At the Brink, THE RISK OFNUCLEAR CONFLICTIS RISING.
New York Times , 4 Mar 24 [Awesome graphics] By W.J. HenniganW. J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.
Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.
THE RISK OF
NUCLEAR CONFLICT
IS RISING.
NUCLEAR NATIONS ARE
BUILDING UP THEIR ARSENALS,
SPEEDING TOWARD
THE NEXT ARMS RACE.
IS ANYONE
PAYING ATTENTION?
Today’s generation of weapons — many of which are fractions of the size of the bombs America dropped in 1945 but magnitudes more deadly than conventional ones — poses an unpredictable threat.
It hangs over battlefields in Ukraine as well as places where the next war might occur: the Persian Gulf, the Taiwan Strait, the Korean Peninsula.
This is one story of what’s at stake — if even one small nuclear weapon were used — based on modeling, research and hundreds of hours of interviews with people who have lived through an atomic detonation, dedicated their lives to studying nuclear war or are planning for its aftermath.
Nuclear war is often described as unimaginable. In fact, it’s not imagined enough.
By W.J. HenniganW.J. Hennigan writes about national security for Opinion.
IF IT SEEMS ALARMIST to anticipate the horrifying aftermath of a nuclear attack, consider this: The United States and Ukraine governments have been planning for this scenario for at least two years.
In the fall of 2022, a U.S. intelligence assessment put the odds at 50-50 that Russia would launch a nuclear strike to halt Ukrainian forces if they breached its defense of Crimea. Preparing for the worst, American officials rushed supplies to Europe. Ukraine has set up hundreds of radiation detectors around cities and power plants, along with more than 1,000 smaller hand-held monitors sent by the United States.
Nearly 200 hospitals in Ukraine have been identified as go-to facilities in the event of a nuclear attack. Thousands of doctors, nurses and other workers have been trained on how to respond and treat radiation exposure. And millions of potassium iodide tablets, which protect the thyroid from picking up radioactive material linked with cancer, are stockpiled around the country.
But well before that — just four days after Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine, in fact — the Biden administration had directed a small group of experts and strategists, a “Tiger Team,” to devise a new nuclear “playbook” of contingency plans and responses. Pulling in experts from the intelligence, military and policy fields, they pored over years-old emergency preparedness plans, weapon-effects modeling and escalation scenarios, dusting off materials that in the age of counterterrorism and cyberwarfare were long believed to have faded into irrelevance.
The playbook, which was coordinated by the National Security Council, now sits in the Eisenhower Executive Office Building, next to the West Wing of the White House. It has a newly updated, detailed menu of diplomatic and military options for President Biden — and any future president — to act upon if a nuclear attack occurs in Ukraine.
At the heart of all of this work is a chilling conclusion: The possibility of a nuclear strike, once inconceivable in modern conflict, is more likely now than at any other time since the Cold War. “We’ve had 30 pretty successful years keeping the genie in the bottle,” a senior administration official on the Tiger Team said. While both America and Russia have hugely reduced their nuclear arsenals since the height of the Cold War, the official said, “Right now is when nuclear risk is most at the forefront.”
Russian President Vladimir Putin reminded the world of this existential danger last week when he publicly warned of nuclear war if NATO deepened its involvement in Ukraine.
The risk of nuclear escalation in Ukraine, while now low, has been a primary concern for the Biden administration throughout the conflict, details of which are being reported here for the first time. In a series of interviews over the past year, U.S. and Ukrainian officials spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss internal planning, diplomacy and ongoing security preparations.
And while it may cause sleepless nights in Washington and Kyiv, most of the world has barely registered the threat. Perhaps it’s because an entire generation came of age in a post-Cold War world, when the possibility of nuclear war was thought to be firmly behind us. It is time to remind ourselves of the consequences in order to avoid them.
Imagine a nuclear weapon is launched.
The missile is launched. Once its solid-fuel rocket motor burns out, the warhead plunges back toward Earth.
A third of a mile above the ground, it explodes.
Its plutonium core and surrounding contents — so delicately pieced together inside — convert into ionized gas and electromagnetic waves within a millisecond.
Temperatures inside the explosion reach millions of degrees, hotter than the surface of the sun.
A roar equal to 10,000 tons of TNT quakes the ground below. A massive fireball blooms so quickly that it seems instantaneous.
Nearly everything flammable below ignites: wood, plastics, oil. Small animals burst into flame, then turn to ash.
Ruptured gas and downed electricity lines fuel an inferno that can rage for miles.
The firestorm consumes so much oxygen that it can suffocate people sheltering inside their cars or homes.
Then there is the shock wave, a rumbling force that expands in every direction, racing at supersonic speeds.
Buildings, trees and other living things are torn apart and thrown at one another.
Near the explosion’s epicenter, buildings heave, sag and crumble. Scalding hot glass and debris shoot like shrapnel into everything in their path. Dry leaves crackle like popcorn and disappear in the blazing heat.
The wreckage — what once was asphalt, steel, soil, glass, flesh and bone — is suctioned into the roiling stem of a mushroom cloud rising for miles.
The cloud appears like a living thing. Its colors change from white to yellow to red to black, billowing into the sky until it eclipses the sun.
Screams for help — and for death — can be heard everywhere, but help is not on the way. Finding a doctor or a nurse is nearly impossible. Most medical workers in the immediate area are dead or injured. Those who survive are quickly overwhelmed.
Then, darkness. There’s a discordant ringing. The air is thick with smoke and debris. Breathing in is difficult — spit out a mouthful of dust and glass fragments, only to take in another.
EVEN AFTER LAST week’s nuclear threat, few believe that Mr. Putin will wake up one day and decide to lob megaton warheads at Washington or European capitals in retaliation for supporting Ukraine. What Western allies see as more likely is that Russia will use a so-called tactical nuclear weapon, which is less destructive and designed to strike targets over short distances to devastate military units on the battlefield.
The strategic thinking behind those weapons is that they are far less damaging than city-destroying hydrogen bombs and therefore more “usable” in warfare. The United States estimates Russia has a stockpile of up to 2,000 tactical nuclear warheads, some small enough they fit in an artillery shell.
But the detonation of any tactical nuclear weapon would be an unprecedented test of the dogma of deterrence, a theory that has underwritten America’s military policy for the past 70 years. The idea stipulates that adversaries are deterred from launching a nuclear attack against the United States — or more than 30 of its treaty-covered allies — because by doing so they risk an overwhelming counterattack.
Possessing nuclear weapons isn’t about winning a nuclear war, the theory goes; it’s about preventing one. It hinges upon a carefully calibrated balance of terror among nuclear states.
After the nuclear age began in 1945, the United States and the Soviet Union were locked in an arms race. Each side amassed tens of thousands of nuclear arms.
Over time, nuclear weapons became symbols of national power and prestige. Other nations in Europe and Asia developed their own arsenals.
The dangerous, costly arms buildup pushed Washington and Moscow to the brink of confrontation, before a gradual warming in relations led to mutual reductions.
In the decades since, overall nuclear stockpiles have shrunk, but the number of nuclear powers has increased to nine
…………………………………………… Moscow has made implicit and explicit nuclear threats throughout the war to scare off Western intervention. Around this time, however, a series of frightening episodes took place.
On Oct. 23, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu of Russia made a flurry of phone calls to the defense chiefs of four NATO nations, including Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin, to say Russia had indications that Ukrainian fighters could detonate a dirty bomb — a conventional explosive wrapped in radioactive material — on their own territory to frame Moscow.
……………………………………………………… If the Russian leader was indeed inching toward the brink, he stepped back.
…………………………………….. IMAGINE THE DAMAGE THE WEAPON WOULD WREAK ON PEOPLE AND
THE ENVIRONMENT………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
India, which has continuing tensions over its borders with China and Pakistan, is fielding longer-range weapons.
Pakistan is developing new ballistic missiles and expanding nuclear production facilities.
North Korea, which has an arsenal of several hundred missiles and dozens of nuclear warheads, regularly threatens to attack South Korea, where the U.S. keeps about 28,500 troops.
China, which has publicly expressed its desire to control the U.S.-allied island of Taiwan by force if necessary, is increasing its nuclear arsenal at a “scale and pace unseen since the U.S.-Soviet nuclear arms race that ended in the late 1980s,” the Congressional Commission on the Strategic Posture of the United States concluded in October.
So while Washington has been helping Ukraine prepare for a nuclear attack, Taiwan or South Korea could be next. The National Security Council has already coordinated contingency playbooks for possible conflicts that could turn nuclear in Taiwan, the Korean Peninsula and the Middle East. Iran, which has continued its nuclear program amid Israel’s war on Hamas in Gaza, has amassed enough enriched uranium to build several weapons if and when it chooses.
During this time of widening conflict, the rising nuclear threat is especially destabilizing: A nuclear explosion in Ukraine or Gaza, where tens of thousands of civilians have already been killed or injured, would sizeably escalate either conflict and its humanitarian toll………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
THIS ISN’T AN easy time for adversaries to be making big leaps of faith, but history shows it’s not impossible to forge deals amid international crises.
The Limited Test Ban Treaty, which prohibits nuclear tests in the atmosphere, in space and underwater, was signed by the United States, Britain and the former Soviet Union in 1963, less than a year after the Cuban missile crisis. Negotiations over the first Strategic Arms Limitation Talks, which froze the number of American and Soviet long-range, nuclear-capable missiles, were concluded less than two months after the United States bombed Haiphong Harbor in Vietnam in 1972, damaging some Soviet ships. Several close calls in Europe during the Cold War contributed to a sweeping collection of agreements between Washington and Moscow that capped the number of each nation’s strategic weapons, opened communication channels and amplified monitoring and verification measures.
…………………………………………………………………………………… The United States is now preparing to build new nuclear warheads for the first time since 1991, part of a decades-long program to overhaul its nuclear forces that’s estimated to cost up to $2 trillion. The outline of that plan was drawn up in 2010 — in a much different security environment than what the country faces today. This administration, or the next one, could make the political case that even more weapons need to be built in response to the expansion and modernization of other nations’ arsenals, particularly Russia’s and China’s.
BEHIND A NONDESCRIPT door on the fifth floor of the State Department building in Washington, down the hall from the former offices of the director of the Manhattan Project, a windowless control room provides a direct channel between the world’s two biggest nuclear powers.
The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center was established in 1988 as a 24-hour watch station to facilitate the information exchange required by various arms control treaties and security-building agreements, mostly between the United States and Russia…………………………………
Today, the mechanisms of peace aren’t moving as swiftly as the machinery of war.
………………….. The National and Nuclear Risk Reduction Center is adding translating services for Persian, Mandarin, Korean and other languages in case more nuclear nations express an interest in sharing information to reduce the risk of an inadvertent conflict.
But for now, those ambitions are unrealized, and the communication lines remain quiet. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2024/03/04/opinion/nuclear-war-prevention.html
More fusion hot air, literally!
Megajoules and megaheadlines are all meganonsense
By Linda Pentz Gunter, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/04/more-fusion-hot-air-literally/ 4 Mar 24
Another week, more fusion news, cue another overblown headline, as the mainstream media once again paid homage to industry hype, digesting nuclear propaganda soundbites without even a hiccup.
On February 8, we learned that the Joint European Torus fusion project, also known as JET, had broken its own record in energy output during a last gasp attempt to make fusion work. The 40-year old project is now closed down for good.
The moment — and just a fleeting moment it truly was, lasting a mere 5.2 seconds — was duIy celebrated as another breakthrough for fusion.
“Nuclear fusion: new record brings dream of clean energy closer,” trumpeted the BBC who were especially smug since Torus is based in the UK.
“Nuclear Fusion World Record Smashed in Major Achievement”, said Science Alert.
“Scientists have made a record-setting fusion energy breakthrough,” blared the headline on Vice.
Below – A jolly video about JET in which the narrator’s voice perhaps generates more energy than the reactor itself.
What actually happened? JET generated 69 megajoules of energy in those 5.2 seconds, breaking its previous record of 59 megajoules over 5 seconds in 2021.
For those of us who don’t go about measuring things in megajoules, I deferred to our colleague, physicist, M.V. Ramana, for an explanation.
What are they really talking about here and is it actually a breakthrough?
“One can start with the annual average consumption of one US household,” Ramana said. “That’s about 10,500 kilowatt hours which is equivalent to 37,800 megajoules. Essentially using one hour = 3,600 seconds, and one joule = one watt-second.”
Head already spinning, I hoped he would do the rest of the math. He did.
“The 69 megajoules generated by JET”, Ramana explained, “is equivalent to roughly 0.06 percent of the electricity consumed by an average US household.”
So a minuscule contribution. But here’s the catch. “The JET machine produced 69 megajoules, but this is all heat,” explained Ramana. “Only about a third of that can be converted into electricity under ideal circumstances.”
Mostly heat, and hardly any electricity. So what the JET fusion so-called breakthrough actually delivered was all hot air. Literally!
Then came some more hot air. “First ‘private’ nuclear reactor to power 2 million British homes” ran another headline. The private sector nuclear company in question is Westinghouse. Yes, that Westinghouse! The one whose executives are in jail over a failed new nuclear power plant project in South Carolina. The Westinghouse that went bankrupt, forcing its mega-giant parent company, Toshiba, to shed not only Westinghouse but all Toshiba’s nuclear assets to avoid going down with the Westinghouse ship.
The same Westinghouse that is now $20 billion over budget at its other new nuclear project at Vogtle in Georgia.
But the British press were all “oh joy, oh rapture unforeseen” over this announcement, a project that has about as much credibility as the whimsical plot of HMS Pinafore.
And finally, we learned that Michigan governor, Gretchen Whitmer, is seeking another $150 million to restart the old and decrepit Palisades nuclear plant.
Palisades has been closed for almost two years and the company that would re-open and run it, Holtec, which specializes in decommissioning and radioactive waste management, has zero experience running a nuclear power plant.
This latest ask comes on top of $150 million already approved last year for a Palisades restart and could be augmented by a $1.5 billion loan from the federal government as well.
All of this nuclear nonsense comes on the heels of other hyperbole surrounding previous so-called advances in fusion (see our earlier coverage here and here), misrepresented almost universally as an imminent answer to our worsening climate crisis.
But, as the song goes in Pinafore, “Things are seldom what they seem.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International
GLOBAL WARFARE “Summit” “16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit”
The only real and proven tool we have, the hard work of diplomacy, is nowhere to be found.
Instead of creating alliances with China and Russia to solve our dire mutual challenges, this rapid warring footing is being touted here as the only real option for our security.
There’s been a shift at these conferences away from facts and towards ideology. “We’ve moved from Civil Service to profit”
02.03.24 – New York City – Anthony Donovan, https://www.pressenza.com/2024/03/global-warfare-summit-summons-national-priority/
Outraged about all the innocents being slaughtered in Russia/Ukraine, Israel/Palestine, and the build-up for war in China/Taiwan? Thank you. Most of these below represent the armaments, bombs, guidance systems, and “intelligence” skill sets being sent to these regions. It is one industry, clamoring for global dominance.
Ten feet tall, high above our heads, as the escalator descends deep below ground to the conference rooms for the 3-day “16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit” in Washington DC is a brightly lit welcoming. It reads:
Securing Our World,
Ensuring Our Future
In reality, nothing could be further from the truth.
Deterrence need only fail once. Once.
It will. What gives anyone the right to threaten all our grandchildren’s existence? Nothing and no one. Our leaders have exceeded the banal mindset of the Cold War, without the public knowing it. The ominous and wrong presumption of leading a nuclear arms race to win a nuclear war has crept back in.
Hundreds of contractors, corporations, the Pentagon, Government agencies, and universities fill the rooms to solidify contracts, and encourage each other to continue building more facilities for more nuclear devices, and much faster. Why? The constant shout here: “Evil.” The enemies Russia and China are fast upon us. The “Summit” echoes their call for a national mobilization to move immediately and fully to deter these two “expansionist” fronts.
The only real and proven tool we have, the hard work of diplomacy, is nowhere to be found. Only a handful have heard of the Treaty on The Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, and those misperceive it as naive. The trillions $ funneled quietly for this “enterprise” are flowing, unaudited, and without any media discussion, oversight or democratic process.
Jim Carrier, a discerning journalist reporting on the Summit, “I’m coming at this from the viewpoint of a journalist, not as an activist. Although… it’s very eye-opening. When I was covering this industry in 1995 everything seemed to be shutting down…. I’m shocked really. Remarkably, it has all come back to life. The vibe last year was that we couldn’t find enough people… this year it is the opposite tone. [The industry] is underway and we’ve hired many thousands of new workers. The big news announced is they will have the first new plutonium pit and it will be “war ready”.
It is frightening to see the inside of the sausage, the enthusiasm these folks are bringing to it, and the power they wield. What we have is a huge lobbying machine of contractors, … We are in a new arms race, a new war going on. The American public is wholly ignorant of it.”
“Enemies” remain the reason for maintaining a secret world of nuclear weapons and warfare. The three days of drumming to build faster was eased by finding a knowledgeable, brave soul.
Greg Mello, Executive Director of Los Alamos Study Group, “This is a real mental health challenge….. There’s been a shift at these conferences away from facts and towards ideology. …I’m going to be very blunt here. This conference is very Sino and Russophobic, … completely ignorant of aspects of foreign policy and history. I spoke to someone on our U.S. Strategic Nuclear Posture Committee, and he did not know anything about US-Russia relations. I was very shocked. It is the acquired stupidity and incompetence in the highest parts of our government, which we did not have in the past, even under Reagan. We don’t understand our “adversaries”. There were hawks back then, but there were a lot of realists who had respect for their counterparties in the Soviet Union. Now that is gone. Now we have arrogance. It has all been politicized. … We’ve moved from Civil Service to profit.”
Mello wisely addressed the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) and State Department during their presentation, “How can we bring in more of the dissident voices to make the discourse in your offices richer and more critical? Can we get back to a more rational approach to the world? And a little less righteous? We need to do more to create channels, find a way to move forward.”
Mello confides later, “Back in the Obama years, on the policy side, it was clear, they could not hate Russia enough! I felt this was going to go to a very dark place.” Indeed, it has.
Hidden deeply on this Ground Hog Day of 2024, General Anthony Cotton, Commander of U.S. Strategic Command (STRATCOM, all nuclear weapons of land, sea, air, space, and related facilities), addresses the Summit talking of the new “business model” of partnership with civilian industry and academia to give our nuclear weapon industry greater agility and speed. “The tables have turned, the advancements of the civilian sector are being introduced to the DOD (Dept. of Defense), … incorporating these new technologies …. to make sure the Labs and the NNSA (National Nuclear Security Administration) have all they need” He talks of modernizing facilities and tech systems “to move fast”, “sustain that flow, the tempo of a constant production line.”
The military-industrial complex we were warned of in 1959 is extolled at the “Summit” to be a national priority, hiring the young, luring in, and incorporating the ingenuity and wisdom long developed by our civilian sector, from Apple, Microsoft, Google, Amazon, Tesla, AI developers, Boeing, Harvard, MIT, and hundreds of other entities.
Instead of creating alliances with China and Russia to solve our dire mutual challenges, this rapid warring footing is being touted here as the only real option for our security.
General Cotton shares the blinders of this “integrated battle space”. “…Platforms, weapons, they all have to be in alignment, in synch. … Analytically driven data, that informs the senior decision maker [the President] of what the picture truly is. The confidence in the decision that you make will be incredible. …A digitalized enterprise is what we are looking at, the tools and state of the art capabilities… the incredible efficiencies we are seeing in the cloud-based environments….”
Harvey Bennett, a Vietnam Veteran, and member of Veterans for Peace reporting for Pacifica Radio, stood up for the final comment facing squarely General Cotton’s presentation. “General, I think the military has been doing the job they’ve been tasked with. But those missing in action, are the diplomats. When I think about what an acceptable risk in strategic deterrence is, if it is not zero, then it is not acceptable because we are talking about annihilation, not just of our country, but worldwide.
Our successes in modernization and technology are laudable, but in the big picture, do they make us safer? Or do they increase our adversary’s sense of vulnerability, and reduce their decision time when there is a question about whether they are under attack with nuclear weapons?
I want to mention the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) which entered into force January 2021. None of the nuclear weapon states are signatories, but we are a signatory to the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and Article 6 of that treaty mandates that nuclear states to pursue in good faith to negotiate with other states to reduce the nuclear arsenals with a view to disarmament.
We have a treaty now to globally eliminate nuclear weapons. I don’t want anyone to be out of a job, but I think the world wants peace, the world wants security. I don’t think that is a zero-sum game. We can’t be secure if the rest of the world isn’t secure. Relying on nuclear weapons is not going to make us safe.
I was alarmed reading a report by General John Hyten in 2018, who had your job (Cmdr. of STRATCOM), speaking to the Arms Control Association. He was describing the Global Thunder War Games of Strategic Deterrence. He was blunt and said
“I hate to tell you but (nuclear war games) ENDS THE SAME WAY EVERY TIME. IT ENDS BAD.”
Bennett said, “Even if it is not “every time”, that’s too many.”
The moderator quickly jumped in thanking the General, not allowing a response, and calling for a lunch break. Silence is not an option, and neither is “Russia, China, Iran”. Thank you, Mr. Bennett, perfectly put.
We know the solution: Shame our Representatives, and companies. Stop our unlimited funding to warfare, and re-direct it to the jobs we need for life and civilization to move forward.
The Dangers of the Nuclear Industrial Complex
The Summit on Nuclear Deterrence was just last week and “WE” were there to witness the insanity and the "evil." Harvey Bennett joined Greg Mello, Executive Director of the Los Alamos Study Group, and journalist Jim Carrier, who attended the three-day "summit" to hear members of the nuclear industrial complex and the Federal Government talk about nuclear war and deterrence. Can you imagine that they actually believe that we need to be ready to fight a nuclear war and win it? Hear that and a few voices of reason on what our country is doing in your name and with your tax dollars.
AUKUS: Are nuclear-powered submarines a good idea for Australia?
“[So] the question for us is, is it sensible for Australia to commit itself to go to war with the US against China — a war we have no reason to believe the US can win, in order to acquire submarines that we don’t need?”
ABC RN / By Nick Baker and Taryn Priadko for Global Roaming 5 Mar 24
There were always going to be questions about a nuclear-powered submarine deal with a (stated) price tag of up to $368 billion.
But, as the dust settles on the AUKUS security pact and Australians patiently wait for the subs that come with it, some defence experts are warning that the deal could fall apart.
“I think the chance of the plan unfolding effectively is extremely low,” Hugh White, an emeritus professor of strategic studies at the Australian National University, tells ABC RN’s Global Roaming.
Professor White was a defence adviser to the Hawke government and worked as a deputy secretary for strategy and intelligence in the Department of Defence. He’s also been a big critic of AUKUS.
So could AUKUS sink? And what would that mean for Australia’s defence plans?
What is AUKUS?
On September 15, 2021, a new trilateral security partnership between Australia, the UK and the US was announced, called AUKUS (A-UK-US).
Australia was scrapping its earlier $90 billion deal with France for 12 conventional-powered submarines and instead securing nuclear-powered submarines through AUKUS.
More details were announced on March 13 last year, including around the two so-called “pillars” of AUKUS.
Pillar One, which has received the most attention, is the submarines.
The plan is for Australia to buy at least three nuclear-powered Virginia class submarines from the US in the early 2030s.
We will then build at least five of a new, nuclear-powered submarine class dubbed the SSN-AUKUS, likely in Adelaide, in the 2030s, 2040s and beyond.
Pillar Two involves the sharing of technology, in areas like quantum computing, artificial intelligence and hypersonic missiles.
Former prime minister Scott Morrison called AUKUS “the best” decision of his government, while current Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has said it would “strengthen Australia’s national security and stability in our region”.
AUKUS worries
Professor White has two main worries around AUKUS.
“We do need submarines. I think submarines are a very important part of a defensive posture for Australia … [But] I don’t think we need nuclear-powered submarines,” he says.
“They’re so much more expensive. They’re so much more difficult to make. They’re so much more difficult to operate. We’ll end up with far fewer of them in our fleet.”
He says his second concern is far bigger: “I don’t think we’re going to get [the submarines].”
He claims the plan is overly reliant on future decisions and assistance from the US and UK governments, and also full of near-insurmountable technical tasks for Australia.
“I think what’s going to happen … is within the next few years, the whole thing will just come apart in our hands. And we’ll be back to square one trying to work out how to get some more conventional [submarines].”
Allan Behm, the director of the international and security affairs program at the Australia Institute, also doubts the likelihood of the AUKUS deal going ahead as planned.
One reason, he says, is that the technologies, skills and workforce that are required from a country like Australia to build and maintain nuclear-powered subs is pushing our limits, even with the involvement of the US and UK.
“We’re going into a technological domain with which we are totally unfamiliar,” says Mr Behm, who has a 30-year career in the Australian public service and was senior advisor to then-shadow minister for foreign affairs Penny Wong.
“We’re talking about a number of submarines with nuclear propulsion systems in them. And we’ve only got one nuclear reactor in Australia, which is nothing like the very, very highly enriched uranium reactors, the pressure water reactors that exist in nuclear-powered submarines,” he says.
“I think the best parallel would be, how would Australia imagine that it would undertake, conduct and retrieve a moon launch?”
US versus China
If AUKUS goes ahead as planned, is it the best way to keep Australia safe?
It’s been framed as a massive deterrent to China, which keeps building up its military.
Mr Morrison told the ABC last year, AUKUS helps to “change the calculus for any potential aggressors in our region”.
But Professor White says there are pitfalls with this strategy too.
He claims AUKUS could pull Australia into a future US-China conflict over Taiwan, which he contends the US may not win.
“China has focused so strongly and so effectively on building precisely the kinds of forces it needs to prevent the US projecting power by sea and air into the Western Pacific,” he says.
“[So] the question for us is, is it sensible for Australia to commit itself to go to war with the US against China — a war we have no reason to believe the US can win, in order to acquire submarines that we don’t need?”
While Australia has made clear it will have full control over the nuclear-powered submarines under the deal, Professor White says the US may still expect us to support them in a future war.
Cost concerns
The estimated cost of the submarine program will be up to $368 billion over the next 30 years. It’s a figure that has attracted no shortage of criticism.
“It puts so many of our defence eggs in one super expensive basket,” Mr Behm says.
“Short of expanding our defence budget by a considerable amount … we would find ourselves with very constrained capabilities in other fields in order to meet the expenditure targets of this project.”
And, based on other defence projects, he contends there will be cost blowouts.
“Whenever [the Department of] Defence says it’s going to cost you $1, always multiply it by three. And so your $368 billion is, in effect, a lifetime cost of $1 trillion,” he says.
“And you can do a hell of a lot with $1 trillion.”
A safer Australia?
The AUKUS critics have their critics too.
Peter Dean, the director of foreign policy and defence at the University of Sydney’s US Studies Centre, says he has a “diametrically opposed” outlook to Professor White and Mr Behm………………………………………………
Scrap AUKUS, totally rethink defence?
Meanwhile, Professor White, from the anti-AUKUS camp, is advocating a totally different approach to AUKUS.
He says Australia should pivot away from the US and think about “how we can develop our national capability to defend ourselves independently against a major Asian power?”
“Traditionally, Australians have believed that as a very big continent with a relatively small population … we couldn’t possibly defend ourselves. But I don’t think that’s right.”
But he says this would need a change in priorities…………………………………………………
A missing part of the discussion
Mr Behm, also from the anti-AUKUS camp, says there’s an element sometimes missing in discussions about defence.
Diplomacy has got to be central to the way in which you think about your long-term national security,” he says.
“You get much more return on your investment in diplomacy than you ever get out of defence systems, which in the life of almost all of them you never use.”………………………………….
Mr Behm advocates for more emphasis on “how you use the intellectual and cultural resources of the nation to both protect and to promote its deep and long-term security”.
“[So] I would be prepared to argue that the pivot on which our national security rests is the foreign minister.” https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-05/aukus-set-to-sink/103534664
The lesson from the criminal H Bomb Bravo “test”- Hibakusha remind us
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese and Rongelap Hibakusha claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
Hibakusha remind us just why a nuclear-free world is needed
By Joseph Gerson, 4 Mar 24, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/04/the-lesson-from-the-criminal-bravo-test/
Later this month I will return to Japan for the annual Bikini commemoration and the Gensuikyō, or Japan Council Against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs, annual conference. There won’t be a bikini fashion show.
The commemoration of what can only be called the criminal U.S. Bravo H-bomb test on March 1, 1954, is one of two annual anchor events of the Japanese peace movement. Although Covid-19 is still with us, these events will play important roles in revitalizing the Japanese peace movement; one of the most effective in the world.
Over the years, this movement has played a major role in preventing Japan from becoming a nuclear weapons state, and the testimonies of Hibakusha (victims and witnesses of the A-bombings) have played critical roles in inspiring the nuclear disarmament diplomacy and the international negotiations that resulted in the 2017 United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
Although I initially met several Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb survivors as early as the 1978 U.N. Second Session of Nuclear Disarmament, it wasn’t until I first traveled to Hiroshima in 1984 that I began what became a 40-year engagement with Hibakusha and the Japanese movement.
In an effort to compensate for his earlier support for the Nuclear Weapons Freeze campaign and to bring nonexistent jobs bacon to Boston, Senator Ted Kennedy (D-Mass.) and, following him, the Massachusetts congressional delegation and the city’s business establishment were suckered into Reagan-administration planning to transform Boston Harbor into a nuclear weapons base.
Knowing the Navy’s record of nuclear weapons accidents, the ways that the base would ratchet up tensions with Moscow and violate the freeze, and with knowledge of better economic and social uses for the waterfront property, several of us organized at the grassroots level to prevent construction of the base. We prevailed, and I was invited to give a brief inspirational speech at the World Conference against A- and H- Bombs. Needless to say, my first trip to Hiroshima was a transformative experience.
Not long thereafter, I returned to Japan for the Bikini Day commemorations and was shocked by what I learned from the testimonies of Rongelap and Japanese survivors of the March 1, 1954, Bravo “test.” Bravo was by far the most devastating of the United States’ nuclear weapons explosions that pulverized Bikini between 1946 and 1958. It was detonated a year after the Soviets tested their first H-bomb and two years before a culturally explosive women’s two-piece swimsuit was first marketed in Paris.
Washington responded to the Soviet Union’s first H-bomb with a bomb 1,000 times more powerful than the Hiroshima A-bomb that destroyed an entire city, initially killed 100,000 people—almost all civilians—and poisoned survivors, the environment, and future generations. Ninety-eight miles away from the Bikini H-bomb test site, inhabitants of tropical Rongelap Atoll were showered by and played with radioactive ash that they first thought was snow. Just 500 miles from the equator, they had never seen snow. Japanese fishing boats hundreds of miles from Bikini Atoll and fish that comprised a major portion of Japan’s ocean-based food supply were also irradiated.
Before the year was out, natives of Rongelap and Japanese fishermen began to die from radiation diseases and cancer. Still births and numerous birth defects including jellyfish babies (transparent skin and no bones), anencephaly (infants born without portions of their brain or skull), and other mutations followed.
Secrecy was immediately imposed by both the U.S. and Japanese governments. But as word got out following the return of the Lucky Dragon V tuna fishing boat’s sickened crew to Yaizu City, women with memories of Hiroshima launched a petition campaign for the abolition of nuclear weapons. It garnered 25 million Japanese signatures, leading to the convening of the first World Conference against A- and H- Bombs, which attracted delegates from across Japan and around the world.
Hiroshima and Nagasaki A-bomb victims, many of whom had hidden themselves from the world due to their disfigurements, excruciating physical and emotional pains, and popular fears that their radiation diseases were contagious began to tell their stories. What became the world’s most powerful and long enduring nuclear disarmament social movement was born.
Two years after Bravo, in 1956, the first Godzilla film (released in Japan in 1954) was distributed in the United States. The original Japanese version, unlike the deracinated version shown in the US, was not the compelling story of a love triangle. It was a powerful expression of rage against the A-and H- bombs, a cry for the elimination of nuclear weapons. Watching it now, the desperate fear of nuclear weapons in the aftermath of the Hiroshima, Nagasaki, and Bikini bombs—fears blunted over the decades—remains palpable.
Race was, of course, a factor. During the Pacific War, The New York Times quoted a U.S. general as saying that he and his troops saw Japanese as “vermin” to be eradicated. The implicit assumption was that Marshallese were darker skinned primitives who could be sacrificed, ostensibly in the pursuit of world peace. In both cases, Japanese and Rongelap Hibakusha claimed that they were used as human “guinea pigs,” monitored by doctors and other scientists but not given medicine.
This outrageous charge was difficult and painful to believe, bringing to mind as it did Dr. Josef Mengele’s murderous experiments at the Auschwitz death camp. But in 2000, in the course of hosting a “Global Hibakusha delegation” for a conference at the United Nations, several of us met with the senior Department of Energy (DOE) official who was responsible for studies of the impacts of radiation on people. I explained that in Japan I had heard Hibakusha cry out that they had been used as “guinea pigs” in experiments conducted by the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission. I said that I could understand victims thinking the worst of their tormentors, but expressed some doubt and asked if he could say it wasn’t so.
“No,” he responded. The experiments had indeed been conducted. And an Utah downwinder who was with us raged in response that the same was secretly being done across the western United States. She was a woman who had lost her father and father-in-law to uranium mining, her sister and daughter to Nevada test fallout, and who consumed a daily meal of pills simply to stay alive.
Some years later I experienced an equally sobering reverberation from the Bikini H-bomb. It came during a lunch break in a well-appointed conference site during another annual Bikini commemoration. A descendant of Rongelap Hibakusha was given a book about the Bikini H-bomb and its devastations. It included a list of the names of each of Rongelap’s inhabitants on that 1954 March 1 morning. One by one this young man placed a check mark next to the name of each person who had died of cancer and other radiation diseases from the Bravo “test.” I watched amidst very painful silence as he methodically checked off the names of nearly every person on the list. Some were women and men I had met along our ways
The disastrous underwater Baker atomic test at Bikini Atoll that preceded the even more out of control Bravo shot. (Photo: U.S. Army Photographic Signal Corps/Wikimedia Commons)
Bikini Day will be little remarked here in the United States: Cowboys and Indians all over again, and quite literally a case of nuclear colonialism. But those who gather in the Marshall Islands and Yaizu City in Japan will not only be marking the 70th anniversary of the devastating Bravo test and honoring those victimized and lost. We will also be reminding the world of the Hibakusha truth that “human beings and nuclear weapons cannot coexist.”
The hands of the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists’ Doomsday Clock are now set at 90 seconds to midnight. We face the risks of possible nuclear escalation in Ukraine, the Middle East, and over Taiwan tensions. With the post-Cold War order in free fall, all nine nuclear weapons states are escalating their arms racing, “modernizing” or expanding their nuclear arsenals. In these critical movements the messages from the Marshall Islands, Yaizu City, and nearby Shizuoka will be clear: The U.N. Treaty on Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons must be universally signed and ratified to make way for a nuclear weapons-free world. And here in the United States, campaigns like Back from the Brink provide paths and hope for human survival.
What must be found is the will!
Dr. Joseph Gerson is the President of the Campaign for Peace, Disarmament and Common Security.
Nuclear industry cries poor , as top nuclear propagandist Rafael Grossi begs banks for more money!
UN nuclear watchdog head urges development banks to fund new projects.
Rafael Grossi says World Bank and Asian Development Bank ‘out of touch’
with modern attitudes to atomic energy.
The head of the UN’s nuclear
watchdog has called on global development banks and their government
shareholders to fund new projects, warning that a failure to do so could
delay the energy transition.
Rafael Grossi, director-general of the
International Atomic Energy Agency, told the Financial Times that a lack of
funding for [?] emissions-free nuclear energy by multilateral lenders such as
the World Bank and Asian Development Bank was “out of step” with the
wishes of most of their shareholders. He said there had been a
“sea-change” in attitudes to nuclear power due to the climate crisis
and the Russia-Ukraine war, which propelled energy security to the top of
policymakers’ priority lists.
FT 4th March 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/7cb8dda3-1739-47f0-b0a7-3d726f068808 u
TODAY. Oh for a bit of sanity and genuine leadership!
I couldn’t resist this facebook comment. It encapsulates the madness of what America and its allies – the Anglosphere and Europe, are doing about the Israeli genocide in Gaza.
Does the “West” – slavish followers of the USA – understand that they are observing and apparently accepting a repeat of genocidal atrocities, as they did in the 1930s about Nazi Germany? (At least there was some excuse in the 30’s. that “they didn’t know about it”)
We all know about it now. We know that Joe Biden and co are supplying Israel with the weapons and know-how for its mass murder of Gazans, while mouthing pious statements about humanitarian aid, and about ending the atrocity that they are in fact prolonging.
That lovely word “zeitgeist” – I’m not sure what it means really. But I think it’s time to change the zeitgeist that says that the important goal for human beings is the individualistic one, to make ever-increasing profit. You see, making and selling weaponry is America’s big export industry – and it provides ever-increasing shareholders’ profits, – and jobs and industry and pride and blah blah blah.
So – the Israeli’s disastrous genocide in Gaza is after all – good for business.
And so is the interminable war in Ukraine – in which “negotiation” “diplomacy” “agreement” are dirty words, never to be contemplated. Ukraine is being steadily destroyed militarily, environmentally, humanly, under the messianic Zelenksy cult. The Raytheon, Norhrop Grumman, Lockheed Martin, Boeing, Halliburton etc etc celebrations party on…………
Who knows how much money from these, and many other corporations, goes to the USA’s Republican and Democratic parties? Does any politician get in, without that backing? At the moment – all the USA fuss about Biden versus Trump. It is irrelevant. Whoever gets to be president will be the puppet of the corporations and especially of the military-industrial-nuclear complex.
All of which means that getting a decent leader in the USA is an impossible task – as he or she must always be beholden to big business.
It is probably a pretty difficult task anywhere, with the power of corporate lobbies to influence politicians, and the USA’s history of CIA-backed removal of leaders in other countries.
Still – we’d better try. If we can’t change from the paradigm of individualism, and ever-increasing profit – to a paradigm of collective action for human and environmental good, – well, we’ve had it!
TODAY. Normalising the unthinkable – the 16th Annual Nuclear (so-called) Deterrence Summit
The 16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Washington DC finished in early February
The propaganda guff should alert us to the deliberately misty thinking of the war-mongers, as they contort the facts, and kid themselves, and us, that they work for a peaceful world. The lovely phrases trip off their tongues so easily:
“Analytically driven data” “state of the art capabilities” “incredible efficiencies ” ” the cloud-based environments” “A digitalized enterprise”. Blah blah . My favourite is always “the cloud”, when what they really mean is acres and acres of dirty great machines guzzling electricity and water.
What this whole conference (now more gloriously termed “summit”) is really about, is profit, money for the American corporations – weapons ones, digital ones, space companies, contractors, and also the Pentagon, government agencies, corporate media and universities. Check out the sponsors –
There are words and phrases that you won’t hear at these conferences – “diplomacy” “negotiation” “understanding”. There’s no money in that stuff.
But you will hear “adversaries” “enemies” “evil” – there’s money in being “war ready” even better “global war ready”. Some participants actually believe that the USA could wage a nuclear war and win it – (whatever “winning a nuclear war” might mean)
I’m not religious, but I can’t help thinking what might have happened if Jesus somehow got into this crooked conference. He wouldn’t have been polite – tables overturned, lap-tops and projectors busted, corporate salesmen driven. Of course, he would be arrested as a terrorist, and given the Julian Assange treatment.
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’
who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police
The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithmsSun 6 Jun 2021 18.00 AESTShare
Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.
……………………………………… What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.
………………………..systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.
Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled – and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorise people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.
……………………………Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories – certainly an improvement – however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers].
And we could only study ImageNet because it is public. There are huge training datasets held by tech companies that are completely secret. They have pillaged images we have uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms and turned them into private systems.
……………………………………………. What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is published by Yale University Press (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/06/microsofts-kate-crawford-ai-is-neither-artificial-nor-intelligent
AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy
John Naughton, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/mar/02/ais-craving-for-data-is-matched-only-by-a-runaway-thirst-for-water-and-energy
The computing power for AI models requires immense – and increasing – amounts of natural resources. Legislation is required to prevent environmental crisis.
One of the most pernicious myths about digital technology is that it is somehow weightless or immaterial. Remember all that early talk about the “paperless” office and “frictionless” transactions? And of course, while our personal electronic devices do use some electricity, compared with the washing machine or the dishwasher, it’s trivial.
Belief in this comforting story, however, might not survive an encounter with Kate Crawford’s seminal book, Atlas of AI, or the striking Anatomy of an AI System graphic she composed with Vladan Joler. And it certainly wouldn’t survive a visit to a datacentre – one of those enormous metallic sheds housing tens or even hundreds of thousands of servers humming away, consuming massive amounts of electricity and needing lots of water for their cooling systems.
On the energy front, consider Ireland, a small country with an awful lot of datacentres. Its Central Statistics Office reports that in 2022 those sheds consumed more electricity (18%) than all the rural dwellings in the country, and as much as all Ireland’s urban dwellings. And as far as water consumption is concerned, a study by Imperial College London in 2021 estimated that one medium-sized datacentre used as much water as three average-sized hospitals. Which is a useful reminder that while these industrial sheds are the material embodiment of the metaphor of “cloud computing”, there is nothing misty or fleecy about them. And if you were ever tempted to see for yourself, forget it: it’d be easier to get into Fort Knox.
There are now between 9,000 and 11,000 of these datacentres in the world. Many of them are beginning to look a bit dated, because they’re old style server-farms with thousands or millions of cheap PCs storing all the data – photographs, documents, videos, audio recordings, etc – that a smartphone-enabled world generates in such casual abundance.
But that’s about to change, because the industrial feeding frenzy around AI (AKA machine learning) means that the materiality of the computing “cloud” is going to become harder to ignore. How come? Well, machine learning requires a different kind of computer processor – graphics processing units (GPUs) – which are considerably more complex (and expensive) than conventional processors. More importantly, they also run hotter, and need significantly more energy.
On the cooling front, Kate Crawford notes in an article published in Nature last week that a giant datacentre cluster serving OpenAI’s most advanced model, GPT-4, is based in the state of Iowa. “A lawsuit by local residents,” writes Crawford, “revealed that in July 2022, the month before OpenAI finished training the model, the cluster used about 6% of the district’s water. As Google and Microsoft prepared their Bard and Bing large language models, both had major spikes in water use – increases of 20% and 34%, respectively, in one year, according to the companies’ environmental reports.”
Within the tech industry, it has been widely known that AI faces an energy crisis, but it was only at the World Economic Forum in Davos in January that one of its leaders finally came clean about it. OpenAI’s boss Sam Altman warned that the next wave of generative AI systems will consume vastly more power than expected, and that energy systems will struggle to cope. “There’s no way to get there without a breakthrough,” he said.
What kind of “breakthrough”? Why, nuclear fusion, of course. In which, coincidentally, Mr Altman has a stake, having invested in Helion Energy way back in 2021. Smart lad, that Altman; never misses a trick.
As far as cooling is concerned, it looks as though runaway AI also faces a challenge. At any rate, a paper recently published on the arXiv preprint server by scientists at the University of California, Riverside, estimates that “operational water withdrawal” – water taken from surface or groundwater sources – of global AI “may reach [between] 4.2 [and] 6.6bn cubic meters in 2027, which is more than the total annual water withdrawal of … half of the United Kingdom”.
Given all that, you can see why the AI industry is, er, reluctant about coming clean on its probable energy and cooling requirements. After all, there’s a bubble on, and awkward facts can cause punctures. So it’s nice to be able to report that soon they may be obliged to open up. Over in the US, a group of senators and representatives have introduced a bill to require the federal government to assess AI’s current environmental footprint and develop a standardised system for reporting future impacts. And over in Europe, the EU’s AI Act is about to become law. Among other things, it requires “high-risk AI systems” (which include the powerful “foundation models” that power ChatGPT and similar AIs) to report their energy consumption, use of resources and other impacts throughout their lifespan.
It’d be nice if this induces some investors to think about doing proper due diligence before jumping on the AI bandwagon.
The nuclear narrative.
What is a narrative? ……… In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Jean-François Nadeau, March 4, 2024, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/808350/chronique-narratif
The future of the world, at least according to the head of the AtkinsRéalis firm, lies in nuclear power. This company, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, has changed its name. The scandals that have affected her, she asserts, belong to the past.
For its campaign to promote atomic energy, AtkinsRéalis secured the services of two former prime ministers: Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris. In 2019, as revealed by Radio-Canada, Jean Chrétien had already gone so far as to propose, with astonishing lightness, storing foreign nuclear waste in Labrador. In a letter, the former prime minister wrote to a Japanese firm: “Canada has been the largest supplier of nuclear fuel for years, and I have always thought it would be appropriate for Canada to become, at the end of account, the steward and guarantor of the safe storage of nuclear waste after their first service cycle. »
No carbon neutrality without nuclear power , repeats the boss of AtkinsRéalis like an advertising slogan. We must replace fossil fuels, while doubling or tripling, thanks to nuclear power, the production of electricity, he pleads. There is no question, in this presentation, of rethinking a model of society based on an infinite expansion of consumption. Always more cars, as long as they are electric. Always more heating, regardless of the fact that our buildings are thermal sieves. In other words, what continues to matter is growth. And the increase in AtkinsRéalis’ turnover is largely due to nuclear power, as noted by Le Devoir .
Last week, Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon reiterated again that he was not closing the door to the return of nuclear power. Since the arrival of Michael Sabia at the head of Hydro-Québec , the signals pointing in the direction of this revival have multiplied. “I think that as a government, in the ministry, at home, we must stay on the lookout for what is happening in nuclear power,” the minister further affirmed in front of an audience of business people. To have such projects accepted, the minister specified that “you simply have to have a good narrative”. In Quebec, he laments, “we have not had any narrative on nuclear power” since the closure of Gentilly-2 .
What is a narrative? In 1928, Edward Bernays, the founding father of the public relations and advertising industry, called these language elements capable of manipulating public opinion propaganda . This word ended up, as we know, having unfavorable connotations. Others were therefore substituted. Here is the latest addition, used in all sauces: the narrative . In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Pierre Fitzgibbon shows interest in mini nuclear reactors. The boss AtkinsRéalis also praises this technology, which is far from wonderful. Nobody says too loudly that these types of plants produce more nuclear waste per megawatt. These mini power plants would produce up to thirty times more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants.
In his “narrative”, the boss of AtkinsRéalis barely concedes that the management of radioactive materials constitutes a serious danger for humanity.
In Ontario, a large dump for radioactive waste was approved on January 9. Tons of heavy metals, dangerous radioactive elements, plutonium, uranium, etc. will pile up there for a century, not far from the Ottawa River. The whole thing promises to occupy, for eternity, an area equivalent to 70 National Hockey League ice rinks.
In France, 280 km of underground galleries are being built to store nuclear waste. To give an idea, the galleries of the Montreal metro total 71 km. This giant sarcophagus will be the largest construction site in Europe. In these galleries, the most dangerous waste will be able to spew radioactivity for 100,000 years.
So that the hydrogen and the fumes released from this collection of waste do not explode, it is necessary to continually ventilate. Which requires electricity. A power outage, if it lasts more than a week, could be catastrophic. Obviously, electrical problems, cataclysms, wars, terrorists, this will never happen in a hundred years. Not again in a thousand years, probably. Moreover, at the entrance to these sites, in what language should we warn future generations not to dig?
The speech of the boss of AtkinsRéalis is very similar to that which is also being given these days by the cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s. Gary Pilnick, its CEO, is sad to see the cost of food soaring. However, he does not recommend reviewing the profit margins on which the food giants are fattening, nor the exploitation system which governs this surge in prices. He simply suggests eating cereal at dinner, so that consumers can lower their bills and cereal manufacturers can make more money. At the bottom of the scale, this makes no difference to the misfortunes of the majority. Agricultural producers in Quebec, for example, find themselves this year with the lowest net incomes since 1938, they say.
Nuclear industries operate according to the same elastic logic which consists of making money at all costs. Our dependence on automobiles and energy-intensive lifestyles suits them. And it is enough, to hear them, to continue to rush forward, head down, to escape from a reality that is ruining the future. Their technologies promise to fix everything. As long as you are willing to swallow their narrative first, like soft cereal .
Wargame simulated a conflict between Israel and Iran: It quickly went nuclear
The Bulletin By Henry Sokolski | February 27, 2024
With the Gaza crisis, a nuclear Rubicon of sorts has been crossed: Elected Israeli officials—a deputy minister and a ruling party member of Parliament—not only publicly referenced Israeli possession of nuclear weapons, but suggested how such weapons might be used to target Gaza. This is unprecedented.[1]
More recently, Iran directly attacked an Israeli-manned intelligence outpost in Iraq. Iran also has inched within weeks of making several nuclear weapons and has made its military ever more immune to first strikes against its key missile and nuclear facilities. Iran and its proxies also now have long-range, high-precision missiles that could easily reach key Israeli targets.[2]
None of these developments is positive. For decades, most security analysts assumed Israel’s undeclared nuclear weapons were only deployed to deter attacks and that Iran would not dare to attack Israel directly. This after-action report describes a war game originally designed nearly two years ago. It directly challenges these assumptions and suggests that military strikes between Israel and Iran—including nuclear ones—are possible.
The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center held the game and its preparatory meetings—five separate sessions—in November and December of 2023. The 35 participants included Republican and Democratic Hill staff; US Executive Branch officials and analysts; leading academic scholars; national security and Middle Eastern think tank experts; and US military personnel.
The game consisted of three moves. After receiving a war brief and instructions from the Israeli prime minister, teams representing the Israeli Ministry of Defense, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and intelligence community formulated their preferred options for launching nuclear strikes against Iran. The prime minister selected one. Move two begins after the Israeli military carries out this strike. In move two, the teams were reconstituted to represent Israel, friendly Arab nations, and the United States and its European allies. Control played Iran, Russia, and China. Each team responded diplomatically and militarily to Israel’s initial nuclear strike against Iran. The game’s third and final move was a “hot wash” where participants discussed their insights……………………………………………………………………………………………………
Many critical questions remain unanswered. Would Israel or Iran conduct further nuclear strikes? Would Israel target Tehran with nuclear weapons? And vice versa, would Iran target Tel Aviv with nuclear arms? Would Russia or the United States be drawn into the war? These many basic unknowns helped inform each of the game’s four major takeaways:
The strategic uncertainties generated after an Israeli-Iranian nuclear exchange are likely to be at least as fraught as any that might arise before such a clash. An unspoken hope among security experts is that nuclear deterrence can work between Israel and Iran. Such optimism, however, discourages clear thinking about what might happen if deterrence fails and both countries use nuclear weapons……………………………………………………………………………………………
Although Israel and Iran might initially seek to avoid the nuclear targeting of population, such self-restraint is tenuous. …………………………………………………………………………………………
Multilateral support for Israeli security may be essential to deter Israeli nuclear use but will likely hinge on Israeli willingness to discuss regional denuclearization.An isolated and desperate Israel is far more likely to use nuclear weapons than an Israel surrounded by friendly, supportive neighbors………………………………………………………………………..
Little progress is likely in reducing Middle Eastern nuclear threats as long as the United States continues its public policy of denying knowledge of Israeli nuclear weapons. The current US policy is of not admitting that Israel possesses nuclear weapons……………………………………………….
…………………….Considering the strategic risks and uncertainties that a possible nuclear exchange between Israel and Iran revealed in this game, the formulation of proportionate military, political, and economic policies to deter nuclear use appears crucial. This requires gaming and careful planning—both efforts that the United States’ outdated policy toward Israel nuclear-related classification all but precludes.
Notes: …………………………………………….. https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/wargame-simulated-a-conflict-between-israel-and-iran-it-quickly-went-nuclear/
You know that the nuclear industry is in deep trouble when its top men at its top front group Breakthrough Institute get worried
NuScale Cancellation Should Be Wake-Up Call For Advocates
Advanced Nuclear Energy Is In Trouble, The Breakthrough Institute, Adam Stein, Adam is Director for Nuclear Energy Innovation at Breakthrough., Ted Nordhaus Ted Nordhaus is Founder and Executive Director of Breakthrough, 28 Nov 2023
Earlier this month, NuScale, the first company to receive a design certification from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a small modular reactor, announced that it was canceling its longstanding deal to deploy its first reactors to serve UAMPS, a consortium of small electricity cooperatives in the intermountain West, due to escalating project costs. The NuScale announcement follows several other setbacks for advanced reactors. Last month, X-Energy, another promising SMR company, announced that it was canceling plans to go public. This week, it was forced to lay off about 100 staff. In early 2022, Oklo’s first license application was summarily rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before the agency had even commenced a technical review of Oklo’s Aurora reactor. Meanwhile, forthcoming new cost estimates from TerraPower and XEnergy as part of the Department of Energy’s Advanced Reactor Deployment Program are likely to reveal substantially higher cost estimates for the deployment of those new reactor technologies as well.
In the wake of these developments, there has been an understandable desire among many nuclear advocates to whistle past this graveyard, with advocates rightly pointing out that there are many promising advanced nuclear technologies and companies working to bring new reactors to market. You can’t score if you don’t shoot and the nascent advanced nuclear industry is planning to take a lot of shots on goal. But taken together, recent developments suggest that efforts to commercialize a new generation of advanced nuclear reactors are simply not on track.
High Interest Rates and Commodity Prices
………………The increase in finance and materials costs for NuScale over the period between the launch of its deal with UAMPS in 2016 and its denouement in 2023 is instructive. Over that period, the U.S. Treasury prime interest rate more than doubled, to more than 8% from less than 4%. The price of steel almost tripled, to more than $650 a ton from less than $250 a ton.
…………Tax credits, clean energy standards, and loan guarantees, along with implicit reliance upon low-cost production in China, have been the primary tools that policymakers have used to drive tech expansion.
It is unclear in the current environment that these policy levers will be sufficient or that the latter reliance on Chinese supply chains is politically viable. Already, during the Trump years, Terrapower and a number of other nuclear developers concluded that developing their technologies in China was no longer a viable option as economic and political tensions between the U.S. and China rose.
For nuclear energy, the present challenges resulting from rising commodity prices and interest rates are further amplified by the regulatory environment. Simply licensing a new reactor has typically taken well over a decade, which exacerbates financing costs when interest rates rise. And regulatory restrictions deeply constrain supply chain flexibility……………………………………….
COMMENT. Of course this article goes on to argue that the solution is to weaken health, environmental and safety regulations !
‘It’ll be a shortlist of one!’ Villagers in England fear nuclear dump proposal
Plans for a new wave of atomic power have not factored in local concerns over the safety of the waste sites the schemes entail.
Alex Lawson, Sun 3 Mar 2024 , https://www.theguardian.com/business/2024/mar/03/itll-be-a-shortlist-of-one-villagers-in-england-fear-nuclear-dump-proposal
When Ian Harrison returned to the Lincolnshire coast to care for his parents a decade ago, he didn’t expect to spend his own retirement fighting plans to dig a £50bn nuclear waste dump near the beaches of his childhood.
Harrison, 67, lives a mile from the village of Theddlethorpe, one of three sites in England being examined for a possible geological disposal facility (GDF) to handle decades of nuclear waste from the power and defence industries. The cavernous dump will feature a series of tunnels and vaults dug 200-1,000 metres underground, capable of holding high-risk nuclear waste.
“It’s just a terrible idea to put a nuclear dump next to a seaside resort,” says Harrison, a retired warrant officer. “The safety concerns are real – look at Chernobyl – but people are more worried about the tourism that comes to Mablethorpe and the impact on local businesses.”Map showing proposed and withdrawn sites for GDFs
After several sites fell out of contention, the former gas terminal in Lincolnshire is one of just three which remain, with two on the Cumbrian coast – Mid Copeland and South Copeland. There is speculation about another site on the north-west coast.
The search for a home for Britain’s nuclear waste underlines a problem at the heart of its energy ambitions. Politicians have extolled the virtues of low-carbon nuclear power, but little attention has been given to the question of where to put the resulting waste.
Allerdale in Cumbria was ruled out last September after the government body behind the GDF project, Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), said there was “only a limited volume of suitable rock”, meaning it was not safe for storage. Last month, councillors in East Yorkshire withdrew from a process to consider hosting a GDF at South Holderness, east of Hull. In 2021, a council leader in Hartlepool resigned in a similar GDF row.
“At South Holderness, the local population complained and the council listened and stopped it,” says Harrison. “Here, people are worried, but they are sugarcoating it and not taking into account local concerns. Eventually, this will end up with a shortlist of one: us.”
The GDF is forecast to cost between £20bn and £53bn. Work on the project could take decades to begin, and high-risk waste will not enter it until at least 2075. The cost will be met by taxpayers, the existing nuclear plants’ operator EDF, and future power station operators.
Work on the GDF is expected to 4,000 jobs in its first 25 years. It is not an unprecedented move – Finland is nearing completion of a 450-metre-deep cavern to store its waste. France, Canada, Switzerland and Sweden are making progress on similar projects.
Britain’s nuclear waste is largely generated by its ageing power stations, as well as by industrial and defence sectors. It is housed in more than 20 ground-level sites which can hold the waste for up to 100 years, meaning a permanent store needs to be found. Even more waste is expected to be generated from a new era of reactors, despite lengthy delays,starting with Hinkley Point C in Somerset, currently the only new UK station under construction.
The handling of nuclear waste in Britain was put in the spotlight last year when the Guardian published Nuclear Leaks, a year-long investigation into problems with cybersecurity, safety and a “toxic” culture at Sellafield. Most of the waste now at the Cumbria site will be sent to a GDF, probably between 2050 and 2125.
While it can be argued that the Copeland sites have communities familiar with nuclear waste, it is an alien industry for Theddlethorpe, where geologists are studying the clay rock under the seabed.
Proponents of a GDF at Theddlethorpe, where a facility would be built onshore and the store tunnelled under the sea six miles off the coast, argue it will bring not only jobs but investment – in flood defences, road improvements and rail links. Detractors say its largely retired community will barely contribute to the workforce, and its holiday parks will play host only to construction workers while tourism slowly dies. A government gaffe in which Skegness was wrongly spelled as “Skegross” on a map did little to engender local support.
Ken Smith, a retired former lecturer and chair of the Guardians of the East Coast pressure group, says: “People call us nimbys and tell us that we’re only interested in the impact on house prices, but that’s a red herring. It’s about the people who live here and the way this could change their lives.”
A test of public support for the Theddlethorpe project is likely to be conducted in 2027. Jon Collins, the independent chair of the Theddlethorpe GDF Community Partnership, says only a small number of the 10,000 people who live in the search area have yet expressed an opinion. “There are a lot of people who have yet to engage. People deserve the opportunity to have a proper debate with all the facts before a decision is made.”
In Mid Copeland, David Moore, 70, a retired farmer, says local support for the project has increased in recent years. “Our community has been brought up handling radioactive waste,” says Moore, a representative on the Mid Copeland GDF community partnership. “We have a highly skilled workforce, and know it brings highly paid jobs.” Residents in nearby South Copeland are more circumspect, he claims.
A contentious element of the project has been the £1m a year in funds offered to prospective sites, handed out by NWS. Spending has included £382,067 for an adventure playground, garden and CCTV at the village halls; £49,981 on a project to reduce loneliness; and £26,102 to the Parrot Zoo Trust. Some locals see the taxpayer money as a “bribe”; others argue the money might as well be taken while the debate continues.
Collins says any final decision needs to take into account both local opinion and the best geological conditions for the site.
But Smith says: “A GDF is simply sweeping the problem under the carpet. My worry is that I want future generations to enjoy what I have I can take my grandchildren for a picnic on the beach: you can’t do that at Sellafield. I do not want the area to be torn apart. If they industrialise this coastline then all that enjoyment will be lost.”
NWS said: “A GDF will only be built where there is a suitable site and a willing community. This is a consent-based process and we are committed to giving local people all the information they need, listening to all voices and letting local people have their say on the topic.”
1 This Month
petition to oppose the rapid increase of space-military industry threatening Jeju Island and the region.
[Petition by April 19th (KST)] Stop the joint military-Hanwha Systems-Jeju Provincial Government Sea Launch!
World Nuclear Power. Reactors 1951-2026, 75 Years of Nuclear Power.
Interactive Map– https://dv.worldnuclearreport.org/
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
of the week–London Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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