This week in nuclear news

Some bits of good news – The planet’s economist: has Kate Raworth found a model for sustainable living?A watchdog acted on fossil fuel ‘greenwashing’

Climate. Is peaceful protest enough to make a difference to the climate crisis. or do we need a “tornado of change”?

AI is the new big worry – Why make a world that nobody wants?

Nuclear. The drums of war are beating ever more severely. The break in Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam increases the danger to Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station – all rather doom and gloom this wek.

Christina notes. What is Zelensky’s “peace formula”, and why on Earth are we backing it?

TOP STORIES

Is nuclear fusion energy salvation?

Ralph Nader: Reverse the Accelerating Warfare State Before It’s Too Late!

The War in Ukraine Was Provoked—and Why That Matters to Achieve Peace.

Kiev’s Long Term Plans To Blow Up The Kakhovka Dam. Ukrainian dam is destroyed; nuclear plant lives in a ‘grace period’.

Detailed evidence exposes Japan’s lies, loopholes in nuclear-contaminated wastewater dumping plan.2

Rosatom says nuclear cleanup in Arctic done – Far from the case, says Bellona.

CLIMATE. Europe’s Nuclear Power Puzzle.

CULTURE and ARTS. A-bombed artist to distribute ‘war brooms’ in Hiroshima as he calls for nuclear abolition.

ECONOMICS.

Cost of building Hinkley nuclear station soars from £18bn to £32.7bn. Increasing costs and delays in building Hinkley nuclear station.
France fully nationalises debt-laden nuclear power group EDF, after its record loss last year.
Marketing. China and Russia building most nuclear power plants, – the main goal is to market them to developing countries.

EDUCATION. Lockheed Martin CEO James Taiclet super ecstatic over USA govt’s budget deal.

EMPLOYMENT. The ABCs of a nuclear education.

ENERGY. Wind and solar overtake fossil fuel generation in the European Union. European Union to try again for renewable energy deal after nuclear row.

ENVIRONMENT. Content of radioactive element in fish at Fukushima‘s Nuclear Power Plant 180 times of safe limit. World Ocean Day appeal to international bodies over Fukushima dump plan. Hong Kong to ban seafood from high-risk regions near Fukushima if Japan dumps nuclear-contaminated water into ocean. Despite scientific evidence and public opposition, Japan to test ocean nuclear wastewater discharge on June 12

ETHICS and RELIGION. U.S. leaders must take responsibility for past nuclear atrocities..

HEALTH. Energy Northwest nuclear plant failed to properly measure workers’ radioactive exposure, report says.

LEGAL. Judge orders the Crown Prosecution Service to come clean about the destruction of key documents on Julian Assange. UK: Julian Assange Dangerously Close to Extradition Following High Court Rejection of Appeal. ASSANGE JUDGE IS 40-YEAR ‘GOOD FRIEND’ OF MINISTER WHO ORCHESTRATED HIS ARREST.

MEDIA. Journalists Are Asking Ukrainian Soldiers To Hide Their Nazi Patches, New York Times Admits. War propaganda machine silencing voices of truth.

NUCLEAR TECHNOLOGY. Robotic “dogs” to help clean up Dounreay nuclear site. Small nuclear reactors for the moon. Nuclear-Powered Cargo Ships Are Trying to Stage a Comeback. A.I. or Nuclear Weapons: Can You Tell These Quotes Apart?

OPPOSITION to NUCLEAR. Mayors call for action against nuclear war.

PERSONAL STORIES. My nuclear family. A reader’s scathing rebuke on this site’s use of Tucker Carlson article [on nuclear-news.net]

POLITICS.

Citizens Advisory Panel to host meetings on recycling spent nuclear fuel, Vermont.
Britain’s taxpayers, slugged with uneconomic Hinkley nuclear plant ‘s costs, now to be slugged again with Sizewell.
In Taiwan, DPP, Hou You-yi clash over nuclear power. US presidential candidate
Nikki Haley says that arming UKraine is “preventing war”.
AUKUS coming to dinner.
Letter. Nuclear plan raises suspicions.
Anxiety and disagreement in South Korea about Fukushima radioactive wastewater.

POLITICS INTERNATIONAL and DIPLOMACY.

Major Progress Made in Nuclear Talks Between U.S. and Iran in Preparation for a New Agreement. UN nuclear chief, facing Israeli criticism on Iran, says his agency ‘very fair but firm’.
Amid Blinken visit, top Saudi diplomat says kingdom seeks U.S. nuclear aid. Israel undecided on Saudi Arabia’s demand for civil nuclear technology Israeli Minister says US should deny Saudi Arabia nuclear reactor.
OpenAI’s Sam Altman calls for an international agency like the UN’s nuclear watchdog to oversee AI.
Washington banned Kiev from signing truce with Moscow – Russian security chief.
German TV Shows Nazi Symbols on Helmets of Ukraine Soldiers.
France says nuclear power is ‘non-negotiable’. France’s EDF and the global nuclear lobby sulking because Europe won’t accept their lie that nuclear power is “renewable”.
Are We Back to Nuclear Brinkmanship for Good?
Universalization of Nuclear Weapon Ban Treaty Is Essential – now more than ever.

RADIATION. As Japan prepares to release Fukushima nuclear waste water – a reminder that countries can ban goods with radiation contamination risks.

SAFETY.

Kakhovka dam breach raises risk for Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant – receding waters narrow options for cooling. Ukrainian dam collapse ‘no immediate risk’ to Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant. Water levels at Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant ‘critical’ after dam collapses in Ukraine. The Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant used water from the destroyed Nova Kakhovka dam. What happens now? Last reactor at Ukraine’s biggest nuclear power plant shut down for safety
Ukraine: Nuclear threat shows danger of small modular reactors .
Japan passes law to allow nuclear power stations to operate beyond 60 years.
Canadian Federal Court Upholds Alcohol and Drug Testing at Nuclear Facilities.
Non Government Organisations Tell Biden that US Nuclear Plants Aren’t Safe from Attack.
Minor’ leak at nuclear submarine dock.

SECRETS and LIES. Washington Post reported Ukraine conducted a test strike with HIMARS on the Kahovka dam last year. Trump-era officials under fire as nuclear fund for Bikini islanders is squandered. Leaks reveal FBI helps Ukraine censor Twitter users and obtain their info. Snowden Warns Today’s Surveillance Technology Makes 2013 Look Like ‘Child’s Play’ . Trump held secret nuclear documents. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DErGSfKuXcg

SPACE. EXPLORATION, WEAPONS.Stealth actions by SpaceX, as 36 space launches approved by California Coastal Commission without a vote, public hearing, or public notice.[ on nuclear-news.net]

SPINBUSTER. Tucker Carlson steamrolls Ukraine propaganda in new show. Patrick Lawrence: Neo-Nazis in Ukraine? No, Yes, No–Yes.

WASTES. Amid opposition, Japan takes 1st step to release nuclear waste water into ocean. Problems ahead for the nuclear industry in the closing and disposal of dead nuclear reactors. Chalk River: Radioactive Wastes and the Honour of the Crown. (from the archives – Canada’s controversial nuclear waste disposal design for Chalk River) Timeline: The history of radioactive contamination in St. Louis County. Consent-based or bribery?

WAR and CONFLICT. The Ukrainian “counter-offensive”: A new stage in the US-NATO war against Russia. Suicide Day Four, all so that NATO can Expand. Ukraine rebuffs Vatican peace attempt. BLINKEN’S BATTLE HYMN. Four nuclear myths. Israel simulates Iran war after Tehran cleared of nuclear allegations.

WEAPONS and WEAPONS SALES. Russia says U.S.-built F-16s could ‘accommodate’ nuclear weapons if sent to Ukraine. Russia warns that supplying nuclear weapons to Ukraine would lead to ‘global, irrevocable collapse’. Starve the Poor; Feed the Pentagon. US “Doomsday” Plane, Capable Of Surviving Nuclear War, Just Got A Big Revamp.

June 12, 2023 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | Christina's notes

5 Comments »

THE USA IS A GANGSTER STATE

As the arch neocon Dick Cheney said, “Reagan taught us that the debt doesn’t matter.” It’s about re-allocating the federal budget to the people who put you in office: arms makers, the military, oil companies, slumlords, tech giants, banks, hedge funds. If you don’t have a lobbyist, a PAC or a dark money conduit, you don’t count for a damn thing in washington dc. Money for domestic tranquility goes out the window. Austerity and degradation step in.
The same philosophy is used by the neocons, whose think tanks are and focus, are heavily funded by arms makers and the military. The warmonger neocons, that run the show of the demented puppet, biden. All they care about, is extreme neo-imperialism so that they can line the pockets of the corporate and military gangsters that line their pockets with more illgotten gains. They are the most greedy, fanatical and barbaric, mass butchers of humanity possible. They care nothing for life or the planet. They would do anytihimg to acheive their goals, including mass genocides and mass genocides leading to nuclear suicide.

Comment by Sue and Tom Millon | June 13, 2023 | Reply
Pray that the Ukaraine war or, any war does not get worse

Comment by Ad | June 13, 2023 | Reply
- The next meeting of NATO Heads of State and, Government will take place, in Vilnius on 11-12 July 2023.
  Nuland will announce that Ukraine is joining NATO, at that meeting on July 11 2023. The announcement, will mark the beginning, of World War Three.
  
  Comment by Antonio Sontavo | June 13, 2023 | Reply
Most all the media in the usa and west, is a lie. The ukrainian army is almost fininshed. Now victoria nuland, and the psychotic neocons will start ww3, in RUSSIA .

Comment by Mamest | June 14, 2023 | Reply
Moon of Alabama
June 02, 2023
‘Artificial Intelligence’ Is (Mostly) Glorified Pattern Recognition

In the early1990s I worked at a University, first to write a Ph.D. in economics and management and then as associated lecturer for IT and programming. A large part of the Ph.D. thesis was a discussion of various optimization algorithms. I programmed each and tested them on training and real world data. Some of those mathematical algos are deterministic. They always deliver the correct result. Some are not deterministic. They just estimated the outcome and give some confidence measure or probability on how correct the presented result may be. Most of the later involved some kind of Bayesisan statistics. Then there were the (related) ‘Artificial Intelligence’ algos, i.e. ‘machine learning’.

Artificial Intelligence is a misnomer for the (ab-)use of a family of computerized pattern recognition methods.

Well structured and labeled data is used to train the models to later have them recognize ‘things’ in unstructured data. Once the ‘things’ are found some additional algorithm can act on them.

I programmed some of these as backpropagation networks. They would, for example, ‘learn’ to ‘read’ pictures of the numbers 0 to 9 and to present the correct numerical output. To push the ‘learning’ into the right direction during the serial iterations that train the network one needs a reward function or reward equation. It tells the network if the results of an iteration are ‘right’ or ‘wrong’. For ‘reading’ visual representations of numbers that is quite simple. One sets up a table with the visual representations and manually adds the numerical value one sees. After the algo has finished its guess a lookup in the table will tell if it were right or wrong. A ‘reward’ is given when the result was correct. The model will reiterate and ‘learn’ from there.

Once trained on numbers written in Courier typography the model is likely to also recognize numbers written upside down in Times New Roman even though they look different.

The reward function for reading 0 to 9 is simple. But the formulation of a reward function quickly evolves into a huge problem when one works, as I did, on multi-dimensional (simulated) real world management problems. The one described by the airforce colonel above is a good example for the potential mistakes. Presented with a huge amount of real world data and a reward function that is somewhat wrong or too limited a machine learning algorithm may later come up with results that are unforeseen, impossible to execute or prohibited.

Currently there is some hype about a family of large language models like ChatGPT. The program reads natural language input and processes it into some related natural language content output. That is not new. The first Artificial Linguistic Internet Computer Entity (Alice) was developed by Joseph Weizenbaum at MIT in the early 1960s. I had funny chats with ELIZA in the 1980s on a mainframe terminal. ChatGPT is a bit niftier and its iterative results, i.e. the ‘conversations’ it creates, may well astonish some people. But the hype around it is unwarranted.

Behind those language models are machine learning algos that have been trained by large amounts of human speech sucked from the internet. They were trained with speech patterns to then generate speech patterns. The learning part is problem number one. The material these models have been trained with is inherently biased. Did the human trainers who selected the training data include user comments lifted from pornographic sites or did they exclude those? Ethics may have argued for excluding them. But if the model is supposed to give real world results the data from porn sites must be included. How does one prevent remnants from such comments from sneaking into a conversations with kids that the model may later generate? There is a myriad of such problems. Does one include New York Times pieces in the training set even though one knows that they are highly biased? Will a model be allowed to produce hateful output? What is hateful? Who decides? How is that reflected in its reward function?

Currently the factual correctness of the output of the best large language models is an estimated 80%. They process symbols and pattern but have no understanding of what those symbols or pattern represent. They can not solve mathematical and logical problems, not even very basic ones.

There are niche applications, like translating written languages, where AI or pattern recognition has amazing results. But one still can not trust them to get every word right. The models can be assistants but one will always have to double check their results.

Overall the correctness of current AI models is still way too low to allow them to decide any real world situation. More data or more computing power will not change that. If one wants to overcome their limitations one will need to find some fundamentally new ideas.

AI is hyped by lying conmen criminals like Musk to distract and fraudulently get money from suckers

Comment by Stilwell | June 14, 2023 | Reply