2023 May 14 « nuclear-news

Chris Hedges: Julian Assange – A Fight We Must Not Lose

BY TYLER DURDEN, FRIDAY, MAY 12, 2023,

https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/chris-hedges-julian-assange-fight-we-must-not-lose—

Authored by Chris Hedges via ScheerPost.com, (emphasis ours)

This is a talk Chris Hedges gave in New York City at rally calling for the immediate release of Julian Assange on World Press Freedom Day.

The detention and persecution of Julian Assange eviscerates all pretense of the rule of law and the rights of a free press. The illegalities, embraced by the Ecuadorian, British, Swedish and U.S. governments are ominous. They presage a world where the internal workings, abuses, corruption, lies and crimes, especially war crimes, carried out by corporate states and the global ruling elite, will be masked from the public. They presage a world where those with the courage and integrity to expose the misuse of power will be hunted down, tortured, subjected to sham trials and given lifetime prison terms in solitary confinement. They presage an Orwellian dystopia where news is replaced with propaganda, trivia and entertainment. The legal lynching of Julian, I fear, marks the official beginning of the corporate totalitarianism that will define our lives.

Under what law did Ecuadorian President Lenin Moreno capriciously terminate Julian’s rights of asylum as a political refugee? Under what law did Moreno authorize British police to enter the Ecuadorian Embassy — diplomatically sanctioned sovereign territory — to arrest a naturalized citizen of Ecuador? Under what law did Donald Trump criminalize journalism and demand the extradition of Julian, who is not a U.S. citizen and whose news organization is not based in the United States? Under what law did the CIA violate attorney-client privilege, surveil and record all of Julian’s conversations both digital and verbal with his lawyers and plot to kidnap him from the Embassy and assassinate him?

The corporate state eviscerates enshrined rights by judicial fiat. This is how we have the right to privacy, with no privacy. This is how we have “free” elections funded by corporate money, covered by a compliant corporate media and under iron corporate control. This is how we have a legislative process in which corporate lobbyists write the legislation and corporate-indentured politicians vote it into law. This is how we have the right to due process with no due process. . This is how we have a government — whose fundamental responsibility is to protect citizens — that orders and carries out the assassination of its own citizens, such as the Muslim cleric Anwar al-Awlaki and his 16-year-old son. This is how we have a press which is legally permitted to publish classified information and our generation’s most important publisher sitting in solitary confinement in a high security prison awaiting extradition to the United States.

The psychological torture of Julian — documented by the United Nations special rapporteur on torture, Nils Melzer — mirrors the breaking of the dissident Winston Smith in George Orwell’s novel “1984.” The Gestapo broke bones. The East German Stasi broke souls. We, too, have refined the cruder forms of torture to destroy souls as well as bodies. It is more effective. This is what they are doing to Julian, steadily degrading his physical and psychological health. It is a slow-motion execution. This is by design. Julian has spent much of his time in isolation, is often heavily sedated and has been denied medical treatment for a variety of physical ailments. He is routinely denied access to his lawyers. He has lost a lot of weight, suffered a minor stroke, spent time in the prison hospital wing — which prisoners call the hell wing — because he is suicidal, been placed in prolonged solitary confinement, observed banging his head against the wall and hallucinating. Our version of Orwell’s dreaded Room 101.

All these crimes, especially after the attacks of 9/11, have returned with a vengeance. The CIA has its own armed units and drone program, death squads and a vast archipelago of global black sites where kidnapped victims are tortured and disappeared.

The U.S. allocates a secret black budget of about $50 billion a year to hide multiple types of clandestine projects carried out by the National Security Agency, the CIA and other intelligence agencies, usually beyond the scrutiny of Congress. The CIA has a well-oiled apparatus, which is why, since it had already set up a system of 24-hour video surveillance of Julian in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, it quite naturally discussed kidnapping and assassinating Julian. That is its business. Sen. Frank Church — after examining the heavily redacted CIA documents released to his committee — defined the CIA’s “covert activity” as “a semantic disguise for murder, coercion, blackmail, bribery, the spreading of lies and consorting with known torturers and international terrorists.”

Fear the puppet masters, not the puppets. They are the enemy within.

This is a fight for Julian, who I know and admire. It is a fight for his family, who are working tirelessly for his release. It is a fight for the rule of law. It is a fight for the freedom of the press. It is a fight to save what is left of our diminishing democracy. And it is a fight we must not lose.

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, civil liberties | 2 Comments

As Donetsk civilians live in constant fear of Ukrainian shelling, from on the ground, I detail the terror

May 11, 2023, -Eva Karene Bartlett https://www.patreon.com/posts/as-donetsk-live-82857680?utm_medium=post_notification_email&utm_campaign=patron_engagement&utm_source=post_link

Heavy Ukrainian shelling of central Donetsk on April 28 killed nine civilians – including an eight-year-old girl and her grandmother – and injured at least 16 more. The victims were burned alive when the minibus they were in was hit by a shell.

The attack also targeted a major hospital, apartment buildings, houses, parks, streets, and sidewalks. All civilian areas – not military targets.

According to the Donetsk People’s Republic’s (DPR) Representative Office in the JCCC (Joint Monitoring and Co-ordination Center on Ukraine’s War Crimes), Kiev’s forces fired high-explosive fragmentation missiles “produced in Slovakia and transferred to Ukraine by NATO countries.” Regarding an earlier shelling on the same day, the JCCC noted that US-made HIMARS systems were used, targeting “exclusively in the residential, central quarter of the city.”

I was outside of Donetsk interviewing refugees from Artyomovsk (also known as Bakhmut) when both rounds of intense shelling occurred, the first starting just after 11am. I returned to see a catastrophic scene, with a burnt-out bus – still smoking – and some of its passengers’ charred bodies melted onto the frame. This tragic picture was sadly not a one-off event.

Elsewhere, city workers were already removing debris and had begun repaving damaged sections of the roads. I’ve seen this following Ukrainian shelling many times, including on January 1 this year, when Ukraine fired 25 Grads into the city centre. Similarly, in July 2022, Ukrainian shelling downtown killed four civilians, including two in a vehicle likewise gutted by flames. When I arrived at the scene about an hour later, workers were repaving the affected section of the street.

The damage to the Republican Trauma Center hospital was quickly cleaned up, but videos shared on Telegram immediately after the shelling show a gaping hole in one of the walls. The room concerned contained what was, apparently, Donetsk’s sole MRI machine.

Along Artyoma street, the central Donetsk boulevard targeted countless times by Ukrainian attacks, the destruction was evident: Two cars caught up in the bombing, residents of an apartment building boarding up shattered windows and doors, the all-too-familiar sound of glass and debris being swept away. In the residential area, the first to be targeted that day, in a massive crater behind one house, the walls and roof of another home were intermixed with rocket fragments.

Another year of Ukrainian war crimes

In April 2022, following strikes on a large market area in Kirovsky district, in western Donetsk, which killed five civilians and injured 23, I went there to document the aftermath, not expecting to see two of the five dead still lying in nearby lanes. This shelling was just before noon, a busy time of day in the area. Bombing at such periods is an insidious tactic to ensure more civilians are maimed or killed.

Double and triple striking the same areas is another method used by Ukrainian forces. In an interview last year, the director of the Department of Fire and Rescue Forces of the DPR Ministry of Emergency Situations, Sergey Neka, told me, “Our units arrive at the scene and Ukraine begins to shell it. A lot of equipment has been damaged and destroyed.”

Andrey Levchenko, chief of the emergency department for the Kievsky district of Donetsk, also hit by Ukrainian attacks, said: “They wait for 30 minutes for us to arrive. We arrive there, start assisting people, and the shelling resumes. They wait again, our guys hide in the shelters, as soon as we go out, put out the fire, help people, then shelling resumes.”

I was here in Donetsk in mid-June, during a day of particularly intense Ukrainian shelling of the very centre of the city, which killed at least five civilians. The DPR authorities reported that “within two hours, almost 300 MLRS rockets and artillery shells were fired.” One Grad rocket hit a maternity hospital, tearing through the roof.

The following month, Ukraine fired rockets containing internationally-banned ‘petal’ mines. The streets of central Donetsk, as well as the western and northern districts and other cities, were littered with the hard-to-spot mines designed to grotesquely maim, but not necessarily kill, anyone stepping on them. These mines keep claiming new victims to this day – when I last wrote about them here, 104 civilians had been maimed, including this 14-year-old boy. Three had died of their injuries. Since then, the number of victims has risen to 112.

In August, heavy Ukrainian shelling of the centre of Donetsk hit directly next to the hotel I was staying in, along with dozens of other journalists and cameramen. Six civilians were killed that day, including one woman outside the hotel, as well as a child. She been a talented ballerina due to leave to study in Russia soon, and along with her grandmother, her ballet teacher was also killed that day, herself a world-famous former ballerina.

Three bouts of Ukrainian shelling of the city centre in a span of just five days in September killed 26 civilians. Four were killed on September 17, among them two people burned alive inside a vehicle on the same central Artyoma Street. Two days later, 16 civilians were killed, the remains of their bodies strewn along the street or in unrecognizable piles of flesh. Three days later, Ukraine struck next to the central market, killing six civilians, two in a minibus, the rest on the street.

In my subsequent visits to Donetsk and surrounding cities in November and December, I filmed the aftermath of more Ukrainian shelling (using HIMARS) of civilian areas of Donetsk and the settlement of Gorlovka to the north. The November 7 shelling of central Donetsk could have killed the toddler of the young mother I interviewed. Fortunately, after hearing the first rockets hit, she ran with her son to the bathroom. When calm returned, she found shrapnel on his bed.

The November 12 shelling of Gorlovka damaged a beautiful historic cultural building, destroying parts of the roof and the theatre hall within. According to the centre’s director, it was one of the best movie theatres in Donetsk Region, one of the oldest, most beautiful, and most beloved buildings in the city. He noted that the HIMARS system is a very precise weapon, so the attack was not accidental.

The shelling goes on

Early morning during Easter Mass on April 16, the Ukrainian army fired 20 rockets near the Cathedral of the Holy Transfiguration in the centre of Donetsk, French journalist Christelle Neant reported, noting that one civilian was killed and seven injured. The shelling extended to the central market just behind the cathedral. Just over a week prior, on April 7, another shelling of that market killed one civilian and injured 13, also considerably damaging the market itself.

Ukraine continues to shell the western and northern districts of Donetsk, also pounding Gorlovka, as well as Yasinovatya just north of Donetsk (killing two civilians some days ago).

On April 23, shelling in Petrovsky, a hard-hit western Donetsk district, killed one man and injured five more. The same day, in a village northeast of Donetsk, a rocket killed two women in their 30s. Security camera footage shows the moment when the women attempted to take cover. The munition that killed them hit directly next to where they huddled.

A few days later, on my way to interview refugees from Artyomovsk sheltering in another city, I passed along the tiny village where those women were killed. It’s a road I’ve driven a dozen times or more, a quiet, calm, scenic region of rolling hills, a lovely river, a beautiful church. It’s far from any front line. The murder of these two women was another Ukrainian war crime.

The people here are constantly terrorized by Ukrainian shelling or the threat of it, and have been since Kiev started its war on the Donbass in 2014.

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

Risks too high at Zaporizhzhia

May 10, 2023 https://beyondnuclear.org/risks-too-high-at-zaporizhzhia/

Beyond Nuclear has put out a press statement warning that the risks of a nuclear catastrophe at Ukraine’s six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are too high, with rumors of a Ukrainian offensive reportedly prompting mass evacuations of civilians living near the plant. Only an immediate ceasefire — or, better still, a negotiated end to a likely unwinnable war — can protect us from a potentially catastrophic nuclear incident at the plant, which has already endured shelling, missile attacks, and frequent loss of connection to the electrical grid.

The press release begins:

Fears of an imminent Ukrainian offensive that could put the country’s six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant in even greater danger, should prompt immediate efforts to negotiate a ceasefire, if not an end to the Russian war against Ukraine, urged safe energy group, Beyond Nuclear today.

News reports that civilians around the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant are being evacuated suggest that the conflict already consuming the southwestern region of Ukraine could be about to escalate, potentially engulfing the nuclear plant.

The Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant has already escaped close calls, the target of shelling and missile attacks on at least one occasion and with frequent losses of offsite power that, if not restored promptly, could lead to a meltdown.

The plant has been occupied by Russian forces since March 4, 2022. Rumors abound that a severely depleted workforce is laboring under stressful and even violent conditions, while other staff have fled or have disappeared.

As a precaution, all six Zaporizhzhia reactors are currently shut down, but that does not mean they are out of danger.

“The fuel in the reactor core still requires electricity to power cooling, as do the pumps that supply cooling water to the fuel pools,” warned Beyond Nuclear international specialist, Linda Pentz Gunter. “A meltdown is still possible. Putting the reactors in what is termed ‘cold shutdown’ just buys workers more time to restore power, but a reliable supply of electricity to the site is still essential to avoid disaster.

“The consequences not only for the people of Ukraine and neighboring Russia, but for all of Europe, should any or all of these reactors melt down or suffer a fuel pool fire are unimaginably dire,” Pentz Gunter said.

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Biden is selling weapons to the majority of the world’s autocracies

Despite the White House’s rhetoric about supporting global democracy, the U.S. sold weapons in 2022 to 57 percent of the world’s authoritarian regimes.

Stephen Semler, May 11 2023, The Intercept

SINCE PRESIDENT JOE BIDEN came into office in 2021, he hasdescribed a “battle between democracies and autocracies” in which the U.S. and other democracies strive to create a peaceful world. The reality, however, is that the Biden administration has helped increase the military power of a large number of authoritarian countries. According to an Intercept review of recently released government data, the U.S. sold weapons to at least 57 percent of the world’s autocratic countries in 2022.

Since the end of the Cold War, the United States has been the world’s biggest weapons dealer, accounting for about 40 percent of all arms exports in a given year. In general, these exports are funded through grants or sales. There are two pathways for the latter category: foreign military sales and direct commercial sales.

The U.S. government acts as an intermediary for FMS acquisitions: It buys the materiel from a company first and then delivers the goods to the foreign recipient. DCS acquisitions are more straightforward: They’re the result of an agreement between a U.S. company and a foreign government. Both categories of sales require the government’s approval.

Country-level data for last year’s DCS authorizations was released in late April through the State Department’s Directorate of Defense Trade Controls. FMS figures for fiscal year 2022 were released earlier this year through the Pentagon’s Defense Security Cooperation Agency. According to their data, a total of 142 countries and territories bought weapons from the U.S. in 2022, for a total of $85 billion in bilateral sales.

How many of those countries were democracies, and how many were autocracies? That question can be answered by comparing the new U.S. arms sales data to political regime data from the Varieties of Democracy project at the University of Gothenburg in Sweden, which uses a classification system that’s called Regimes of the World.

The system classifies regimes into four categories: closed autocracy, electoral autocracy, electoral democracy, and liberal democracy. For a country to be classified as a democracy, it must have multiparty elections and political freedoms that make those elections meaningful. According to this methodology, the dividing line between democracies and autocracies is whether a country’s leaders are accountable to their citizens through free and fair elections.

Of the 84 countries codified as autocracies under the Regimes of the World system in 2022, the United States sold weapons to at least 48, or 57 percent, of them. The “at least” qualifier is necessary because several factors frustrate the accurate tracking of U.S. weapons sales. The State Department’s report of commercial arms sales during the fiscal year makes prodigious use of “various” in its recipients category; as a result, the specific recipients for nearly $11 billion in weapons sales are not disclosed………………………… https://theintercept.com/2023/05/11/united-states-foreign-weapons-sales/

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Experts urge G7 leaders to discuss nuclear security

NNK News, , May 12, 23

Amid Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the threat of nuclear weapons use continues to grow but nuclear security is also endangered in the region. Experts from the US and Japan called for the G7 leaders to address these issues at next week’s summit in Hiroshima.

Rafael Grossi, head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned on Saturday that the situation around Russian-held Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant is unpredictable and potentially dangerous.

He also expressed concern about the stressful conditions for people working there as military activity increases in the region.

Experts gathered in Tokyo on Thursday to discuss how countries can protect their nuclear facilities from being targeted by other nations. They condemned Russia’s actions, saying they could result in a devastating situation.

Nuclear Threat Initiative’s Scott Roecker said, “The most significant risk we’re worried about is not a nuclear detonation — it’s not a nuclear explosion with a mushroom cloud. It is the risk of significant radiation release associated with an attack on Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant.”

The nuclear issue is one of the important topics that will be discussed at the G7 Summit. Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy is scheduled to attend online. He is expected to call for discussions on nuclear security.

Roecker said, “The G7 leaders have a unique opportunity in Hiroshima to talk about what’s happening from a nuclear standpoint in Ukraine. There needs to be more done to strengthen the international legal framework and the international norms around nuclear facilities in times of conflict that need to be better protected. And they should not be a target during military conflict.”….. https://www3.nhk.or.jp/nhkworld/en/news/20230512_05/

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | 2 WORLD, safety | Leave a comment

Counting the rising costs of Scotland’s nuclear testing facility

Alan Laird, 12 May 23
https://www.thenational.scot/community/23516945.counting-rising-costs-scotlands-nuclear-testing-facility/

HOW magnanimous of Andrew Bowie, Westminster’s Nuclear Minister, not to “impose nuclear power on Scotland” (The National, May 4), although he’s a bit late with that assurance. But never mind democracy, let’s look at the cost.

Dounreay was commissioned as a test facility in 1955 on our north coast – in other words, “let’s put it waaaay up there in case something goes wrong”.

The initial research reactor “went critical” – a not very reassuring term for “started working” – in 1958.

The Dounreay Fast Reactor started up in 1959 and shut down in 1977 after 15 years of operation. Its maximum output of 14MW was negligible.

A Fast-Breeder Reactor, now an abandoned technology, began supplying 250MW from 1975 till 1995, enough for about 48,000 homes. Its cooling was by liquid sodium – 1500 tons of the stuff – which explodes instantly in contact with air. Cool.

Then there is the military site, HMS Vulcan, for development and testing the reactors of nuclear-powered submarines. From 1963 to 2015, five generations of small reactors have been tested here, routinely run at greater than operational stress to find out any faults before installation in the subs. How reassuring. As with MoD sites on the Clyde, full disclosure of breaches of health and safety are not disclosed. The site is due for decommissioning next year. Estimates of the costs are not available.

In 1998, following safety and pollution concerns, Norway, Sweden and the Irish Republic demanded the immediate closure of the site. PM Tony Blair was advised it would take £1 billion and 100 years to complete the work. By 2006, 25 years and £2.7bn was the estimate, then in 2007 it was 17 years and £2.6bn. In 2019 contracts worth £400m were awarded to continue the clean-up, with a new estimate of £4.3bn and 60 years. I guess no-one actually knows.

The site also took in foreign spent nuclear fuel for reprocessing. Unsurprisingly, many foreign customers refused to take their nuclear waste back. It’s mostly still there, along with Dounreay’s own.

The expected date of the return of the site to brownfield use is 2330. Yes, that’s more than 300 years from now. Uncountable billions of pounds and nearly 400 years of an unusable bit of Scotland is an astounding price to pay for powering 48,000 homes.

The arguments for nuclear power put forward by the industry and their UK Government lackeys are contradictory, disingenuous and downright dishonest.

Dounreay’s installation is a mere toy compared to Hunterston (both reactors now decommissioned) and Torness (the nuclear regulator thinks it should close by 2024). First estimates for decommissioning these sites is £132 billion and 120 years. I wonder when that estimate will be revised upward?

Just as a footnote, all of the UK’s uranium has to be imported. Much of it from Russia. The real reason the UK Government wants to continue with this outrageous waste of money is for the steady supply of enriched uranium for making atomic bombs. That’s worth it to them at any cost.

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

Pacific leaders remain steadfast against nuclear waste disposal

National Indigenous Times, Gorethy Kenneth (PNG Post Courier) – May 11, 2023

Pacific has a combined voice on “no nuclear waste” in the Pacific, Prime Minister James Marape told reporters in Port Moresby on Tuesday.

He was asked by reporters if the country would support Japan on its nuclear waste issue.

Mr Marape said that he would release a statement at a later date on the latter.

Japan allegedly reported that it was due to start dumping one million tonnes of nuclear waste from the damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant into the Pacific ocean in only a few months.

And according to Japan’s government, the waste water was to be treated by an Advanced Liquid Processing System, which would remove nuclides from the water.

However, the Pacific island leaders united and demanded that Japan share pivotal information about the plan.

Japan, however, assured the Pacific leaders that there was no such threat, and instead defended that the country and their government had no plans to dump more than one million tonnes of radioactive waste water into the Pacific ocean……….. https://nit.com.au/11-05-2023/5922/pacific-leaders-remain-steadfast-against-nuclear-waste-disposal-png23

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | indigenous issues, OCEANIA, opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment

75 active wildfires rage in Alberta, Canada

Much of Canada and parts of the US are blanketed by smoke as wildfires in
the province of Alberta continue to rage. As of Thursday, there are 75
active wildfires in Alberta, 23 of which are considered out of control.
Early May is typically the start of wildfire season in the region, but
experts have said that this level activity is unusual.

BBC 12th May 2023

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/world-us-canada-65566072

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Canada, climate change | Leave a comment

Rolls-Royce falls 6% as update lacks oomph and news on small nuclear business

Oliver Haill, 11 May 23, Proactive Investor 11th May 2023

Rolls-Royce Holdings PLC’s (LSE:RR.) shares fell 6% to a month’s low after its trading update contained nothing new, analysts said, with some concern about the lack of updates about its small nuclear reactor business…………

https://www.proactiveinvestors.co.uk/companies/news/1014774/rolls-royce-falls-6-as-update-lacks-oomph-and-news-on-small-nuclear-business-1014774.html

May 14, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment