Doctors fear health fallout from nuclear energy plans
Canberra Times, By Marion Rae, February 12 2025
Doctors have warned of no “safe” level of radiation from a proposed network of nuclear reactors as battlelines are drawn for the federal election.
Similar to other nuclear-powered nations, Australians living within a certain radius of a reactor would need to be issued potassium iodide tablets for use in a radiation emergency, a nuclear briefing has learned.
“The only reason that everyone in that radius is given that is because they might need it,” Assistant Minister for Climate Change and Energy Josh Wilson told a nuclear briefing on Tuesday.
If anyone comes to buy your house, the proximity of a reactor will be noted on the land titles register, and insurers will not cover nuclear accidents, he said.
The warning came as doctors fronted parliament to warn of long-term health risks for workers and surrounding communities, particularly children.
Evidence included a meta-data analysis of occupational and environmental exposure that accumulated data on more than seven million people.
It found living within 30km of a reactor increased overall cancer risk by five per cent, with thyroid cancer increasing by 14 per cent and leukaemia by nine per cent.
A separate study of workers in the nuclear industry in France, the United Kingdom and the United States analysed results from more than 300,000 people who were monitored for over 30 years.
Finding not only increased cancer rates but surprisingly increased rates of heart attacks and strokes, it found impacts at low doses were larger than previously thought.
“There is no ‘safe’ lower dose of radiation. The science is clear. All exposure adds to long-term health risks,” vice-president of the Medical Association for Prevention of War Dr Margaret Beavis said……………………………
Under the coalition’s nuclear energy blueprint, seven reactors would be built across five states to replace ageing coal-fired power plants with more gas-fired plants to provide baseload power in the interim.
“Zero-emissions nuclear plants” are a key part of the Nationals’ election pitch to regions where coal plants are already closing, while Labor is pressing ahead with the transition to renewable energy backed up by big batteries.
Public Health Association of Australia spokesman Dr Peter Tait said the idea that the nuclear industry was free of greenhouse gas emissions was a “furphy”, given the construction and uranium supply chain involved.
Emissions would rise threefold under the nuclear plan due to increased coal and gas use, he warned, with the first plant not due to come online until the late 2030s.
From a public health perspective, Australians can’t afford that delay, Dr Tait said.
Executive director of Doctors for the Environment Dr Kate Wylie said prolonging the dependency on fossil fuels would mean more Australians would be affected by their known health risks, including increased rates of asthma.
Nuclear energy would also put communities at risk during the next drought, when reactors would be first in line for scarce water, Dr Wylie said.
“The ethical thing to do is to choose the least water-intensive energy sources, which are wind and solar,” she said. https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8890265/doctors-fear-health-fallout-from-nuclear-energy-plans/?fbclid=IwY2xjawIan3hleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHaAJ7wF9BUi9CgA1_tQDXS5gC2WCrX8HSFZUrOQPGgXABnNkhEvlgHKolQ_aem_OShH2FPpE3tO3RIv_gAgBg
NUCLEAR BRIBERY: Nuclear Waste Services funds Cumbrian community projects
More than 260 projects across Cumbria and Lincolnshire have received
financial support from Nuclear Waste Services (NWS). The community projects
have received millions of pounds worth of funding from NWS in the last
three years. The communities in which NWS operates have been supported by
funding that aims to benefit people and projects. Over the last three
years, more than £10 million has been awarded to over 260 initiatives
across Cumbria and Lincolnshire ranging from youth schemes, mental health
initiatives, and mountain rescue.
Carlisle News & Star 13th Feb 2025, https://www.newsandstar.co.uk/news/24931120.nuclear-waste-services-funds-cumbrian-community-projects/
The Pentagon Is Recruiting Elon Musk To Help Them Win a Nuclear War
By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News 10 Feb 25
Donald Trump has announced his intention to build a gigantic anti-ballistic missile system to counter Chinese and Russian nuclear weapons, and he is recruiting Elon Musk to help him. The Pentagon has long dreamed of constructing an American “Iron Dome.” The technology is couched in the defense language – i.e., to make America safe again. But like its Israeli counterpart, it would function as an offensive weapon, giving the United States the ability to launch nuclear attacks anywhere in the world without having to worry about the consequences of a similar response. This power could upend the fragile peace maintained by decades of mutually assured destruction, a doctrine that has underpinned global stability since the 1940s.
A New Global Arms Race
Washington’s war planners have long salivated at the thought of winning a nuclear confrontation and have sought the ability to do so for decades. Some believe that they have found a solution and a savior in the South African-born billionaire and his technology.
Neoconservative think tank the Heritage Foundation published a video last year stating that Musk might have “solved the nuclear threat coming from China.” It claimed that Starlink satellites from his SpaceX company could be easily modified to carry weapons that could shoot down incoming rockets. As they explain:
Elon Musk has proven that you can put microsatellites into orbit, for $1 million apiece. Using that same technology, we can put 1,000 microsatellites in continuous orbit around the Earth, that can track, engage and shoot down, using tungsten slugs, missiles that are launched from North Korea, Iran, Russia, and China.”
Although the Heritage Foundation advises using tungsten slugs (i.e., bullets) as interceptors, hypersonic missiles have been opted for instead. To this end, a new organization, the Castelion Company, was established in 2023.
Castelion is a SpaceX cutout; six of the seven members of its leadership team and two of its four senior advisors are ex-senior SpaceX employees. The other two advisors are former high officials from the Central Intelligence Agency, including Mike Griffin, Musk’s longtime friend, mentor, and partner.
Castelion’s mission, in its own words, is to be at the cutting edge of a new global arms race. As the company explains:
Despite the U.S. annual defense budget exceeding those of the next ten biggest spenders combined, there’s irrefutable evidence that authoritarian regimes are taking the lead in key military technologies like hypersonic weapons. Simply put – this cannot be allowed to happen.”
The company has already secured gigantic contracts with the U.S. military, and reports suggest that it has made significant strides toward its hypersonic missile goals.
War and Peace
Castelion’s slogan is “Peace Through Deterrence.” But in reality, the U.S. achieving a breakthrough in hypersonic missile technology would rupture the fragile nuclear peace that has existed for over 70 years and usher in a new era where Washington would have the ability to use whatever weapons it wished, anywhere in the world at any time, safe in the knowledge that it would be impervious to a nuclear response from any other nation.
In short, the fear of a nuclear retaliation from Russia or China has been one of the few forces moderating U.S. aggression throughout the world. If this is lost, the United States would have free rein to turn entire countries – or even regions of the planet – into vapor. This would, in turn, hand it the power to terrorize the world and impose whatever economic and political system anywhere it wishes.
If this sounds fanciful, this “Nuclear Blackmail” was a more-or-less official policy of successive American administrations in the 1940s and 1950s. The United States remains the only country ever to drop an atomic bomb in anger, doing so twice in 1945 against a Japanese foe that was already defeated and was attempting to surrender.
President Truman ordered the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki as a show of force, primarily to the Soviet Union. Many in the U.S. government wished to use the atomic bomb on the U.S.S.R. President Truman immediately, however, reasoned that if America nuked Moscow, the Red Army would invade Europe as a response.
As such, he decided to wait until the U.S. had enough warheads to completely destroy the Soviet Union and its military. War planners calculated this figure at around 400, and to that end—totaling a nation representing one-sixth of the world’s landmass—the president ordered the immediate ramping up of production.
This decision was met with stiff opposition among the American scientific community, and it is widely believed that Manhattan Project scientists, including Robert J. Oppenheimer himself, passed nuclear secrets to Moscow in an effort to speed up their nuclear project and develop a deterrent to halt this doomsday scenario.
In the end, the Soviet Union was able to successfully develop a nuclear weapon before the U.S. was able to produce hundreds. Thus, the idea of wiping the U.S.S.R. from the face of the Earth was shelved. Incidentally, it is now understood that the effects of dropping hundreds of nuclear weapons simultaneously would likely have sparked vast firestorms across Russia, resulting in the emission of enough smoke to choke the Earth’s atmosphere, block out the sun’s rays for a decade, and end organized human life on the planet.
With the Russian nuclear window closing by 1949, the U.S. turned its nuclear arsenal on the nascent People’s Republic of China.
The U.S. invaded China in 1945, occupying parts of it for four years until Communist forces under Mao Zedong forced both them and their Nationalist KMT allies from the country. During the Korean War, some of the most powerful voices in Washington advocated dropping nuclear weapons on the 12 largest Chinese cities in response to China entering the fray. Indeed, both Truman and his successor, Dwight D. Eisenhower, publicly used the threat of the atomic bomb as a negotiating tactic.
Routed on the mainland, the U.S.-backed KMT fled to Taiwan, establishing a one-party state. In 1958, the U.S. also came close to dropping the bomb on China to protect its ally’s new regime over control of the disputed island – an episode of history that resonates with the present-day conflict over Taiwan.
However, by 1964, China had developed its own nuclear warhead, effectively ending U.S. pretensions and helping to usher in the détente era of good relations between the two powers—an epoch that lasted well into the 21st century.
In short, then, it is only the existence of a credible deterrent that tempers Washington’s actions around the world. Since the end of the Second World War, the United States has only attacked relatively defenseless countries. The reason the North Korean government remains in place, but those of Libya, Iraq, Syria, and others do not, is the existence of the former’s large-scale conventional and nuclear forces. Developing an American Iron Dome could upset this delicate balance and usher in a new age of U.S. military dominance.
Nuking Japan? OK. Nuking Mars? Even Better!
Musk, however, has downplayed both the probability and the consequences of nuclear war.
According to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, there are over 12,000 warheads in the world, the vast majority of them owned by Russia and the United States. While many consider them a blight on humanity and favor their complete eradication, Musk advocates building thousands more, sending them into space, and firing them at Mars.
Musk’s quixotic plan is to terraform the Red Planet by firing at least 10,000 nuclear missiles at it. The heat generated by the bombs would melt its polar ice caps, releasing carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. The rapid greenhouse effect triggered, the theory goes, would raise Mars’ temperatures (and air pressure) to the point of supporting human life.
Few scientists have endorsed this idea…………………………………………………..
Elon and the Military-Industrial-Complex
Until he entered the Trump White House, many still perceived Musk as a radical tech industry outsider. Yet this was never the case. From virtually the beginning of his career, Musk’s path has been shaped by his exceptionally close relationship with the U.S. national security state, particularly with Mike Griffin of the CIA……………………………………….
Griffin became the chief administrator of NASA. In 2018, President Trump appointed him the Under Secretary of Defense for Research and Engineering. While at NASA, Griffin brought Musk in for meetings and secured SpaceX’s big break. In 2006, NASA awarded the company a $396 million rocket development contract – a remarkable “gamble,” in Griffin’s words, especially as it had never launched a rocket. National Geographic wrote that SpaceX “never would have gotten to where it is today without NASA.”…………………………………………………….
Today, the pair remain extremely close, with Griffin serving as an official advisor to Castelion. A sign of just how strong this relationship is that, in 2004, Musk named his son “Griffin” after his CIA handler.
Today, SpaceX is a powerhouse, with yearly revenues in the tens of billions and a valuation of $350 billion. But that wealth comes largely from orders from Washington. Indeed, there are few customers for rockets other than the military or the various three-letter spying agencies.
In 2018, SpaceX won a contract to blast a $500 million Lockheed Martin GPS into orbit. While military spokespersons played up the civilian benefits of the launch, the primary reason for the project was to improve America’s surveillance and targeting capabilities. SpaceX has also won contracts with the Air Force to deliver its command satellite into orbit, with the Space Development Agency to send tracking devices into space, and with the National Reconnaissance Office to launch its spy satellites. All the “big five” surveillance agencies, including the CIA and the NSA, use these satellites.
Therefore, in today’s world, where so much intelligence gathering and target acquisition is done via satellite technology, SpaceX has become every bit as important to the American empire as Boeing, Raytheon, and General Dynamics. Simply put, without Musk and SpaceX, the U.S. would not be able to carry out such an invasive program of spying or drone warfare around the world.
Global Power
An example of how crucial Musk and his tech empire are to the continuation of U.S. global ambitions can be found in Ukraine. Today, around 47,000 Starlinks operate inside the country. These portable satellite dishes, manufactured by SpaceX, have kept both Ukraine’s civilian and military online. Many of these were directly purchased by the U.S. government via USAID or the Pentagon and shipped to Kiev.
In its hi-tech war against Russia, Starlink has become the keystone of the Ukrainian military. It allows for satellite-based target acquisition and drone attacks on Russian forces. Indeed, on today’s battlefield, many weapons require an internet connection. One Ukrainian official told The Times of London that he “must” use Starlink to target enemy forces via thermal imaging.
The controversial mogul has also involved himself in South American politics……………………………………………….
At Trump’s inauguration, Musk garnered international headlines after he gave two Sieg Heil salutes – gestures that his daughter felt were unambiguously Nazi. Musk – who comes from a historically Nazi-supporting family – took time out from criticizing the reaction to his salute to appear at a rally for the Alternative für Deutschland Party. There, he said that Germans place “too much focus on past guilt” (i.e., the Holocaust) and that “we need to move beyond that.” “Children should not feel guilty for the sins of their parents – their great-grandparents even,” he added to raucous applause.
The tech tycoon’s recent actions have provoked outrage among many Americans, claiming that fascists and Nazis do not belong anywhere near the U.S. space and defense programs. In reality, however, these projects, from the very beginning, were overseen by top German scientists brought over after the fall of Nazi Germany. Operation Paperclip transported more than 1,600 German scientists to America, including the father of the American lunar project, Wernher von Braun. Von Braun was a member of both the Nazi Party and the infamous elite SS paramilitary, whose members oversaw Hitler’s extermination camps.
Thus, Nazism and the American empire have, for a long time, gone hand in hand. Far more disturbing than a man with fascist sympathies being in a position of power in the U.S. military or space industry, however, is the ability the United States is seeking for itself to be impervious to intercontinental missile attacks from its competitors.
On the surface, Washington’s Iron Dome plan may sound defensive in nature. But in reality, it would give it a free hand to attack any country or entity around the world in any way it wishes – including with nuclear weapons. This would upend the fragile nuclear peace that has reigned since the early days of the Cold War. Elon Musk’s help in this endeavor is much more worrying and dangerous than any salutes or comments he could ever make. more https://www.mintpressnews.com/pentagon-recruiting-elon-musk-nuclear-war/289055/
The Coventry experiment: why were Indian women in Britain given radioactive food without their consent?
When details about a scientific study in the 1960s became public, there was shock, outrage and anxiety. But exactly what happened?
By Samira Shackle, Guardian, 11 Feb 25
In 2019, Shahnaz Akhter, a postdoctoral researcher at Warwick University, was chatting to her sister, who mentioned a documentary that had aired on Channel 4 in the mid-1990s. It was about human radiation experiments, including one that had taken place in 1969 in Coventry. As part of an experiment on iron absorption, 21 Indian women had been fed chapatis baked with radioactive isotopes, apparently without their consent.
Having grown up in Coventry’s tight-knit South Asian community, Akhter was shocked that she had never heard of the experiment. When she looked into it, she found an inquiry by the Coventry Health Authority in 1995 conducted soon after the documentary aired. The inquiry examined whether the experiment put the subjects’ health at risk and whether informed consent was obtained. But the only mention of the women’s perspectives was a single sentence: “At the public meeting, it was stated that two of the participants who had come forward had no recollection of giving informed consent.”
…………………………………… rather than putting out a public call for information, Akhter quietly asked around within her community for people who might know families that had been affected.
By chance, at about the same time, a historian and broadcaster, Dr Louise Raw, came across some old reporting about the radioactive chapatis – specifically, a 1995 story in India Today following up on the documentary, which jogged her memory of watching the film when it aired. Raw is interested in hidden histories and was immediately intrigued.
……………………………………………………….The story provoked major anxiety in Coventry. Though the study only involved 21 women, Owatemi was contacted by scores of people terrified that their mothers or grandmothers had been affected.
………………………………………Desperate for information, Kalbir – an articulate, assertive woman who sees herself as a fighter – tried to get access to her mother’s medical records, only to hit dead ends: the doctor’s surgery no longer existed and medical confidentiality still applied after death. Meanwhile, Akhter and Owatemi’s efforts were stalling too. The Medical Research Council (MRC), the public body that funds and coordinates research into human health in the UK, says it does not have any documentation relating to the study, not even a list of who was experimented on………………………………
The study took place more than 50 years ago, yet it still stirs up strong emotions, tapping into a host of broader anxieties about racial health inequalities and abuses by the medical establishment. After so many years have elapsed, sorting truth from panic is a complex task. What really happened in Coventry in 1969?
……………………………………………………..In the postwar period, doctors used radiation to treat everything from arthritis to ringworm. By the mid-1950s, it had become clear that exposure increases the chance of developing certain cancers and can cause infertility. The use of radiation was pared back, but medical researchers remained excited about the quick, precise experimentation it offered.
……………………………………..a new set of principles for ethical research on humans, known as the Nuremberg Code, had been introduced. The first of its 10 points is: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential.” The code also sets out other principles: experiments should be for the good of society and carried out by qualified researchers, and the risk should never exceed the potential benefit. But at first the code didn’t have much effect on researchers in the UK and the US, who saw it as something that applied to evil war criminals, not high-minded doctors who wanted to further scientific knowledge. In 1964, the medical researcher Paul Beeson, who had been a professor of medicine at both Yale and Oxford, wrote that the Nuremberg Code was “a wonderful document to say why the war crimes were atrocities, but it’s not a very good guide to clinical investigation which is done with high motives”.
……………………………..There are countless other examples from the US, UK and Canada. A number of these involved radiation exposure: in the 1950s, pregnant women in London and Aberdeen were injected with radioactive iodine to test their thyroid function despite the fact that radiation exposure of any sort poses a risk to a foetus. In Massachusetts in the 1940s and 1950s, boys with learning difficulties at a residential school were fed radioactive oatmeal as part of an experiment to see how Quaker Oats were digested.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………. in Cardiff Elwood hired an Indian housewife to teach a group of Welsh women to make traditional chapatis. Using flour fortified with radioactive iron, they made 200 chapatis to freeze until needed. Meanwhile, Elwood looked for participants. He needed South Asian women who still ate a traditional diet. Eventually he settled on Coventry, where there was a community of migrants from the Punjab region of India. Elwood’s team enlisted a doctor’s surgery in Foleshill, the centre of Coventry’s South Asian community, to identify women who could take part.
………………………………………………………….Despite translation difficulties, and the possibility that the women did not understand what was happening, the study got under way. Every morning for four days, the women were asked to eat one of the irradiated chapatis, which were delivered on dry ice each morning. A few hours later, Tom Benjamin, a field worker on Elwood’s team, would return, visiting all 21 houses to check the women had eaten it and record what foods they’d had with it. Seventeen days later, the women were picked up and driven an hour and a half to Harwell Laboratory for testing,
…………………………………Kalbir finds it upsetting to imagine her mother there. “The terror these women must have gone through,” she said. “They were already struggling in England. Our homes were being attacked by racists, we would get abused on the street, and then the system does this to them.”
The study, published in 1970, found that iron was not absorbed any more effectively from chapatis and the fermented flour they use than from bread. No one informed the women about the results, and no one followed up to check whether the radiation exposure had impacted their health.
………………………………………………In the 1990s, MRC officials insisted that it would be a poor use of public money to do a follow-up study on the women since the level of radiation exposure was so low. But to people who already feel misled, such reassurances can feel like a repetition of the “doctor knows best” mentality. “I feel anger, frustration and massive anxiety,” Kalbir told me. “I’m desperate to get answers and justice.” As it has surfaced and resurfaced, the story of the radioactive chapatis has come to represent something more than itself. “These women had a hard time in England,” said Kalbir. “They didn’t understand the way research and the medical professions worked. They had a great deal of trust. This shouldn’t have happened.” https://www.theguardian.com/news/2025/feb/11/the-coventry-experiment-why-were-indian-women-in-britain-given-radioactive-food-without-consent
‘Nothing prepared us for Sizewell C devastation’
Richard Daniel, Environment reporter, BBC East of England, 10 Feb 25
Groundwork for a new nuclear power station on the Suffolk coast is well under way, but the funding needed to build it has still not been agreed.
Sizewell C said it was confident a final investment decision on the station would be made this summer.
Meanwhile, the cost of its sister project, Hinkley Point C in Somerset, has risen to as high as £46bn.
Opponents have likened Sizewell C to the beleaguered HS2 rail project and said the government should pull out before it is too late.
So what is the state of play?
In east Suffolk, signs of development are hard to miss.
Thousands of trees have been felled, and a huge swathe of land stretching from the outskirts of Leiston to the coast have been cleared for a new construction compound and access road to the Sizewell C site.
Elsewhere, land is being dug up for a new link road off the A12, a new bypass around the villages of Stratford St Andrew and Farnham, and two park-and-ride sites at Wickham Market and Darsham.
The groundwork started a year ago.
The twin reactors would generate 3.2 GW of electricity, sufficient to power six million homes.
So far the UK government, which has an 85% stake in the project, has pledged £5.5bn towards development work.
Last month, EDF denied reports that the total cost of the project had risen to over £40bn, up from an estimated £20bn in 2018.
It is seeking investors and the government said a final investment decision would be made in June.
‘It’s all gone’
David Grant’s farm at Middleton, near Leiston, has been cut in two by the new Sizewell link road and an access road to the B1122.
He said he had lost 38 acres (15 hectares) of arable land.
Opponents of Sizewell C still argue the project should be scrapped before it is too late.
Alison Downes, from Stop Sizewell C, said: “The taxpayer is being forced to pay for what is basically a bet that this project is a good idea and should go ahead.
“The possibility that Sizewell C could go ahead at whatever price is just completely inconceivable.
“Every penny they spend on Sizewell C is a penny lost to cheaper, quicker renewable energy projects that could get us to net zero more quickly and address our climate crisis.”
“Nothing prepared us for the devastation caused,” he said.
“It’s all gone, dug out with machines completely ruthlessly and without any sympathy.
“I think this is HS2, but bigger, frankly.
“I’ve got friends who were involved in the HS2 cancellation and they haven’t even been able to repurchase their land. Luckily we have the option to repurchase if this doesn’t go ahead.”
‘Every penny they spend is a penny lost’
Opponents of Sizewell C still argue the project should be scrapped before it is too late.
Alison Downes, from Stop Sizewell C, said: “The taxpayer is being forced to pay for what is basically a bet that this project is a good idea and should go ahead.
“The possibility that Sizewell C could go ahead at whatever price is just completely inconceivable.
“Every penny they spend on Sizewell C is a penny lost to cheaper, quicker renewable energy projects that could get us to net zero more quickly and address our climate crisis.”…………………. https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd9qwygd5j4o
Trump Promises Billions in Defense Cuts
State of the Union: Trump said that Elon Musk’s DOGE will audit the Pentagon and Department of Education.
Mason Letteau Stallings, Feb 9, 2025 more https://www.theamericanconservative.com/trump-promises-billions-in-defense-cuts/
Trump said that Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency would soon lead an audit of the Pentagon and “find billions, hundreds of billions of dollars of fraud and abuse.”
The Department of Education will be another one of Musk’s targets, Trump said. “I’m going to tell him very soon, like maybe in 24 hours, to go check the Department of Education.”
Trump’s comments came during a pre-Super Bowl interview with Bret Baier of Fox News.
National Security Advisor Mike Waltz, in a separate interview Sunday on NBC’s “Meet the Press,” offered that military shipbuilding should be an area of interest for DOGE. “There is plenty to look into in ship building, which is an absolute mess,” he said.
According to Waltz, the Pentagon suffers from widespread problems. “Everything seems to cost too much, take too long, and deliver too little to the soldiers,” he said, adding that “we do need business leaders to go in there and absolutely reform the Pentagon’s acquisition process.”
Nuclear Free Local Authorities back petition to save fish at Hinkley C
The NFLAs are backing a petition promoted by the Bristol Avons River Trust
(BART) and The Rivers Trust calling on the developer of the Hinkley Point C
nuclear power station to honour its requirement to install an Acoustic Fish
Deterrent at the plant. BART and The Rivers Trust wants EDF to install the
fish protection measures that were originally agreed to prevent millions of
fish being sucked to their death into the huge intake pipes, each the size
of six double decker buses.
The new station will suck in the equivalent of
three Olympic swimming pools of cooling water per minute from the Severn
Estuary, and with it the fish. The estuary is one of the UK’s most highly
designated nature conservation sites, with fish stocks including the
endangered Atlantic salmon, European eel, and twaite shad. These species
play a crucial role in global ecosystems and support the food chain for
tens of thousands of birds and other wildlife, including seals and
cetaceans.
NFLA 10th Feb 2025 https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/nuclear-free-local-authorities-back-petition-to-save-fish-at-hinkley-c/
The resurgence of nuclear power: a conversation with M. V. Ramana
energy central, 12 Feb 25
Ahmad Faruqui 45,027,conomist-at-Large. Ahmad Faruqui is an energy economist who has worked on electricity pricing issues throughout the globe and testified numerous times before regulatory commissions and governmental bodies.
Professor Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia. His latest book is Nuclear is Not the Solution. I put some questions to him on what is causing a resurgence of nuclear power and whether it is a good or a bad idea.
Faruqui. What is causing the resurgence? The sudden arrival of data centers, driven by the quest for AI? Or climate change?
Ramana. I would first dispute the idea that there is an actual resurgence in nuclear power. What we are seeing is a resurgence in talk about nuclear power. We have seen similar waves of talk about nuclear power, most recently during the first decade of this millennium when there was much talk about a so-called nuclear renaissance. It was during that period that the US government introduced the Energy Policy Act of 2005 which provided significant incentives to utilities to build nuclear plants.
Utilities proposed building more than thirty reactors, but of these only four nuclear reactors proceeded to the construction stage, and two of these reactors in the state of South Carolina were abandoned mid-project following huge cost and time overruns, after over 9 billion dollars were spent. Only two reactors were actually built, at the Vogtle power plant in Georgia, and these ended up costing over $36 billion, much more than the $14 billion estimated when construction of those reactors started, and even more than the roughly $5 to $6 billion figures that were suggested when the Energy Policy Act was passed.
It is in light of this history that we should consider the talk about new nuclear plants today. Coming back to your question, what is causing this talk about resurgence: I would argue that this is mostly motivated by the nuclear industry’s struggle to stay alive and viable. Many nuclear plants today are operating only because of government subsidies of one kind or the other. So, if the industry has to build anything new, it has to resort to hype and artificially induced panic about running out of power.
…………………………………………………………………………… Faruqui. Japan, which had shut down its nuclear power plants after the 2011 incident at Fukushima, is now planning to expand it rapidly to meet its climate goals. Does that surprise you?
Ramana. Once again, I would separate the rhetoric from reality………………………. Despite the strong support from the Japanese government to restart nuclear reactors for over a decade, Japan got just 5.6 percent of its electricity from nuclear power plants in 2023. That does not suggest that nuclear power will expand “rapidly”.
Faruqui. What is the status of nuclear power in Germany?
Ramana. Germany has shut down all of its reactors over a long phaseout process starting with a law passed in 2000. At that time, Germany’s nuclear reactors produced a little over 150 TWh of electrical energy. That has declined to zero in 2024. This decline in electrical energy has more than been compensated by renewables. In 2024, wind power contributed 136.4 TWh, biomass contributed 36 TWh, and solar photovoltaics contributed 72.2 TWh. Altogether renewables provided 62.7 percent of Germany’s electricity, and emissions from the power sector have declined by 58 percent between 1990 and 2024.
…………………………………………….Ramana. ………………..Most countries around the world do not operate nuclear plants. The existing nuclear plants are heavily concentrated in a few countries.
Faruqui. What are the main barriers to nuclear power: costs, delays in construction and activation, or inability to safely handle nuclear waste?
Ramana. I would say that the main barrier is cost; delays in construction and commissioning also translate into financial losses for the utilities building nuclear plants.
Faruqui. Are small modular reactors (SMRs), which are being put forward by tech billionaires such as Bill Gates, going to solve the problems associated with large, conventional reactors?
Ramana. I do not think so. As I mentioned earlier, one of the main challenges confronting those promoting nuclear power is poor economics. This problem is worse for small modular reactors. If they are ever built, SMRs will generate lower amounts of power, which means less revenue for the owner. But the cost of constructing these reactors will not be proportionately smaller. Therefore, electricity from SMRs will be more expensive than power from large nuclear plants……………………..
Faruqui. Can nuclear fusion get around the problems faced by nuclear fission energy?
Ramana. In my opinion, generating electrical power from nuclear fusion is unlikely to ever be economically viable. Three basic challenges confront using nuclear fusion to generate electricity. First, there is the “physics challenge”: to produce more energy than is used by the facility as a whole. Current nuclear fusion experiments are far from meeting this challenge. Second, there is the “engineering challenge” of converting what works in an experimental set up and produces energy for a microscopic fraction of second into a continuous source of electricity that operates 24 hours/day, 365 days/year. The third is the economic challenge of having this incredibly complicated process compete with other simpler and far cheaper ways of generating electricity.
Faruqui. Many nuclear plants have been shut down over the years in the US. What were the reasons? Are those concerns still valid for functioning power plants, such as Diablo Canyon in California?
Ramana. Most nuclear plants that were shut down in recent years were closed because of economic reasons……………………………………………………………………………
Faruqui. Some nuclear plants that were shut down are being reopened. In particular, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania which was shut down in 1979 after a major disaster. What risks are associated with its reopening?
Ramana. Again, I would like to see the plant actually start operating before saying that the plant is “being reopened”………………………………… , the dangers of continuing operations are high and increasing.
Faruqui. Nuclear proponents argue that incidents such as Chernobyl in 1986 in what is now Ukraine and Fukushima in 2011 in Japan were caused by bad design and bad operations and are unlikely to occur in the US. Do you agree?
Ramana. While it is true that we are unlikely to have another severe accident exactly like the ones at Chernobyl and Fukushima, there are many different combinations of initiating factors and failures that can lead to another accident that results in radioactive materials being dispersed into the biosphere. …………………………………. For Perrow, “the dangerous accidents lie in the system, not in the components” and are inevitable……
more https://energycentral.com/c/gn/resurgence-nuclear-power-conversation-m-v-ramana
Jobs Jobs Jobs ! -screams the nuclear lobby
And the media faithfully regurgitates the message.
It’s not new, but it is now being spouted with a new exuberance (- or desperation?) in Britain:
“Hinkley C construction set to create 3,000 new jobs in next 18 months”. – Construction Enquirer 11th Feb 2025, West Somerset Free Press 10th Feb 2025, Burnham-on-sea.com 10th Feb 2025, BBC 10th Feb, 2025 , Somerset Live 10th Feb 2025, “creating thousands of highly skilled jobs” – Adam Smith Institute 10th Feb 2025 , Irvine Times 10th Feb 2025
As a child, I always wondered why people got so excited at the idea of more jobs. I used to think that they didn’t really want the jobs. They just wanted the money that you get paid for the job. And really, that still applies.
I now know that jobs can also bring personal satisfaction, a pleasure in doing something well, in knowing that your work is valuable. But I’d have to question that in some jobs – for example, in the 1960s if you worked for the Dow Chemical Company, making napalm to burn Vietnamese children. And I question it about the nuclear weapons-nuclear power industry.
Today, we know about ionising radiation causing illness and deaths, about the environmental damage of the nuclear fuel chain, the waste problem, about the intrinsic connection between the “civil” and military nuclear industries. We also know of the increasing evidence that the nuclear industry is not a healthy workplace.
So, why is the nuclear lobby spruiking “jobs” as the reason for the nuclear industry? The UK has an official unemployment rate of 4.4%, not wonderful, but not a crisis – not a statistically very high rate for a G20 country I would have thought that the biggest arguments for a new nuclear industry would be that it’s supposed to fix climate change, to be a clean industry, to be an economically successful industry.
The trouble is – there is ample evidence that nuclear power cannot fix climate change, is not clean, and most critical for Britain, it is not economically viable. That’s why the industry can’t get investors. The UK government has to supply direct funding through grants and investments to support the development of new nuclear power plants, particularly for projects like Sizewell.
And there’s a constant stream of corporate media articles, about the nuclear resurgence and the great future and employment in the (non-existent) small nuclear reactors. Professor Ramana of the University of British Columbia has questioned this resurgence, and examined what is actually happening : “I would first dispute the idea that there is an actual resurgence in nuclear power. What we are seeing is a resurgence in talk about nuclear power”.
The media, when it republishes handouts from the nuclear lobby, is not doing journalism. It’s just repeating propaganda .
It is hard to find proper journalistic scrutiny on the jobs situation in UK’s nuclear industry. But there is such scrutiny:
- Only 20 % of Great British Nuclear staff employed permanently.
- The Wylfa project – will deny local people of Ynys Môn the opportunity to take up green jobs in the interim……… For the reality, as established at the two existing gigawatt projects, at Hinkley Point C in Somerset and increasingly at Sizewell C in Suffolk, is that, for these large construction projects, large national and multinational civil engineering contractors are engaged, with experience in delivering mega projects at this scale, and they bring with them specialist subcontractors with their own transient workforces.
- Hinkley Point C ‘using cheap foreign labour‘ , say striking workers.
- Nuclear power is nothing if not hugely capital, not labour, intensive.
When touting for nuclear power as a great jobs-provider, surely it would be reasonable to compare this with alternative energy sources, but this, of course, is never mentioned in nuclear industry handouts to media.But – Renewables create more jobs/$ than fossils and nuclear.
I can only conclude that Sr Keir Starmer’s Labour government is all too well aware of the money pit into which they are plunging Britain, with these grandiose nuclear projects of Hinkley Point C, and Sizewell C. They must be hoping to get the British public, and investors, enthused about the nuclear job market, especially at a time when the government is about to make brutal cuts in welfare benefits. The rather dodgy assumption might be that human beings – disabled or too ill to work, family carers, suddenly losing income, will be able to work in the supposedly expanding nuclear industry.
A Nuclear Future is Not Inevitable
nuclear plants entail an ideology that is undemocratic and sometimes even fascistic.
“If you accept nuclear power plants,” argued philosopher Jerry Mander in 1977, “you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite.”
The marriage between Big Tech and nuclear power endangers us all.
John P. Slattery, Commonweal Magazine 9th Feb 2025 https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/nuclear-power-amazon-microsoft-trump-biden-slattery-ai
We are less afraid of nuclear power than we used to be. And we are less afraid than we should be, as Big Tech seeks to promote and control nuclear power for its own ends.
Consider Microsoft’s proposal to revive Three Mile Island, the site of the worst nuclear disaster in U.S. history. Under the deal, Microsoft would be the sole beneficiary of the power generated by the facility that shuttered in 2019. Microsoft’s stated goal in reopening this plant, scheduled for 2028, is to be fully committed to “decarbonizing” the power grid.
Consider also Google’s announcement to purchase nuclear energy from small modular reactors (SMRs) owned by Kairos Power. Kairos is currently building several of these reactors in Tennessee, in the belief that multiple smaller reactors will be easier to construct and maintain than a single large one. The first energy outputs are expected in 2030.
Finally, consider Amazon, which is following in Google’s footsteps by partnering with the company X-Energy to construct its own dedicated SMRs. Its plans, which would significantly outpace Google’s by the project’s completion in 2039, include nuclear reactors in Virginia, Washington, and Tennessee.
These long-speculated plans were announced in a flurry in the fall and confirm that the future of the tech industry—and of American energy production—is nuclear. The seemingly insatiable demand for energy by large language models—the core of what we have come to know as “artificial intelligence”—will be met by nuclear power.
There has been little to no pushback on these plans. The conservative Institute for Energy Research hailed the announcements as the latest reminder that “renewable energy is unreliable” for America’s growing energy demands, because, they argue, the promise of pure renewable energy is a fairy tale and not a practical solution. A few decades ago, a progressive think tank might have issued a rebuttal, aligning with a progressive Democratic Party to condemn private companies’ strong-arming of the power grid, the government, and the public into accepting nuclear power as the only viable option. But these are not today’s politics.
At the UN’s COP29 climate summit in October, nuclear power was celebrated as the only real way to meet the energy demands of the future while also slowing down climate change. The Biden administration—and the 2024 Democratic platform with him—was bullish about nuclear power, bolstering the tech companies’ plans by releasing a nuclear roadmap this November to triple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050.
The popularity of nuclear power has grown so much at a federal level that Republican and Democratic positions today are indistinguishable on the topic. During Biden’s 2020 presidential bid, the Democratic Party fully endorsed nuclear power for the first time since 1972. In 1980, by contrast, the Democratic party opposed all new constructions of nuclear power and pushed for investments in renewable energy, while the Republican platform endorsed coal and nuclear power.
During the 2024 presidential campaign, only Donald Trump expressed reservations about nuclear power. Talking to Joe Rogan, Trump was wary of Biden’s promises about nuclear power, citing several projects that failed during his time as president and declaring nuclear power “too big, too complex, and too expensive” to be dependable. Given Trump’s newly close ties with a tech industry begging to be unregulated, it is hard to imagine that he will want to slow down their plans. Kamala Harris did not say much about nuclear power during her short bid for presidency, but neither did she back away from the Biden administration’s clear pro-nuclear stance.
When politicians and companies talk about nuclear power, they use language of inevitability and necessity. There is no other way to become carbon neutral, they argue. Nuclear power guarantees reliability and longevity in a way that no other power source can offer. The technology, argues its defenders, has come so far that the new reactors will be safe and environmentally friendly. The math behind nuclear energy is compelling: a single kilogram of enriched uranium can produce as much energy as 88 tons of coal, 47 tons of natural gas, and 66 tons of oil. For the same amount of energy, nuclear plants produce around two percent of the emissions of fossil fuels. On paper, it is an easy sell, but we should not be so easily convinced.
The science is clear: renewable energy sources like wind turbines, solar panels, geothermal vents, and hydroelectric plants remain the only true hope for a long-term future of stabilizing the climate and producing plentiful energy while keeping our air and water clean. Renewable energy projects, compared to nuclear power, are relatively simple to construct and to scale, from rooftop solar panels to hilltop wind turbines. A recent study showed that there are enough renewable-energy projects proposed today that would meet the entire national demand for energy by 2035 if the impediments were removed. These impediments include an aging power grid, bloated algorithmic models, corporate interests protecting the fossil-fuel industry, and the lack of federal willpower to overcome regulatory bottlenecks.
Nuclear power also has vast downsides that are, unsurprisingly, not discussed in the recent announcements and strategic national plans. Nuclear plants produce large quantities of radioactive waste for which there is no safe disposal method. Nuclear plants have consistently gone vastly over budget in construction, been expensive to maintain, and take far longer to complete than originally promised—if, indeed, they are ever completed. The Three Mile Island plant that shut down in 2019 did so because of unprofitability, not concern for safety.
Furthermore, nuclear power is a massive security and health risk. As Russia continues its invasion into Ukraine, the stability of the four Ukrainian power plants continues to be in question, as they have at multiple times lost power and been damaged by Russian attacks. The many safeguards in place are not bulletproof, and the destruction of a single power plant or a critical water line could cause serious injury or death to millions of people.
Beyond the environmental, health, economic, and planning risks, nuclear plants entail an ideology that is undemocratic and sometimes even fascistic.
“If you accept nuclear power plants,” argued philosopher Jerry Mander in 1977, “you also accept a techno-scientific-industrial-military elite.” Nuclear power requires all of these institutions to create and maintain itself. It cannot be left to decay, like an old coal plant or a broken wind turbine. It must be guarded around the clock with barbed wire and military security, not because we are in danger of losing electricity, but because nuclear power inherently endangers the entire global population. Every nuclear reactor produces waste that, with its lifespan of millions of years, places demands upon our children and grandchildren to maintain the technological and military capability to deal with its eternal radioactivity.
The emergence of bipartisan support for nuclear power aligns with the affinity of both parties toward the strong military, technological, scientific, and industrial complex that Mander warned about in the seventies. The Big Tech firms of today have become as dangerous as Big Oil in their capacity to influence global markets, political fortunes, and the lives of billions. Their desire for a power source that requires centuries of military and corporate control will further blur the lines between state and corporate power, transforming the military into a de facto protector of corporate wealth. “We may be able to manage some of the ‘risks’ to public health and safety that nuclear power brings,” wrote philosopher Langdon Winner in 1986, “but as society adapts to the more dangerous and apparently indelible features of nuclear power, what will be the long-range toll in human freedom?”
And there is yet another risk: the correlation of support for nuclear energy with support for nuclear weapons. While nuclear energy and nuclear weaponry should be able to be considered separately, support for one tends to bleed into support for the other. The recent bipartisan support for nuclear energy in the United States has come alongside alarming bipartisan support for expanding our arsenal of nuclear weapons. If nuclear energy demands an unhealthy merger of technological, corporate, and military powers, expanded nuclear weaponry welcomes a new global nuclear arms race that, when combined with the rise of AI weapon systems, will almost certainly drive us to the brink of global disaster.
A nuclear future is neither inevitable nor necessary. A renewable energy future is possible. A world without nuclear weapons is possible. A world where artificially intelligent algorithms serve democratic, peaceful societies is possible. Let us not be so taken with the glamour of an algorithm or the hype of some AI singularity that we sit by and watch Big Tech, along with our own government, take a step back from a long-term commitment to renewable energy. In the end, the only answer to nuclear power is the same answer to nuclear weapons: not even one is acceptable.
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
February 10, 2025 , By Michael Klare / TomDispatch
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security.
……………………………………………………………………………… Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. ……………………………………………………………………..
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th…………………………………………………………………….
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Michael Klare, Droning Washington
Posted on February 9, 2025
Yes, some of us still remember that the now-famous (or do I mean infamous?) phrase “the military-industrial complex” actually came from the farewell address of former World War II general and then-President Dwight D. Eisenhower on January 17, 1961. But how often do any of us remember the all-too-painfully appropriate context in which he offered it to the American people — as a warning about a future that today is so much ours, as the budget of the Department of Defense (so it’s still called despite the many disastrous and anything but “defensive” wars the U.S. military has fought in this century) heads for the trillion-dollar mark? Here, then, to introduce military expert and TomDispatch regular Michael Klare’s eye-opening account of where the MIC (the shorthand version of that phrase) is heading in the age of the drone and artificial intelligence, is the larger context for Eisenhower’s first use of the term:
“Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
“This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence — economic, political, even spiritual — is felt in every city, every state house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources, and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
“In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals, so that security and liberty may prosper together. Akin to, and largely responsible for the sweeping changes in our industrial-military posture, has been the technological revolution during recent decades.”
And more than 60 years later, with Eisenhower’s grimly visionary statement in mind, let Klare suggest just how eerily on target he was. If you don’t believe me, note that tech giant Anduril is now setting up its first factory in the Midwest — Columbus, Ohio, to be exact — at the cost of an initial billion dollars to produce “autonomous systems and weapons,” as artificial intelligence prepares to go to war. Tom
A New Military-Industrial Complex Arises
The Secret War Within the Pentagon
Last April, in a move generating scant media attention, the Air Force announced that it had chosen two little-known drone manufacturers — Anduril Industries of Costa Mesa, California, and General Atomics of San Diego — to build prototype versions of its proposed Collaborative Combat Aircraft (CCA), a future unmanned plane intended to accompany piloted aircraft on high-risk combat missions. The lack of coverage was surprising, given that the Air Force expects to acquire at least 1,000 CCAs over the coming decade at around $30 million each, making this one of the Pentagon’s costliest new projects. But consider that the least of what the media failed to note. In winning the CCA contract, Anduril and General Atomics beat out three of the country’s largest and most powerful defense contractors — Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and Northrop Grumman — posing a severe threat to the continued dominance of the existing military-industrial complex, or MIC.
For decades, a handful of giant firms like those three have garnered the lion’s share of Pentagon arms contracts, producing the same planes, ships, and missiles year after year while generating huge profits for their owners. But an assortment of new firms, born in Silicon Valley or incorporating its disruptive ethos, have begun to challenge the older ones for access to lucrative Pentagon awards. In the process, something groundbreaking, though barely covered in the mainstream media, is underway: a new MIC is being born, one that potentially will have very different goals and profit-takers than the existing one. How the inevitable battles between the old and the new MICs play out can’t be foreseen, but count on one thing: they are sure to generate significant political turbulence in the years to come.
The very notion of a “military-industrial complex” linking giant defense contractors to powerful figures in Congress and the military was introduced on January 17, 1961, by President Dwight D. Eisenhower in his farewell address to Congress and the American people. In that Cold War moment, in response to powerful foreign threats, he noted that “we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions.” Nevertheless, he added, using the phrase for the first time, “we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.”
Ever since, debate over the MIC’s accumulating power has roiled American politics. A number of politicians and prominent public figures have portrayed U.S. entry into a catastrophic series of foreign wars — in Vietnam, Cambodia, Laos, Iraq, Afghanistan, and elsewhere — as a consequence of that complex’s undue influence on policymaking. No such claims and complaints, however, have ever succeeded in loosening the MIC’s iron grip on Pentagon arms procurement. This year’s record defense budget of approximately $850 billion includes $143.2 billion for research and development and another $167.5 billion for the procurement of weaponry. That $311 billion, most of which will be funneled to those giant defense firms, exceeds the total amount spent on defense by every other country on Earth.
Over time, the competition for billion-dollar Pentagon contracts has led to a winnowing of the MIC ecosystem, resulting in the dominance of a few major industrial behemoths. In 2024, just five companies — Lockheed Martin (with $64.7 billion in defense revenues), RTX (formerly Raytheon, with $40.6 billion), Northrop Grumman ($35.2 billion), General Dynamics ($33.7 billion), and Boeing ($32.7 billion) — claimed the vast bulk of Pentagon contracts. (Anduril and General Atomics didn’t even appear on a list of the top 100 contract recipients.)
Typically, these companies are the lead, or “prime,” contractors for major weapons systems that the Pentagon keeps buying year after year. Lockheed Martin, for example, is the prime contractor for the Air Force’s top-priority F-35 stealth fighter (a plane that has often proved distinctly disappointing in operation); Northrop Grumman is building the B-21 stealth bomber; Boeing produces the F-15EX combat jet; and General Dynamics makes the Navy’s Los Angeles-class attack submarines. “Big-ticket” items like these are usually purchased in substantial numbers over many years, ensuring steady profits for their producers. When the initial buys of such systems seem to be nearing completion, their producers usually generate new or upgraded versions of the same weapons, while employing their powerful lobbying arms in Washington to convince Congress to fund the new designs.
Over the years, non-governmental organizations like the National Priorities Project and the Friends Committee on National Legislation have heroically tried to persuade lawmakers to resist the MIC’s lobbying efforts and reduce military spending, but without noticeable success. Now, however, a new force — Silicon Valley startup culture — has entered the fray, and the military-industrial complex equation is suddenly changing dramatically.
Along Came Anduril
Consider Anduril Industries, one of two under-the-radar companies that left three MIC heavyweights in the dust last April by winning the contract to build a prototype of the Collaborative Combat Aircraft. Anduril (named after the sword carried by Aragorn in J.R.R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings) was founded in 2017 by Palmer Luckey, a virtual-reality headset designer, with the goal of incorporating artificial intelligence into novel weapons systems. He was supported in that effort by prominent Silicon Valley investors, including Peter Thiel of the Founders Fund and the head of another defense-oriented startup, Palantir (a name also derived from The Lord of the Rings).
From the start, Luckey and his associates sought to shoulder aside traditional defense contractors to make room for their high-tech startups. Those two companies and other new-fledged tech firms often found themselves frozen out of major Pentagon contracts that had long been written to favor the MIC giants with their bevies of lawyers and mastery of government paperwork. In 2016, Palantir even sued the U.S. Army for refusing to consider it for a large data-processing contract and later prevailed in court, opening the door for future Department of Defense awards.
In addition to its aggressive legal stance, Anduril has also gained notoriety thanks to the outspokenness of its founder, Palmer Luckey. Whereas other corporate leaders were usually restrained in their language when discussing Department of Defense operations, Luckey openly criticized the Pentagon’s inbred preference for working with traditional defense contractors at the expense of investments in the advanced technologies he believes are needed to overpower China and Russia in some future conflict.
Such technology, he insisted, was only available from the commercial tech industry. “The largest defense contractors are staffed with patriots who nevertheless do not have the software expertise or business model to build the technology we need,” Luckey and his top associates claimed in their 2022 Mission Document. “These companies work slowly, while the best [software] engineers relish working at speed. And the software engineering talent who can build faster than our adversaries resides in the commercial sector, not at large defense primes.”
To overcome obstacles to military modernization, Luckey argued, the government needed to loosen its contracting rules and make it easier for defense startups and software companies to do business with the Pentagon. “We need defense companies that are fast. That won’t happen simply by wishing it to be so: it will only happen if companies are incentivized to move” by far more permissive Pentagon policies.
Buttressed by such arguments, as well as the influence of key figures like Thiel, Anduril began to secure modest but strategic contracts from the military and the Department of Homeland Security. In 2019, it received a small Marine Corps contract to install AI-enabled perimeter surveillance systems at bases in Japan and the United States. A year later, it won a five-year, $25 million contract to build surveillance towers on the U.S.-Mexican border for Customs and Border Protection (CBP). In September 2020, it also received a $36 million CBP contract to build additional sentry towers along that border.
After that, bigger awards began to roll in. In February 2023, the Department of Defense started buying Anduril’s Altius-600 surveillance/attack drone for delivery to the Ukrainian military and, last September, the Army announced that it would purchase its Ghost-X drone for battlefield surveillance operations. Anduril is also now one of four companies selected by the Air Force to develop prototypes for its proposed Enterprise Test Vehicle, a medium-sized drone intended to launch salvos of smaller surveillance and attack drones.
Anduril’s success in winning ever-larger Pentagon contracts has attracted the interest of wealthy investors looking for opportunities to profit from the expected growth of defense-oriented startups. In July 2020, it received fresh investments of $200 million from Thiel’s Founders Fund and prominent Silicon Valley investor Andreessen Horowitz, raising the company’s valuation to nearly $2 billion. A year later, Anduril obtained another $450 million from those and other venture capital firms, bringing its estimated valuation to $4.5 billion (double what it had been in 2020). More finance capital has flowed into Anduril since then, spearheading a major drive by private investors to fuel the rise of defense startups — and profit from their growth as it materializes.
The Replicator Initiative
Along with its success in attracting big defense contracts and capital infusions, Anduril has succeeded in convincing many senior Pentagon officials of the need to reform the department’s contracting operations so as to make more room for defense startups and tech firms. On August 28, 2023, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks, then the department’s second-highest official, announced the inauguration of the “Replicator” initiative, designed to speed the delivery of advanced weaponry to the armed forces.
“[Our] budgeting and bureaucratic processes are slow, cumbersome, and byzantine,” she acknowledged. To overcome such obstacles, she indicated, the Replicator initiative would cut through red tape and award contracts directly to startups for the rapid development and delivery of cutting-edge weaponry. “Our goal,” she declared, “is to seed, spark, and stoke the flames of innovation.”
As Hicks suggested, Replicator contracts would indeed be awarded in successive batches, or “tranches.” The first tranche, announced last May, included AeroVironment Switchblade 600 kamikaze drones (called that because they are supposed to crash into their intended targets, exploding on contact). Anduril was a triple winner in the second tranche, announced on November 13th. According to the Department of Defense, that batch included funding for the Army’s purchase of Ghost-X surveillance drones, the Marine Corps’ acquisition of Altius-600 kamikaze drones, and development of the Air Force’s Enterprise Test Vehicle, of which Anduril is one of four participating vendors.
Just as important, perhaps, was Hicks’ embrace of Palmer Luckey’s blueprint for reforming Pentagon purchasing. “The Replicator initiative is demonstrably reducing barriers to innovation, and delivering capabilities to warfighters at a rapid pace,” she affirmed in November. “We are creating opportunities for a broad range of traditional and nontraditional defense and technology companies… and we are building the capability to do that again and again.”
Enter the Trumpians
Kathleen Hicks stepped down as deputy secretary of defense on January 20th when Donald Trump reoccupied the White House, as did many of her top aides. Exactly how the incoming administration will address the issue of military procurement remains to be seen, but many in Trump’s inner circle, including Elon Musk and Vice President J.D. Vance, have strong ties to Silicon Valley and so are likely to favor Replicator-like policies.
Pete Hegseth, the former Fox News host who recently won confirmation as secretary of defense, has no background in weapons development and has said little about the topic. However, Trump’s choice as deputy secretary (and Hick’s replacement) is billionaire investor Stephen A. Feinberg who, as chief investment officer of Cerberus Capital Management, acquired the military startup Stratolaunch — suggesting that he might favor extending programs like Replicator.
In a sense, the Trump moment will fit past Washington patterns when it comes to the Pentagon in that the president and his Republican allies in Congress will undoubtedly push for a massive increase in military spending, despite the fact that the military budget is already at a staggering all-time high. Every arms producer is likely to profit from such a move, whether traditional prime contractors or Silicon Valley startups. If, however, defense spending is kept at current levels — in order to finance the tax cuts and other costly measures favored by Trump and the Republicans — fierce competition between the two versions of the military-industrial complex could easily arise again. That, in turn, might trigger divisions within Trump’s inner circle, pitting loyalists to the old MIC against adherents to the new one.
Most Republican lawmakers, who generally rely on contributions from the old MIC companies to finance their campaigns, are bound to support the major prime contractors in such a rivalry. But two of Trump’s key advisers, J.D. Vance and Elon Musk, could push him in the opposite direction. Vance, a former Silicon Valley functionary who reportedly became Trump’s running mate only after heavy lobbying by Peter Thiel and other tech billionaires, is likely to be encouraged by his former allies to steer more Pentagon contracts to Anduril, Palantir, and related companies. And that would hardly be surprising, since Vance’s private venture fund, Narya Capital (yes, another name derived from The Lord of the Rings!), has invested in Anduril and other military/space ventures.
Named by Trump to direct the as-yet-to-be-established Department of Government Efficiency, Elon Musk, like Anduril’s Palmer Luckey, fought the Department of Defense to obtain contracts for one of his companies, SpaceX, and has expressed deep contempt for the Pentagon’s traditional way of doing things. In particular, he has denigrated the costly, generally ill-performing Lockheed-made F-35 jet fighter at a time when AI-governed drones are becoming ever more capable. Despite that progress, as he wrote on X, the social media platform he now owns, “some idiots are still building manned fighter jets like the F-35.” In a subsequent post, he added that “manned fighter jets are obsolete in the age of drones anyway.”
His critique of the F-35 ruffled feathers at the Air Force and caused Lockheed’s stock to fall by more than 3%. …………………………
President Trump has yet to indicate his stance on the F-35 or other high-priced items in the Pentagon’s budget lineup. He may (or may not) call for a slowdown in purchases of that plane and seek greater investment in other projects. Still, the divide exposed by Musk — between costly manned weapons made by traditional defense contractors and more affordable unmanned systems made by the likes of Anduril, General Atomics, and AeroVironment — is bound to widen in the years to come as the new version of the military-industrial complex only grows in wealth and power. How the old MIC will address such a threat to its primacy remains to be seen, but multibillion-dollar weapons companies are not likely to step aside without a fight. And that fight will likely divide the Trumpian universe.
21 February WEBINAR – What Scientists Are Telling Us About Radiation that Nuclear Boosters Won’t
Feb 21, 2025 03:00 AM in Etc/GMT-10 https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_I6Urz_iGSR2Zvb43N08_GQ#/registration
Contacts: Stephen Kent, skent@kentcom.com, 914-589-5988 Mary Olson, olson.mary@gmail.com, 828-242–5621
A webinar sponsored by the NGO Gender + Radiation Impact Project, with leading experts on the impacts of radiation, to answer your questions about new research concerning harmful impacts of the nuclear energy and weapons industries. Join us! Presenters are Cindy Folkers of Beyond Nuclear, author of the book ‘The Scientists Who Alerted Us to the Dangers of Radiation,’ and Dr. Amanda Nichols, lead author of ‘Gender and Radiation: Towards a New Research Agenda, Addressing Disproportionate Harm,’ a new report by the UN Institute on Disarmament Research (UNIDIR). The event will be moderated by Mary Olson, Founder of the Gender and Radiation Impact Project.
A growing body of evidence reveals ionizing radiation disproportionately impacts women and young children. Those arguing for expanding nuclear power and weapons production pointedly ignore and contradict evidence of their harms — part of a pattern of suppression that goes back to the dawn of the nuclear age a century ago. Scientists who first revealed radiation’s harmful impacts were pilloried and had their funding and data seized. The pattern of suppression still holds today, but with the rush toward nuclear-powered AI centers and a new nuclear arms race looming, it has kicked into high gear. False claims and preposterous talk points from the nuclear industry are increasingly and uncritically repeated without challenge. For a quick, sourced primer on these issues, see the recent OpEd “They won’t tell you these truths about nuclear energy” in The Hill. https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/5118792-nuclear-power-industry-radiation-debunk/
South Korea increases support for domestic nuclear industry
The Ministry of Trade, Industry and Energy has announced KRW150 billion
(USD103 million) of financial support this year to companies within South
Korea’s nuclear power industry – an increase of KRW50 billion compared with
last year.
World Nuclear News 10th Feb 2025,
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/south-korea-increases-support-for-domestic-nuclear-industry
Engineer who worked on Hinkley Point C nuclear project quizzed on suspicion of being a Russian spy
By LETTICE BROMOVSKY, 4 February 2025 , https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14355483/Nuclear-power-worker-suspicion-Russian-spy.html?openWebLoggedIn=true&login
An engineer who worked on a UK nuclear project was quizzed on suspicion of being a spy after he returned to the UK from Russia.
Mario Zadra, a 67-year-old Italian national, who worked as an engineer on the Hinkley Point C project from 2020 to 2023 from their headquarters in Bristol, was questioned by counter-terrorism police after he flew into Heathrow airport on April 12, 2023.
It was reported that potentially sensitive documents were found in his possession and were seized by the authorities to prevent them being ‘used to carry out a hostile attack’.
Zadra was arrested under Schedule Three, which gives police the power to search, question, and detain a person to determine whether they are engaged in hostile activity, Burnham & Highbridge Weekly News first reported.
Hinkley Point C is currently constructing two new nuclear reactors, which will provide zero-carbon electricity for around six million homes, and is expected to cost a massive £46billion.
Zadra was later dismissed by his employer, Alten Ltd, a supplier for EDF’s Hinkley Point C – settling for more than £37,000 in an employment tribunal, local media reported.
Counter terrorism police retained Mr Zadra’s hard drives for national security reasons. He was not charged with any offence.
A spokesperson for Hinkley Point C said: ‘Hinkley Point C takes information security very seriously and there are rigorous measures in place to protect sensitive data.
‘This individual did not have access to sensitive nuclear information. The information he removed was outdated.
‘Allegations made by this person were thoroughly investigated and independently reviewed. His contract with Alten Ltd ended as a result of increasingly inappropriate and disruptive behaviour.’
The Met police and the Home Office have been approached for comment.
Octopus Energy launches renewables investment platform for consumers
Octopus Energy, the UK’s largest energy supplier, has launched an
investment platform allowing consumers to buy shares of a renewable energy
project. Octopus has launched ‘the Collective’ which it says is a
first-of-its-kind initiative that enables customers to invest in renewables
themselves. There is a minimum investment requirement of £25 but, since
there are no fees and the Collective is free to join, all returns go to the
investor. A YouGov survey revealed that 33% of Brits want to invest in
green power; Octopus says that by becoming the first energy company in the
UK with a retail investment platform regulated by the Financial Conduct
Authority (FCA), it will meet this demand.
Current 10th Feb 2025 https://www.current-news.co.uk/octopus-energy-launches-renewables-investment-platform-for-consumers/
1 This Month
Website of the Week
New book – https://www.amazon.com/dp/1923372157?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Now until to February 10, 2026 Radioactive waste storage in France: the debate is finally open! How to participate?
-
Archives
- January 2026 (118)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (377)
- September 2025 (258)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
- May 2025 (261)
- April 2025 (305)
- March 2025 (319)
- February 2025 (234)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 