nuclear-news

The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Is it worse to have no climate solutions – or to have them but refuse to use them?

Rebecca Solnit, 16 Oct 2024 ,
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2024/oct/16/climate-crisis-technology-ai

Tech barons are forever predicting some amazing new technology to fix the climate crisis. Yet fixes already exist.

When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love.’

There are so many ways to fiddle while Rome burns, or as this season’s weather would have it, gets torn apart by hurricanes and tornadoes and also goes underwater – and, in other places, burns. One particularly pernicious way comes from the men in love with big tech, who are forever insisting that we need some amazing new technology to solve our problems, be it geoengineering, carbon sequestration or fusion – but wait, it gets worse.

At an artificial intelligence conference in Washington DC, the former Google CEO Eric Schmidt recently claimed that “[w]e’re not going to hit the climate goals anyway because we’re not organized to do it” and that we should just plunge ahead with AI, which is so huge an energy hog it’s prompted a number of tech companies to abandon their climate goals. Schmidt then threw out the farfetched notion that we should go all in on AI because maybe AI will somehow, maybe, eventually know how to “solve” climate, saying: “I’d rather bet on AI solving the problem than constraining it.”

Eventually is not good enough. A distinguished group of scientists said in a paper published on 8 October: “We are on the brink of an irreversible climate disaster. This is a global emergency beyond any doubt. Much of the very fabric of life on Earth is imperiled. We are stepping into a critical and unpredictable new phase of the climate crisis.”

We need to pull back from that brink, but Schmidt is arguing for plunging over it, because guys like him are excited about AI. This is like arguing we should jettison the lifeboats and hang out on the sinking ship because what if there was eventually a totally awesome, new kind of lifeboat we can’t even imagine right now?

We have the lifeboats now – we have the solutions, and we have had them for a while, and they keep getting better, as in better-designed, more efficient, more affordable and adaptable. We just need to implement them, but they’re just not the solutions a lot of the rich and powerful like. Proposing we go for some false or nonexistent solution has become an excuse constantly deployed as an excuse for not supporting the solutions we have.

Delay is the new denial” became a slogan in the climate movement a few years ago, and maybe “decoy is the new denial” should be added to it, by which I mean proposing we ignore workable present-day solutions in favor of unworkable and nonexistent ones while continuing to burn fossil fuel.

One might think that Schmidt, whose net worth is estimated at around $23bn, would devote some time and resources to organizing us to reach our climate goals rather than excuse himself from acting with his dismissive defeatism. But overall billionaires and the very rich are part of the problem, with their outsized power and the dismal ways most of them use it. And their climate impact is obscene – the richest 1% of humanity is responsible for more carbon emissions than the poorest 66%.

Scientists and engineers have been telling us for a very long time what we need to do and how to do it, and most of us already know that what we need to do is make a swift transition away from burning fossil fuels. Protecting forests and other natural systems and redesigning how we live, travel and produce and consume also matter, but phasing out the extraction and burning of fossil fuels is the big one. Schmidt lives in California, where we’ve been getting more than 100% of our electricity needs met many days this year by sun, wind and water, and storing the surplus in immense battery systems. Obviously not everything in California runs on electricity, but this is a nice demonstration model of how rapidly a renewable system can scale up.

When it comes to some of the tech oligarchs, I suspect the sheer modesty of the solutions – that we should consume less, which means we can produce less, and make this energy transition to a renewable-powered world – is not the kind of gee-whiz rocket science they love. (Though solar and wind technologies are pretty amazing, particularly if you know how rapidly their design has improved, their cost has plummeted and their implementation has spread.) It is in many ways a social solution in which lots of us adjust how we live and how we power our devices, not a grand centralized invention that is super profitable for a few.

I do not know if it would be worse to live in a world in which we genuinely did not have the solutions, or to live in one where we have them but are not implementing them on the speed and scale we know we need to. But I know we have the solutions.

  • Rebecca Solnit is a Guardian US columnist. She is the author of Orwell’s Roses and co-editor with Thelma Young Lutunatabua of the climate anthology Not Too Late: Changing the Climate Story from Despair to Possibility

October 20, 2024 Posted by | climate change, technology | Leave a comment

The Irony of Powering AI on Atomic Energy

the irony of reviving a dying and dangerous 20th century technology to power a 21st century technology that also promises miracles and has high environmental and human costs.

Should the U.S. revive nuclear power to satisfy the growing electricity demands of artificial intelligence?

UNDARK, By Stephanie Palazzo, 10.17.2024

The former visitor center for the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant, or TMI, was overrun by greenery when I conducted an interview there in 2020 for my graduate research. The ivy had climbed to the second-story observation deck, once a carefully crafted vantage point for visitors to look across the street at the power plant and onto the atomic future it heralded. 

On March 28, 1979, TMI’s Unit 2 reactor suffered a catastrophic loss of coolant, resulting in a partial meltdown that shook public confidence in the growing nuclear power industry. In 2019, the remaining Unit 1 reactor began its 60-year decommissioning. But on Sept. 20, 2024, Microsoft announced its deal with Constellation Energy, the current owner of the plant, to restart Unit 1 by 2028 to power the technology giant’s data centers, many of which are devoted to artificial intelligence.

On the surface, nuclear power offers a seemingly reliable, carbon-free energy source to support AI’s voracious energy demands. But belying that proposed solution is the irony of reviving a dying and dangerous 20th century technology to power a 21st century technology that also promises miracles and has high environmental and human costs.

……………………………………In his “Atoms for Peace” speech to the United Nations General Assembly that year, President Dwight D. Eisenhower rhetorically transformed the atom from a global weapon of war into an abundant source of energy. But Eisenhower and other experts believed the atom’s potential extended beyond the energy sector. In 1957 at the ratification of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Eisenhower declared that “the splitting of the atom may lead to the unifying of the entire divided world.”

Its mid-century proponents described atomic power with almost breathless excitement. In a 1970 article for the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, chemist Glenn Seaborg, then chairman of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, started by describing a hypothetical speech taking place in 1995. In this imagined future, he wrote that “the atom’s energy used in infinite variety is the lifeblood of our society,” enabling technological miracles in medicine and space travel.

Seaborg had foreseen an atomic utopia just within Americans’ grasp. But seared into many minds in the post-war era were images of nuclear apocalypse. To “reeducate” the American public on atomic energy in the service of peace and prosperity, the U.S. coordinated a mid-century propaganda program.

As the starting point for tours, TMI’s visitor center played a key role in this rebranding. Tours were not only educational. They were a public relations tool, designed to convince a concerned public that nuclear technology was safe — especially after the plant’s 1979 accident.

In 2023, OpenAI’s CEO Sam Altman underwent a public relations tour of another kind. Traveling across Europe, the Middle East, Asia, and Australia, Altman discussed the political and economic consequences of AI with heads of state as well as with AI users………………Altman believes that AI can be used “to benefit humanity.” Bill Gates has spoken of the technology’s ability to democratize education and medicine across the world. Microsoft was one of the first major companies to invest in OpenAI, pouring in $13 billion over the past five years.

But neither Microsoft nor OpenAI has provided satisfying answers to increasingly unsettling questions about the technology’s less virtuous capabilities, from generating deepfakes to bioterrorist attacks. At the same time, chilling statistics lay out how AI may impact the global economy and the planet. The Pew Research Center found that 19 percent of workers were in jobs most vulnerable to AI, and a Wells Fargo analysis projected a 20 percent increase in U.S. electricity demand by 2030, in part fueled by the AI boom.

Given the reality of AI’s energy demands on an ever-warming planet, proponents of nuclear power see it as a carbon-free solution. But the mining, milling, and production of nuclear fuel, as well as the construction and decommissioning of nuclear plants, emit greenhouse gases at levels ranging from 10 to 130 grams of carbon dioxide per kilowatt hour of power — lower than fossil fuels but higher than wind and hydroelectricity (and roughly on par with solar).

Papering over these economic and environmental realities, Altman and Gates, like Eisenhower and Seaborg, foresee a future in which American technology will create a better, more unified world — the same scientific optimism that powered the peaceful atom. But particularly at TMI, there is another way to remember “Atoms for Peace”: as a cautionary tale of technology outpacing expertise.

…………………..The 12-year cleanup of TMI cost $973 million. Grainy black-and-white images from cameras sent into the damaged reactor revealed shocking information: Up to two-thirds of the reactor had been exposed, 45 percent of the uranium fuel had melted, and 19 tons of it had dropped to the reactor floor — all evidence that the accident was closer to nuclear catastrophe than the experts had initially realized.

The people living in the small town that once welcomed TMI as a source of revenue and jobs complained of a metallic taste, burns on their skins, stillbirths among their farm animals, mutated plants, and, decades later, clusters of cancers.

The accident exposed the faults in Eisenhower’s careful distinction between the power plant and the bomb, and the fledgling industry never recovered. When 1995 did arrive, it did not offer the atomic utopia that Seaborg prophesized. Rather than the “lifeblood of society,” the atom seemed almost irrelevant, replaced by lower cost fossil fuels.

The U.S. is only in the beginning stages of its half-century project to decommission roughly 20 American nuclear plants and dispose of over 90,000 metric tons of nuclear waste from commercial nuclear power reactors, the highest amount of any country in the world. These efforts are underway while regulations loosen over decommissioning plants that continue to house radioactive waste on-site.

Now TMI, in the process of decommissioning, is being revived. What sort of vision of the future would the power plant’s visitor center present to the public in 2028?

Three Mile Island has become a symbol of the U.S. nuclear industry’s overconfidence in its early expertise and of its ultimate failure to deliver on its promises. The irony of it being used to power AI — a technology already notorious for surprising and outpacing its experts — is unavoidable. But there is something even more dangerously ironic about powering the future with the stubborn optimism of the past. Rather than how to meet AI’s voracious energy demands, Three Mile Island might provide a historical vantage to consider whether to power this future at all.

Stephanie Palazzo, Ph.D., is a sociocultural anthropologist and teacher. She is currently writing a book on Three Mile Island’s 1979 accident and present decommissioning. https://undark.org/2024/10/17/opinion-irony-of-powering-ai-on-atomic-energy/?utm_source=Undark%3A+News+%26+Updates&utm_campaign=a71e329248-RSS_EMAIL_CAMPAIGN&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_5cee408d66-185e4e09de-%5BLIST_EMAIL_ID%5D

October 20, 2024 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Years after nuclear fiasco soaked ratepayers, leaders look at restarting VC Summer project .

The State, BY SAMMY FRETWELL OCTOBER 15, 2024

Seven years after two power companies abandoned a failing nuclear construction project, a report has concluded that the equipment and existing buildings on the site are in “excellent’’ condition — and it would be worth a look at restarting construction.

A Sep. 16 report by two members of the Governor’s Nuclear Advisory Council said partially completed buildings show “no degradation, corrosion’’ or chipped concrete at the V.C. Summer site northwest of Columbia. The report, discussed Tuesday at the council’s quarterly meeting, said nuclear parts that had already been installed showed some surface rust, but that was not unexpected or a substantial problem.

The V.C. Summer nuclear expansion project marked what many consider the biggest construction failure in South Carolina history. The project to build two reactors to complement an existing one cost $9 billion, soaked ratepayers with higher utility bills and left thousands of employees out of work. Utilities walked away from the project in 2017 because of excessive costs and delays.

But there has been renewed talk of restarting the effort to meet growing energy needs, and the Advisory Council report examined what kind of shape the buildings and equipment were in………………….

The reality of restarting the project is unknown without more study and finding a way to pay for it. Doing so would make for an additional cost, beyond the more than the $9 billion Santee Cooper and SCE&G spent on the V.C. Summer project before it was shelved seven years ago.

Lee and Little’s report recommended a more extensive study of the equipment, buildings and possibility of finishing the project.

Considering the costs to customers — many are still paying for the failed project as part of their monthly energy bills — beginning work on the abandoned reactors could be unpopular with the public, said Tom Clements, a nuclear safety watchdog and critic of the V.C. Summer expansion. As of late last year, ratepayers were still being charged more than 5 percent on their Dominion energy bills for the failed project.

At the same time, SCE&G, which was acquired by Dominion Energy, terminated the federal license to build the plant. Getting a new one for the work could be an extensive process, taking possibly years to complete, he said. “It would take a tremendous amount of effort and financial resources that would make restart of the project highly impractical,’’ Clements said………………………………………………………………

Meanwhile, Santee Cooper is not interested in owning or operating nuclear reactors at V.C. Summer, if they were completed, a spokeswoman said. A Dominion spokesman offered similar comments. The Virginia-headquartered power company “has no plans to restart construction of additional units at V.C. Summer,’’ spokeswoman Rhonda O’Banion said in an email…………………………………………………………

Sen. Tom Davis, R-Beaufort, also has mentioned that the infamous Three Mile Island site in Pennsylvania was under consideration for restart of a nuclear reactor. Davis suggested Lee and Little put together the report discussed Tuesday at the council meeting. Efforts are underway to crank up a unit that shut down in 2019 so that the plant can accommodate a Microsoft data center, Reuters reported. Data centers are tremendous users of energy. The Three-Mile Island site is home to what’s considered the nation’s worst nuclear accident, a meltdown in the 1970s. The reactor to be restarted is not the one in which the 1979 accident occurred.

……………………………………………………………………… Dominion Energy and Santee Cooper jointly own the V.C. Summer property, but Santee and Westinghouse own the equipment. When the V.C. Summer expansion project shut down, SCE&G ratepayers had been charged more than $1 billion for the construction, prompting a public and political outcry. Top utility executives were accused of withholding information about the project’s problems, charged criminally for their actions and sentenced to prison……………………….  https://www.thestate.com/news/local/environment/article293978684.html

October 20, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Revealed: The Israeli Spies Writing America’s News

Mint Press News, October 16th, 2024, Alan Macleod

ne year after Oct. 7 attacks, Netanyahu is on a winning streak.” So reads the title of a recent Axios article describing the Israeli prime minister riding on an unbeatable wave of triumphs. These stunning military “successes,” its author Barak Ravid notes, include the bombing of Yemen, the assassinations of Hamas chief Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah, and the pager attack against Lebanon.

The same author recently went viral for an article that claimed that Israeli attacks against Hezbollah are “not intended to lead to war but are an attempt to reach ‘de-escalation through escalation.’” Users on social media mocked Ravid for this bizarre, Orwellian reasoning. But what almost everybody missed is that Barak Ravid is an Israeli spy – or at least he was until recently. Ravid is a former analyst with Israeli spying agency Unit 8200, and as recently as last year, was still a reservist with the Israeli Defense Forces group.

Unit 8200 is Israel’s largest and perhaps most controversial spying organization. It has been responsible for many high-profile espionage and terror operations, including the recent pager attack that injured thousands of Lebanese civilians. As this investigation will reveal, Ravid is far from the only Israeli ex-spook working at top U.S. media outlets, working hard to manufacture Western support for his country’s actions.


White House Insider

Ravid has quickly become one of the most influential individuals in the Capitol Hill press corps. In April, he won the prestigious White House Press Correspondents’ Award “for overall excellence in White House coverage”—one of the highest awards in American journalism. Judges were impressed by what they described as his “deep, almost intimate levels of sourcing in the U.S. and abroad” and picked out six articles as exemplary pieces of journalism.

Most of these stories consisted of simply printing anonymous White House or Israeli government sources, making them look good, and distancing President Biden from the horrors of the Israeli attack on Palestine. As such, there was functionally no difference between these and White House press releases. For example, one story the judges picked out was titled “Scoop: Biden tells Bibi 3-day fighting pause could help secure release of some hostages,” and presented the 46th President of the United States as a dedicated humanitarian hellbent on reducing suffering. Another described how “frustrated” Biden was becoming with Netanyahu and the Israeli government.

Protestors had called on reporters to snub the event in solidarity with their fallen counterparts in Gaza (which, at the time of writing, comes to at least 128 journalists). Not only was there no boycott of the event, but organizers gave their highest award to an Israeli intelligence official-turned-reporter who has earned a reputation as perhaps the most dutiful stenographer of power in Washington.

Ravid was personally presented with the award by President Biden, who embraced him like a brother. That a known (former) Israeli spy could hug Biden in such a manner speaks volumes about not only the intimate relationship between the United States and Israel but about the extent to which establishment media holds power to account………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

An Infamous Spy Agency

Founded in 1952, Unit 8200 is the Israeli military’s largest and most controversial division.

Responsible for covert operations, spying, surveillance and cyberwarfare, since October 7, 2023, the group has been at the forefront of the world’s attention. It is widely identified as the organization behind the infamous pager attack on Lebanon, which left at least nine dead and around 3,000 people injured. While many in Israel (and Ravid himself) hailed the operation as a success, it was condemned worldwide as an egregious act of terrorism, including by ex-CIA director Leon Panetta.

Unit 8200 has also constructed an artificial intelligence-powered kill list for Gaza, suggesting tens of thousands of individuals (including women and children) for assassination. This software was the primary targeting mechanism the IDF used in the early months of its attack on the densely populated strip.

Described as Israel’s Harvard, Unit 8200 is one of the most prestigious institutions in the country. The selection process is highly competitive; parents spend fortunes on science and math classes for their children, hoping they will be picked for service there, unlocking a lucrative career in Israel’s burgeoning hi-tech sector.

It also serves as the centerpiece of Israel’s futuristic repressive state apparatus. Using gigantic amounts of data compiled on Palestinians by tracking their every move through face recognition cameras monitoring their calls, messages, emails and personal data, Unit 8200 has created a dystopian dragnet that it uses to surveil, harass and suppress Palestinians.

Unit 8200 compiles dossiers on every Palestinian, including their medical history, sex lives and search histories, so that this information can be used for extortion or blackmail later. If, for example, an individual is cheating on their spouse, desperately needs a medical operation, or is secretly homosexual, this can be used as leverage to turn civilians into informants and spies for Israel. One former Unit 8200 operative said that as part of his training, he was assigned to memorize different Arabic words for “gay” so that he could listen out for them in conversations.

Unit 8200 operatives have gone on to create some of the world’s most downloaded apps and many of the most infamous spying programs, including Pegasus. Pegasus was used to surveil dozens of political leaders around the world, including France’s Emmanuel Macron, South Africa’s Cyril Ramaphosa, and Pakistan’s Imran Khan.

The Israeli government authorized the sale of Pegasus to the Central Intelligence Agency, as well as some of the most authoritarian governments on the planet. This included Saudi Arabia, who used the software to surveil Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi before he was assassinated by Saudi agents in Türkiye.

A recent MintPress News investigation found that a large proportion of the worldwide VPN market is owned and operated by an Israeli company headed and co-founded by a Unit 8200 alumnus.

In 2014, 43 Unit 8200 reservists penned a joint statement declaring that they were no longer willing to serve in the unit on account of its unethical practices, which included making no distinction between ordinary Palestinian citizens and terrorists. The letter also noted that their intelligence was passed on to powerful local politicians, who used it as they saw fit.

This public statement left Ravid bristling with anger at his co-workers. In the wake of the scandal, Ravid went on Israeli Army radio to attack the whistleblowers. Ravid said that to oppose the occupation of Palestine was to oppose Israel itself, as the occupation is a fundamental “part” of Israel. “If the problem is really the occupation,” he said, “then your taxes are also a problem — they fund the soldier at the checkpoint, the education system… and 8200 is a great spin.”

Leaving aside Ravid’s comments, the question arises: is it really acceptable that members from a group designed to infiltrate, surveil and target foreign populations, that has produced many of the planet’s most dangerous and invasive spying technology, and is widely to be behind sophisticated international terror attacks, are writing Americans’ news about Israel and Palestine? What would the reaction be if senior figures in U.S. media were outed as intelligence officers for Hezbollah, Hamas, or Russia’s F.S.B.?

News About Israel, Brought to You by Israel

Ravid is far from the only influential journalist in America with deep ties to the Israeli state, however. Shachar Peled spent three years as an officer in Unit 8200, leading a team of analysts in surveillance, intelligence and cyberwarfare. She also served as a technology analyst for the Israeli intelligence service, Shin Bet. In 2017, she was hired as a producer and writer by CNN and spent three years putting together segments for Fareed Zakaria and Christiane Amanpour’s shows. Google later hired her to become their Senior Media Specialist.

Another Unit 8200 agent who went on to work for CNN is Tal Heinrich. Heinrich spent three years as a Unit 8200 agent. Between 2014 and 2017, she was the field and news desk producer for CNN’s notoriously pro-Israel Jerusalem Bureau, where she was one of the principal journalists shaping America’s understanding of Operation Protective Edge, Israel’s bombardment of Gaza that killed more than 2,000 people and left hundreds of thousands displaced. Heinrich later left CNN and is now the official spokesperson of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

CNN’s penchant for hiring Israeli state figures continues to this day.  Tamar Michaelis, for example, currently works for the network, producing much of its Israel/Palestine content. This is despite having previously served as an official IDF spokesperson in the Israeli Defense Forces.

The New York Times, meanwhile, hired Anat Schwartz, an ex-Israeli Air Force Intelligence officer with zero journalistic experience. Schwartz co-wrote the infamous and now discredited “Screams Without Words” expose, which claimed that Hamas fighters systematically sexually violated Israelis on October 7. Times staff themselves revolted over the lack of evidence and fact-checking in the piece.

Multiple New York Times employees, including star columnist David Brooks, have had children serving in the IDF; even as they report or offer opinions on the region, the Times never disclosed these glaring conflicts of interest to its readers. Nor has it disclosed that it purchased a Jerusalem house for its bureau chief that was stolen from the family of Palestinian intellectual Ghada Karmi in 1948.

MintPress News interviewed Karmi last year about her latest book and Israeli attempts to silence her. Former New York Times Magazine writer and current editor-in-chief of The Atlantic Jeffrey Goldberg (an American) dropped out of the University of Pennsylvania to volunteer as an IDF prison guard during the first Palestinian Intifada (uprising). In his memoirs, Goldberg revealed that, while serving in the IDF., he helped cover up the abuse of Palestinian prisoners.

Social media companies, too, are filled with former Unit 8200 agents. A 2022 MintPress study found no fewer than 99 former Unit 8200 operatives working for Google.

Facebook also employs dozens of ex-spooks from the controversial unit. This includes Emi Palmor, who sits on Meta’s oversight board. This 21-person panel ultimately decides the direction of Facebook, Instagram and Meta’s other offerings, adjudicating on what content to allow, promote, and what to suppress……………………………………

Top Down Pro-Israel Censorship

When it comes to the Israeli attack on its neighbors, corporate media has consistently displayed a pro-Israel bias. The New York Times, for example, regularly refrains from identifying the perpetrator of violence when that perpetrator is the Israeli military and described the 1948 genocide of around 750,000 Palestinians as a mere “migration.” A study of the paper’s coverage found that words like “slaughter,” “massacre,” and “horrific” appear 22 times more frequently when discussing Israeli deaths than Palestinian ones, despite the gigantic disparity in the number of people killed on both sides.

Meanwhile, in a story about how Israeli soldiers shot 335 bullets at a car containing a Palestinian child and then shot the rescue workers who came to save her, CNN printed the headline “Five-year-old Palestinian girl found dead after being trapped in car with dead relatives” – a title that could be interpreted that her death was a tragic accident.

This sort of reporting does not happen by accident. In fact, it comes straight from the top.  A leaked New York Times memo from November revealed that company management explicitly instructed its reporters not to use words such as “genocide,” “slaughter,” and “ethnic cleansing” when discussing Israel’s actions. Times’ staff must refrain from using words like “refugee camp,” “occupied territory,” or even “Palestine” in their reporting, making it almost impossible to convey some of the most basic facts to their audience.

CNN staff are under similar pressure. Last October, new C.E.O. Mark Thompson sent out a memo to all staff instructing them to make sure that Hamas (and not Israel) is presented as responsible for the violence, that they must always use the moniker “Hamas-controlled” when discussing the Gaza Health Ministry and their civilian death figures, and barring them from any reporting of Hamas’ viewpoint, which its senior director of news standards and practices told staff was “not newsworthy” and amounted to “inflammatory rhetoric and propaganda.”

Both the Times and CNN have fired multiple journalists over their opposition to Israeli actions or support for Palestinian liberation. ………………………………………………………………………………

Hiring agents from Unit 8200 to produce American news should be as unthinkable as employing Hamas or Hezbollah fighters as reporters. Yet former Israeli spooks are entrusted with informing the American public about their country’s ongoing offensives against Palestine, Lebanon, Yemen, Iran and Syria. What does this say about the credibility and biases of our media?

Since Israel could not continue to prosecute this war without American aid, the battle for the American mind is as important as actions on the ground. And as the propaganda war wages, the lines between journalist and fighter blur. The fact that many of the top journalists supplying us with news about Israel/Palestine are literally former Israeli intelligence agents only underlines this.  https://www.mintpressnews.com/revealed-israel-unit-8200-spies-american-media/288457/

October 20, 2024 Posted by | media, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

US wants Ukraine to send teenagers into the chopper mill of lost proxy war against Russia.

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL, 18 Oct 24

After 32 months of failure, one might conclude the US is ready to toss in the towel in its proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Over $150 billion in war material has done nothing to achieve stalemate, much less victory. Russia is advancing steadily to cut off Ukraine’s ability to remain in the fight both provoked and extended for over 2 years by the Biden administration.

Ukraine’s young men ore fleeing conscription in droves. To keep the conveyor belt of cannon fodder flowing, President Zelensky lowered the draft age from 27 to 25 last April. He was responding to criticism from supreme US war promoter Sen. Lindsay Graham, who visited Zelensky to offer “I would hope that those eligible to serve in the Ukrainian military would join. I can’t believe it’s at 27. You’re in a fight for your life, so you should be serving — not at 25 or 27. We need more people in the line.” At the beginning of this lost war Graham gloated that “Ukraine should fight to the last person”…as long as billions in US weapons keep flowing.

The Biden administration is now suggesting Ukraine should toss teenagers into the war by lowering the draft age to 18 to fill the ranks of near empty brigades. If asked again about Ukraine’s dire situation, Graham would likely amend his earlier comment to state that ‘Ukraine should fight to the last teenager.’

October 20, 2024 Posted by | weapons and war | Leave a comment

The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what it means for the planet

 The Atlantic Ocean’s currents are on the verge of collapse. This is what
it means for the planet. Scientists are concerned that the Atlantic
Ocean’s system of currents may be about to reach a tipping point. If it
does, it’ll have severe consequences for all of us.

 BBC Science Focus 13th Oct 2024
https://www.sciencefocus.com/comment/atlantic-current-collapse

October 20, 2024 Posted by | climate change, oceans | Leave a comment

Nuclear Fever: War Mongering on Iran

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war. “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so

October 18, 2024, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark,  https://theaimn.com/nuclear-fever-war-mongering-on-iran/

The recent string of exaggerated military successes – or at least as they are understood to be – places Israel in a situation it has been previously used to: prowess in war. Such prowess promises much: redrawing boundaries; overthrowing governments; destroying the capabilities of adversaries and enemies. Nothing, in this equation, contemplates peace, let alone diplomatic resolution. It’s playground pugilism that rarely gets out of the sandpit.

In Washington, a fever has struck regarding Israel’s advances. The outbreak has stirred much enthusiasm in a doctrine that has been shown, time and again, to be wretchedly uncertain and grossly dangerous. With no concrete evidence of imminent harm to US interests, it featured in the highest policy planning circles that oiled an invasion of Iraq in 2003. While the stated objective was the disarming of Saddam Hussein’s regime for having Weapons of Mass Destruction it turned out not to have, the logic was one of pre-emptive strike: we attack the madman in Baghdad before he goes nuclear and loses it.

The establishment wonk on empire and espionage at The Washington Post, David Ignatius, offers a fairly meaningless assessment in terms of claimed Israeli dominance over Iran and its proxies. After a year of conflict, Israel had “gained what military strategists call ‘escalation dominance’.” The implication: a decisive attack on Iran is imminent.

The point here (at this juncture, the mind lost seeks sanctuary in a mental asylum of lunatic reassurances), is that attacking Iran in toto will not result in much by way of retaliatory detriment. Some bruising, surely, but hardly lingering flesh wounds. Israel has, it would seem, been working some magic, spreading its own view that Iran has a gruesome plan in its military vault: eliminating Israel by 2040.

In Foreign Policy, Matthew Kroenig, generously self-described as a national security strategist, blusters for war. “Indeed, now is an ideal opportunity to destroy Iran’s nuclear program,” he asserts with childish longing. The reason for such an attack lies in a presumption. Yet again, the doctrine of pre-emption, one hostile to international law and the UN Charter, plays out its feeble rationale. Evidence, in such cases, is almost always scanty. Kroenig, however, is certain. Iran will secure one bomb’s worth of weapon-grade material within a matter of weeks. The rest is obvious. No evidence is offered, nor does it even matter, given Kroenig’s longstanding zeal in wishing to rid Iran of its nuclear facilities.

The Atlantic Council has also suggested a policy that what is good for the goose of Christian-Jewish freedom is not good for the gander of Persian Shia ambition. It is exactly this full-fledged hypocrisy that the despots of the secular tyranny in North Korea realised in dealing with Washington. Beware the nostrums against nuclear armament.

In a report authored by both Democrats and Republicans for the Council, a warning of chilling absurdity is offered: “The United States needs to maintain a declaratory policy, explicitly enunciated by the president, that it will not tolerate Iran getting a nuclear weapon and will use military force to prevent this development if all other measures fail.”

Instead of resisting belligerent chatter, the authors suggest that the US threaten Iran through announcing “yearly joint exercises with Israel, such as Juniper Oak and seek additional funding in the next budget cycle to speed research and development of next-generation military hardware capable of destroying Iran’s nuclear program

Kroenig shows his usual stuffing. Iran can never have nuclear weapons, because the United States and Israel say so. (The Sunni powers, for their own reasons, agree.) This form of perennial idiocy could apply to all the powers that have nuclear weapons, including Israel itself. At one point, no state should have had that relic of sadism’s folly. Then they came in succession after the United States: the Soviet bomb, the Britannic bomb, the Gallic bomb. Throw in China, India, Pakistan, Israel. Plucky, deranged North Korea, was wise to note the trend, showing lunacy to be eternally divisible.

It is precisely that sort of logic that has drawn such comments as this from the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei in a May interview: “Iran’s level of deterrence will be different if the existence of Iran is threatened. We have no decision to produce a nuclear bomb, but we will have to change our nuclear doctrine if such threats occur.” This month, almost 40 legislators penned a letter to the Supreme National Security Council calling for a reconsideration of current nuclear doctrine. The greater the fanatic’s desire to remove a perceived threat, the more likely an opponent will give basis to that threat.

For all the faux restraint being officially aired in Washington regarding Israel’s next round of military assaults, there is enormous sympathy, even affection, for the view that wrongs shall be righted, and the mullahs punished. Bedding for a more hostile response to Iran also features in the inane airings of the presidential election. Vice President Kamala Harris, in an interview with 60 minutes, remarked that, “Iran has American blood on its hands, okay?” In making that claim, she suggested that Tehran was somehow Washington’s greatest adversary.

In response to this fatuous remark, Justin Logan of the Cato Institute offers an ice-cold bath of reason: “This is not the Wehrmacht in 1940.” The path to dominating the Middle East hardly involves such tools as propaganda, proxy operations and psychological warfare “much less becoming the greatest threat to the United States.”

The nuclear option is now available to governments that should never have had them. But acquiring the dangerously untenable followed. To assume that brutal, amputation loving theocrats in Tehran should not have them defies the trajectory of a certain moronic consistency. The Persian bomb is probably imminent, and it is incumbent on the murderous fantasists in Israel and the United States to chew over that fact. Unfortunately for the rest of us, the fetish against acquisition risks expanding a conventional conflict through testing the will and means of a power that, while wounded, hardly counts as defeated.

October 20, 2024 Posted by | Iran, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

US opens applications for $900 million for small nuclear reactors (article includes a note of caution)

By Timothy Gardner, October 17, 2024

WASHINGTON, Oct 16 (Reuters) – The U.S. on Wednesday opened applications for up to $900 million in funding to support the initial domestic deployment of small modular reactor nuclear technology…………………………

 no U.S. commercial SMR has been built yet. Critics say they will be more expensive to run than larger reactors because they will struggle to achieve economies of scale. Like the large reactors, they will also produce long-lasting radioactive waste for which there is no final depository in the U.S.

HOW WILL THE MONEY BE DISTRIBUTED?

The funds come from the 2021 bipartisan infrastructure law and the Energy Department anticipates offering it in two tiers.

Up to $800 million will go to milestone-based awards for support of first mover teams of utility, reactor vendor, constructor, end users and others.

………………..Up to $100 will spur additional SMR deployments by addressing gaps that have hindered the domestic nuclear industry in areas such as design, licensing, supplier development, and site preparation, the department said. https://www.reuters.com/sustainability/climate-energy/us-opens-applications-900-million-small-nuclear-reactors-2024-10-16/

October 20, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

First ex-Royal Navy nuclear submarine to be disposed of enters final dismantling phase.

 Navy Lookout 15th Oct 2024 https://www.navylookout.com/first-ex-royal-navy-nuclear-submarine-to-be-disposed-of-enters-final-dismantling-phase/

Work has started on the third and final phase of the project to dismantle ex-HMS Swiftsure. As the demonstrator project for the dismantling programme, she will be the first former RN SSN to be fully disposed of.

The glacial project to safely scrap the growing fleet of decommissioned boats has finally begun to make some progress at Rosyth in the last few years. Each submarine will undergo a three-step process which involves Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLW) being removed first. The second and most demanding stage involves the removal of the Reactor Pressure Vessel that holds the reactor core and is classed as Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste (ILW).

Work has started on the third and final phase of the project to dismantle ex-HMS Swiftsure. As the demonstrator project for the dismantling programme, she will be the first former RN SSN to be fully disposed of.

The glacial project to safely scrap the growing fleet of decommissioned boats has finally begun to make some progress at Rosyth in the last few years. Each submarine will undergo a three-step process which involves Low Level Radioactive Waste (LLW) being removed first. The second and most demanding stage involves the removal of the Reactor Pressure Vessel that holds the reactor core and is classed as Intermediate Level Radioactive Waste (ILW).

Swiftsure’s disposal is a notable achievement as the first Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) anywhere in the world to be dismantled. Other nations use a much simpler process and cut the entire reactor compartment out of the submarine and transport it structurally complete for burial in land storage facilities. The US has successfully disposed of over 130 nuclear ships and submarines since the 1980s. The Russians have disposed of over 190 Soviet-era boats (with some international assistance) since the 1990s while France has already disposed of 3 boats from their much smaller numbers.

Besides the progress with Swifsure, LLW has been safely removed from ex-HMS Resolution, Revenge and Repulse. As experience has been gained working on successive boats techniques have been refined and more waste has been managed to final disposal at reduced cost. The optimisation of the process allowed 50% greater tonnage of waste to be removed in 75% of the time it took for Swiftsure. So far the work has been completed safely on budget and on time. Work has yet to begin on ex-HMS Dreadnought, Churchill and Renown still afloat in the basin at Rosyth.

While there is positive progress at Rosyth, 14 Dock at Devonport is still not ready to accept the first boat to begin defuelling and dismantling. There are now 15 decommissioned submarines filling up the basins in Plymouth (soon to be 16 when HMS Triumph goes in 2025). Work to get rid of this legacy cannot start soon enough. At least the lessons learned in Rosyth should give the teams at Devonport an advantage although the majority of these boats still have their nuclear fuel on board and will have to undergo a 4-stage process.

October 20, 2024 Posted by | decommission reactor, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment