US military flights through Shannon would be ‘illegal’ under new anti-nuclear treaty
‘Doomsday Clock now stands at two minutes to midnight,’ Irish CND president says, Irish Times, Elaine Edwards
It would be illegal for most American military flights to pass through Shannon airport under a new international nuclear weapons treaty which the Government is committed to ratifying, the president of the Irish Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) has said.
Rev Prof Patrick Comerford was speaking at a commemoration ceremony in Dublin to mark the 73rd anniversary of the atomic bombing of the Japanese city of Hiroshima during the second World War………
Legislation to ratify it and give effect to its provisions is being prepared by the Department of Foreign Affairs. …..
Prof Comerford said Ireland was today once again at the forefront, promoting the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or the Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty.
The treaty was passed on July 7th last year and in order to come into effect, it needs the signature and ratification of at least 50 countries…….
Despite opposition from Nato member states to the treaty, Ireland was one of the strongest proponents of the new treaty during last year’s negotiations,” Prof Comerford said.
“The Government is committed to early ratification, and, despite Brexit consuming so much of the department’s time and resources, negatively, I hope in a very positive way this treaty can be ratified by Ireland before the end of the year.”
He said that once it entered into force, there would be “a clear international prohibition on acquiring, stockpiling and sharing nuclear weapons”, which had been a major short-falling in the earlier treaty.
Bulletin of Atomic Scientists 3rd Aug 2018 , When a Superman-shaped drone crashed into a French nuclear plant on July 3
of this year, officials were lucky it was just Greenpeace demonstrating
vulnerabilities at the facility, and not a terrorist group intent on
attacking the site.
This incident highlights why the 2010 Nuclear Posture
Review’s assessment that nuclear terrorism is “today’s most immediate
and extreme danger” remains relevant: It underscores the importance of
the sustained and persistent six-year effort from 2010 to 2016 to reduce
the threat posed by nuclear terrorism, far from the headline nuclear issues
of Iran, North Korea, and arms control with Russia. https://thebulletin.org/2018/08/why-countries-still-must-prioritize-action-to-curb-nuclear-terrorism/
Fusion start-ups hope to revolutionize energy in the coming decades With the help of venture capital funding and new technologies, a cadre of companies want to commercialize fusion energy in the next 20 years, Science News, by Katherine Bourzac, AUGUST 6, 2018 | APPEARED IN VOLUME 96, ISSUE 32
“……..A multinational, multi-billion-dollar, multidecade project calledITERpromises to demonstrate net energy production from nuclear fusion after its reactor turns on in 2025. (Itermeans “the way” in Latin; the project was originally called the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor.) But the ITER design is not scalable—it’s far too large and expensive to serve as a power plant on the electrical grid. Instead, it’s designed to give partner countries the research tools they need to start building practical fusion reactors sometime in 2055 at the earliest.
That’s far too late, some researchers say, especially in the face of climate change. “We need fusion energy to be deployable at a scale of tens of gigawatts at many power plants in the 2030s to tackle carbon emissions,” says David Kingham, executive vice chair of Tokamak Energy, a fusion start-up in Oxfordshire, England.
This dream of clean, abundant energy from nuclear fusion has been echoing in basement labs like the one at MIT since the 1950s. But since that time, no one has yet shown that a fusion reactor can produce more energy than it consumes—let alone run stably for years or decades………
fusion entrepreneurs and the deep-pocketed investors who are sponsoring them are seeing green. “Fusion has been undervalued by governments. It’s long term. It’s speculative. But the upside is huge,” Greenwald, the deputy director of the MIT center and a cofounder of Commonwealth Fusion Systems, says. “There’s trillions of dollars to be made. There’s trillions of watts of additional demand coming,” says Michl Binderbauer, CEO of TAE Technologies in Foothill Ranch, Calif.
Still, there are skeptics who think these start-up companies’ promises are unreasonable—at least on the aggressive time frames they’re promising. And some of the companies, skeptics say, are working on designs that physicists have deemed not ready for the grid anytime soon, while neglecting practical issues such as how to build reactors resilient enough to withstand the intense heat produced during fusion……..
“The GSENM area has been inhabited by man for more than 13,000 years. Projectile points (“arrowheads”), other tools, pottery shards, rock art, camp sites, and residential Ancestral Puebloan sites such as pit houses can be found across the landscape. These artifacts are extremely important to the Native Americans who still live here today and view […]
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