This week in nuclear news

A bit of good news. At the close of COP27 Summit, some progress on climate justice.

Coronavirus. Radio Ecoshock, (mentioned just below) gives a good update on the current situation.

Coronavirus. Radio Ecoshock, (mentioned just below) gives a good update on the current situation

Climate. I hope that many readers/listeners have discovered Alex Smith’s Radio Ecoshock. The latest edition gives a good wrap-up on the COP27 Climate Summit. And Alex reminds us that “Paralyzed by fear of freezing or economic collapse, there is no mass movement calling for an end to fossil fuels“. ………and ” politicians cannot go too far ahead of willingness by citizens.”

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CLIMATE. Nuclear Power Is Not the Answer. “Everywhere you look at Egypt’s COP27 you can see and hear the influence of the fossil fuel industry” – Greenpeace. ‘On The Highway To Climate Hell’ – The Climate Crisis, Activism And Broken Politics.

CIVIL LIBERTIES. Moscow accuses Ukrainian soldiers of killing POWs . Russia investigates alleged footage of Ukrainian troops torturing POWs

ECONOMICS. New Westinghouse nuclear deal faces old skepticism: Can it deliver on time and on budget? France’s EDF, Credit Agricole sign 1 bln euro nuclear loan. Even with billions of dollars in tax credits, costs skyrocket at U.S. Small Modular Reactor Project. UK’s Sizewell nuclear project remains unfinanced. Marketing: USA desperate to sell NuScam’s small nuclear reactors – its latest targeted buyer is Thailand.

ENERGY. As Europe Quits Russian Gas, Half of France’s Nuclear Plants Are Off-Line. Putin’s nuclear grip on Europe could spark another energy crisis, expert warns. TIDAL power extinguishes the arguments for new nuclear plants in Suffolk.

ENVIRONMENT. DOE awards millions to restart nuclear operations in southern Ohio as contamination concerns continue.

HISTORY. Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ? Fallout from a nuclear past: New book explores human toll of ‘nuclear colonization’ in New Mexico.

MEDIA. Musk’s Money Is Playing Old Games With New Media. With Kiev exposed for a lie that could have triggered a third world war, it is time to examine past deceptions that Western media promoted.

NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY. Small nuclear reactors: USA, Japan, South Korea and a whole heap of companies join in the gamble of NuScam’s small nuclear reactors for Ukraine. So-Called Next-Generation Nuclear Power Plants Are Being Oversold. Strange Rolls Royce plan for Large complex of Large Small Nuclear Reactors for Bradwell. The fading promise of low-cost power from UAMPS’ Small Modular Reactors – Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis. USA using COP27 to co-opt Europe , especially Ukraine, into the small nuclear reactor gamble.

Japan’s new nuclear energy policy- is it really feasible? Nuclear fusion discovery uncovers strange behaviour of limitless energy source.

OPPOSITION TO NUCLEAR. Austria digs in anti-nuclear heels as neighbours build out.

POLITICS.

U.S. nuclear plants expect government decision on credits by year-end. U.S. rejects funding to re-open Michigan nuclear plant -Holtec.
Sizewell C nuclear plant in Suffolk to go ahead, Chancellor Jeremy Hunt confirms. Nuclear Free Local Authorities welcome energy efficiency plans, but deplore costly Sizewell C nuclear build at the public’s expense.
Finland refutes nuclear weapons ‘siting’ and reinforces border.
Nuclear is unsafe, unreliable and will leave long and toxic legacy.

POLITICS INTERNATIONAL and DIPLOMACY.

Biden, Xi ‘Agreed’ Nuclear Weapons Should Never Be Used. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XsAfxQAZNw Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance – a leader for action on the Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AbnsoFftLwc US nuclear strategy gravely threatens global security.
US and Western officials considering diplomacy as winter looms and Ukraine war cost may rise to $60 billion. NATO needs enemies to justify its existence – Russia. Russia and US hold secret talks in Ankara – Kommersant. Urging peace with Russia, top US general challenges DC’s proxy war. Biden and CIA Director Burns in Double Act to Split Putin and Xi.
Australia’s reassessment of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. US big defense and Australia’s nuclear crossroads. Albanese must use Xi meeting to return us to the Howard-Abbott golden age of Australia-China relations (this from Murdoch’s Sky News !!!)
Japan’s changing nuclear energy policy.

SAFETY. Shelling of Zaporizhzhia is playing with fire, says UN nuclear chief, as blasts reported. Reactors at Ukrainian nuclear power plants shut down after Russian strikes. Shutdown of Ukraine’s Khmelnytskyy Nuclear Power Plant due to military attacks in the region .

SECRETS and LIES. USA Views Ukrainians And Russians As Lab Rats For Weapons Testing. Blowback: Italian police bust Azov-tied Nazi cell planning terror attacks. NATO Diplomat HITS BACK At Zelensky After He INSISTS Ukraine Did Not Send Deadly Missile: Report – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GjHEi3b28bY

WASTES. What’s happening with the radioactive waste facility in South Australia? Radiation Free Lakeland slams the hypocrisy surrounding “Ethics Committee”s approval of seismic blasting that kills marine life, in the plan for undersea dumping of nuclear wastes.

WAR and CONFLICT. Poland missile incident is step towards World War III – Medvedev. Missile fired at NATO member Poland came from Ukraine, US officials say. Did the “stray missiles” to Poland come from Russian or from Ukrainian military? NATO’s hair trigger: The Polish missile incident was a close brush with nuclear annihilation.Biden’s Nuclear Policy Fails the Ukraine Test. Top US general warns of reality on the ground in Ukraine. Top Zelensky advisor threatens war with Iran. NATO pushes to consolidate control of Black Sea —Videos from Finland: U.S. troops rehearse for war on Russian border —N Korea warns of ‘all-out’ nuclear response to US ‘aggression’

WEAPONS and WEAPONS SALES PERVERSE PRIORITIES UK : CUT PUBLIC SPENDING, KEEP NUCLEAR ARMS AND WARPLANES. Pink Floyd legend Roger Waters blames US profiteers for Ukraine conflict.

November 21, 2022 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Christina's notes

2 Comments »

What do we have to look forward to in the usa? A rightwing, conservative, coot who calls himself a liberal. Biden is bankrupting the country to fight proxy a war. A proxy war that is close to ww3. Biden has paved the way for racist-fascist, devil Trump, to run again. Biden has paved the way, so trumps, vicious, extremist, racist killer goons, can go after, the rest of us. Then the far right, racist, extremists of Trump, will start ww3 as they totally destroy what is left of the climate and environment. Bleak future.

https://rall.com/comic/blame-the-progressives

I went out and handed out water and food, to hundreds of homeless people in my city. It was so sad, to think that fascist bastards like the Canadian popular front and trump, think that these people are homeless because it is their own fault and, that they deserve to be homeless or rounded up and jailed or exterminated. That’s what Trump AND billionaire musk are saying. This is is with 1000 dollar a month rent , that few can afford. With crushing medical debt in this phoney , dog eat dog country.
The right wing militarist Biden, who is pretty racist, and just short of being a full-blown fascist, shovels money to more cops, as Trump did and will, when he becomes president for life. When Trump declares martial law from his white house bunker and starts the cleansing.. Biden shovels Billions to neo-nazi, Corrupt demons in Ukraine while tens of millions suffer in this awful country

Comment by Carol Sillman | November 22, 2022 | Reply
Glenn Greenwad Fox News Darling
SEPTEMBER 24, 2021
Paul S

What’s so great about being disingenuous and indirect? I think its creepy and snotty. Political writing is best done in an honest and forthright fashion, not through oblique flippancy. (A good editor might have flagged the facetiousness. But there are no editors at his current reader-supported venue Substack, to which Greenwald has been consigned ever since he told The Intercept he was too good to be edited – this in regard to a piece that tried to advance Trump campaign propaganda against Joe Biden on the eve of the 2020 presidential electiop.

There are Greenwald’s snotty and racist shots at the George Floyd Rebellion and at caring about old people’s (“Grandma’s”) pandemic protection; the continuation of his ongoing GOP-friendly double standard on contemporary politics by ripping Democratic elites’ hypocrisy on masks while saying nothing about the GOP madness on masks and vaccines (madness he has sadly aligned himself with); his suggestion that servants are oppressed by wearing masks during a pandemic. (Most of the people serving hors d’oeuvre and cocktails at festive liberal bourgeois-democratic gatherings – and at Republican neofascist ones too by the way – probably want to be masked for some very good health reasons: they have more random and up-close face-to-face interactions with others – and far less control of their personal space – than do the celebrated partygoers at these events. They also have much less access to quality health care after contracting Covid-19.) Covid masks are not tools of worker oppression, comrades.

The horrific Covid-friendly policies executed by Greenwald’s preferred capitalist party-in-power (the aforementioned REPUBLICAN Party of Trump

This is by far the most relevant point here, the correspondents who tell me that Greenwald and progressives, like myself are “on the same side” are way off base. For years now, the sly fascism-denier Greenwald has creepily thrown in with the white nationalist right. He downplays the seriousness of the fascist-putschist Capitol Riot of January 6, 2021. He defends Trump and other Amerikaner neofascists against the “censorship” of their supposed free speech right to spew sexist, nativist, and white power hatred on Twitter and Facebook but has little if anything to say about how numerous red states have definitely attacked free speech in viciously racist ways by banning honest public-school discussion of American white systemic racism past and present. He accuses 2020 George Floyd social justice and anti-police protesters of wanton violence but defends the fascist January 6th insurrectionists against government repression. He recklessly rage-tweets against anti-racist “wokeness,” Greenwald has joined the white nationalist right in warning against “endless hordes of people pour[ing] over the [US] border,” opining that “a nation cannot survive if its population lacks any common foundation” and is “characterized by scattered allegiances.” He derides the elementary observation that such nativist sentiments are “racist” as childish name-calling.

He said earlier this year that the virulent fascists Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, and the “2016 iteration of Donald Trump” are “socialists” – a thoroughly bizarre characterization. I’m not making this up (you can’t make something like that up). In an interview he gave to the far-right journal The Daily Caller last March, Greenwald announced that he saw Bannon, Carlson, the Trump of 2016, and numerous other far-right white nationalists as the real socialists, unlike progressive Democrats who were “about nothing more than trying to sandpaper the edges off neoliberalism”: “I would describe a lot of people on the right as being socialist. I would consider Steve Bannon to be socialist. I would consider the 2016 iteration of Donald Trump the candidate to be a socialist, based on what he was saying. I would consider Tucker Carlson to be a SOCIALIST(AS THEY ALL TALK ABOUT HOW THEY WANT TO ROUND ALL DEMOCRATS AND LIBERALS UP AND PUT THEM IN CONCENTRATION CAMPS BECAUSE THEY ARE COMUNISTS AND SOCIALISTS)

My next book, This Happened Here: Amerikaners, Neoliberals, and the Trumping of America, includes a chapter sub-section that goes through much of what Trump said and did in 2016 (and before and after). It shows beyond the sliver of a shadow of any reasonable doubt that the future 45th President of the United States’ 2016 actions and statements had nothing to do with socialism (for God’s sake) and everything to do with a perverse, mutually reinforcing mix of malignant narcissism, fake populism, and white nationalist neofascism.

“Socialism?” Only perhaps if we mean the National Socialism of the Nazi Third Reich, many of whose early techniques and narratives “the most dangerous criminal in human history” (Noam Chomsky’s accurate characterization of Trump in early 2020) and his team would deploy during the orange beast’s criminal presidency. As the liberal commentator Jonathan Chait had the surprising decency to point out in 275 dead-on words last March:

…Carlson, Bannon, and Trump fail any sane definition of socialism. There is still an insane definition, favored in parts of the right, which claims that Adolph Hitler was actually a socialist. By this definition, the political spectrum is a simple line, with one pole being laissez-faire capitalism as articulated by the American right and the other being any form of “big government.” Since fascism employs a great deal of government power and sometimes even uses the term socialist in its self-definition, fascism is actually on the left.

This was always a ridiculous way to understand fascism. It has become more obviously ridiculous over the past five years, which have brought actual, self-identified Nazis into a broad coalition with laissez-faire conservatives. (There’s a reason the Nazis called their 2017 Charlottesville torchlight rally “Unite the Right,” not “Unite the Left.” It’s because they’re on the political right.) …But yes, if you consider demagogic attacks on immigrants and the “transnational, global, corporatist elite” combined with substance-free promises to “take better care of our own working class” to be “socialism,” then you can describe Carlson’s brand of demagogic hate-mongering as socialist. In place of a redistribution of wealth, it offers working-class people the chance to direct their resentment at cosmopolitan elites [tugs collar nervously] and various brown-skinned people.

Greenwald has successfully completed his orbit around the political spectrum. He now finds himself hailing the bona fides of a wealthy heir who uses racial resentment to redirect the white working-class away from material concerns. It’s a (National Socialist German) workers’ party now.

Bulls-eye! Greenwald has appeared dozens of times on his “misunderstood” friend Carlson’s despicable Fatherland News show (likely accounting for the lions’ share of his 72 appearances on Fox News between December of 2017 and June of 2021) and the leading forum of white nationalist hate and neofascist propaganda in the United States today. He provides cover for the fascist frozen food fortune heir Carlson (who recently spent a week broadcasting from neofascist Hungary), backing “Tuckems’” bogus claim to be the victim of liberal surveillance by the National Security Agency. He lends deceptive credibility to the “tv dinner princeling’s” claim to be open-minded and tolerant of PROGRESSIVES, by habitually going on the show as a supposed portside commentator. Writing about Greenwald’s regular presence on the Tucker Carlson Hate Hour, The New Republic’s Jacob Silverman put things very well last July:

‘If Greenwald were a more honest broker, he would denounce Fox News as fiercely as he does CNN and MSNBC. In the world of 24/7 infotainment, there are no redeemable cable news networks, but Fox’s list of sins is long. Carlson peddles vile anti-immigrant rhetoric (as Greenwald did, early in his blogging career) and has expressed support for replacement theory, in which, according to its adherents, the white population of this country is threatened. Carlson is also less than reliable. Last year, in defending their star personality in a slander case, Fox News’s lawyers said that he should not be taken seriously. Instead, they claimed, Carlson is “engaging in ‘exaggeration’ and ‘non-literal commentary.’” Tucker Carlson Tonight, which until last year employed a writer who posted floridly racist comments on internet forums, traffics in conspiracy and unsourced rumormongering: Just last week, speaking above a chyron that warned of “Anti-White Mania,” Carlson suggested that white Americans might go the way of Rwandan Tutsis, who were massacred in a genocide. Between these segments on threats to white Americans and the perils of immigration caravans appears one of the most laureled and famous journalists of recent years… a once-great journalist has dispensed with investigatory skepticism, turning himself into an unquestioning collaborator for a network as hateful and propagandistic as anything on the air. Extending every measure of good faith to Fox’s clownish right-wing personalities, Greenwald is just as ruthless and unforgiving with his enemies, who now seem to be everywhere. Promising that he’s tolerant of genuine critique, he brooks none. With 1.6 million Twitter followers and tens of thousands of Substack subscribers, he can afford to live in his own bubble.

POLITICAL SCIENTIST DIMAGGIO ON GREENWALD

Some of Greenwald’s right-wing giveaways:

+1. Going on Fox News and giving credence to Tucker Carlson and using it as a platform to attack Dems, while refusing to say a single critical word about Republicans. It’s hard to see how people can be so intentionally thick as to miss that he is only invited on because he’s attacking Dems. The second he goes after the Republicans, he’s done there.

+2. Absurdly attacking the “big tech” companies for supposedly being left-wing totalitarian censors. This ignores the reality that they have served as hardcore platforms for the worst kind of rightwing conspiracy theorizing for years, under Trump and beyond. They’ve been a vehicle for turning US politics into a rightwing conspiratorial sewer.

+3. Attacking the Democrats as fascist and Orwellian while denying that white supremacy and fascism is a real thing on the American right. This is just monstrous and deplorable, but, hey, he made his bones defending Nazis, so that’s what he does.

He’s on my side? Really? I don’t ally with white supremacists, the GOP, Nazis, and carry water for a fascist-denying, climate-denying, arch-plutocratic GOP. His opposition to NSA spying was almost 10 years ago. He can’t sit on his laurels forever. His appeal to the PROGRESSIVES, has to be about more than that. If that’s it, plus all the normalizing of rightwing neofascist politics he’s been doing, it’s a sad state of affairs. And now he’s channeling GOP talking points with all the [anti-] mask stuff and [ripping on] AOC. He talks shit about her and not wearing masks at a gala, but says nothing about pandemofascists like Greg Abbot, Ron DeSantis, and Trump. You can’t do that and be taken seriously on the left, or what passes for it.

Where is GG’s attack on the GOP for the anti-CRT Orwellian spying on teachers in the classroom stuff? He has literally ZERO, ZERO to say that is critical of the GOP. All he does is attack Dems. Because that’s what Fox wants. That makes him a Republican. “Glenn Greenwald is a Republican Because FOX News Signs for His Checks.” That’s your headline right there.

Greenwald broke into the public eye – as lawyer for Illinois Nazi leader Matt Hale.

Maybe “GG” is just circling back to his beginnings. I have recently and belatedly learned that Greenwald initially supported the US invasion of Iraq because, as he explained in his 2006 book How Would a Patriot Act?, “I wanted the president [the maniacal messianic militarist George W. Bush!] to succeed, because my loyalty is to my country, and because I accepted his judgment that American security would be enhanced by the invasion of this sovereign country.” Yikes. Greenwald was the 36-year-old 1994 graduate of an elite law school in March of 2003 when the monstrous war criminal Dubya ordered the transparently criminal, Orwellian, and mass-murderous assault on Mesopotamia. Millions of US Americans marched against this illegal and imperialist war even before it was launched.

Speaking of my inbox, since I clicked on Greenwald’s Substack page, I am now getting emails advertising his latest essays. A message today (Wednesday, September 22nd) says that he’s found “new proof of the Biden family e-mails” and of how the liberal media collaborated with the CIA and Big Tech to steal the 2020 election from that 2016 Donald Trump. When he’s not worrying about how face masks and vaccine mandates oppress the proletariat, Greenwald is all into rightwing conspiracy crap.

And no, me shaking my head in disbelief at Greenwald’s obscene service to the neofascist TRUMP , does not make me a fake progressive apologist for the doddering corporate imperialist Joe Biden, who I have relentlessly criticized for the last three years.

Okay, that’s enough. If the last remaining progressive Greenwald defenders and fans want to bust me out for not properly acknowledging the (snotty and ill-advised) facetiousness of Greenwald’s attack on the AOC and her fans, fine, but for God’s sake please don’t tell me in 2021 that he’s still a progressive if he ever really was. He’s a contrarian grifter turned neo-Kapo fascism bootlicker facetiously snarking all the way to the bank in his ever more bizarre Internet bubble.

Comment by Terence Hogard | November 22, 2022 | Reply