnny 5” after a sentient military robot from a 1980s movie..
Then there were the giant press machines, which required regular pounding with a sledgehammer [emphasis mine] to function properly but still botched the shaping of nearly every shell. “We really didn’t have any standardized practice,” said Quantel White, a former employee. “It was just a bunch of guys taking turns going at the machine with a sledgehammer every night.”
If someone comes up with a better metaphor for the U.S. approach to maintaining its imperial ascendency, please let me know.
Who will be held accountable for the artillery shell boondoggle? Not GD executives.
Wages of Failure: Since the Army halted two production lines at the factory, the General Dynamics unit responsible for the debacle has received contract awards totaling $2.5 billion.
Maybe Turkish robotics firm Repkom will take the blame?
Paranoia set in. Repkon refused to share passwords needed to control important equipment, according to five former General Dynamics employees. Sometimes workers would be startled by the sight of a machine moving by itself and realize it was being controlled by someone in Turkey. Spooked, General Dynamics workers tore out hardware to cut off remote access to the machines, two former workers said.
If this is starting to sound like a bad movie plot with espionage and sabotage threads, keep in mind that you paid way more than $17 to see this film. But not to worry! Private-public partnerships with contractors all over the globe are racing ahead to produce fast, powerful military hardware that will attempt to compete with Iran, China, and Russia. All three of which are currently demonstrating the decisive power of a loyal, patriotic work force called upon to step up production in the face of existential threats.
General Dynamics workers in my state go out on strike regularly for better pay and working conditions, while their CEO slurps up another bonus.
In April 2024, General Dynamics CEO Novakovic told investors: “In the U.S., we are rapidly increasing ammunition production with the opening of our Texas facility.” General Dynamics failed to conduct a scheduled first article test in Mesquite that same month.
I’ll let Xi Jinping have the last word here. From his 2015 plans for The Governance of China:
There cannot be sustainable development in the world when some countries are getting richer and richer while others languish in prolonged poverty and backwardness.. Such practices as beggar-my-neighbor, shifting crises onto others and feathering one’s nest at the expense of others are both immoral and unsustainable.
Confronted with complex threats to international security, fighting alone or fighting with a blind faith in the use of force [emphasis mine] will not get one anywhere.
$26.8 billion nuclear refurbishment to begin in Pickering early next year
By Glenn Hendry, July 24, 2026
A nearly $27 billion plan to refurbish four reactors at the Pickering Nuclear Generating Station to get nearly four decades more service out of them is set to begin early next year, with all four units to be taken offline in September.
The Ontario government gave the green light to the refurbishment in November, with the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission’s approval still required.
The commission previously had already approved a short extension of units 5 to 8 at the Pickering nuclear plant to the end of 2026.
The renewal will start with Unit 5, pending approval, while the project team makes progress on the ground with construction of a new 200,000-square-foot retube feeder and boiler replacement training and mock-up facility, using experience gained from a similar project built for the refurbishment of the nearby Darlington plant.
The hub will be “critical” to training more than 2,800 skilled trades staff ahead of the refurbishment, Ontario Power Generation said on its website.
The new facility will feature detailed mock-ups of the Pickering reactor design and its components. It will also provide a training mock-up of Pickering’s lower boiler assembly, a unique aspect to the refurbishment.
The project team is also constructing other buildings to support the project, including the Common Services Building, a two-storey, 38,000-square-foot modular building that will be used by vendor partners.
Russophobia: Elite Obsession or Deep-Rooted Prejudice?
A conversation with Professor Geoffrey Roberts
Ian Proud, August 12, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/russophobia-elite-obsession-or-deep?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=211518204&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
Professor Geoffrey Roberts, one of Britain’s leading historians of Soviet and Russian history, recently took part in an academic conference on Russophobia held as part of the annual cultural festival in Pskov, Russia.
The discussions there, and our subsequent conversation, offer a clear-eyed look at a phenomenon – Russophobia – that has intensified dramatically since 2022.
One striking difference emerged immediately between western and Russian participants at the conference.
Russian participants tended to view Russophobia as a deep-rooted cultural feature of the West, particularly Britain, stretching back two centuries to Russia’s emergence as a great power after the Napoleonic Wars.
Western speakers, including Roberts, saw it as far more contingent and episodic — a political instrument that surfaces when it serves a purpose and can recede just as quickly.
Roberts argues that today’s Russophobia is primarily an elite phenomenon.
It thrives in the Westminster bubble, among sections of the media, the intelligence services, the defence industry and the chattering classes.
Ordinary people are often more open-minded. Taxi drivers still express genuine curiosity about life in Moscow rather than reflexive hostility. Public opinion has proved remarkably resistant to years of daily propaganda; the extreme narrative has failed to mobilise a durable popular majority for confrontation.
Within the elite itself there are different strands: a large “herd” that follows the prevailing narrative for career reasons; those with financial or institutional interests in keeping the confrontation alive; and a smaller group of true believers.
The late Lord Robert Skidelsky, whose writings on Russophobia formed the basis of Roberts’ own paper in Pskov, described it as a ready-made repertoire of stereotypes and attitudes that can be activated when political circumstances demand.
Its current intensity is instrumental — it helps mobilise support for Ukraine and for the West’s proxy war against Russia.
History suggests such episodes can reverse rapidly.
Britain and Russia fought as allies in both world wars.
The anti-Soviet version of Russophobia collapsed with surprising speed under Gorbachev.
Roberts remains cautiously optimistic that a negotiated end to the war in Ukraine would undermine the extreme forms of Russophobia and open space for more pragmatic voices. Without an end to the fighting, however, the instrumental value of the narrative remains high.
The conversation also touched on deeper strategic realities.
You cannot fight a war by committee.
Russia’s more centralised decision-making and industrial capacity have allowed it to adapt and sustain the conflict, while Western policymakers continue to underestimate Russian resilience and overestimate the prospects of Ukrainian victory or regime collapse in Moscow.
The result is a prolonged, self-defeating policy that has already cost Ukraine dearly and eroded the legitimacy of European governments at home.
Roberts’ message is ultimately a hopeful one. Most people in any country want peace. Ending the war would not only stop the bloodshed; it would also deprive Russophobia of its most powerful current fuel and create the conditions for a more rational relationship between Russia and the West.
In the meantime, moderate, evidence-based voices remain essential.
You can watch the full conversation here:
The result is a prolonged, self-defeating policy that has already cost Ukraine dearly and eroded the legitimacy of European governments at home.
Roberts’ message is ultimately a hopeful one. Most people in any country want peace. Ending the war would not only stop the bloodshed; it would also deprive Russophobia of its most powerful current fuel and create the conditions for a more rational relationship between Russia and the West.
In the meantime, moderate, evidence-based voices remain essential.
You can watch the full conversation here:
‘Deliberate negligence’: Russian nuclear power company with EU operations accused of violating safety standards
Rosatom’s Egyptian plant will use the same technology as a facility the company is building in Hungary.
August 17, 2026 By Ben Makuch, https://www.politico.eu/article/rosatom-hungary-nuclear-energy-egypt-russia-el-dabaa-paks-ii-russia-safety-standards-violations/
BRUSSELS — A Russian state-controlled corporation building a nuclear power plant in Hungary is facing allegations of safety, security and engineering failures at another project in Egypt that uses the same technology, according to internal documents obtained by POLITICO.
In a confidential letter dated June 4 and addressed to a Rosatom executive, Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority describes “defects” affecting multiple reactor units and violations of “nuclear safety culture” as it builds the El Dabaa nuclear plant. The letter also cites “deliberate negligence” on the part of an official at the project.
The tranche of documents was shared through an intelligence official who was granted anonymity because they are not authorized to speak to the media, and it has never previously been made public. It includes confidential company documents that describe construction delays and engineering concerns coming from Rosatom’s own reviews of the project.
Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 prompted Europe to impose sweeping sanctions on the country, Rosatom has tried to convince European governments that it remains a reliable and competent supplier in the nuclear power market. But the accusations of safety breaches could add to existing concerns over the Kremlin-controlled company’s operations in the EU.
In an emailed statement to POLITICO, Rosatom said it upholds the highest levels of nuclear safety and had done so throughout the construction of El Dabaa. The company declined to comment on whether it had received the letter or the complaints from Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority, which did not respond to multiple requests for comment about its communications with Rosatom.
“The high standard of work organisation, the quality management system and the safety culture are affirmed by the sustained attention paid to the project by the political leadership of the Russian Federation and the Arab Republic of Egypt, as well as by the leadership of the International Atomic Energy Agency, whose representatives regularly attend key project milestones,” said the company by email, adding that a recent ceremony for one of El Dabaa’s reactor units was attended by Russian, Egyptian and IAEA officials.
None of the allegations contained in the letter, presented to Rosatom by POLITICO, have been “confirmed within the contractual, technical and oversight procedures envisaged by the project,” read the company’s statement.
In a press release issued after this article was published, Egypt’s Nuclear Power Plants Authority “affirmed that the El Dabaa project is being implemented in accordance with the highest internationally recognized nuclear safety and security standards.”
“For a project of this scale and complexity, the identification of individual technical observations and non-conformities during construction, followed by appropriate corrective measures, is a normal part of the implementation process,” the statement read.
Egyptian Prime Minister Mostafa Madbouly said in July he expected the construction of all four El Dabaa reactors to finish by 2030, with the first reactor unit set to begin producing power by 2028. No nuclear fuel has yet been introduced to the site. Rosatom’s Egyptian plant will use the same technology at the heart of Hungary’s Paks II project, the Kremlin-backed nuclear expansion that has repeatedly raised tensions between Budapest and the European Commission.
The Commission told POLITICO it was not aware of the confidential documents and allegations they contain. “For the EU, nuclear safety is a key priority,” said a Commission spokesperson.
They added that while the Commission was following the project’s developments, “issues of nuclear safety are [the] responsibility of the EU Member State concerned.”
Initially green-lit by Hungary’s former Prime Minister Viktor Orbán in 2014, the Paks II project became emblematic of Budapest’s alignment with Russian President Vladimir Putin and provided a foothold for Russian energy technology inside the EU. Work began on the project in February this year.
The Kremlin-controlled corporation also has plant projects in Turkey and China, while Germany is under fire for green-lighting a deal in July that will allow one of Rosatom’s subsidiaries to help produce nuclear fuel rods for a plant in Lower Saxony. The German government said the deal would be under strict national security controls.
The Egyptian government and its embassies in Belgium and the United States did not respond to multiple requests for comment.
The allegations
Once fully operational, the El Dabaa complex will contain four Russian-designed nuclear reactor units under the supervision of the Nuclear Power Plants Authority. In the letter sent by the Egyptian authority to Rosatom, an official at the agency wrote that uncompleted reactor units have already encountered defects.
Originally sent to Rosatom in English, the letter appears to have been translated into Russian for internal circulation. POLITICO is citing a version of the letter translated back into English.
“There has been a re-emergence of serious concrete defects, including voids behind the metal cladding at Unit 4, defects in the foundation slabs of Units 1, 2 and 3, which took a year to repair, and defects in the cellular structure in the cylindrical wall of the reactor building at Unit 4,” details the letter.
The Egyptian agency then accuses Rosatom of “misleading methods” and “fictitious work” attempting to prove the plant’s construction is over halfway complete, “while a visual inspection at the site clearly shows that the main buildings of the nuclear island are still in the underground construction phase.”
Rosatom, the Egyptian authority alleges, also presides over an unprofessional workplace culture in which workers were caught in possession of “prohibited alcoholic beverages” on the work site, used “forged passes and impersonated others to gain unauthorized access,” and took several “photos and videos taken at the construction site” that ended up on social media, “which negatively affected the reputation of the project.”
The letter makes reference to a serious accident on the construction site, which resulted in a worker suffering “a severe open fracture” and then being smuggled to a private vehicle, not to an “equipped ambulance,” which the Egyptian authority claims was done “intentionally” to cover up the incident.
“Such behavior represents a serious disregard for both human well-being and professional responsibility, and constitutes a gross violation of workplace safety regulations, nuclear safety culture and reporting obligations,” said the letter.
Four additional internal Rosatom business documents reviewed by POLITICO reinforce aspects of the Egyptian authority’s concerns, detailing delays, construction-quality problems and project-management failures. One Rosatom draft audit prepared internally in 2025 warned of a “significant risk of failure to fulfill” the company’s contractual obligations and forecast that the preliminary schedule of El Dabaa’s first reactor unit could slip by 18 months, from September 2028 to March 2030.
Future in doubt
The allegations contained in the documents cast a shadow over the Paks II project in Hungary and are likely to reinforce concerns in Brussels about entrusting critical European infrastructure to a company under the Kremlin’s control.
In a lengthy commentary by the Royal United Services Institute, a London-based defense and security think tank, researchers warned Western countries against doing business with Rosatom, citing its deep connections to Russian intelligence and its problematic role in forcibly running the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in Ukraine through military force.
For the government of Hungary’s newly elected Prime Minister Péter Magyar, the Rosatom revelations also present a new headache: Paks II remains indispensable to Hungary’s plans to decarbonize its electricity system and replace aging nuclear capacity. In an effort to reexamine Orbán-era policymaking, Magyar’s government recently opened a review into Paks II, questioning its hefty price tag and connections to Putin.
Former Hungarian Green lawmaker Benedek Jávor, who focused on Paks II and was critical of the Orbán government, cautioned other governments about working with Rosatom. He told POLITICO he now believed the allegations coming out of El Dabaa could have far-reaching consequences for Rosatom and the fate of Paks II.
“They’ve already decided to reconsider the contract, and this was already communicated during the election campaign,” he said of Magyar’s government. “[This] information from Egypt will definitely be part of the evaluation.”
Looking Back….Going Forward
Andrew and Varrie Blowers writing for the Blackwater Against New Nuclear Group (BANNG) for Energy and Environment Regional Life Column for August, 2026
This month we’ve decided to look back over previous August issues of
this column to reflect on our preoccupations over the past decade. We’ve
picked on two themes – radioactive wastes and new nuclear power – covered
in four columns which focus on our successes as well as our continuing
concerns during these years. August 2017: BANNG led a successful campaign
to force the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) to abandon its
experimental scheme to flush dissolved Fuel Element Debris (FED) residue
into the Blackwater. As a result, Magnox cancelled its plans to use FED
dissolution at its other sites. August 2020: In the midst of the pandemic,
the Chinese project to build reactors at Bradwell reached its apotheosis
with its pre-application for planning consent. The outrage against the
project was palpable. Combined with local political and public opposition
and government concerns around national security risks, BANNG was
emboldened to conclude the project was dying. Later, when the Chinese
walked away, we could presume the project dead.
BANNG 5th Aug 2026, https://www.banng.info/news/regional-life/looking-back-going-forward/
It’s Getting So Hot That Nuclear Plants Are Being Forced to Power Down
Governments are freaking out.
By Joe Wilkins Aug 14, 2026 , https://futurism.com/science-energy/europe-heat-wave-water-nuclear-plants
Nuclear energy is often touted as an ultra-efficient alternative to dirtier energy sources like coal or natural gas. Expanding the world’s capacity for atomic power is the key to avoiding a cascading climate disaster, some of the industry’s proponents say — but what if it’s too late?
With record setting heatwaves scorching Europe, water levels in the continent’s major rivers are reaching all-time lows. While receding water levels are a huge boon for European archeologists as ancient ruins surface for the first time in centuries, the situation is causing massive headaches for nuclear engineers, who have had to scramble to power down nuclear energy facilities across the continent.
As German broadcaster Deutsche Welle reported, facilities like the two gigawatt Paks nuclear plant in Hungary have come close to powering down completely, as a critical lack of water flowing from the Danube threatened the facility’s ability to cool its reactors. That’s a major crisis, because in any given year, the Paks plant generates nearly half of the country’s total electricity supply.
The Hungarian government is now scrambling to keep things running, ABC reported, mobilizing engineers to deliver some 145,000 cubic meters of rocks into the riverbed to manually slow the current and conserve water upstream.
The situation isn’t much better in Romania, where the state-owned nuclear power producer may be forced to completely shut down its last remaining reactor, per Reuters. That’s not for lack of trying: earlier this month, the Romanian navy detonated 180 kilograms of explosives meant to redirect water from the Danube to cool its nuclear reactors.
Meanwhile in France, a combination of extreme drought and a recurring jellyfish invasion have reduced the nation’s nuclear energy production by 20 percent, though a more diversified energy grid means the situation isn’t quite as hairy as those in Hungary or Romania.
With yet another heat wave already on the horizon, Europe’s nuclear energy woes may really just be the tip of the iceberg.
We Talk: Japanese residents warn against ‘nuclear sharing’
Global Stringer, 14 Aug 26, https://news.cgtn.com/news/2026-08-14/We-Talk-Japanese-residents-warn-against-nuclear-sharing–1PB6c6oYkp2/p.html
August 15 marks 81 years since Japan announced its surrender in World War II.
Since taking office in October last year, Prime Minister Sanae Takaichi’s government has pushed to revise Japan’s three national security documents and has repeatedly called for a review of the “no introduction” clause of the Three Non-Nuclear Principles. The moves have sparked concern in Japan and abroad over the future direction of the country’s nuclear policy.
A poll released by the Japan Association for Public Opinion Research on August 1 found that 76% of respondents support maintaining the Three Non-Nuclear Principles of not possessing, not producing and not permitting the introduction of nuclear weapons.
A CGTN stringer in Tokyo spoke with local residents about the Three Non-Nuclear Principles, the concept of nuclear sharing, and the possibility of Japan allowing the United States to deploy nuclear weapons on its territory.
One interviewee, Hikaru Kusano, said Japan should never engage in nuclear sharing, warning that it would pose a threat to other countries. Another respondent, Masahiro Sawa, argued that nuclear weapons can never guarantee security and that a world free of nuclear weapons may be the best path forward.
The Microreactor Miracle Meets a Morphing AI-Nuclear Future
questions about whether the country will achieve its long-term core nuclear deployment objectives. And over-relying on a boost from the micro reactor miracle offers meager dividends when deployment is paramount.
August 15, 2026, By: Kenneth Luongo, https://nationalinterest.org/blog/energy-world/the-microreactor-miracle-meets-a-morphing-ai-nuclear-future
The microreactor milestone is real, but shifting AI models, China’s challenge, and deployment delays could complicate America’s nuclear ambitions.
It was impressive that four microreactor start-up companies beat the clock and achieved reactor criticality in compliance with the Trump administration’s arbitrary July 4 Reactor Pilot Program (RPP) deadline. But these reactors are years away from deployment, and the excessive swaggering associated with this modest achievement is out of step with the quavering nuclear energy realities ricocheting off a rapidly evolving artificial intelligence (AI) system.
US Microreactor Achievements
Of the four reactors that achieved zero power, only Antares has an identified market application beyond this demonstration. Its Mark-1 reactor has been selected as a pilot technology for powering Joint Base San Antonio, Texas.
The Antares Mark-0 reactor, which is the zero-power test reactor and prototype for the commercially oriented R1 Mark1, was the first to meet the criticality deadline on June 4 at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). It uses High Assay Low-Enriched (HALEU) TRistructural isotropic (TRISO) fuel and is sodium-cooled. The projected commercial reactor can provide 100 kilowatts to 1 megawatt (MW) electric power. Beyond its work with the Department of Defense (DOD), Antares also has been working with the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) on potentially powering a Moon base.
Valar Atomics’ Ward-250 achieved criticality on June 18 in Utah and claimed it produced 10 kilowatts (kW) of thermal output. It had previously announced a criticality test at Los Alamos National Laboratory in November 2025. The Ward-250 is a TRISO-fueled high-temperature gas reactor (HTGR) that uses helium as a coolant. After the test, Valar announced a partnership with Nvidia to explore powering AI data centers and stated that its evolving commercial unit could be “deployed by the hundreds at ‘gigasites’” that could support manufacturing as well as energy production.
Deployable Energy, a year-old company, met the criticality mark on June 30 at Idaho National Laboratory (INL). The company’s founder reportedly delivered the reactor core in the bed of a Ford F-150 truck. The reactor is part of the Nuclear Energy Launch Pad initiative at INL, which is designed to carry the RPP into the future. The reactor is a water-moderated, helium-cooled design using 4.9 percent enriched fuel. It is considered a “nuclear battery” and would max out at 1 MW. It is designed to fit in a 20-foot shipping container and be dropped at any location.
Aalo Atomics Aalo-X Critical Test Reactor sneaked in under the criticality deadline at midnight on July 4 at INL. The test reactor included a full-scale core and was designed to demonstrate key components that will be used in the Aalo-X, a low-enriched uranium (LEU) fueled, sodium-cooled 10 MW reactor. The goal is to deploy groups of these reactors in 50 MW Aalo Pods to support commercial data centers. Aalo recently formed a strategic partnership with Crusoe, a vertically integrated AI infrastructure provider, to “validate nuclear power’s effectiveness with AI workloads” at INL.
The Mutating AI Data Center Model
With the microreactor milestone behind them, the Trump administration and reactor developers now face an evolving landscape for nuclear energy. AI data centers have been viewed as the top driver of America’s energy growth and ideal for pairing with nuclear energy. Projections indicate these centers could add 100 gigawatts (GW) to the US grid by 2030.
But the data center opportunity is rapidly morphing, and opposition is growing; the now-dominant American AI model is under pressure at home and abroad. That raises questions about what role new nuclear power ultimately will play as the AI arena evolves.
The assumption has been that the hyperscalers, including Apple, Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform, will build massive data centers as fast as they can to support US AI frontier modelcomputing growth. One assessment identified the data center build time as roughly two to three years
But the frontier model concept and its computing campuses are under pressure.
Alex Karp, CEO of Palantir, has been on a recent crusade criticizing the American AI frontier model as a trap that requires businesses to provide their intellectual property (IP) to AI’s leading companies like Anthropic and OpenAI. Karp claims that these models’ architecture creates an “addiction” among users and allows the system provider to absorb proprietary corporate data that can be used to compete against their current customers in the future.
He argues that companies should build their AI systems on models they own, training them on their proprietary content and keeping their data under their control. He also advocates for an “application layer” his company has developed with NVIDIA that can protect an enterprise’s IP. If Karp’s concept catches on, and Meta seems to have taken note, it could impact the mega data center build-out, reducing the number required and downsizing their power requirements. That could be a challenge for some leading nuclear reactor companies betting on the data center boom, or it could favor dial-an-output modular reactors if the costs are competitive.
China’s Dual AI Challenge
A version of the Karp concept seems to have already been adopted by China, which, because it is already closing the quality gap with the best US AI models, now poses a double threat to US dominance.
China is giving away fast, cheap open-source AI models. These free Chinese AI platforms are popular in Africa and Latin America but are also being used by US and European companies, including Siemens, DoorDash, and Airbnb.
Of course, one goal of China is to allow companies to easily build systems on their platform in order to serve geopolitical objectives and create dependencies it can exploit in the future. The US National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) evaluated China’s DeepSeek AI model and found that its AI offerings advance Chinese Communist Party narratives. It concludes that China’s DeepSeek “remains a leading open weight model developer and has contributed to a rapid increase in adoption of PRC [People’s Republic of China] models globally.” It cautions that the expanding global use of these models “May pose a threat to application developers, to consumers, and to US national security.”
This approach by AI is similar to China’s Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), which has helped the country capture hundreds of infrastructure projects across over 140 countries, resulting in deep relationships and financial dependencies, particularly with emerging economy nations. And while its energy projects so far have heavily tilted toward fossil fuels, BRI’s relationships and financial model enhance China’s position as a future provider of new nuclear energy in the Global South, posing a threat to the future US export of small reactors and creating worry for the US political, commercial, and national security establishment.
Lagging Nuclear Reactor Technology and Scaling Challenges
Even if the US data center boom were to play out as planned, there are questions about when and whether new US nuclear power will be ready to power it.
So far, the hyperscalers have modestly invested in small modular reactors (SMRs), but they are unlikely to be available in time for a near-term data center boom. If the buildout is over by the early 2030s, most SMRs will still be on the sidelines.
As a hedge, these companies have banked on the resurgence of mothballed nuclear power plants like Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania and Palisades in Michigan. Both of those projects are estimated to deliver new power before the end of this decade for a combined 1.6 GW. What the hyperscalers have not done is back construction of new large reactors despite the fact that a single Westinghouse AP-100 can provide over one GW of power.
The US government wants 10 new AP-1000s under construction by 2030, but its $80 billion strategic partnership with Westinghouse and its commitment to provide $17.5 billion in loans for long lead items haven’t attracted the necessary additional investment and commitment required from the private sector.
The US government wants 10 new AP-1000s under construction by 2030, but its $80 billion strategic partnership with Westinghouse and its commitment to provide $17.5 billion in loans for long lead items haven’t attracted the necessary additional investment and commitment required from the private sector.
This reticence reflects a cost-overrun risk aversion from domestic electric utilities and Wall Street. In response, the administration is repurposing federal lands to create data center-nuclear power campuses. And it has turned to allies such as South Korea and Japan to jumpstart the process with foreign cash derived from bilateral trade and tariff deals.
But that avenue also doesn’t seem to be working. The Trump administration has been frustrated with the lack of progress on the nuclear energy component of the $350 billion South Korean commitment to invest in the United States, and with Japan, it has found that its involvement in a $40 billion nuclear power project is running aground over nuclear liability concerns.
With less than 30 months left in Trump’s term, and the prospect of a hostile House of Representatives sucking the air out of his agenda, there is an urgency in rethinking the Trump administration’s nuclear deployment policy. The dependence on a rapidly evolving AI and data center market leaves questions about whether the country will achieve its long-term core nuclear deployment objectives. And over-relying on a boost from the micro reactor miracle offers meager dividends when deployment is paramount.
About the Author: Kenneth Luongo
Kenneth N. Luongo is a recognized innovator, entrepreneur, and leader in global nuclear energy and transnational security policy. He is the president and founder of the Partnership for Global Security (PGS). He has been a TEDx presenter, written over 100 articles, including in The New York Times and Foreign Affairs, and engaged extensively with global media, governments, and audiences around the world on nuclear energy and transnational security challenges and responses. He was formerly a senior advisor to the secretary of energy and a professional staff member on Capitol Hill.
US says lower oil prices, not Iran’s nuclear program, are now top priority in war
The top US priority now in the Iran war is no longer its nuclear program but to bring gasoline prices down for American consumers, the vice president said Thursday, with the treasury secretary adding that new economic punishment to wear down Tehran is imminent.
The comments by Vice President JD Vance and Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent illustrate the powerful leverage Tehran has gained by shutting down the Strait of Hormuz.
Preventing Iran from obtaining a nuclear weapon – consistently touted by President Donald Trump as his main reason for the war – now takes a back seat to getting oil flowing again freely through the strait, Vance said on Fox News.
Vance’s comments underscored the stark reality that the war now centers on control of the strait, the critical fuel supply conduit that was open before Trump started the war along with Israel in late February.
Iran has all but shut it down in retaliation and thus found a crucial bargaining chip against Trump as he struggles to find a way out of the war and shies away from resuming large-scale attacks.
The 80-year-old president’s approval rating is plummeting, the war is unpopular among Americans and midterm elections are approaching in November.
Republicans fear Trump and the war, which has caused gasoline prices to soar, will cost them their control of Congress.
“I know that oil is down today and it’s way down from the highs in the early days of the conflict,” Vance said on Fox News. “That’s goal number one – keep oil and gas cheap for Americans all over our country.”
“And then obviously goal number two is ensure that Iran never gets a nuclear weapon,” he added.
‘Low-keying it’
The vice president has been among the members of the administration most skeptical of the offensive launched against Iran in late February.
These remarks, however, appear to confirm the more cautious approach now favored by the US president, which involves maintaining strong economic pressure on Iran by blockading its ports and preventing it from selling oil.
Heralding more economic punishment, Bessent threatened to subject Iran to economic isolation “like the world has never seen before.” He said new measures are expected next week.
Only days ago Trump had said an agreement to reopen the strait was imminent. Now his administration seems to be digging in, with diplomacy on hold as he hopes economic suffering will cause Iran to yield.
“We are low-keying it,” Trump said Sunday. “We are only semi-negotiating with them. We are just watching Iran with its huge inflation and the fact they have no money,” Trump told the news outlet Axios.
The US military reportedly burned through stockpiles of costly high-tech missiles and other weapons in the months since the war started at a cost of billions and is now reportedly running low, limiting Trump’s options for resuming attacks on Iran.
“Sometimes we’re focused on the energy piece of it because we want Americans to be able to afford the price of oil and gas. Sometimes we’re obviously focused on the military… on the nuclear program,” Vance also said.
Trump had said recently he would hold off on attacking Iran again only if an agreement were reached quickly to reopen the strait.
Now Iran has set a list of conditions for reopening the passageway that the Trump administration is unlikely to accept: an end to the war on all fronts, the lifting of the US blockade of Iranian ports, the end of sanctions, the release of frozen assets and compensation for wartime damage.
Those conditions echo the terms of a so-called memorandum of understanding which was reached in June and collapsed as fighting resumed. It included a provision to create a $300 billion reconstruction fund for Iran.
The 100,000-year plan for Finland’s and Sweden’s nuclear waste turns on something very small — whether bacteria half a kilometre underground can make enough sulphide to eat through five centimetres of copper
Why don’t i find this terribly reassuring?
When I wonder aboutall the countries busily producing radioactive trash, why doesn’t this article make me feel that it is all OK?
Two centuries of engineering innovation may ultimately depend on whether microorganisms in the bedrock can generate enough corrosive compounds to breach the copper canisters meant to contain radioactive waste for the next hundred thousand years.
By Space Daily Editorial Team · Edited by Mal James, August 14, 2026, https://spacedaily.com/m-the-100000-year-plan-for-finlands-and-swedens-nuclear-waste-turns-on-something-very-small-whether-bacteria-half-a-kilometre-underground-can-make-enough-sulphide-to-eat-through-five-centim/
he strange thing about the biggest engineering promise being made in northern Europe right now is that it does not really hinge on the steel, the concrete, or the granite. It hinges on how fast a population of microbes, living in near-total darkness half a kilometre down, can turn one chemical into another.
Finland and Sweden are both burying spent nuclear fuel for good, using a Swedish method called KBS-3. It wraps three barriers around the waste: a copper canister with a cast-iron insert inside it, a thick jacket of packed clay called bentonite, and then the bedrock itself.
In Finland the repository is Onkalo, about 430 metres down. In Sweden it sits near Forsmark at roughly 500 metres. The copper shell around each canister is 50 mm thick, five centimetres of it. The design is supposed to keep the waste sealed off for at least 100,000 years.
We are not corrosion scientists, microbiologists, or nuclear engineers. What follows is reading and reflection on the published research, not a verdict on whether these repositories are safe. The studies cited are mostly lab experiments and modeled projections, and a lab result about clay in a test cell is not a guarantee about a specific canister in the ground 40,000 years from now.
What 100,000 years actually asks of a metal box
It is hard to hold the number in your head. These canisters need to outlast everything humans have ever built, several times over, with no maintenance and no one watching.
The clever part of the design is that copper is not being asked to do the impossible. In pure water with no oxygen and no aggressive chemistry, it just sits there. The catch is that the ground is not chemically dead. So the real question was never “is copper strong?” It was “what, specifically, in this rock and this water can attack copper over geological time?” The answer comes down to a surprisingly short list.
Why the enemy is sulphide, not oxygen
When the canisters go into the ground, there is a short window, perhaps a few years to a few decades, where trapped oxygen can corrode the copper a little. Then the oxygen gets used up and never comes back. From that point on the canister lives in an oxygen-free world for essentially its entire life. By one estimate, a KBS-3 canister spends more than 99.99% of its expected service life in these oxygen-free conditions.
That flips the corrosion problem on its head. Oxygen, the thing that rusts most metals, barely matters here. The agent that matters in an oxygen-free repository is sulphide, and sulphide is not just sitting in the rock waiting. Most of it has to be made by living things.
Deep groundwater carries dissolved sulphate. Sulphate on its own leaves copper alone. But a group of microbes called sulphate-reducing bacteria breathe sulphate the way we breathe oxygen, and their waste product is sulphide. That is the chemical that can actually corrode the copper. So the load-bearing question in a 100,000-year safety case turns out to be biological: how busy are the bacteria, and how much of their sulphide reaches the metal.
Meet the bacteria, and what they need
Sulphate-reducing bacteria are ancient, widespread, and perfectly at home in deep oxygen-free groundwater. Give them dissolved sulphate, an energy source, and liquid water they can move around in, and they will make sulphide. That this kind of microbe-driven corrosion is real, and can move fast in the right conditions, is not hypothetical. An in-ground study in packed bentonite soaked with groundwater at repository depth measured active sulphide production by bacteria, with the rate dropping sharply as the clay was packed to higher densities.
So why is anyone confident the canisters last? Because the whole design is arranged to deny the bacteria the one thing they need most: room to work and a clear path to the metal. That is the job of the clay.
The bentonite bottleneck
The bentonite around each canister is not passive packing material. When it gets wet it swells into a dense, gel-like barrier. Two things happen at high density. The pores get so small and the water so tightly held that bacteria struggle to live and move. And sulphide can no longer flow freely; it can only creep through slowly.
A 2000 lab study led by Karsten Pedersen and colleagues tested exactly this. They reported that “sulphate-reducing bacteria were found to be active, reducing sulphate at the lowest density studied, 1.5 g cm-3, but sulphate reduction activity ceased at higher densities.” The paper’s own conclusion is carefully hedged: at full repository packing, it says the bacteria will most probably not be able to induce corrosion. That is one study, on Swedish KBS-3 clay, and it reads as suggestive rather than final. But it points at something the whole safety case leans on: squeeze the clay hard enough and the microbial factory inside it may largely shut down.
That still leaves sulphide arriving from the surrounding groundwater. Here the argument shifts from biology to plumbing. A 2017 review by Fraser King and colleagues argues that the long-term corrosion rate is set not by how eagerly copper reacts, but by how slowly sulphide can travel to its surface through the clay. As long as the sulphide supply stays low, the corrosion is throttled to a crawl.
Put those numbers into a 100,000-year projection and the developers reach a comfortable conclusion. SKB’s own review estimates that, counting the sulphide already in the deposition holes plus what can seep in from groundwater, the copper corrosion depth after 100,000 years comes to less than 5 mm. Against a 50 mm wall, that leaves a large margin.
Closing thoughts
So the summary is a split one. That copper resists corrosion in an oxygen-free repository is well supported. That dense bentonite slows the bacteria and throttles the sulphide is supported by lab work, with the caveat that it is lab work. That the resulting rate holds steady for 100,000 years is a modeled projection, reasonable and carefully argued, but a projection all the same. The five centimetres of copper is the easy part. The hard part is a number about how much a colony of bacteria, buried in clay half a kilometre underground, can do over a span of time longer than civilisation.
Benjamin Netanyahu describes UK as ‘first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon’
Israeli PM criticised by political rival for attacking an international ally and overseeing ‘horrific diplomatic failure’
Emma Graham-Harrison in Jerusalem and Rowena Mason, https://www.theguardian.com/world/2026/aug/14/benjamin-netanyahu-describes-uk-first-islamic-republic-to-get-nuclear-weapon
The Israeli prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, called the UK “the Islamic republic of Britain” in a podcast interview, where he also described the country as the “first Islamic republic to get a nuclear weapon”.
His comments, made during an interview for Israel’s army radio, played into a common far-right Islamophobic trope about Britain’s small Muslim population.
Netanyahu praised positive coverage of Israel by the journalist Randolph Churchill, the son of former prime minister Winston Churchill, over half a century ago, then said: “Go find that in today’s Britain, in what is called the Islamic republic of Britain.”
Rather than challenge Netanyahu’s comments, the host questioned whether he is unfairly singling out the UK, asking: “Isn’t all of Europe is like that?”
Netanyahu replies by doubling down. “Yes, but you know someone said the first Islamic republic with nuclear weapons will be the Islamic republic of Britain.”
Pakistan, officially the Islamic Republic of Pakistan, has had a nuclear arsenal since the 1990s.
Relations between the UK and Israel have been increasingly strained in recent months, especially since Andy Burnham took over in No 10. Shortly before becoming prime minister, he apologised for Labour’s initial response to Israel’s military action in Gaza, saying the party “didn’t get it right” and needed to “do better” under his leadership, signalling a significant shift in the UK’s approach to the Middle East.
In July, he said he would “do more to put pressure on the Israeli government”, including through further sanctions on individuals and entities, as well as a potential ban on the trade of goods with illegal settlements.
The US vice-president, JD Vance, made remarks similar to Netanyahu’s comments during the 2024 presidential campaign, saying the UK could become the first “truly Islamist country that will get a nuclear weapon”.
London’s mayor, Sadiq Khan, has also been a frequent target of racialised attacks from rightwing leaders abroad, including Donald Trump, seeking to gain political advantage from Islamophobic lies.
Muslim leaders in the UK have said that hate crimes targeting their community are hitting new levels amid a rise in far-right rhetoric and growing support for anti-immigrant political parties.
Avi Dabush, who is running for the Knesset with Israel’s opposition Democrats party, attacked Netanyahu for mocking a critical ally at a time when Israel faces unprecedented global isolation. “That’s what happens when there’s a horrific diplomatic failure, and an inability to rally countries in the world in favour of our interests,” he said in a social media post.
Leading the most far-right government in Israel’s history, Netanyahu has alienated traditional allies while aligning with far-right figures, including some with a history of antisemitism.
The British Foreign, Commonwealth and Development Office said: “These comments are completely unacceptable and we have raised them with the Israeli government.”
The Prime Minister’s Office did not respond to requests for comment on whether Netanyahu’s statement represented the official position of the Israeli government.
‘Menace to the World’: With Iran Talks Stalled, Trump Vows to Declare Strait of Hormuz a US Territory
“He absolutely needs to be impeached, removed, and locked up,” said one progressive critic, calling the president “a completely unhinged lunatic.”
Jessica Corbett, Aug 14, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/news/donald-trump-strait-of-hormuz
In yet another remark that triggered alarm around the world, President Donald Trump said Friday that he planned to declare the Strait of Hormuz—which Iran has blockaded for much of the past five months over his and Israel’s illegal war—a US territory.
Just two days after the latest inflation figures demonstrated, in the words of one expert, “Trump’s catastrophic mismanagement of our economy,” the president ignored the economic fallout from his war, which led Iran to restrict ship traffic through the strait, driving up fuel prices worldwide.
“We’re bringing the prices way down,” he told a Long Island crowd. Trump also said that “after we finish defeating Iran, which is being very badly defeated, pretty soon, I’ll be declaring the Hormuz Strait a territory of the United States.”
Some critics responded to clips of the comments on X by mocking Trump—an infamous liar. Congressman Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) quipped, “Awesome! And the Easter Bunny is real.”
Ryan Costello, policy director at the National Iranian American Council, said that “this jingoism rings a bit hollow when most of the US bases near the strait have been essentially abandoned due to danger from Iranian missiles and drones.”
Progressive political commentator Kyle Kulinski declared that “he absolutely needs to be impeached, removed, and locked up. He’s a completely unhinged lunatic, and he’s a sadistic violent menace to the world.”
After high initial claims about lower prices, Trump admitted that gasoline has soared due to his war, but said: “For you to pay a tiny little bit more for your gasoline, just remember, you’re doing it so that a very evil country cannot have a—a country, really it’s the No. 1 state sponsor of terror in the world—we don’t want to have them have a nuclear weapon. So, remember that when you have to pay a little bit more, you’re at $4, it’s OK. I’ll never apologize. I did the right thing.”
Trump’s threat over the strait between the Persian Gulf and the Gulf of Oman came just before a monthlong ceasefire between the US and Iran is set to expire on Monday. A senior White House official told Politico that the situation is “static.”
“It doesn’t matter how close or how far we are,” said the official, who has heard no mention of a potential extension of the ceasefire. “What matters is if Iran wants to come to the table and agree to a deal. Right now, they haven’t done that.”
The Associated Press reported Friday that “the Trump administration appears to be reaching out to a broader swath of countries that might be able to help pressure Tehran,” and Ali Vaez, Iran project director at the International Crisis Group, told the outlet that “everyone is just urging both sides to stop this reckless game of chicken.”
In addition to launching an illegal war on Iran in February, and invading Venezuela in January to abduct its president, Trump has made threats against various other nations during his second term, including Canada, Cuba, Colombia, Greenland, and Mexico. He’s also threatened to seize the Panama Canal and killed hundreds of people by blowing up boats allegedly smuggling drugs.
It’s Time For Movements To Rethink Social Media
What you post no longer goes to the people who chose to hear from you — it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if it goes anywhere at all. Attention is concentrated on a handful of corporate platforms whose incentive is to keep you scrolling, not to help you organize.
August 15, 2026 , Mehran Khalili Waging Nonviolence, https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/15/its-time-for-movements-to-rethink-social-media/
Movements can still find people on social media. But the real organizing has to happen somewhere else — and getting people there is the part we keep skipping.
Last September I made a short video that was by far the most viral piece of content I’ve ever put out.
I can’t trace all the views, but at least a million people watched it across Instagram and TikTok, and possibly elsewhere. Neighbors in Athens, Greece told me they’d come across my face in their feed; Chinese accounts captioned the video and reposted it. I felt like I’d made a dent in the universe and — I’m not going to lie — a little bit special.
The video wasn’t pop wisdom or a dance routine. It had a job to do: get people to sign a petition, created by DiEM25 and Progressive International, to block Germany’s genocide-enabling former foreign minister, Annalena Baerbock, from becoming president of the U.N. General Assembly.
And on that, it failed. By the end of my week of internet mini-fame, the number of signatures had barely shifted. It had 49,000 signatures that July, two months before I posted. I watched it closely that week, and it barely moved. Baerbock got the job – the petition now asks her to resign.
I know a few things about digital communication. For two decades it’s been a key part of what I do — I’ve written about it, researched it, advised movements on it. The petition wasn’t mine, but the video was. And I couldn’t make it work.
Maybe the video could have been packaged better, or the petition link made easier to find. Maybe my pitch was entertaining but not compelling. Maybe a petition was never the right vehicle for stopping Baerbock in the first place.
My organizer friends thought it went great. They congratulated me on the numbers. Nobody asked about the petition.
That last part is what’s bothered me since. Because if a million views and no signatures is considered a success, we’re measuring the wrong thing.
And that opens up a bigger question, one I don’t think we ask often enough: When we use social media in our organizing, what are we actually doing? Is it worth the time we put into it? And is there a way of doing it that actually builds something?
Why we’re all on there anyway
Social media is now a given for organizers, and for good reason. We’ve been using it to fill public squares for well over a decade, from Occupy to Black Lives Matter to last year’s Gen Z protests across the Global South. To get around media blackouts and show the world what power does when it thinks no one’s filming, from Ferguson to Gaza. To make and sink political careers. To tank the stock prices of corporations that deserve it.
Social media has changed how we communicate. It’s forced us to be quicker, sharper and more entertaining. Because attention is scarce — and we’re competing for it against everything else.
But beneath all of this, most of us are working from the same assumption: that platforms are where the work happens. That the posting is the organizing. That if we get the reach, the rest will follow.
What changed
That assumption has a history. Those of us who were around in 2011 will remember that social media held a different kind of promise. We thought we could topple governments and kings, if only we could get enough people onto the streets. And social media was very good at getting people onto the streets, as long as the anger was already there.
Sometimes that was enough. Tunisian dictator Ben Ali went. Egyptian dictator Mubarak went. But when it didn’t hold — when Occupy dissolved, when Tahrir Square gave way to a military government, when the squares emptied — we told ourselves it wasn’t the right moment, or that the repression was too heavy.
My sense is that a lot of us still carry that same idealism about social media’s power. But two things have changed since then.
The first is that governments got very good at pushing us back. They stifle protest at the source now, with monitoring, arrests and social media operations of their own. Movements can still get around censorship, and often do. But the state has learned to work on the same terrain. Amnesty International has documented how last year Kenyan authorities used the same platforms as the Gen Z movement to threaten and discredit organizers. And where that isn’t enough, the state can reach for the platform itself — banning it, as Nepal did in 2025, or changing who owns it, as happened with TikTok in the U.S.
The second is that the platforms themselves changed shape. We went from follower feeds to recommendation feeds. What you post no longer goes to the people who chose to hear from you — it goes wherever the algorithm sends it, if it goes anywhere at all. Attention is concentrated on a handful of corporate platforms whose incentive is to keep you scrolling, not to help you organize.
That second shift is the one we’ve underrated in terms of its impact on our ability to organize. In 2011 we posted, our followers saw it and we organized in the replies — as I did during the Athens riots. Distribution and coordination happened in the same place, at the same time.
Comments still exist, of course. But when a post reaches few of your followers, and reaches strangers instead, the reply thread stops being a place where a group can form. It becomes a place where individuals arrive one at a time and leave the same way.
And yet we still use these platforms like it’s 2011. We shoot things off into the ether and hope something will stick — that people will hear our calls to rise up and somehow self-organize. Or that if we point at a problem often enough, everyone will arrive at the same solutions we did. And each time something or someone does break through, it feels like luck.
That doesn’t mean a post can’t start something. In India, after the chief justice called unemployed young people cockroaches, a student in Boston asked on social media what would happen if all the cockroaches came together. Within weeks the Cockroach Party had formed, with millions of followers and protests in several states, and almost no organizing in between. That was three months ago. They have since won a major victory, but nobody yet knows what it will become.
A spontaneous movement can still form from social media. You just can’t plan for it, and you can’t repeat it. And yet a lot of what we do is built on waiting for it.
The tools changed. Our habits didn’t.
Why we didn’t change with them
In some ways this is understandable. Social media is the shiniest and most responsive part of our toolkit. It’s free. We all know how to use it. We understand the algorithms, the buzzwords, the memes, how to play the game. And above all, it answers immediately.
Nothing else in organizing does that. A meeting doesn’t tell you how it went. A training doesn’t report back for six months. And a list doesn’t tell you anything at all until you ask it to do something.
So we borrow like crazy from the people for whom social media genuinely is the whole job: activist influencers. They build an audience out of perceived closeness — a parasocial relationship, the illusion of intimacy and reciprocity. That’s a real skill, and it has its uses. But an audience is only enough if attention is the goal. It isn’t a base. Nobody shows up on a Tuesday night because they feel close to someone on a screen.
Meanwhile, the dull part of the work gets skipped — the meetings, the follow-up calls, the trainings, the arguments about what we’re actually demanding and from whom. And that’s the part that turns attention into power. As Zeynep Tufekci argues, social media allows networked movements to reach scale without building the capacity that scale used to require.
You can see what that costs. In Bangladesh, Nepal and Madagascar, protests driven by social media brought governments down — but in each case, what filled the space was something that already existed. An established party in Dhaka, a party formed three years earlier in Kathmandu, the army in Antananarivo. Not the movements themselves.
Worse, I think our use of these platforms has begun to shape our strategy. We optimize for what the platform rewards, because that’s the number that gets sent straight back to us. The silent but vital parts of the organizing work get subtly deprioritized — or stop happening at all.
What it looks like when someone gets it right
In February 2025, Americans angry about Elon Musk’s growing political influence started posting about his company, Tesla. Selling their cars, filming these sales and complaining online. It could have stayed there.
What moved it off the feed was small and specific. A Boston University professor saw a showroom protest in New York City run by the group Rise and Resist, held the same action in her own city and posted about it on Bluesky. Others copied her. A few people built a website and a map, and the whole thing ran under one hashtag: #TeslaTakedown.
Tesla’s weak spot was its showrooms: physical places, with addresses and opening hours, belonging to a company whose value rested heavily on its founder’s reputation. Organizers picked a time and stuck to it — they protested at the same place, every week. By March there were protests at Tesla showrooms in more than 250 cities across the globe.
The organizers’ own account of why it worked comes down to two things: Presence beats planning, and regularity builds community. That isn‘t an argument against strategy — choosing the showrooms was a strategy, and a good one. It’s an argument against making people wait while you perfect it. In a moment of anger, people didn’t need a planning document. They needed to be told where to go and what to do.
And the sign-ups ran through Action Network, the organizing platform. Not through the comments of the movement’s social media posts. So when those posts stopped performing, the movement still had its list.
Morocco’s Gen Z protests are another example of how to do it right. Last year brought a wave of protests in Morocco, against corruption, inequality and the state of public services. The movement called itself GenZ 212, after Morocco’s country code.
It got the word out on Instagram and TikTok, but it used the communications platform Discord as its backbone. People were sorted into regional channels, reflecting where they actually lived, and decisions were taken in nightly discussions that ended in votes. One estimate put the number of people on the channels at 250,000 last October.
It was untidy; it was sometimes chaotic. But Discord, which has no recommendation feed, did something for Morocco’s protesters that a feed couldn’t: It enabled them to make decisions under pressure, as a group, and to adapt. When the first days brought arrests, the movement moved its protests into working-class neighborhoods. When deaths followed police intervention, members reconvened to establish what had actually happened and to argue for peaceful protest, countering attempts to paint them as reckless.
Like most of the major Gen Z movements we’ve seen, GenZ 212 was leaderless and decentralized. The distinction here isn’t leaders versus no leaders. It’s whether there’s a room where a question can be settled and a decision can be made.
What these movements have in common
One word: a handoff.
In both cases organizers recruited on social media, just as in 2011. But they didn’t stay there. They moved people quickly into spaces they controlled. Here it happened to be Action Network and Discord; it could as easily have been a mailing list, a forum, a group chat or a room with chairs in it. What matters is that it wasn’t an algorithmic feed.
This reframes the arguments we keep having about which social media platforms to be on and which to quit. Platforms rise and fall, and whichever one holds the attention next, it will still only be the top of the funnel. The better question is: What does a movement need to own so that an algorithm change, or a ban, can’t decapitate it?
Case in point: The Gen Z movement in Nepal, operating on Discord, was able to simply route around the sweeping government ban of social media platforms last year. And the movement brought the government down.
The handoff has to be engineered
But there’s a catch to the handoff: The architecture of the platforms works against you.
Platforms downrate anything that makes people leave the app — that’s the one behavior the whole system is built to prevent. Their architecture says it plainly: Instagram doesn’t let you put a link in a caption. TikTok confines them to your bio. And on Facebook, posts containing a link have gone from about one in seven to one in 66 — by Meta’s own count.
So the handoff can’t be an afterthought. It has to be designed as carefully and deliberately as the hook.
Platforms downrate anything that makes people leave the app — that’s the one behavior the whole system is built to prevent. Their architecture says it plainly: Instagram doesn’t let you put a link in a caption. TikTok confines them to your bio. And on Facebook, posts containing a link have gone from about one in seven to one in 66 — by Meta’s own count.
So the handoff can’t be an afterthought. It has to be designed as carefully and deliberately as the hook.
Be clear about what you’re counting
The other half is measurement, and it’s the half we get wrong most often. The platforms hand us a pile of data for free, and we take it, because it’s there. But going viral is not a win. It was never the goal.
Mehran Khalili is a political consultant and organizer based in Athens, Greece. He writes Subvrt, a newsletter on practical organizing, and works with DiEM25, where he produces and hosts public conversations on how to confront power. He has advised movements and NGOs, and has run grassroots campaigns in Greece. After hours, he makes black-and-white photographs.
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