2024 September 27 « nuclear-news

U.S. Gov’t Agencies Found Israel Was Blocking Gaza Aid. Blinken Ignored Them to Keep Weapons Flowing

September 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear finance will rely on consumers’ stomach for risk.

Projects prove too tricky to fund through normal financing methods.

Western governments have flip-flopped on nuclear power for decades. But the current enthusiasm for atomic energy in countries such as the Czech Republic, Sweden, the US
and the UK now also appears to be spreading to the private sector.

This week, 14 of the world’s biggest banks and financial institutions pledged
to increase their support for nuclear power. Nuclear power projects prove
too tricky to fund through normal project financing methods.

Upfront costsare high and construction is lengthy. If the company set up to construct
the project defaulted, a half-built nuclear plant would be pretty worthless
as security. The interest lenders would demand for that level of risk would
simply make projects unviable, says Jens Weibezahn, assistant professor at
the Copenhagen Business School.

Projects running overtime and budget, such
as EDF’s Hinkley Point C plant in south-west England, have hit
confidence. On the French utility’s last estimate, the initial £18bn
budget for the 3.2 gigawatt plant had ballooned to £31bn-£35bn in 2015
prices (£41.6bn-£47bn in today’s money).

Several other countries are also considering models such as the regulated asset base, involving consumers paying towards the construction of nuclear power plans before
they start operating. Microsoft’s deal points to another way in which the
private sector can support a nuclear renaissance — although its agreement
is notably not for a new build.

FT 25th Sept 2024
https://www.ft.com/content/0608e36e-51cd-4ab7-bd18-62a536808536

September 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

Blinken Lied To Congress About Israeli War Crimes Because He Knows He’ll Get Away With It

Caitlin Johnstone, Sep 25, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/blinken-lied-to-congress-about-israeli?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=149377307&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

As Israel butchers hundreds of civilians in its latest attacks on Lebanon, leaked documents have surfaced revealing that US Secretary of State Antony Blinken knowingly lied to congress about Israel’s siege warfare against civilians in Gaza.

ProPublica’s Brett Murphy, who has been covering aspects of this story for months, has a new article out titled “Israel Deliberately Blocked Humanitarian Aid to Gaza, Two Government Bodies Concluded. Antony Blinken Rejected Them.” In it we learn that both USAID and the State Department’s Bureau of Population, Refugees and Migration produced two separate reports this past spring concluding that Israel was deliberately blocking much-needed humanitarian aid from Palestinian civilians in Gaza, which under US law should have led to the suspension of US weapons supplies. Blinken dismissed these findings, as did the rest of the headless cohort known as the Biden administration.

Days after receiving these reports, Blinken delivered a statement to congress that he knew to be false, saying, “We do not currently assess that the Israeli government is prohibiting or otherwise restricting the transport or delivery of U.S. humanitarian assistance.”

This was a lie. Blinken’s own people were telling him Israel was obstructing aid, but he lied to congress about it in order to ensure that Israel would keep receiving the weapons it needs to keep killing Palestinian and Lebanese civilians.

This is what happens when you don’t prosecute your war criminals. Blinken lied to congress that Israel wasn’t assessed to have been blocking aid when both USAID and the State Department’s refugees bureau had indeed assessed that the Israeli government is doing precisely that, because he knew he’d never be jailed for lying in facilitation of horrific war crimes.

Blinken has watched George W Bush’s entire cabinet not only walk free but continue to have high-profile careers in government, punditry, think tanks and the military-industrial complex, when they all should have been caged for two decades now. He watched CIA officials like Michael Hayden lie to congress about the agency’s torture program without ever facing any consequences. He watched Director of National Intelligence James Clapper lie to congress about the NSA’s surveillance program without ever facing any consequences. He knew he could lie to congress about some of the worst atrocities his nation has ever participated in because he knew there would never be any consequences for this.

None of the world’s worst people are in prison, but if you ever did anything to try to bring them to justice yourself you’d spend the rest of your life behind bars, or be executed. The law doesn’t exist to protect ordinary people from the worst of our society, it exists to protect the worst of our society from ordinary people.

It’s worth noting here that while powerful men in Washington break the law and lie in facilitation of mass atrocities, the US is executing Black men without evidence of their guilt. The state of Missouri just executed a man named Marcellus Williams despite objections from prosecutors, jurors, and the victim’s own family due to a lack of solid evidence that he actually committed the murder he was convicted of. Days earlier, Khalil Divine Black Sun Allah was executed in North Carolina despite the key witness in his case recanting his testimony against him.

Both men were Black, and both men were Muslim. As men with white skin lie with impunity to help butcher brown-skinned civilians in the middle east, I personally find this noteworthy.

This has been going on a long time. In 1902, the renowned attorney Clarence Darrow said the following in a speech to inmates at the Cook County Jail in Chicago:

“Those men who own the earth make the laws to protect what they have. They fix up a sort of fence or pen around what they have, and they fix the law so the fellow on the outside cannot get in. The laws are really organized for the protection of the men who rule the world. They were never organized or enforced to do justice. We have no system for doing justice, not the slightest in the world.”

It’s just as true in 2024 as it was in 1902.

September 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

“Peaceful” and war-making nuclear industries get together in tertiary education

The University of Sheffield Advanced Manufacturing Research Centre (AMRC)
and Holtec, the USA’s largest nuclear components exporter, have entered a
formal partnership to collaborate on SMRs and large-scale nuclear and
fusion in the civil and defence sectors.

Earlier this week, the two
organisations signed a Memorandum of Understanding (MoU) for ‘Cooperation
on Nuclear Advanced Manufacturing Technology’ at the AMRC’s facility in
Sheffield.

Machinery Market 24th Sept 2024 https://www.machinery-market.co.uk/news/38159/SMRs-and-large-scale-nuclear-and-fusion-collaboration

September 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, UK | Leave a comment

Spent nuclear fuel shipped to Japan’s 1st interim storage facility in Aomori

The interim storage facility, set up with joint investment from TEPCO and Japan Atomic Power Co, can store up to 5,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel for up to 50 years.

But there are concerns that the storage period will be exceeded

Sep. 25 TOKYO, https://japantoday.com/category/national/spent-nuclear-fuel-shipped-to-japan’s-1st-interim-storage-facility

The operator of a nuclear power plant in central Japan on Tuesday shipped spent fuel to the country’s first interim storage facility.

Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings Inc sent 69 spent fuel assemblies from the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa plant in Niigata Prefecture by ship. The fuel will be delivered to the interim storage facility in Mutsu, Aomori Prefecture, on Thursday at the earliest.

With capacity at spent fuel pools at the plant’s No. 6 and No. 7 reactors approaching the limit, TEPCO plans to transfer two containers that can hold 138 fuel assemblies and five containers with 345 assemblies from the plant to the interim storage facility in fiscal 2025 and fiscal 2026, respectively.

The 69 assemblies, which had been kept at the No. 4 unit, were shipped out in a metal container.

The interim storage facility, set up with joint investment from TEPCO and Japan Atomic Power Co, can store up to 5,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel for up to 50 years.

But there are concerns that the storage period will be exceeded as a nuclear fuel recycling plant due to be built in Rokkasho, also in Aomori, has yet to be completed.

The storage facility is expected to begin operations in late October following inspections by the Nuclear Regulation Authority.

There were 13,752 spent fuel assemblies kept at the Nos. 1-7 reactors at Kashiwazaki-Kariwa before the shipment, accounting for over 80 percent of the spent fuel pools’ capacity. At No. 6 and No. 7 units, the spent fuel pools were at over 90 percent capacity.

September 27, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Japan, wastes | Leave a comment