nuclear-news

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

This week’s NOT the corporate nuclear-related news

Some bits of good news – Planting Billions of Trees Turned Barren Desert into a Carbon Sink That Lowers CO2.   

Town Enthusiastically Switches to Restorative Justice and Reoffending Almost Vanishes.  

Dramatic recovery of various fish species after California’s ban on trawling

TOP STORIES 

Israel used weapons in Gaza that made thousands of Palestinians evaporate. 

What if Nuclear Deterrence was an Obsolete Concept? 

Why can’t western leaders accept that they have failed in Ukraine? 

Murica: US throws pennies at massive UN debt.

Climate. The Apocalyptic President.  Donald Trump has revoked the official doctrine that carbon dioxide is a danger to human health. Brace for Trump’s brave new world of 1.7°C global warming. 

The challenges in projecting future global sea levels.  Excruciating tropical disease can now be transmitted in most of Europe, study finds.

AUSTRALIA. 

NUCLEAR RELATED ITEMS

ECONOMICS. A $33 billion nuclear bailout is coming to your electric bill. Cost of Hinkley Point C nuclear plant jumps again to nearly £50bn. – EDF has further pushed back the start-up of the UK’s flagship HinkleyPoint C nuclear plant. British taxpayers bankroll French nuclear giant while Hinkley Point C quietly receives 500-tonne reactor heart.

Investigation: France’s future nuclear reactors could cost three times more than expected.
Scotiabank subsidiary fully divests from Israeli arms firm.
Nuclear power: EDF assesses the cost of reactor modulation for the first time (but its calculation is incomplete).
ENERGY. Why can’t people grasp that there’s much more to renewables than wind?
ENVIRONMENT. Major leak at Highland nuclear site triggers hunt for mystery bunkers. New Mexico Environment Department Holds LANL Accountable for Hexavalent Chromium Plume.
ETHICS and RELIGION. Pope Leo rejects Trump invitation to join Gaza ‘Board of Peace’ 
HEALTH. DNA Mutations Discovered in The Children of Chernobyl Workers. Harrowing six final words of nuclear worker as his skin fell off during 83 days of agony.
LEGAL RAF Lakenheath protesters to face no further action. Further charges on health and safety offences at a nuclear construction site.
MEDIA. Fukushima review – a devastating account of disaster and denial in 2011 nuclear catastrophe. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m8HuMGIsiTo Ch4 doc shows Starmer’s ban on Palestine Action was done to protect the arms industry. DoJ Released Much More on Epstein’s Israel Ties—But Media Still Aren’t Much Interested.

POLITICS. Democrats Aren’t Resisting Trump’s Iran War Because They Secretly Support It. A Dangerous Equation: Trump’s Iran Plans and the Democrats Who Expect to Benefit.

The Unelected Overlord: How Kushner Turned the White House into Israel’s Backroom Deal Den. Trump Team Didn’t Just Collude with Israel, Kushner was Acting as Foreign Agent for Tel Aviv.

POLITICS INTERNATIONAL and DIPLOMACY.

SAFETY. Ministry of Defence’s nuclear clean-up project brings new risks – ALSO AT https://nuclear-news.net/2026/02/22/3-b1-ministry-of-defences-nuclear-clean-up-project-brings-new-risks/ Massive military convoy carrying ‘nuclear weapons’ passes through Glasgow..
SECRETS and LIES. The global elite in the shadow of Jeffrey Epstein. The Israeli Government Installed and Maintained Security System at Epstein Apartment. Why Epstein’s Links to the CIA Are So Important. Epstein, Yermak and Zelensky.
Uranium Neo-colonialism in Mongolia: Crime but No Punishment. Beijing moves to contain Mossad’s expanding reach in Iran.
SPACE. EXPLORATION, WEAPONS. Space-based missiles, killer robots key to U.S. effort to gain orbital dominance.
SPINBUSTER. Lies Of Omission As Fresh American War Crimes Loom.
TECHNOLOGY. Algorithms and AI have turned Gaza into a laboratory of death.Small modular nuclear reactors for developing countries: Expectations and evidence Open Access. Deep Fission Wins Fresh Investor Backing for Nuclear Reactor Burial
WASTES. “Dumping Radioactive Wastewater into the Hudson River” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cxf4e1j5Zr4

WAR and CONFLICT.

Israel and American Hawks are pushing US to Iran War with Catastrophic Consequences. Munich Security Conference Evangelizes European War. The Ticking Time Bomb Looming Over Gaza, And Other Notes.

WEAPONS and WEAPONS SALES.

February 23, 2026 Posted by | Weekly Newsletter | Leave a comment

Cost of Hinkley Point C nuclear plant jumps again to nearly £50bn

The rising cost — and a further delay to the completion date — will be seen as a blow to the UK’s energy security and an indictment of its infrastructure record. The cost of the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station has ballooned to nearly £50 billion and the date when it is expected to be in service has been put back again to 2030.

It does not
augur well either for a second major new nuclear power station, Sizewell C
in Suffolk, which is in the early stages of construction. The news was
revealed in statements in Paris on Friday by EDF, the state-owned French
energy company contracted to build Hinkley Point and Sizewell C.


The company estimated that the cost of Hinkley C was now £35 billion at 2015
prices. Adjusted for inflation, that translates to up to £49 billion. The
original projected cost was £15 billion. The plant is already years late,
as it was originally expected to go into commission in the mid-2020s.


Some argue that the date could yet be pushed back into the 2030s, leaving a
significant gap in UK energy policy after coal-fired power stations were
closed, leaving the country increasingly dependent on giant wind farms in
the North Sea. Consumer energy bills are at historically high levels.

 Times 20th Feb 2026, https://www.thetimes.com/business/companies-markets/article/hinkley-point-c-nuclear-power-station-rise-nearly-50bn-gncq0j6rp

February 23, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

EDF has further pushed back the start-up of the UK’s flagship HinkleyPoint C nuclear plant.

EDF has further pushed back the start-up of the UK’s flagship Hinkley
Point C nuclear plant, taking a €1.8bn charge and pushing up the final
bill for a project that has suffered several delays and cost overruns.


The French state energy company said the first of the two reactors at the 3.2
gigawatt project in Somerset would now begin operating in 2030, blaming
delays in “electromechanical work”. That compares with a previous
“best case” target of 2029, itself a two-year delay from an earlier
timetable.

When the project was given the go-ahead in 2016, it was due to
come online in 2025. EDF said the plant was now expected to cost £35bn in
2015 prices — or almost £49bn at today’s prices — compared with a
previous range of £31bn-£34bn. The project was costed in 2016 at £18bn
in then-current prices. EDF warned that a further delay to 2031 would add
another £1bn.

 FT 20th Feb 2026, https://www.ft.com/content/3a1ccd4b-1faf-40e9-a53a-f7961cf16d62

February 23, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, UK | Leave a comment

A $33 billion nuclear bailout is coming to your electric bill.

the “advanced” nuclear power plants being promoted today are decades-old designs that didn’t work then and are now being wheeled out as new-and-improved nuclear power plants. 

By Karl Grossman, Feb 20, 2026, https://riverheadlocal.com/2026/02/20/a-33-billion-nuclear-bailout-is-coming-to-your-electric-bill/

$33 billion.

That’s the amount of money the New York State Public Service Commission—its members appointed by the state’s governor—has just approved for you as an electric ratepayer, and every other ratepayer in the state including all businesses and non-profit institutions, to pay from 2029 to 2049 to bail out four nuclear power plants upstate.

The $33 billion would be included as a charge in the bills electric utilities send to all the state’s ratepayers.

In 2017, the PSC approved a $7.6 billion 12-year bail-out of the plants, which their owners had wanted to shut down because they said they were not economical.

They include the oldest nuclear power plant of the 94 now operating in the United States, the Nine Mile Point 1 nuclear power plant in upstate Oswego, which began operating in 1969, and the second-oldest nuclear plant running in the nation, the R.E. Ginna plant, near Rochester. 

Nuclear power plants, when they were first introduced in the U.S. in the 1950s, were licensed for 40 years. After 40 years, it was determined that internal parts, especially metals, would become so embrittled by radioactivity that the plants would not be safe to operate.

Now, our money, to the tune of $33 billion, would be used in the coming two decades to keep Nine Mile Point 1, having run in 2026 for 57 years, and Ginna, running for 56 years, going far longer.

If there is an accident at any of these plants, upstate is not that far from Suffolk County, as the radioactivity would blow in the wind. A check on Google says they are in the range of 200 air miles, and a little more depending on what part of Suffolk. 

Consider taking a drive in a 57-year-old automobile upstate, or anywhere. How confident would you be in its mechanical ability?

But Hochul is totally enamored of nuclear power. She seemingly believes that the Chernobyl, Three Mile Island and Fukushima disasters never happened. She has been calling for New York State to become the “center” of a nuclear revival in the U.S.

As she said in her “State of the State” address last month, in 2025 “I took the bold step of greenlighting the first nuclear power project in a generation….We set a goal of building one gigawatt of nuclear power,” the equivalent of one large nuclear power plant. She went on that for 2026, it’s “go big” on nuclear power. “So I’ve decided to raise the bar to five gigawatts. That’s more nuclear energy than has been built anywhere in the United States in the last 30 years.”

She is pushing particularly so-called “advanced” nuclear power plants—even though, as a comprehensive analysis by the Union of Concerned Scientists, and other studies, have found they are not “advanced.” 

“If nuclear power is to play an expanded role in helping address climate change, newly built reactors must be demonstrably safer and more secure than current generation reactors. Unfortunately, most ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors are anything but,” concluded its report.

“Not So Advanced: Hype vs. Reality for Nuclear Technology,” was the headline of a piece from the Natural Resources Defense Council.

But, as Hochul declared recently, “This is not your grandmothers’ and your grandfathers’ nuclear. This is advanced. This is state-of-the-art. This is safe.”

In fact, the “advanced” nuclear power plants being promoted today are decades-old designs that didn’t work then and are now being wheeled out as new-and-improved nuclear power plants. 

Meanwhile, Hochul also keeps insisting that nuclear power is “zero-emission” and thus an antidote to climate change. But the nuclear-fuel-cycle—mining, milling and enrichment of nuclear fuel—is heavily carbon-intensive, and nuclear power plants also emit carbon, a radioactive form of carbon, Carbon-14. 

She is fond of old nuclear plants, too, like the four upstate plants the $33 billion bail-out would keep running. “They’re all up on Lake Ontario and one is actually the oldest operating nuclear facility in the United States going strong and safe since 1969,” Hochul claims

Of the bail-out and Hochul’s push for nuclear power, Laura Shindell, the New York State director of the organization Food & Water Watch, says: “It’s outrageous that New Yorkers will once again be forced to bail out this toxic, money-burning industry with billions and billions more in the coming years. Despite decades of evidence that nuclear power is both inherently dangerous and cost-foolish, Governor Hochul insists on throwing good money after bad, with everyday families footing the bill. We’re fed up with the governor’s repeated failure to deliver on promises of clean, affordable energy for this state. She claims she cares about affordability, and then approves this rate increase.”


Says Avni Pravni-Buck, deputy director of Alliance for a Green Economy: “Governor Hochul and her Public Service Commission have locked New Yorkers into an expensive and inefficient scheme to enrich Constellation Energy, while taking New York further away from our renewable energy and climate goals. Every dollar spent on Constellation’s reactors is a dollar that could have gone to building renewable energy and storage, which is cheaper, cleaner, and better for our electricity grid. We’re dismayed to hear that electric ratepayers will now be footing a $33 billion bailout for the upstate nuclear reactors, without any forward-looking plan to transition to renewable resources…”


Tim Judson, executive director of the Nuclear Information and Resource Service, says: “New York’s nuclear bailout program has always been a classic ‘bridge-to-nowhere’—forcing households and businesses to fork over pots of gold, only to leave us with an ever-growing pile of radioactive waste. Since 2017, we have been charged over $4 billion to prop up old, uneconomical nuclear power plants—12 times more than we have spent on incentives for renewable energy. The bailout program was supposed to be expensive but temporary, a $7 billion ‘bridge to renewable energy.’ Here we are years down the road, and the PSC has decided not only to make the bailout basically permanent, but to dramatically increase the cost to $33 billion over an extra 20 years. New York needs to pull the plug on it.”

 A true green energy path is before us. This is not it. 

February 23, 2026 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

MIT Weapons Expert and Former Pentagon Adviser Calls Donald Trump’s Golden Dome Missile System “Total Delusion” and “Crazy Idea” with “No Merit.”

Jeremy Kuzmarov, Feb 20, 2026, https://covertactionmagazine.com/2026/02/18/mit-weapons-expert-and-former-pentagon-adviser-calls-donald-trumps-golden-dome-missile-system-total-delusion-and-crazy-idea-with-no-merit/

In January 2025, Donald Trump, the newly inaugurated U.S. president, signed an executive order directing the U.S. armed forces to construct a missile defense system called the “Golden Dome,” aimed at establishing space weapons in orbit for the first time in history.

Legitimized in part by the expiry of the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START) with Russia on February 5, Trump placed the cost of the Golden Dome—which Russia called “highly provocative”—at around $175 billion, though congressional estimates have put the real cost at more than a trillion dollars.

Lockheed Martin—which stands to profit massively from Golden Dome’s construction—asserted on its website that Golden Dome for America is a “revolutionary concept to further the goals of peace through strength and President Trump’s vision for deterring adversaries from attacks on the homeland. This next generation defense shield will identify incoming projectiles, calculate trajectory and deploy interceptor missiles to destroy them mid-flight, safeguarding the homeland and projecting American strength.”[1]

A more critical assessment was provided by Theodore Postol, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) physicist and former Pentagon weapons adviser who, in a January YouTube lecture, called Trump’s Golden Dome a “total delusion” and “crazy idea” with “no merit.”

Postol said that the actual cost of the Golden Dome should be in the ballpark of $10 to $15 trillion and that there is not much likelihood that the system would even be functional if that amount were spent.

The reason is because the Russians and Chinese are likely to develop counter-measures that would nullify the impact of space-based interceptors that are at the heart of the Golden Dome, and because the creation of debris would destroy the interceptors and other space-based satellite systems the U.S. has set up.

Though Trump promised that the Golden Dome would be built in three years, little work has actually been done so far because of technological and logistical hurdles that even current senior Pentagon officials consider to be “insurmountable.”[2]

Postol began his lecture by noting that the Golden Dome would add a space-based component to the already-existing, ground-based U.S. missile defense system in which newly created interceptors orbiting the Earth would have the capacity to shoot down nuclear-armed Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) fired at the U.S. mainland.

Part of the novelty is that the space-based interceptors would have the capability of detecting decoy missiles the ground-based system could not differentiate from missiles with real warheads.

Postol said, however, that the missile interceptors would have to be replaced every six or seven years, after which time they would normally slow down and fall into the atmosphere.

Also, to stop just one ICBM, between 1,000 and 1,200 interceptors would have to be created. Thus, to stop 100, which Russia and China are capable of firing, about 120,000 interceptors would have to be developed—at a ridiculously high cost.

Trump’s Golden Dome system attempts to revitalize Ronald Reagan’s Strategic Defense Initiative (SDI), or “Star Wars,” which proposed creation of space battle stations from which direct energy and laser weapons set off by a hydrogen bomb were to be refracted through large mirrors and guided by internal computers and sensors that could be deployed against incoming ballistic missiles and nuclear war-heads.

SDI was influenced by alarmist CIA proclamations of the Soviet military “threat” put out by Team B—a renegade group of defense intellectuals directed by CIA Director George H. W. Bush and his deputy, Theodore Shackley, and headed by CIA-linked Harvard Professor Richard Pipes.

SDI’s former Deputy of Technology, Michael D. Griffin, an aerospace engineer and former National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) executive, formed the Space Development Agency during the first Trump administration, which worked on the development of a space-based missile tracking system that is to be further developed under the Golden Dome.[3]

Postol was a Pentagon adviser in the 1980s when SDI was initiated and called it “ridiculous” and a “hallucination”—much like Trump’s Golden Dome.

When he was working at the Pentagon, Postol said that he was “absolutely stunned” by the reaction of “otherwise technically informed people” who “accepted SDI and were even overjoyed by it.”

Postol noted this was a radicalizing experience for him that made him “realize how people in government follow orders” and “don’t think for themselves.” If they did the latter, he said, “they would be pushed aside—if they are lucky.”

After a speech by Reagan on SDI, Postol saw a senior Navy Captain that he knew, Linton Brooks who served as Under Secretary of Energy for Nuclear Security from 2002 to 2007, dancing while proclaiming that SDI would save lives. When Postol asked Brooks “where is the science,” Brooks “literally froze” and otherwise had no response.

Dr. Richard Garwin, author of the first hydrogen bomb design, was part of a network of nuclear physicists in the 1980s who called for banning weapons in space and referred to Ronald Reagan as “Darth Vader” after the Star Wars villain.[4]

February 23, 2026 Posted by | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

New Mexico Environment Department Holds LANL Accountable for Hexavalent Chromium Plume.

Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety, 20 Feb 26

Today’s Update is continuation of our reporting on the diligent and thorough work done by the New Mexico Environment Department to hold Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) accountable for not responsibly addressing the hexavalent chromium plume beneath LANL that has now spread beneath Pueblo de San Ildefonso. 

On Tuesday, February 11th, the New Mexico Environment Department issued two Administrative Compliance Orders under the New Mexico Hazardous Waste Act and the New Mexico Water Quality Act to address the on-going migration of hexavalent chromium into the sole source regional drinking water aquifer that feeds the Rio Grande and those living downstream.  The Orders proposed civil penalties for multiple violations of both laws that total nearly $16,000,000.  https://www.env.nm.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/02/2026-02-11-COMMS-NMED-acts-to-hold-DOE-accountable-for-legacy-waste-Final.pdf

Both Orders provide detailed histories of what has led the Environment Department to issue civil penalties for contamination of groundwater, which was first discovered in 2004 in a newly drilled monitoring well in Sandia Canyon. 

Since then LANL has not done everything in its power to properly investigate and protect against the groundwater contamination. It has drilled wells at least 1,000 deep to reach the contaminated waters, extracted those waters, treated the waters on the surface, and returned them back into the deep aquifer. Due to the findings of contamination beneath Pueblo de San Ildefonso, in November 2025, the Environment Department ordered the cessation of these operations. This is not the first time the Environment Department ceased operations.

Get all the details at nuclearactive.org

February 23, 2026 Posted by | environment, USA | Leave a comment

Why Epstein’s Links to the CIA Are So Important

The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release.

We won’t know the full truth about his crimes until the extent of his ties to US intelligence are clear.

Jeet Heer, January 2026, https://www.thenation.com/article/society/jeffrey-epstein-cia-ties/

On November 18, Donald Trump suffered a major political defeat when the House of Representatives passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act by a nearly unanimous vote: 427–1. But while emphatic, the House measure included a significant proviso that might yet prevent a full reckoning with Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes.

Trump had fought for months against the bill, which was drafted by a bipartisan coalition created by California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie. In the end, the strong public revulsion for Epstein’s crimes made opposing the bill untenable. But the final version specified that the Department of Justice must make public “all unclassified” documents on Epstein

The word unclassified potentially gives Trump and the CIA wide latitude to hold back Epstein-related materials that they claim are too sensitive to release. In this, they have the support of House Speaker Mike Johnson, who insisted that US intelligence agencies be allowed to “protect their critical sources and methods. It is incredibly dangerous to demand that officials or employees of the DOJ declassify material that originated in other agencies and intelligence agencies.”

Johnson’s words stand in stark contrast to the remarks by Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of four dissident House Republicans who forced Trump to abandon his opposition to the Epstein bill. “The real test will be: Will the Department of Justice release the files, or will it all remain tied up in investigations?” she asked in a November 18 press conference. “Will the CIA release the files?” Greene—perhaps feeling too bruised by the clash with Trump, who attacked her repeatedly over her Epstein heresy—subsequently announced that she will be retiring from Congress. But her words still cut to the heart of why getting……………………………………..[Subscribers only]

February 23, 2026 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment