As international tensions rise to a new level, with the Ukraine war passing its first anniversary and the Albanese Government set to announce its commitment of hundreds of billions of dollars to new weaponry, nuclear propelled subs, Stealth bombers etc, The Road to War brings into sharp focus why it is not in Australia’s best interests to be dragged into an American-led war with China.]]
The Road to War is directed by one of Australia’s most respected political documentary filmmakers, David Bradbury. Bradbury has more than four decades of journalistic and filmmaking experience behind him having covered many of the world’s trouble spots since the end of the Vietnam war — SE Asia, Iraq, East Timor, revolutions and civil war in Central and South America, India, China, Nepal, West Papua.
“I was driven to make this film because of the urgency of the situation. I fear we will be sucked into a nuclear war with China and/or Russia from which we will never recover, were some of us to survive the first salvo of nuclear warheads,” says the twice Oscar-nominated filmmaker.
We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from Climate Change,” says Bradbury.
There is general concern among the Defence analysts Bradbury interviews in the film that Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China. And that neither the Labor nor LNP governments have learnt anything from being dragged into America’s wars of folly since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, two disastrous wars in Iraq and America’s failed 20 year war in Afghanistan which ripped that country apart, only to see the Taliban warlords return the country and its female population to feudal times.
We must put a hard brake on Australia joining in the current arms race as the international situation deteriorates. We owe it to our children and future generations of Australians who already face the gravest existential danger of their young lives from Climate Change,” says Bradbury.
There is general concern among the Defence analysts Bradbury interviews in the film that Australia is being set up to be the US proxy in its coming war with China. And that neither the Labor nor LNP governments have learnt anything from being dragged into America’s wars of folly since World War II — Korea, Vietnam, two disastrous wars in Iraq and America’s failed 20 year war in Afghanistan which ripped that country apart, only to see the Taliban warlords return the country and its female population to feudal times.
“Basing US B52 and Stealth bombers in Australia is all part of preparing Australia to be the protagonist on behalf of the United States in a war against China. If the US can’t get Taiwan to be the proxy or its patsy, it will be Australia,” says former Australian ambassador to China and Iran, John Lander.
Military analyst, Dr Richard Tanter, fears the US military’s spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, will be the first target of any direct confrontation between the US and Russia or China.
“The US military base at Pine Gap is critical to the US military’s global strategy, especially nuclear missile threats in the region. The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear Hit List,” says Dr Tanter whose 40 years of ground-breaking research on Pine Gap with colleague, Dr Des Ball, has provided us with the clearest insight to the unique role Pine Gap plays for the US. Everything from programming US drone attacks to detecting the first critical seconds of nuclear ICBM’s lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia, to directing crippling nuclear retaliation on its enemy.
Military analyst, Dr Richard Tanter, fears the US military’s spy base at Pine Gap near Alice Springs, will be the first target of any direct confrontation between the US and Russia or China.
“The US military base at Pine Gap is critical to the US military’s global strategy, especially nuclear missile threats in the region. The generals in Moscow and Beijing would have it as a top priority on their nuclear Hit List,” says Dr Tanter whose 40 years of ground-breaking research on Pine Gap with colleague, Dr Des Ball, has provided us with the clearest insight to the unique role Pine Gap plays for the US. Everything from programming US drone attacks to detecting the first critical seconds of nuclear ICBM’s lifting off from their deep underground silos in China or Russia, to directing crippling nuclear retaliation on its enemy.
“Should Russia or China want to send a signal to Washington that it means business and ‘don’t push us any further’, a one-off nuclear strike on Pine Gap would do that very effectively, without triggering retaliation from the US since it doesn’t take out a US mainland installation or city,” says Dr Tanter.
“It’s horrible to talk about part of Australia in these terms but one has to be a realist with what comes to us by aligning ourselves with the US,” Tanter says.
“Studies show in the event of even a very limited nuclear exchange between any of the nuclear powers, up to two billion people would starve to death from nuclear winter,” says Dr Sue Wareham of the Medical Association for the Prevention of War.
“The Australian Government, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and Defense Minister Richard Marles, have a serious responsibility to look after all Australians. Not just those living in cities. Were Pine Gap to be hit with even one nuclear missile, Health Minister Mark Butler would be hard pressed to find any volunteer nurses and doctors willing to risk their lives to help survivors in Alice Springs, Darwin and surrounding communities from even one nuclear missile hitting this critical US target,” says Dr Wareham.
The Road to War. Latest Film by David Bradbury
Premiere in Melbourne March 22 at the Carlton Nova cinema
Hobart screening State Cinema March 23 with special guest Bob Brown
Adelaide screening Capri cinema March 29
Further information or interviews with David Bradbury:
In his farewell address, Dwight D. Eisenhower warned of the “military-industrial-congressional complex” where one hand fed the other in a vicious cycle of self-aggrandizement at public expense. Of the expenses paid since 1960, none has been dearer than the habitable climate of Earth.
………………………………………………………………………. Direct Air Capture, Small Modular Reactors, and Fusion Energy — all are pwnings of solar by the National Laboratories, set in motion by Edward Teller.
National Labs make some sense if you are trying to solve some gargantuan problem that humanity faces — it would be good to have one for climate change, for instance — but today they mainly exist to keep engineers and physicists fully employed.
It is easy for the labs to lobby their funders, ultimately taxpayers, for ungodly sums for national security reasons, to prevent a brain drain, to advance basic science — even if the work being proposed is not only useless but mindlessly destructive, as long as it costs a lot and employs millions of little Edward Tellers. It will be good for the economy and will advance the cause of democracy, right?
History Rhymes
Edward Teller is commonly thought of as the “father of the hydrogen bomb” although he did not like the sobriquet. Born in Hungary in 1908, Teller came to the United States in the 1930s as one of the many so-called “Martians”, physicists being rescued from Europe to join what would become the Manhattan Project that developed the first atomic bomb. After the war, having successfully pwned his rival, Robert Oppenheimer, as a pinko, Teller co-founded the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, and was its director for many years. He was author of the Red Scare, the Cold War expansion of nuclear arsenals, the Reagan “Star Wars” Strategic Defense Initiative, posthumously the Trump Space Force, and some hare-brained plans that thankfully never came to fruition, such as nuclear-powered airplanes and a plan to excavate an artificial harbor in Alaska using H-bombs.
In a recent Pugwash podcast, Professor Frank von Hippel, Co-Director of the Science and Global Security program at Princeton, explained how Teller was so masterful at pwning presidents and secretaries of Energy and Defense. In the 1990’s, von Hippel was an advisor to President Clinton, and later Obama. In the ’80s, he advised Gorbachev on how to wind down the Soviet nuclear threat. He reveals that Reagan and Gorbachev had agreed, mano a mano at the Reykjavik summit, to eliminate nuclear weapons from the face of the Earth only to have Reagan backpedal when the weapons labs balked. Reagan was pwned. Von Hippel tells how it later went during the Clinton years:
… the emphasis has been on energy but the research really was done for nuclear weapons design purposes … and the issue was a Nuclear Weapons Test Ban and where the weapons lab directors were insisting that they needed to do 15 more tests… there were reasons of safety or reliability that required them.
And the labs presented the tests that they wanted to do in this meeting that was called by the Secretary of Energy [Hazel Henderson] and I was not convinced so I brought along a retired weapons designer who was also not convinced. And it turns out the Secretary of Energy wasn’t convinced either.
And one of them [the directors] said, well if you would give us as much money for not testing as you’ve been giving us for testing we might be able to see it your way. And so that was the beginning of the science-based stockpile stewardship program and it was basically the budgets — some billions of dollars a year — that were offered to the weapons labs basically to do what they wanted.
This month’s issue of Wired magazine gushes over one outcome:
In December 2022 — a solid century since physicists first identified fusion as the source of star power — American scientists at the National Ignition Facility in Livermore, California, where ignition is a way of life, had a breakthrough – [much touted laser fusion experiment]…………………………………
……………………………………. they’ve been trying to ignite these little pellets for decades now and they finally got to the point where [for 80 nanoseconds] they got as much energy out of of the pellet from fusion energy as they put into it from laser energy and that was a breakthrough.
To get to a power plant is an enormous, enormous extrapolation. You’d have to do this many times a second — hundreds of times a second. You’d have to have affordable lasers that would do this repeatedly many hundreds of times a second and in the end, whether that would compete with other sources of energy is a stretch. Even a very simple nuclear power plant can’t compete with solar and wind power anymore, so whether this extravagant contraption could is extremely unlikely.
I watched the press conference where US Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm [above] took to the stage and announced this world-changing breakthrough with visions of unlimited energy that would have no climate consequences. I could barely fathom how people could be so gullible as to believe it. Even when one of the lab directors got up and said that the breakthrough would really help their weapons research, apparently no-one saw through the ruse. Astonishing.
Wired’s head exploded in technocornucopian orgasm:
Fusion will, of course, rescue the environment and decarbonize planet Earth in a cool afternoon.………………………..
That 80-nanosecond burst was estimated to have cost $3.5 billion, which is likely an underestimate. It resulted in nuclear waste — principally tritium, which will linger for some 240 years as a lethal isotope. Gordon Edwards, President of Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, replied to von Hippel that:
I think we have been we have been manipulated and a lot of people fell for it because you don’t think that the Secretary of Energy is going to go on public airwaves and simply give a false account of what actually happened. And that’s what we’re seeing. I think that the the scramble for money for fusion research, and even for fission research in terms of small modular reactors, is impelling people to misrepresent their product as a way of of getting governments to invest in it and the public to support it.
………………………………………………………. Rather than disguising a fundamentally military project like the Lawrence Lawrence Livermore Lab experiment as a peaceful energy thing when in fact it’s a military maintenance project, we have to restart the debate over nuclear weapons policy.
And thus we all drift, pwned like Granholm, stocked to the gills with horrific weaponry and new threats to unleash it out of MRGA (Make Russia Great Again) rage. Every new reactor built is both a bomb component factory and a wartime target. It makes plutonium. We gave up a critical 50 years chasing the peaceful atom myth — unlimited energy that’s safe, clean, too cheap to meter — when we could have had cheap, safe, clean renewable energy with no explosive potential and a tamer climate all that time. Maybe it is time we stop listening to Edward Teller’s ghost and listened to Justin Trudeau’s dad, Maybe it’s time we did something different for a change. https://medium.com/the-shadow/jennifer-granholm-was-pwned-301c2a3c657a
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán has said in a fresh interview with Swiss weekly Weltwoche that his country’s leadership is “strong enough to keep the war away from our country” while also stressing that Washington has become prime the decision-maker over the conflict in Ukraine.
He further addressed the proxy war nature of the conflict in saying, “There are some who want to force Hungary into the war, and they are not picky about the means with which to achieve that goal.”
“Ukraine is our neighbor where Hungarians live as well,” he continued. “They are being conscripted and are dying by the hundreds on the front.” The Hungarian government has long protested this practice and presented its complaints to Kiev.
“Europe has retired from the debate,” Orban complained of EU countries being dragged into confrontation with Moscow by Washington. “In the decisions adopted in Brussels, I recognize American interests more frequently than European ones.”
“In a war that is taking place in Europe the Americans have the final word,” he stressed in the interview.
Most recently, Hungary has shown its unwillingness to go along with the rest of NATO by delaying a vote on ratifying Sweden and Finland’s accession bids.
According to a Thursday Associated Press report, “The delay, which pushes the vote back by two weeks to the parliamentary session beginning March 20, comes as Hungary remains the only NATO member country besides Turkey that hasn’t yet approved the two Nordic countries’ bids to join the Western military alliance.” The report indicates:
Hungary’s populist prime minister, Viktor Orban, has said that he is personally in favor of the two countries joining NATO, but alleges that the governments in Stockholm and Helsinki have “spread blatant lies” about Hungary which have raised questions among lawmakers in his party on whether to approve the bids.
As small modular nuclear reactors come closer to reality in the U.S., managing and disposing of their highly radioactive waste should be a national priority. Forty years after the passage of the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, there is, “no clear path forward for the siting, licensing, and construction of a geologic repository” for nuclear waste, according to a recent U.S. National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine report.
The good news is that there is already a clear strategy for managing and disposing of this highly radioactive material. The bad news is that the U.S. government has yet to seriously follow that plan.
The National Academies report tells us that new or advanced reactor designs—the hoped-for saviors of the nuclear industry—will not save us from the need to build geologic repositories, deep-mined facilities for permanent nuclear waste disposal. In some cases, these new reactors may make it worse by creating more waste that’s more costly to manage, new kinds of complex waste, or just more waste, period. Before we face that onrush, we first need to deal with the large volume of waste we’ve already produced.
The U.S., which led the way on managing nuclear waste in the 1980s and 1990s, has now fallen to the back of the pack. About 88,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel from commercial reactors remain stranded at reactor sites, and this number is increasing by some 2,000 metric tons each year. These 77 sites are in 35 states and threaten to become de facto permanent disposal facilities. Without a geologic repository, there is no way forward for the final disposal of this highly radioactive material. Storing it in pools and dry casks at reactor sites is a temporary solution; it is safe for decades, but not the millennia needed to isolate this radioactive material from the environment. The present U.S. policy of indefinite storage at a centralized site is not a viable solution, as it shifts the cost and risk to future generations.
Beginning now, the nation needs to follow a pathway already set out for a national nuclear waste repository. Both a 2012 presidential Blue Ribbon Commission and an international expert panel organized by Stanford and George Washington Universities in 2018 recommended a new, independent, waste management and disposal organization with funding outside of the annual Congressional appropriations and restrictive budgetary rules. The Blue Ribbon Commission called for creation of a new federal corporation, like the Tennessee Valley Authority, for this organization, while the Stanford/GWU panel looked to replicate not-for-profit, utility-owned, but independent, organizations modeled on successful programs in other countries, such as Sweden and Finland.
Charges to nuclear-power-produced electricity fund these organizations, and they remain regulated by independent nuclear regulators. Both panels agreed on the need for an independent organization and finances………………………………………………………………
Assured finances are also key. In the U.S., Congress hasn’t appropriated funds for its Yucca Mountain nuclear waste program since 2010. In fact, Congress has so badly mangled the process of collecting and appropriating the ratepayers fund, now over $40 billion, that it has rendered these funds essentially inaccessible. Outrageously, this money, actually collected from electricity ratepayers, not taxpayers, is being used to offset the national debt.
Even if the U.S. starts today, it will take decades to site, design and build a facility for disposal of its nuclear waste stockpile. That process must accelerate now, before the reactors we need for their electricity run out of room for their growing inventories of highly radioactive waste. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-waste-is-piling-up-does-the-u-s-have-a-plan/
West created ‘Nazi paradise’ in Ukraine to fight Russians – Dugin
Kiev’s backers, however, ultimately don’t believe it will win, the political philosopher said.
The West has fostered the creeping “nazification” of Ukraine in order to make its people hostile to Russia, political philosopher and author Aleksandr Dugin has told RT. In an exclusive interview aired on Saturday, he said that Kiev’s backers have tried to hide from their own citizens the growing tolerance of nationalists and neo-Nazis in the country.
“The West thinks in such a manner: We could not create artificial nationalism in Ukraine and push Ukrainians to fight Russians [any other way],” Dugin said.
“For a traditional society, liberal values cannot be the goal to defend. So they need something [else]. The most radical [tool] to create and promote this artificial pseudo-consciousness is nationalism … or Ukrainian Russophobic fascism. And it is being used by the [globalist] liberals.”
Dugin said the West supported radicals in Kiev, despite cracking down on similar groups at home. “They destroy any kind of nationalism on their [own] territories. But in Ukraine, on the other hand, they make it flourish.” In the end, “a Nazi paradise” has been created in Ukraine, he claimed.
According to Dugin, such an approach will ultimately lead to the destruction of the Ukrainian state. “I don’t think they seriously believe in the possible victory of Ukraine,” he stated.
Ukraine’s Azov Battalion is among the units that welcomes fighters with openly nationalist and neo-Nazi views. Ukrainian soldiers have repeatedly been filmed and photographed bearing Nazi insignia and tattoos. Russian President Vladimir Putin listed “denazification” as one of the objectives of the military operation Moscow launched in the neighboring state a year ago.
Last year, Dugin’s daughter, journalist Darya Dugina, was killed by a bomb planted under the car she was driving. Moscow said Ukrainian agents were behind the assassination. Kiev denied its involvement. Nevertheless, the New York Times later reported that US intelligence officials believe that the Ukrainian authorities had authorized the attack.
DieDieBooks, created by Rachel Kempf and Nick Toti in Kirksville, MO, is a publisher releasing a series of film criticism in anthology style—each release is a stand-alone book about a different horror film, each written by a different author. As part of the first ‘season’ of titles from the new Missouri publisher, a full-length look at the cult-classic nuclear horror film Threads is out now from author Bob Mielke.
Threads is a 1984 film that shows the lead-up, destruction, and years-long aftermath of a nuclear attack, with painstaking detail. It is set in Sheffield, England, and was originally commissioned by the BBC to show the true dangers of the Cold War. Thanks to its stark portrayal of nuclear holocaust during an era of Cold War high tension, this film has long remained a horrifying pillar of that era, in its attempts to scare straight world powers.
To capture the import and payload of the British title, no author could be more fitting than Mielke. While not a traditional film critic like other authors in the DieDieBooks imprint, Mielke is a nuclear activist and researcher in addition to his work as a professor at Truman University, where he teaches an interdisciplinary seminar on nuclear warfare.
To have a nuclear scientist-level take on a nuclear science horror film is certainly an unexpected angle for a full-length essay about a genre film. Mielke delivers on his potential by turning over a wildly engaging text but equally singular in perspective—no one else could have written this, and you feel smarter just for having picked up his treatise…………………………………………………….
With the rising threat of nuclear destruction bearing down on the world again today, these films and the Threads book become even more pertinent. The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists moved the Doomsday Clock to 90 seconds to midnight this year, the closest the clock has ever been. This is meant to tell the world how close we are to nuclear destruction.
In 1984 when Threads was commissioned to diffuse the impending nuclear warfare, the Doomsday Clock was only set to three minutes to midnight.
ST. LOUIS, Mo. (KMOV) – Two Republican state representatives from Wentzville are seeking a full accounting of the contamination and potential caused by the nuclear weapons work that took place in the St. Louis region decades ago.
Additionally, they hope to get the state to press the federal government for compensation for people who developed rare cancers and diseases that were likely caused by radiation exposure.
Representative Tricia Byrnes filed House Concurrent Resolution number 21 last week, and Representative Richard West filed the companion House concurrent Resolution number 22. The legislation calls for a joint investigation by various departments of state government.
“We hope to get the state of Missouri and its agencies to stand up and ask the federal government to step in with some kind of legislative remedy,” said Byrnes.
“We’ve been fighting this as singular battles, St. Louis City, St. Louis County, St. Charles County. And I think if all the leaders come together, we approached the federal government and say, look, we want to be made whole,” said West.
Uranium was processed in the 1940′s and 1950′s at Mallinckrodt Chemical Works at a facility downtown for atomic bombs. Some of the waste was stored along Banshee Road near Lambert St. Louis International Airport and contributed to the contamination of nearby Coldwater Creek. Some of the waste was also stored in the 9200 block of Latty Avenue and eventually was illegally buried at West Lake Landfill.
Uranium was also processed at the Weldon Spring Chemical Plant along Highway 94 in St. Charles County from 1957-1966. After the plant closed and before it became a Superfund Cleanup site, children were known to play in the abandoned buildings. People also swam in a nearby quarry where radioactive waste and remnants of the downtown St. Louis site were dumped.
Both Byrnes and West have relatives who’ve been diagnosed with rare cancers and diseases that are associated with exposure to radiation.
“The victims of this are starting to become numerous,” said West.
In 2018 the Missouri Department of Health and Senior Services found elevated levels of cancer in the zip codes that Coldwater Creek runs through. And the CDC concluded that contamination in the creek was the likely cause.
The Energy Employees Occupational Illness Compensation Program Act (EEOICPA) was set up to compensate nuclear weapons workers who develop one of about two dozen types of cancer associated with radiation exposure. A similar program called the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) was set up to compensate people who lived downwind from nuclear bomb tests and also developed one of the cancers on the government list.
West and Byrnes are seeking to get the State of Missouri to advocate, on behalf of residents of the region with radiation-related cancers and illnesses, to be compensated similarly.
Both pieces of legislation have been assigned to the General Laws committee, which will hold a hearing on the legislation Tuesday, March 7, at 4 p.m. Byrnes and West are requesting that anyone who was diagnosed with radiation-related cancer or illness which may have been caused by the local work on the nuclear weapons program, to attend the hearing and tell their story.
Nearly 60 years after a midair collision dumped four US hydrogen bombs in south-eastern Spain, strewing radioactive plutonium across the landscape, Spanish officials have renewed efforts to have Washington cart off tens of thousands of cubic metres of contaminated soil to the US for storage.
A source at Spain’s ministry of foreign affairs confirmed on Monday that it had formally requested the US takes action to remove the radioactive earth. The request is in line with a non-binding agreement struck between the two countries in 2015 and which included a US commitment to “arrange for disposal of the contaminated earth at an appropriate site in the United States”.
As the US had yet to formally respond, the source declined to offer further details. El País, the Spanish newspaper that first reported the story, said the request had been lodged a few months ago. The US government did not respond to a request for comment.
The demand is the latest chapter in a saga that traces back to January 1966 when a US B-52 bomber loaded with nuclear weapons collided with a tanker plane during a midair refuelling operation off the coast of Almeria, Spain. Seven of the two planes’ 11 crew members were killed.
Four hydrogen bombs tumbled from the B-52; one was later recovered intact in the Mediterranean while the other three crashed on land near the coastal village of Palomares.
While the bombs did not explode, two of the plutonium-filled detonators went off, scattering 7lb of radioactive plutonium-239 across the landscape.
The US sent about 1,600 servicemen to the crash site to recover the weapons and clean up the contamination. About 1,400 tonnes of contaminated soil was shipped to a facility in South Carolina.
Both countries were eager to downplay the collision, which took place during the height of the cold war and as Spain was in the grip of the Franco dictatorship.
Amid fears that the risk of radioactive contamination would harm the country’s budding tourism industry, Spain’s then tourism minister and the US ambassador took a widely publicised swim in the sea off the coast of Palomares in the weeks after the incident.
Concerns over the lingering impacts of the collision catapulted back into the spotlight in 2007, after a study suggested up to 50,000 sq metres of land remained contaminated. The affected area was fenced off and barred from being used for agriculture or development.
In 2015 Madrid and Washington signed off on an agreement to negotiate a binding deal for the site’s remediation. “We have to build on today’s signing to take further action to resolve – once and for all – this very important issue,” the then US secretary of state, John Kerry, said during a joint press conference with the Spanish foreign minister at the time, José Manuel García-Margallo.
Little was done to implement the agreement, however, as elections ushered in changes in Spain and the US. The Spanish government’s recent decision to take up the issue again with the US was prompted by the assessment that bilateral relations were “at their best in years,” sources told El País, leaving Madrid hopeful that some progress could be made before Spain heads to the polls for general elections at the end of the year.
Two Chinese officials on Monday urged Japan not to arbitrarily start dumping nuclear-contaminated water from the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power station into the Pacific Ocean, criticizing move “an extremely irresponsible act that has drawn grave concerns from the international community and relevant countries.”
Liu Jing, deputy director of the China Atomic Energy Authority, told a meeting of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) Board of Governors that Japan’s nuclear-contaminated water dump plan is not purely a domestic matter, but concerns the global marine environment and public health, Xinhua News Agency reported on Tuesday morning.
Liu said the IAEA has neither completed its assessment of Japan’s disposal plan nor drawn specific conclusions, and all its three reports published so far pointed out the plan’s non-compliance with the agency’s safety standards and suggested improvement.
However, Japan has arbitrarily approved its own plan and expedited the construction of discharge facilities, ignoring the authoritative advice from the IAEA and the opposition from both home and abroad, Liu said.
Noting that China supports the IAEA’s work on Japan’s discharge plan, the Chinese nuclear official said he hopes the agency will continue to perform its duties in an objective and impartial manner, listen to the opinions of stakeholders, strictly implement the agency’s safety standards and international good practices, and help the international community ensure absolute safety.
Liu stressed that Japan’s plan to dump contaminated water into the ocean is not the only feasible way of disposal, and Japan should not use the assessment from the IAEA technical task force as a free pass on its discharge plan.
He urged Japan not to distort the reports of the IAEA task force to justify its discharge plan, nor ignore suggestions from the task force, nor set a deadline for the release of the task force’s final assessment report.
Noting that the disposal of the contaminated water will span a long time and involve many uncertainties, he said that Japan should allow effective international supervision on the water disposal, address the legitimate concerns of its neighbors and Pacific island countries, and hold meaningful consultations with stakeholders………….. https://www.globaltimes.cn/page/202303/1286787.shtml
UK Defense JournalMarch 6, 2023 Massive NATO anti-submarine warfare exercise kicks off The exercise involves ships, submarines, aircraft, and personnel from nine Allied nations in the Central Mediterranean Sea for anti-submarine warfare and anti-surface warfare training. Dynamic Manta (DYMA23) commenced on February 27 off the coast of Sicily. The primary objective of Dynamic Manta is […]
The decision still needs to go through some legislative hoops before it is finalised – but it signals a stronger-than-ever willingness by the government to revamp nuclear power across the country. The Senate voted in favour of getting rid of the limit altogether in January.
A 2015 law to promote green growth limited the proportion of energy France could get from nuclear to 50% of its energy mix by 2035. With 69% of the country’s energy coming from nuclear, according to official data, the measure was thought to encourage investment in renewables and paved the way at the time of the closing of France’s iconic and then oldest Fessenheim plant in June 2020.
Mar 3, 2023
Lawmakers voted in favour of doing away with the 50% legal limit on nuclear in the country’s total energy mix on Thursday as part of France’s larger efforts to build newer, more modern nuclear plants.
The vote took place in the Committee for Economic Affairs on Thursday as part of a broader legislative package that would see the building of six new nuclear European Pressurised Reactors 2 (EPR2). The first one of those, EPR2 is expected to be operational in 2035………………………
There are certain English villages, wrote Bill Bryson, “whose very names summon forth an image of lazy summer afternoons”. One example was Theddlethorpe All Saints. Lying on the quiet Lincolnshire coast north of Skegness, Theddlethorpe’s approximately 500 residents are served by a thatched pub and two handsome medieval churches, which stand out against huge skies.
Yet storm-clouds are building on the horizon; soon, this obscure corner of England could be the backdrop to a dystopian tale. Theddlethorpe has always had an industrious underbelly. Between 1972 and 2018, it was known for the Theddlethorpe Gas Terminal, where natural gas gathered from beneath the North Sea was collected, then fed into the National Grid. At its peak, Theddlethorpe handled around 5% of the UK’s gas supply, but with the shift away from fossil fuels, the plant became redundant.
In 2021, just as locals were feeling grateful for the site’s long-promised return to agricultural use, came news that the terminal might have an unwelcome afterlife — as the landward end of an undersea nuclear waste dump. It is one of four sites being considered by the government for a Geological Disposal Facility (GDF), the others all being on the far side of the country, near Sellafield, a huge nuclear site in Cumbria.
The idea s that vast storage caverns would be blasted into bedrock up to 1,000 metres under the sea, several miles offshore. “Higher activity” radioactive waste would then be transported to Theddlethorpe from 23 surface storage locations across the UK, and trundled out along a tunnel, to be walled up and forgotten. The immediate vicinity of Sellafield is already unfit for many other purposes; why contaminate hitherto unaffected areas?
Especially because it would clearly be much cheaper to store waste close to its sources. NWS admits: “The transport provisions to the Theddlethorpe GDF Search Area are currently limited” and “significant works” would be required. The Government proposal suggests these works would cost between £20 and £53 billion — although as the tale of HS2 shows, the cost of extending transport networks is liable to gross underestimation. This throws up a question considered taboo in the discourse around large infrastructure projects: would expansion of either railways or roads really “benefit” an area whose residents generally value its rural character?
After 15 years of stalled talks, more than 100 countries reached a historic agreement to protect the high seas on Saturday, a long-awaited step that environmental groups say will help reverse marine biodiversity losses from climate change and overfishing.
The legally binding UN treaty to conserve and ensure the sustainable use of ocean biodiversity was finally agreed on after five rounds of protracted UN-led negotiations that ended on Saturday, a day after the original deadline. “The ship has reached the shore,” said the UN conference’s president Rena Lee, after a marathon final stretch of talks hit 38 hours.
NewsweekMarch 6, 2023 U.S. To Train NATO Nations on Operating HIMARS Across Europe The U.S. Army is preparing to offer training on the High Mobility Artillery Rocket Systems (HIMARS) that have featured prominently in the Ukraine war. The V Corps of the U.S. Army will lead a summit and training sessions to “increase knowledge on […]
BOISE, Idaho — Butte County, Idaho sued the Department of Energy to end the agency’s interim storage of highly radioactive spent nuclear fuel at the Idaho National Laboratory, which the county claims has been done without the statutorily mandated annual duties under the Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, and comes with “ongoing social and economic impacts.”
nuclear-news 