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The slow death of net neutrality

Net Neutrality’s Slow and Insidious Death Officially Begins Today http://www.truth-out.org/news/item/44252-urgent-demands-for-congress-to-act-as-net-neutrality-s-slow-and-insidious-death-begins  April 23, 2018By Jake Johnson, Common Dreams | Report 

Today is the day that net neutrality’s “slow and insidious” death at the hands of the Republican-controlled FCC officially begins, and Congress is facing urgent pressure to save the open internet before it’s too late.

With Monday marking 60 days after the FCC’s net neutrality repeal entered the Federal Register, parts of the GOP-crafted plan — spearheaded by agency chair and former Verizon lawyer Ajit Pai — will now slowly begin taking effect, while some still need to be approved by the Office of Management and Budget.

Net neutrality backers in Congress, meanwhile, are still struggling to compile enough votes to repeal Pai’s new rules, despite the fact that they are deeply unpopular among the American public.

The Senate needs just one more vote to pass a Congressional Review Act (CRA) resolution to restore net neutrality protections before it can move to the House, where it would face an uphill battle. An official vote in the Senate has yet to be scheduled, but could come in the next few weeks.

In a recent Twitter thread, the advocacy group Fight for the Future warned against sensationalistic headlines proclaiming that net neutrality will immediately be gone on Monday, noting that large telecom companies will ensure that the open internet’s death is as quiet and subtle as possible in order to minimize public backlash.

“The ISPs aren’t going to immediately start blocking content or rolling out paid prioritization scams. They know Congress and the public are watching them,” the group noted. “And that’s the worst part. What will happen is over time ISP scams and abuses will become more commonplace and more accepted. They’ll roll out new schemes that appear good on their face but undermine the free market of ideas by allowing ISPs to pick winners and losers.”

 

April 25, 2018 Posted by | civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Conflict of interest inn the appointment of UK’s Chair of the Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Council.

GDF Watch 22nd April 2018,  Nobody is disputing her personal abilities or competence, but the
appointment of Lorraine Baldry as the new Chair of Sellafield Limited
raises concerns about potential conflicts of interest within the geological
disposal programme.

Baldry was also recently appointed Chair of the
Radioactive Waste Management Advisory Council. The Council is an
independent group of experts who advise RWM, the GDF delivery body, on how
to best progress the geological disposal programme.

RWM is a wholly-owned subsidiary of the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) — Sellafield
Limited is also a wholly-owned subsidiary of the NDA. This means Baldry
will be advising RWM on geological disposal, while also running the company
which currently owns most of the waste destined for geological disposal and
has a very vested interest in the GDF.

Potential conflicts of interest between the NDA and RWM were raised by Minister’s own independent expert
advisors, the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management (CoRWM) in their
most recent Annual Report in January 2018.
http://www.gdfwatch.org.uk/2018/04/22/nda-appointment-a-conflict-of-interest/

April 25, 2018 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

Trump says North Korea must get rid of its nuclear weapons

 https://www.cnbc.com/2018/04/24/trump-says-north-korea-must-get-rid-of-its-nuclear-weapons.html –25 Apr 18
U.S. President Donald Trump on Tuesday said the United States would continue to put “maximum pressure” on North Korea ahead of what he hoped would be positive talks with North Korean leader Kim Jong Unthat would lead to Pyongyang’s denuclearization.

“I want them to get rid of their nukes,” Trump said at a joint news conference with French President Emmanuel Macron at the White House.

April 25, 2018 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

How artificial intelligence could start a nuclear war

Why artificial intelligence might trigger a nuclear war https://www.technologyreview.com/the-download/610996/why-artificial-intelligence-might-trigger-a-nuclear-war/

Well before Terminator robots rise and attack us, AI could help us destroy ourselves with nuclear weapons, warns a new study.

The news: A RAND Corporation report concludes that military adoption of artificial intelligence and other emerging technologies could have a destabilizing effect over the next couple of decades and lead some nation to take the nuclear option.

Details: Strategic stability provided by “mutually assured destruction” might be undermined if AI offers a new—and vastly better—way to target an adversary’s weapons systems, the report says. The findings are drawn from information collected through workshops with experts on nuclear weapons, national security, government policy, and AI.

Algorithms for peace: It isn’t all doom and gloom. The study also suggests that under some scenarios, AI could help preserve strategic stability by providing new ways of gathering and analyzing information about nuclear capabilities.

A Strangelove scenario? It is notoriously difficult to predict what AI will look like 10 or 20 years from now. That said, even current AI looks likely to have a big impact on the military. The RAND report may only heighten calls to weaponize the technology and make its development a national priority.

April 25, 2018 Posted by | 2 WORLD, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Westinghouse CEO admits that the 2000s “nuclear renaissance” was never going to happen

Westinghouse CEO opens up about collapse of 2000s ‘nuclear renaissance’,  (Mainichi Japan)  WASHINGTON — The CEO of the U.S. nuclear power firm Westinghouse Electric Co. — which used to be under the Toshiba Corp. umbrella and which filed for bankruptcy in March 2017 — has told the Mainichi Shimbun that the “nuclear renaissance” in the 2000s “was not realistic.”……..

Westinghouse Electric was acquired by Toshiba in 2006. At the time, nuclear power was gaining attention as a countermeasure to tackle global warming, with a spate of power plant construction projects emerging across the world, particularly in the U.S.

However, after a drop in demand for electricity caused by the global financial crisis triggered by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, as well as the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant disaster in 2011, demand for new nuclear power plants has plunged worldwide.

Looking back at this time, Gutierrez acknowledges that the nuclear renaissance, whereby firms would build plants, never actually happened, and says that Westinghouse Electric senior management’s bold plans to build dozens of new plants across the world was not realistic…….

April 25, 2018 Posted by | business and costs, USA | 1 Comment

How the diabolically dangerous plutonium cores killed two nuclear scientists

The Nuclear ‘Demon Core’ That Killed Two Scientists https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/demon-core-that-killed-two-scientistsAfter World War II ended, physicists kept pushing a plutonium core to its edge. BY SARAH LASKOW 
APRIL 23, 2018 

Since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the world has been in a state of readiness for nuclear combat. In this secretive domain, mistakes and mishaps are often hidden: This week we’re telling the stories of five nuclear accidents that burst into public view.
THE WAR WAS OVER—JAPAN HAD surrendered. The third plutonium core created by the United States, which scientists at Los Alamos National Lab had been preparing for another attack, was no longer needed as a weapon. For the moment, the lab’s nuclear scientists were allowed to keep the sphere, an alloy of plutonium and gallium that would become known as the demon core.

In a nuclear explosion, a bomb’s radioactive core goes critical: A nuclear chain reaction starts and continues with no additional intervention. When nuclear material goes supercritical, that reaction speeds up. American scientists knew enough about the radioactive materials they were working with to be able to set off these reactions in a bomb, but they wanted a better understanding of the edge where subcritical material tipped into the dangerous, intensely radioactive critical state.

 One way to push the core towards criticality involved turning the neutrons it shedback onto the core, to destabilize it further. The “Critical Assembly Group” at Los Alamos was working on a series of experiments in which they surrounded the core with materials that reflected neutrons and monitored the core’s state.

The first time someone died performing one of these experiments, Japan had yet to formally sign the terms of surrender. On the evening of August 21, 1945, the physicist Harry Daghlian was alone in the lab, building a shield of tungsten carbide bricks around the core. Ping-ponging neutrons back the core, the bricks had brought the plutonium close to the threshold of criticality, when Daghlian dropped a brick on top. Instantly, the core reacted, going supercritical and Daghlian was doused in a lethal dose of radiation. He died 25 days later.

His death did not dissuade his colleagues, though. Nine months later, they had developed another way to bring the core close to that critical edge, by lowering a dome of beryllium over the core. Louis Slotin, another physicist, had performed this move in many previous experiments: He would hold the dome with one hand, and with the other use a screwdriver to keep a small gap open, just barely limiting the flow of neutrons back to the bomb. On a May day in 1946, his hand slipped, and the gap closed. Again, the core went supercritical and dosed Slotin, along with seven other scientists in the room, with gamma radiation.

In each instance, when the core slipped over that threshold and started spewing radiation, a bright blue light flashed in the room—the result of highly energized particles hitting air molecules, which released that bolt of energy as streams of light.

The other scientists survived their radiation bath, but Slotin, closest to the core, died of radiation sickness nine days later. The experiments stopped. After a cooling-off period, the demon core was recast into a different weapon, eventually destroyed in a nuclear test.

April 25, 2018 Posted by | - plutonium, incidents, USA | Leave a comment

Will Trump take emergency measures to bail out 2 economically failing nuclear power stations?

As state help fades for 2 nuclear plants, will Trump attempt rescue? Lancaster Online, 24 Apr 18, AD CRABLE | Staff Writer

With two nuclear plants in Pennsylvania now inching closer to the point of no return, it appears there is little political will for a financial life preserver on the legislative level.

“A bailout, subsidy-type approach that we’ve seen in New York, Illinois, now New Jersey — I’ve not been satisfied that is politically viable here in Pennsylvania,” state Sen. Ryan Aument said last Tuesday.

Aument spoke after a hearing with beleaguered utility leaders called by the House-Senate Nuclear Energy Caucus that the Landisville Republican helped form to come to the aid of nuclear plants. He was not available for additional comment Monday.

……..Exelon has said that without federal or state help, its Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Dauphin County will close in September 2019, idling more than 600 workers.

FirstEnergy Corp, which recently filed for bankruptcy, recently announced that without relief it would close its Beaver Valley nuclear plant near Pittsburgh in 2021, as well as two nuclear plants in Ohio.

……. Appeals to feds

FirstEnergy Corp. has taken the drastic step of asking the U.S. Department of Energy to declare an energy emergency to ensure profits for nuclear and coal plants.

DOE has indicated it is cool to such a move.

In January, the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission rejected a DOE proposal to approve rules to subsidize nuclear and coal plants to keep the nation’s power supply “reliable and resilient.”

But the Trump administration reportedly is considering a new initiative to make good on the president’s campaign pledge to protect the coal and nuclear power industries.

Bloomberg is reporting that President Trump is considering coming to the aid of struggling coal and nuclear by invoking a Cold War-era federal law that gives a president sweeping authority to nationalize the energy sector to make sure it is available in times of war or after a disaster.

The Defense Production Act was passed under the Truman administration and was used then to cap wages and impose price controls on the steel industry.

The White House Press Office did not respond to a request for comment.

At the Nuclear Caucus hearing in Harrisburg last week, representatives from Exelon, FirstEnergy and Talen Energy said that the federal government is not likely to act in time to save the nuclear plants, and they appealed for Pennsylvania legislators to act as several other states have.

“Help is not coming from Washington,” said Kathleen Barron, Exelon’s senior vice president of federal regulatory affairs and policy…….https://lancasteronline.com/news/local/as-state-help-fades-for-nuclear-plants-will-trump-attempt/article_5119d0a2-472d-11e8-a65d-0730d4760e55.html

April 25, 2018 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

In the 1950s, military accidents meant that nuclear warheads went missing.

When the U.S. Kept Losing Nuclear Bombs https://www.atlasobscura.com/articles/has-america-ever-lost-nuclear-bombs  In the 1950s, military accidents meant that nuclear warheads went missing, BY SARAH LASKOW ,APRIL 24, 2018

Since the United States dropped two atomic bombs on Japan, the world has been in a state of readiness for nuclear combat. In this secretive domain, mistakes and mishaps are often hidden: This week we’re telling the stories of five nuclear accidents that burst into public view.
THERE ARE OBJECTS THAT WILL inevitably get lost: socks, hats, cheap headphones, attachments to households appliances. But some things you try harder to keep hold of: your wallet, your keys, America’s nuclear warheads.

It doesn’t always work out.

 In 1956, for instance, a B-47 bomber was flying from Florida to an overseas base, with two nuclear cores on board. After meeting up with another plane to refuel, it disappeared. The U.S. military never found any trace of the plane, its crew, or the nuclear materials.

When the military does lose nuclear weapons, it’s rare that their location is so mysterious. More often, planes have jettisoned weapons during in-flight emergencies, for the safety of the crew, and the high explosives built into the bombs have gone off. (Conventional explosives set off a bomb’s nuclear reaction; in early designs, the radioactive cores of nuclear bombs were often kept separate, as a safety measure.) But on occasion the weapons do disappear.

Two years after the bomber went missing over the ocean, another B-47 was flying a simulated combat mission on the coast of Georgia, when a fighter plane collided with it. Both planes were damaged; the fighter pilot bailed out of his plane and landed in a nearby swamp. Before landing their busted plane, the crew of the B-47 dropped the nuclear weapon they were carrying into the water.

There was no explosion. But when the military searched the three-mile area around where the bomb was thought to land, they could find no trace of it. It’s thought that the weapon dove through about 15 or 20 feet of water and landed, nose-first, in the sandy bottom of the Wassaw Sound, near Georgia’s Tybee Island, a popular vacation spot.

It’s presumed to be there still, buried in the silt and sand. While a Congressional document from the 1960s indicates that the lost weapon had its plutonium core with it, the military says that it’s only a partial weapon. Even in that case, though, the lost warhead contains radioactive material: By the late 1950s, some weapons included a “secondary stage” of highly enriched uranium, meant to be set off by the initial reaction in the bomb’s core. The amount of uranium in this type of bomb isn’t publicly known.

Early in the 2000s, in response to local interest and Congressional prodding, a group of military agencies looked again for the bomb’s remains and considered what to do if they found it. The conclusion: Best to leave it in place. Unmoved, it should remain harmless; an attempt to remove it would put the clean-up crew in danger. If it did happen to go off by accident, “Even boats going over it would not even notice. They might see some bubbles coming out around them,” an Air Force representation told the Los Angeles Times.

April 25, 2018 Posted by | incidents, USA | Leave a comment

UK government struggles to get community consent for nuclear waste dumping

GDF Watch 20th April 2018  Ministers have been told to drop their Local Authority ‘veto’ idea, and to focus on doing more to build community confidence and trust. That is the headline conclusion from a review of responses to the Working With Communities (WWC) consultation that have already been published. Although not a statistically representative sample of the responses submitted, the opinions come from all corners of society.

All the expert and public evidence received during the policy development phase said that giving any tier of local government a ‘veto’ over the process would undermine the policy and any concept of ‘community consent’.

Despite that near unanimous opinion, Ministers still decided to include proposals that would give local authorities the power to block the will of the community. There has been a consistent and broad-based push back to those proposals in the published consultation responses. GDFWatch believes a veto power would make a mockery of the Government’s own consent-based policy and mean the siting process would be DOA [dead on arrival]. Community and place-based organisations, while fully recognising the integral role of local authorities, were equally
critical of the proposal
http://www.gdfwatch.org.uk/2018/04/20/consultations-closed-what-now-summary-of-responses/

April 25, 2018 Posted by | general | Leave a comment

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