Three Indian actions at the start of 2018 would contribute as a great source of insecurity in the regional and global strategic environment. First, India successfully launched 31 satellites, including the country’s 100th satellite of Cartosat series, on a single mission. Second, their army chief voiced readiness to cross the border to carry out any operation in Pakistan despite the nuclear deterrence. And third, India test-fired the Agni-V missile which covers China, Russia and even believed it could reach several European capitals. These developments are interlinked and have a causal relationship. The Indian military modernisation, especially in space and missile affairs, has encouraged the country’s leadership to enunciate hawkish and offensive comments against Pakistan.
India is militarising the outer space and this progress will disturb the fragile strategic equation of South Asia. The militarisation of space involves utilisation of peaceful space technology for exploiting weapons on the ground and on the earth’s atmosphere with more accuracy. There is a dual nature of the peaceful application of space technology and a satellite guidance system meant for peaceful use can be incorporated into a missile programme for military purposes. Initially, India has always depended on the dual-use capability of satellite technologies for military and strategic purposes.
India successfully launched the first military satellite GSAT-7 in August 2013 with the ability to carry out wide network-centric operations and maritime domain awareness. Whereas in 2016, the Indian Space Research Organisation (ISRO) launched the seventh and final satellite to complete its own Regional Navigation Satellite System (IRNSS) which will be called Navigation with Indian Constellation (Navic). Several Indian sources confirmed that the main objective of the system is military use and the chief beneficiary of this system will be the Indian military.
The navigation system will offer an encrypted service for the Indian military and agencies. Along with Navic, India is already working on the fourth generation GSAT dedicated military communication satellites. It will connect all three domains that are sea-based assets (warships, nuclear submarines and aircraft carriers), land-based assets (troops formation, conventional war tech, ballistic and cruise missiles) and air force assets (combat aircraft). The Indian progression in space is reinforcing a belief within New Delhi’s policy pundits to exploit sub-conventional military options under the nuclear umbrella such as the Cold Start doctrine.
India intensified the war from space by launching record-breaking 104 satellites from a single rocket (PSLV-C37). This technological feat was a demonstration of potential Multiple Independently Targetable Reentry Vehicle (MIRV) capability because PSLV rocket can be used as a missile to carry nuclear warheads to target locations. There are reports that India is planning to induct an ICBM missile (Agni-VI) into its armed forces with the capability of carrying MIRV, which can hit the targets up to 6,000 km.
Interestingly, the payload of Agni-VI is almost the same as satellite payload carried by the ISRO’s much larger and heavier Global Satellite Launch Vehicle (GSLV). This fact evidently demonstrates that the very foundation of Indian missile is the space launch vehicle technology delivered to it by countries like the US, Russia, France and Germany at different times under the rubric of peaceful scientific development.
In the last decade, India has ramped up the pace of space modernisation and the driving force is the Indo-US nuclear deal of 2005. In 2005, when the US and India were involved in constructing closer ties in space exploration and satellite navigation, there were reliable reports that Indian scientists were attempting to develop an ICBM. The deal started to create new avenues for India with regard to technology transfer. The emerging space-related cooperation between the US and India has started to help in improving the efficiency of latter’s missile capabilities. Moreover, India’s inclusion into the Missile Technology Control Regime (MTCR) last year has enabled technological development with significant military implications.
The status acquired by India in MTCR has already generated noticeable benefits for India, especially in the context of producing BrahMos cruise missile. Under the shed of MTCR, now it is easy for India to import “high-end, dual-use technology” from other MTCR members, a benefit Pakistan and China do not have. The membership of MTCR has scaled down the level of scrutiny on the Indian space programme because the guidelines of MTCR are not designed to impede national space programmes or international cooperation.
The militarisation of space by India is already posing security challenges for its nuclear-armed neighbours while strengthening the Indian battlefield strategy, robust system for location identification and navigational support. The Indian defence ministry has already hinted that space warfare is a priority area till 2025 under the “technology perspective and capability roadmap”. The offensive military posture coupled with international cooperation in modernising India’s space programme will have a negative impact on the regional strategic stability.
Published in The Express Tribune, January 30th, 2018.
The South Australian Premier’s apparent change of heart on a national nuclear waste dump in South Australia is a late but welcome development, according to Greens SA Parliamentary Leader, Mark Parnell MLC.
‘The Greens have steadfastly opposed the Commonwealth Government’s process of nuclear waste dump site selection and we have supported communities at both Kimba and in the Flinders Ranges who are opposed to the dump. We invite Labor to join us in this campaign.’ said Mark Parnell.
‘The Greens believe that before any decisions are made about how to manage Australia’s nuclear waste, the Federal Government needs to make the case for a central repository, which to date, it hasn’t done. Waste from the Lucas Heights reactor can stay where it is and most medical waste has low levels of short-lived radioactivity and generally ends up safely in landfill.
‘Australia certainly needs to take responsibility for and manage our own domestic nuclear waste, but we must also be working to ensure that no new nuclear waste is generated.
The South Australian Government has a number of political and legal tools at its disposal to block the national nuclear waste dump. This includes the fact that one of the sites being investigated (Barndioota in the Flinders Ranges) is on Crown Land for which SA Environment Minister Ian Hunter is ultimately responsible. The land cannot be used for nuclear waste dump without the Minister’s approval, yet throughout 2017, the Minister responded to the Greens during Parliament’s Question Time that neither he nor his Department had had any discussions with the Federal Government over using this publicly-owned land for a national waste dump.
‘The question the Premier needs to answer is: who in his cabinet and which of his Departments is negotiating with the Federal Government? Will he now direct them to tell the Feds that SA is not interested in becoming the nation’s nuclear waste dump? Unless he gives those directions, the public will rightly be suspicious that the current anti-dump rhetoric might not last beyond March 17th’, concluded Mark Parnell.
Developers working on the privacy-oriented cryptocurrency zcash have employed nuclear waste from Chernobyl in the network’s latest secrecy-assuring ceremony.
The devs, Ryan Pierce and Andrew Miller, held their latest “Powers of Tau” ceremony last weekend, and notably used the nuclear waste to generate random numbers.
Miller said:
“Powers of Tau is all about generating and safely disposing of cryptographic ‘toxic waste.’ So, what better way to generate entropy than with actual radioactive toxic waste?”
To ensure the event’s privacy, it took place at 3,000 feet above sea level on a small private aircraft in the airspace above Illinois and Wisconsin, wrote Miller on a mailing list when describing the procedure.
Miller said a radioactive graphite moderator acted as the source for low-level gamma and beta radiation. The graphite was sourced from the core of the Chernobyl nuclear facility, which suffered a catastrophic meltdown in 1986. A Geiger tube connected to a number generator converted radioactive pulses into digits, which were then incorporated into the code.
“The entropy source was a hardware-based random number generator utilizing a Geiger tube and a radioactive source, constructed and programmed by Ryan Pierce,” Miller said.
The graphite emitted very low levels of radiation, “falling substantially below all thresholds that might restrict its transportation by air, and posting no health risk,” according to Miller. In fact, the amount of radiation emitted is only a few times the level of background radiation that people receive on Earth, Pierce said in a video describing the experiment.
During the ceremony, the developers extreme measures to ensure malicious actors cannot possibly compromise the code during the process – the reason, in this case, for the aircraft flight. Further, to ensure the radioactive source was producing genuinely random pulses, Pierce and Miller attached a battery to their data collector to compare.
These measures, also extend to destroying all the computers used to build the code – or at least the parts of the software the developers utilize for the process.
The result is, in theory, a completely random, private piece of code with which to build zcash.
Disclosure: CoinDesk is a subsidiary of Digital Currency Group, which has an ownership stake in Zcash Company, the for-profit entity that develops the zcash protocol.
The Sierra Club opposes HR.3053 which has been introduced by the US House of Representatives concerning the treatment of nuclear waste. By creating the false impression that something is being done to safely dispose of radioactive nuclear waste, this bill not only creates a very dangerous situation where nuclear waste will be transported all over the United States, but also generally encourages the nuclear power industry in the United States. Take action today and tell your federal reps to vote against the “Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017.”
The bill calls for the reconsideration of Yucca Mountain as a permanent storage facility for radioactive waste. After years of study, the Yucca Mountain site was proven unsuitable for nuclear waste disposal because of its geology and hydrologic defects, making it inherently unsafe for storage. Yucca Mountain was removed as a potential nuclear storage facility during the Obama era, but nuclear energy proponents in the present administration are trying to present Yucca as a reliable solution. The bill also calls for the creation of intermediate storage sites for nuclear waste in the U.S., without working out the details of a comprehensive path to solve the nuclear waste problem. There is a great danger that these unsafe intermediate sites will become de facto permanent after the inevitable rejection of Yucca Mountain.
Additionally, the bill triggers the transfer of massive, unprecedented high-level radioactive nuclear waste across the nation by truck, rail, barge and ship to the proposed interim sites. This in itself creates a grave danger of nuclear contamination across the country. If HR.3053 becomes law, the resulting transportation of nuclear waste would provide the appearance of a constructive resolution of the nuclear industry’s waste problem.
These massive shipments of nuclear waste are already traveling through NYS from Canada. HR.3053 would only add to the dangers of highly radioactive nuclear waste being transported through our communities. Take action today!
“The UK nuclear regulator is going to be given unprecedented responsibility for policing a diplomatically contentious new arrangement, which will increase suspicion among member states of the 1968 Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) — (for which Britain, as a co-drafter of the treaty text, is one of three depositary states) — which ministers pray-in-aid whenever they discuss the rationale for a UK nuclear safeguards system. However, ministers routinely cherry-pick those parts of the NPT that suit their purposes.
“But the NPT is an integrated diplomatic agreement, with its articles all relevant and related. Cherry-picking is both diplomatically unwise, as it normalises abrogation for other signatory nations, and undermines the very treaty for which the UK is supposed to act as a protective depositary state.
“The UK is already in very bad diplomatic odour with many NPT member states for its 50-year abject failure to abide by its article 6 requirement to ‘pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament’.
“The proposed arrangements for a new self-policed ‘safeguards’ regime for Britain will undoubtedly add to the bad image of the country in the wider international community as a state that abrogates its international treaty commitments.
“This diplomatic dimension has been totally overlooked by the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR) and utterly ignored by ministerial evidence to this committee; the consequences further down the road will be predictably dire.
“There is time to avoid this outcome; but ministers must be prevailed upon to change their currently untenable negotiating stance.
“ONR has a key, proactive and robust role to play in doing so. I hope for the future credibility of British diplomatic reputation — which has suffered serious damage in recent weeks due to the multiple failures of the Foreign Secretary — ONR steps up to the plate and intervenes.”
On January 23 the House of Commons returned to examine the remaining stages of the draft Bill in Parliament.
It still contained the unacceptable British opt out to proliferate from the civil programme if ministers decide to do so. They have already done this over 600 times under the current legislation.
Our MPs, more concerned with cheerleading for European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) than doing their real job, have been truly awful at scrutinising this draft legislation.
Labour’s front bench energy spokesperson, Dr Alan Whitehead disarmingly told MPs in the Commons: “I think that it is agreed that Euratom has served well our purposes as a nuclear nation over the past 40 years, and nuclear safeguarding has worked very well in inspecting and representing our obligations to international agencies such as the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).”
Sadly, this assertion is wrong in almost every particular.
For the record, both Labour and Tory ministers have authorised the withdrawal from safeguards for nuclear materials for military uses over 600 times since the Trilateral treaty between Britain, Euratom and IAEA entered into force in 1978, by activating the withdrawal clause 14; thus making it a complete mockery to say the British civil nuclear industry — and its stockpile of nuclear materials — is in any realistic way under nuclear safeguards obligations.
Indeed, ONR itself now publishes annual data on such withdrawals on its website. Labour’s shadow team should be aware of these important facts.
Unfortunately our independent national nuclear regulator, the ONR, is passively continuing to collude in this disgrace by declining to speak out against this flawed legislation, which is an invite to other nations to copy Britain and proliferate with impunity.
1. The experience of evacuations during the Fukushima nuclear disaster
2. Whether lengthy evacuations from large cities are feasible?
3. Some emergency plans for evacuations in North America
(a) Introduction
If another severe nuclear accident, such as Windscale (in 1957), Chernobyl (1986) or Fukushima (2011) were to occur then the adverse health effects would primarily depend on wind direction and on the nature of the accident. The main responses to a nuclear disaster are shelter, evacuation and stable iodine prophylaxis. The most important, in terms of preventing future cancer epidemics, is evacuation. This article is based on North American evacuation plans. Little is known of UK emergency evacuation plans as few are publicly available.
In North American plans, if a severe nuclear accident were to occur, able citizens would be requested to leave designated evacuation/no entry zones under their own steam and to find accommodation with family and friends in uncontaminated areas. At the same time, Government authorities would evacuate prisons, hospitals, nursing homes, care homes and certain schools.
Little, if any, consideration seems to have been given to how long such evacuations would last. For example, the large majority of the 160,000 people who left or were evacuated from Fukushima Prefecture, Japan during the accident in March 2011 are still living outside the Prefecture. Many are living in makeshift shelters eg shipping containers or prefab houses.
At present, the Japanese Government is attempting to force evacuees (by withdrawing state compensation) to return to less contaminated areas, with little success. Currently, ~7 years after the accident, an area of about 1,000 square km is still subject to evacuation and no entry orders. This compares with the area of 2,700 square km still evacuated and subject to no or restricted entry at Chernobyl ~32 years after the accident.
(b) Experience of the Fukushima Evacuation
In 2015 and 2016, the author visited Fukushima Prefecture in Japan with international study teams. These study tours were informative as they revealed information about the evacuations that differed from official accounts by TEPCO and the Japanese Government. From many discussions with local mayors, councillors, local health groups and small community groups, the following information was revealed.
The most common figure cited for evacuees is 160,000, of which 80,000 were evacuated by the authorities and the rest left on their own, often on foot, cycles and carts. It took about two weeks to evacuate all parts of the initial 20 km (later 30 km) radius evacuation areas around the Fukushima reactors.
The main reason for the delays was that many roads in the Prefecture were jammed with gridlocks which sometimes lasted 24 hours a day, for several days on end on some roads. These traffic jams were partly due to the poor existing road infrastructure and partly due to many road accidents. These jams were of such severity that safety crews for the Fukushima nuclear station had to be moved in and out mostly by helicopter. All public transport by trains and buses ceased. Mobile telephone networks and the internet crashed due to massive demand.
Thousands of people either refused to leave their homelands or returned later. Older farmers often refused to leave their animals behind or be moved from their ancestral lands. In at least a dozen recorded cases, older farmers slaughtered their cow herds rather than leave them behind (dairy cows need to be milked daily): they then committed suicide themselves in several instances (see next section).
According to Hachiya et al (2014), the disaster adversely affected the telecommunications system, water supplies, and electricity supplies including radiation monitoring systems. The local hospital system was dysfunctional; hospitals designated as radiation-emergency facilities were unable to operate because of damage from the earthquake and tsunami, and some were located within designated evacuation zones. Emergency personnel, including fire department personnel, were often asked to leave the area.
At hospitals, evacuations were sometimes carried out hurriedly with the unfortunate result that patients died due to intravenous drips being ripped out, medicaments being left behind, the absence of doctors and nurses who had left, and ambulance road accidents (see next section). Many hastily-allocated reception centres (often primary schools) were either unable or ill-equipped to deal with seriously ill patients.
Much confusion resulted when school children were being bussed home, while their parents were trying to reach schools to collect their children. Government officials, doctors, nurses, care workers, police, firepersons, ambulance drivers, emergency crews, teachers, etc faced the dilemma of whether to stay at their posts or return to look after their families. In the event, many emergency crews refused to enter evacuation zones for fear of radiation exposure.
Stable iodine was not issued to most people. Official evacuation plans were either non-existent or inadequate and, in the event, next to useless. In many cases, local mayors took the lead and ordered and supervised evacuations in their villages without waiting for orders or in defiance of them. Apparently, the higher up the administrative level, the greater the levels of indecision and lack of responsibility.
In the years after the accident, the longer-lasting effects of the evacuations have become apparent. These include family separations, marital break-ups, widespread depression, and further suicides. These are discussed in a recent publication (Fields, 2017) which relates the sad, often eloquent, stories of the Fukushima people. They differ sharply from the accounts disseminated by TEPCO.
(c) Deaths from evacuations at Fukushima
Official Japanese Government data reveal that nearly 2,000 people died from the effects of evacuations necessary to avoid high radiation exposures from the Fukushima disaster, including from suicides http://www.reconstruction.go.jp/topics/main – cat2/sub – cat2 – 1/20141226_kanrenshi.pdf
The uprooting to unfamiliar areas, cutting of family ties, loss of social support networks, disruption, exhaustion, poor physical conditions and disorientation resulted in many people, in particular older people, losing their will to live. http://www.pref.fukushima.lg.jp/uploaded/attachment/62562.docx
The evacuations also resulted in increased levels of illnesses among evacuees such as hypertension, diabetes mellitus and dyslipidaemia (Hasegawa, 2016), psychiatric and mental health problems (Sugimoto et al, 2012), polycythaemia- a slow growing blood cancer (Sakai et al, 2014 and 2017), cardiovascular disease (Ohiro et al, 2017), liver dysfunction (Takahashi A et al, 2017) and severe psychological distress (Kunii et al, 2016).
The above account should not be taken as arguments against evacuations as they constitute an important dose-saving and life-saving strategy during emergencies. Instead, the toll from evacuations should be considered part of the overall toll from nuclear accidents.
For example, although about 2,000 deaths occurred during and immediately after the evacuations, it can be calculated from UNSCEAR (2013) collective dose estimates that about 5,000 fatal cancers will arise from the radiation exposures at Fukushima, ie taking into account the evacuations. Many more fatal cancers would have occurred if the evacuations had not been carried out.
There is an acute planning dilemma here: if evacuations are carried out (even with good planning) then illnesses and deaths will undoubtedly occur. But if they are not carried out, even more people could die. In such situations, it is necessary to identify the real cause of the problem. And here it is the existence of NPPs near large population centres. In such cases, consideration should be given to the early closure of the NPPs, and switching to safer means of electricity generation.
(e) Very Large Cities: Evacuations for lengthy periods?
If another severe nuclear accident were to occur, the death toll would depend on wind direction and whether the reactors were close to large cities. For example, Pickering NPP is located 20 miles from Toronto in Canada with an urban population of ~5 million; Indian Point NPP in the state of New York US is located 30 miles from New York City (~9 million); and Dungeness NPP is located 50 miles from London, UK (~9 million). These nuclear stations are just major examples of nuclear power stations located relatively close to urban centres, especially in the UK, US, and France.
If the worst were to occur and radioactive plumes from a severe nuclear accident reached large cities, would it be feasible to evacuate them quickly, and would it be feasible to do so for lengthy periods? There appears to be little literature on these questions, but it is expected that severe logistical problems would exist with the timely evacuation of millions of residents, workers and visitors from major cities,
(d) US Evacuation Plans after nuclear accidents – viability?
After a major 1986 earthquake damaged the Perry reactor in Ohio on the north shore of Lake Erie, the then Ohio Governor, Richard Celeste, sued the US NRC to delay its issuance of the plant’s operating license on the grounds of the non-viability of evacuation of large population centres nearby. The US population within 80 km of Perry nuclear station was 2,300,000. Canadian populations would have been affected but were not included. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Nuclear_Generating_Station#cite_note-7
In Canada, the Ontario Government has been developing evacuation plans for the Pickering nuclear station near Toronto since 1980, but whether the feasibility of such plans has kept up with the significant population growth around the station over 40 years is an open question.
However, the matter of evacuation is relatively undeveloped: future detailed plans remain to be drawn up by local governments in and near Toronto. This is perhaps unsurprising given the difficulties involved, but it appears that many issues remain to be resolved. For example,
How long would it take to untangle traffic jams exiting the city?
How long it would take for drivers to reach their emergency vehicles and school buses?
Would emergency crews enter contaminated zones to deal with accidents?
What happens when residents refuse to leave?
How to deal with residents who return?
How lomg would evacuations last? Months, years, decades?
Another issue is what happens when people, who are asked not to leave, decide to evacuate? In 1979, during the Three Mile Island nuclear accident near Harrisburg in Pennsylvania US, evacuation requests were made for approximately 3,500 vulnerable older people, children and pregnant women. The result was 140,000 immediately fled the area, thus creating large traffic jams which impeded the evacuations of vulnerable people. (Ziegler and Johnson, 1984).
The Canadian plans reveal that, in the event of a severe accident, evacuation will be for a radius of 20 km from the NPPs (in the direction of the plume). This differs from the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s two emergency planning zones around NPPs – a plume exposure pathway zone with a radius of 16 km, concerned primarily with exposure to, and inhalation of, airborne radioactive contamination. Secondly, an ingestion and direct radiation pathway zone of 80 km, primarily concerned with ingestion of contaminated foods/ liquids and ground radiation from deposited Cs-137. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perry_Nuclear_Generating_Station#cite_note-6
(f) Conclusions
The experiences of Japanese evacuees after Fukushima discussed above are distressing to read. Their experiences were terrible, so much so that it requires Governments of large cities with nearby NPPs to reconsider their own situations and to address the question… what would happen if radioactive fallout heavily contaminated large areas of their city and required millions of residents to leave for long periods of time, eg several decades?
And how long would evacuations need to continue….weeks, months, years, or decades? The time length of evacuations is usually avoided in the evacuation plans seen so far. In reality, the answer would depend on Cs-137 concentrations in surface soils. The time period could be decades, as the half-life of the principal radionuclide, Cs-137, is 30 years. This raises the possibility of large cities becoming uninhabited ‘ghost’ towns like Tomioka, Okuma, Namie, Futaba, etc in Japan and Pripyat in Ukraine.
This bleak reality is hard to accept or even comprehend. However it is a matter that some Governments need to address after Fukushima.
Wheatley et al (2017) comprehensively examined the historical records of 216 nuclear accidents, mishaps and near-misses since the mid-1950s. They predicted the future frequencies and severities of nuclear accidents and concluded both were “unacceptably high”. Wheatley et al (2016) also concluded that the relative frequency with which nuclear events cascaded into nuclear disasters remained large enough that, when multiplied by their severity, the aggregate risk to society was “very high”. It is unsurprising that, after Fukushima, several major European states including Germany and Switzerland have decided to phase-out their nuclear reactors.
Jan. 22–The U.S. Department of Energy Environmental Management division, the Savannah River Site landlord, may soon get a new leader.
On Jan. 18, Anne Marie White — a nominee for EM-1, the head of the DOE’s environmental cleanup program — testified before a federal energy committee, defending her qualifications and answering a handful of state-specific questions.
The assistant secretary position, formally known as EM-1, is currently vacant. It was last held by Monica Regalbuto during Barack Obama’s presidency.
White, though, was not confirmed Thursday: U.S. Sen. Lisa Murkowski, R-Alaska, said the Senate committee “will be working to move our nominees as quickly as we can” into their respective positions.
“We’ve got big things that we address here in the energy committee,” Murkowski said. “There are big things that the Department of Energy faces on a daily basis.”
The U.S. Senate received White’s nomination, handled by President Donald Trump and reinforced by DOE Secretary Rick Perry, on Jan. 8.
Environmental Management is an organization within the DOE that is tasked with cleaning up more than 100 sites across the country.
“If I am honored with a confirmation by the United States Senate, I will look forward to working together with you and your staffs to resolve the challenging issues that confront the nation in the areas of risk reduction and environmental cleanup from the nuclear weapons production program,” White said Thursday to members of the U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee.
She later said the EM-1 role encompasses “our moral obligation to clean up our environmental legacy challenges from World War II and the Cold War.”
White, who earned a master’s degree in nuclear engineering, has worked in the nuclear industry for approximately 25 years: According to her Thursday testimony, White began her career physically involved with nuclear cleanup and eventually established her own nuclear consulting firm.
White told the Senate committee she has worked at many DOE-EM sites.
A Jan. 3 White House statement — one that nominated several other people to a range of positions — said White’s credentials are “industry-recognized.”
“Environmental cleanup work was a natural fit for me,” White said, adding that, if confirmed, she would work to increase safety and establish relationships with those actually involved with the manual cleanup work.
“Maintaining and further building trust with the workforce that we rely on to clean up our nation’s legacy environmental challenges will be a focus throughout my tenure,” she said.
Murkowski, the committee chairwoman, was the first to question White. The Alaskan senator was curious how White would reduce risk at the DOE and how she would reduce the department’s profile on the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s radar.
The accountability office has labelled the DOE as “high risk,” citing the department’s growing liabilities.
As of 2017, the federal government’s environmental liability totals $447 billion, according to the GAO’s latest report. The DOE is responsible for a majority of that — approximately $372 billion, the largest amount since at least fiscal year 2000.
White said, if appointed, she would reduce DOE risk by always ensuring “a safe work environment.” She said decision making must be made more timely, technically based and involved and that she would make “some improvements” in the way of contracting and job assignments.
White would also like to engage local communities more. In response to questions posed by West Virigina Sen. Shelley Capito, a Republican, White said nuclear neighbors — think Aiken County and SRS — and their perception of the DOE is paramount.
“Local communities are extremely important to the work we do,” White said, “and gaining their support is extremely important.”
“We need to be transparent in our communications with them,” she continued.
The Senate committee’s reception of White on Thursday morning was balmy at best, tepid at worst.
U.S. Sen. John Barrasso, R-Wyoming, said he could not endorse White due to ongoing uranium trade conflicts involving Russia and Kazakhstan. Barrasso — who represents a state that is among the nation’s largest uranium suppliers — said the uranium business is being adversely affected. Without White’s promise she’d end international head butting, Barrasso said, he could not support her.
White’s nomination must go through more committee hearings and a full U.S. Senate hearing before it can be approved.
The Energy and Natural Resources Committee will next discuss White’s appointment on Jan. 30, according to the committee’s calendar.
Colin Demarest is a reporter with Aiken Standard and has been with the newspaper since November 2017. He is a New Jersey native and received his B.A. in Journalism and Mass Communications from the University of South Carolina.
Company insists bill could still be critical to keeping nuclear plants up and running, despite Trump tax windfall to plant operator
The nuclear subsidy bill that died in the lame-duck session a few weeks ago did not stay buried very long.
The controversial bill providing lucrative subsidies to keep three nuclear units operated by Public Service Enterprise Group afloat is up for a vote in a key Senate committee on Thursday.
The revival of the bill is less surprising than its suddenness — given that Gov. Phil Murphy’s incoming administration had expressed qualms about the legislation not including clean-energy components along with providing a safety net to the nuclear plants.
Senate President Steven Sweeney reacted angrily when the bill faltered, promising to bring it back quickly in the new session, but few expected it to resurface this soon, especially opponents.
“This bad idea obviously needs a good wooden stake,’’ said Steven Goldenberg, an attorney representing large energy users and part of a coalition of business groups, consumer advocates, and environmentalists fighting the proposed subsidies.
The fact the bill (S-877) is identical to one that Murphy appeared to help torpedo a few weeks ago might also reignite speculation that the incumbent Senate President and new governor are not on the same page, or maybe even the same book.
PSEG caught napping
It also appeared to take PSEG by surprise. In an artfully worded statement, the Newark company said, “We understand that a nuclear bill will be considered by the Senate Environment & Energy Committee on Thursday. This is a continuation of the dialogue on this critical issue and we believe that avoiding the premature closing of the nuclear plants serving New Jersey is consistent with Gov. Phil Murphy’s clean energy agenda.’’
PSEG said the need to protect nuclear energy remains urgent. “We encourage the Legislature to move quickly and look forward to working with the administration and Legislature to bring about a clean energy future that includes nuclear,’’ the statement concluded.
Jeff Tittel, director of the New Jersey Sierra Club, was not as diplomatic about the quick posting of the identical bill. “The Legislature is rushing this forward without having any consideration of what the Murphy administration thinks,’’ he said. “They are telling the governor we don’t care what you think.’’
The governor’s office did not respond to a request for comment.
$300M annual subsidy
The bill would provide up to $300 million a year in subsidies paid by ratepayers to the nuclear units if the state Board of Public Utilities determines the plants are in economic distress. Nuclear plants across the nation face challenges because of cheap natural gas, leading to the premature closing of at least six nuclear facilities.
Without some sort of financial incentives, PSEG has threatened to close the three units, which the company claims could turn unprofitable within the next two years. “The need to act is urgent,’’ Sweeney wrote in an op-ed published Sunday in the Star-Ledger, “it is why I will push for enactment early this year.’’
But critics argue the company has yet to prove its case, citing its recent disclosure in a financial filing that PSEG Power, the operator of the plants, stands to gain from a one-time, noncash benefit of between $550 million to $650 million from the Trump administration tax plan enacted last month.
“It is to be expected,’’ said Paul Patterson, an energy analyst at Glenrock Associates in New York City. “Given the economics of the industry, it is not surprising we’re seeing it in New Jersey as well.’
By Cai Hong in Tokyo and Pan Mengqi in Beijing | China Daily | Updated: 2018-01-18 07:54
The renewal of a Tokyo-Washington agreement on the use of nuclear energy has sparked fears that Japan may take the chance to make nuclear weapons, experts said.
Japan and the United States decided on Wednesday to automatically renew their agreement on peaceful uses of nuclear energy in July when the 30-year pact is due, Japanese media reported.
Japan will be more under the sway of the US after the agreement, which went into effect in 1988, is renewed. The accord, after renewal, can be scrapped in six months if either Japan or the US notifies the other, the Kyodo News said.
The pact lays the foundation for Japan’s nuclear fuel cycle project, allowing Japan to extract plutonium and the remaining uranium from spent nuclear fuel and reprocess it into mixed oxide (MOX) fuel for use in nuclear plants.
Japan had tried not to renegotiate the agreement so as to maintain its nuclear fuel cycle policy.
Zhou Yongsheng, a professor of Japanese studies at China Foreign Affairs University, said the renewal means that the Washington administration holds a more tolerant attitude toward Japan’s possession of nuclear materials.
“According to its current technology level, Japan certainly has the ability to manufacture nuclear weapons within a short period of time, thus possessing the nuclear materials will undoubtedly add risks to the already unsteady security situation in Northeast Asia,” Zhou said.
Japanese Foreign Minister Taro Kono said on a TV program on Jan 11: “Japan needs and has a duty to create a situation in which we can explain with confidence how the country intends to use plutonium to the international community.”
Kono is critical of the country’s nuclear fuel cycle project.
The Mainichi Shimbun reported that some officials within the US Department of Defense and the State Department’s Bureau of International Security and Nonproliferation are concerned about Japan’s stockpiling of a massive amount of plutonium, which can be converted into nuclear weapons.
“Japan owns nearly 50 tons of separated plutonium. That is enough for over 5,000 nuclear weapons. Yet Japan has no feasible peaceful use for most of this material,” Alan J. Kuperman, associate professor and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, said in a signed article published by Kyodo News on Aug 17.
Kuperman asked how a country that forswears nuclear arms came to possess more weapons-usable plutonium than most countries that have nuclear arsenals.
In their co-authored article published in Japan Times, three US experts concluded that it is undeniable that reactor-grade plutonium – extracted from spent reactor fuel by reprocessing – can be used for nuclear weapons.
They were Victor Gilinsky, program adviser for The Nonproliferation Policy Education Center who served as a Nuclear Regulatory Commissioner under US presidents Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan; Henry D. Sokolski, the NPEC’s Executive Director; and Bruce Goodwin, a Senior Fellow at the Center for Global Security Research at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory.
A NUCLEAR officer once responsible for pushing the button to launch 50 devastating missiles has revealed his biggest fear and said the “globe is on a hairpin trigger”.
EVERY day for two years, Peter Hefley would drive through Wyoming farmland to work, hoping he wouldn’t be called upon to act.
The nuclear launch officer, then 25, was one of two people who worked in an Air Force command and control centre deep underground from 2005 to 2007, maintaining a squadron of 50 of the world’s most devastating missiles and waiting for instructions to launch.
“If you imagine a hardened bunker 60 feet below the ground, that’s what we were doing,” he told news.com.au.
“Each [missile] had up to three nuclear warheads on it. Any one of those warheads would just destroy a city regardless of size.”
But while he used to have confidence in the fact Commander-in-Chief at the time, George W. Bush, would follow an escalation process from diplomacy to a declaration of war and use of conventional weapons first, now he has no such confidence.
“It’s fear,” he said when asked what led him to speak out given his critical former role. “It’s being afraid that not only can I picture myself, now there are kids doing what I did and the atmosphere is completely different.
“I’m nervous as a citizen because this is scary. Something that can devastate a good portion of the globe is on the hairpin trigger.”
The former college space hacker who ended up on the Air Force’s missile program said he now wants people to realise just how quickly a disaster could occur.
“The most important thing everybody can understand is how quick that process can happen because everybody is trained to do it as fast as possible,” he said about the system that can take just four minutes from the President’s order until the first missiles leave their silos.
The stark warning comes as a leaked draft of the Trump Administration’s Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) showed plans to increase “low yield weapons” that will not rely on host nations for support and are designed to ensure a “prompt response”.
Separately, US Air Force psychiatrist Steven Buser told the New York Times “warning signs abound” when thinking about whether Trump would pass the military’s strict Personnel Reliability Program (PRP) for fitness to serve in that role.
While the White House has said the NPR does not represent official policy, the report describes “low yield weapons” — the same force as those dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki — as a “low cost and near term modification that will help counter any mistaken perception of an exploitable ‘gap’ in US regional deterrence capabilities”.
Critics, including Mr Hefley, argue it could lead to a terrifying proliferation of the weapons the world is supposed to be eradicating, in the context of an unstable political environment.
“This is the first time I’ve heard in my lifetime [an argument for] restocking the nuclear armament. Everything has been a take down because they realise the devastation. This is ‘let’s add to this and let them do more things that will let us use more nuclear weapons’.”
The comments come after President Trump’s escalating rhetoric with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un and brags that his “nuclear button” is bigger and readily available. Trump supporters claim his hardline approach has helped force North Korean concessions including diplomatic talks with South Korea.
Hefley is one of 17 former nuclear launch officers who has recently signed an open letter stating President Trump is “worse than we feared” when it comes to his temperament to be Commander-in-Chief.
Global Zero executive director Derek Johnson, who wants to see nuclear weapons abolished, said the Nuclear Posture Review’s new stance takes the country closer to the “point of no return”.
“Trump’s plan to develop so-called ‘low-yield’ nuclear weapons and loosen restrictions on their use is a dramatic departure from longstanding US policy that makes nuclear war more likely. The world is about to get a whole lot more dangerous,” he said.
“Once we cross the nuclear threshold, all bets are off. If a nuclear weapon is used, nobody on the receiving end is going to stop to measure the mushroom cloud before retaliating. This plan paves a road to disaster.”
There’s a mad dash for a vital radioactive isotope that’s used in about 50,000 medical procedures every day in the US, including spotting deadly cancers and looming heart problems. Currently, access to it hinges on a shaky supply chain and a handful of aging nuclear reactors in foreign countries. But federal regulators and a few US companies are pushing hard and spending millions to produce it domestically and shore up access, Kaiser Health News reports.
The isotope, molybdenum-99 (Mo-99), decays to the short-lived Technetium-99m (Tc-99m) and other isotopes, which are used as radiotracers in medical imaging. Injected into patients, the isotopes spotlight how the heart is pumping, what parts of the brain are active, or if tumors are forming in bones.
But, to get to those useful endpoints, Mo-99 has to wind through a fraught journey. According to KHN, most Mo-99 in the US is made by irradiating Cold War-era uranium from America’s nuclear stockpile. The US Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration secretly ships it to aging reactors abroad. The reactors—and five subsequent processing plants—are in Australia, Canada, Europe (Netherlands, Belgium, Poland, and the Czech Republic), and South Africa, according to a 2016 report by The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine. Private companies then rent irradiation time at the reactors, send the resulting medley of isotopes to processing plants, book the final Mo-99 on commercial flights back to the US, and distribute it to hospitals and pharmacies.
With just a 66-hour half-life, Mo-99’s trip has to be fast. “It’s like running through the desert with an ice cream cone,” Ira Goldman, senior director of global strategic supply at Lantheus Medical Imaging in North Billerica, Massachusetts, told KHN.
But things often don’t go smoothly—or quickly. The international shipping can run into mundane travel delays. Jittery pilots may refuse to transport radioactive material. And then there are problems at the reactors. A curious baboon once wandered into the reactor hall in South Africa, causing an unexpected shutdown, for instance.
But a more common problem is maintenance at the reactors, some of which are more than 50 years old. Facing $70 million in repairs, the Canadian government decided to call off Mo-99 production at its Chalk River, Ontario, reactor in 2016. It will permanently shut down the reactor at the end of this year.
Decaying chain
And those disruptions and shutdowns mean shortages. In 2009 and 2010, there was a shortage of Mo-99 after two reactors went down at once. Doctors were forced to used more expensive, more toxic imaging agents. With the permanent shuttering of the Canadian reactor, the National Academies judged there to be a greater than 50-percent chance of impending “severe” shortages.
The imperiled supply and the ever-present concern of uranium getting into the wrong hands led President Obama to pass legislation in 2013 to push companies into the business of Mo-99. The handful of companies that have now risen to the challenge have received millions in federal funds to jumpstart efforts to make Mo-99 domestically and, importantly, without highly-enriched uranium.
One of those is NorthStar Medical Radioisotopes of Beloit, Wisconsin, which received $50 million in funding and is working on a safe way to make Mo-99.
Likewise, SHINE Medical Technologies received $25 million from the DOE to help build a $100 million facility in Janesville, Wisconsin. SHINE got construction approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Agency last year and has designed eight particle accelerators for the site. They still need to raise additional capital and navigate a tangle of regulations.
But the company’s founder and CEO, Greg Piefer, a nuclear engineer, is optimistic. He promised the company will have Mo-99 production up and running by 2020, a deadline pushed back form 2015.
“If we don’t have significant production soon, we will continue to export highly enriched uranium,” Piefer said. “And the National Nuclear Security Administration will have failed their mission.”
MPs have demanded guarantees that UK cancer patients will not lose access to new radiotherapy treatments because of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU’s treaty on nuclear materials.
In a report published on Monday (15 January), the European Scrutiny committee called on UK ministers to set out “what arrangements will apply to the import of medical isotopes from the EU during any post-Brexit implementation period”.
The question of whether UK patients will lose access to new cancer treatments has exorcised the UK medical community ever since Prime Minister Theresa May set out the UK’s plans to leave the European Atomic Energy Community (Euratom) in her letter to European Council President Donald Tusk which began the Article 50 process of the UK’s withdrawal from the EU.
Brexit Secretary David Davis has indicated that the UK will instead seek to set up its own nuclear regulator.
But that has prompted concerns about the possibility of new customs controls on the transport of radio isotopes, which is already tightly regulated.
In November, Dr. John Buscombe, President of the British Nuclear Medicine Society, told the House of Lords that each year close to a million patients in the UK receive radiotherapies or scans, around 80% of which use materials imported from EU manufacturers.
UK Energy Minister Richard Harrington had however “emphatically confirmed that the UK’s ability to import medical isotopes from the EU or the rest of the world will not be affected by withdrawal from Euratom”, noted MPs.
Oncologists and radiologists are worried about a repeat of the two year shortage in radio isotopes between 2008 and 2010 caused by shutdowns of supply reactors in Canada and the Netherlands which produce Molybdenum-99 – the isotope most commonly used in medicine. Around 90% of Molbdenum-99 and its decay product (Technetium-99m) is used in the medical interventions involving radioisotopes. It is not produced in the UK.
“I was working as a Breast Cancer surgeon during the Technetium shortage which lasted well over a year. During that time we were faced with having to ration bone scans to only the most urgent or worrying cases,” said Dr. Philippa Whitford MP, a member of the European Scrutiny committee.
The Nuclear Industry Association (NIA) has called for a transitional arrangement during which the UK would keep its current arrangements under Euratom after March 2019, giving time for a new agreement for nuclear cooperation to be struck with the EU.
For its part, the Exiting the EU committee will hold its own hearing with Cancer Research UK at its Cambridge University headquarters on Thursday (18 January) to discuss the UK’s continued involvement in EU-wide agencies and access to research funding post-Brexit.
SANTIAGO: Pope Francis admitted on Monday (Jan 15) he was frightened by the prospect of an accidental nuclear apocalypse, as he began a week-long visit to Chile and Peru to bolster a local Catholic Church riven by sex abuse scandals.
“I think we are at the very edge,” the pope told reporters aboard his plane when asked about the threat of a nuclear war in the wake of a recent string of tests by North Korea and a false missile alert last week that sparked panic in the US state of Hawaii.
“I am really afraid of this. One accident is enough to precipitate things,” he said.
The pope landed in Santiago late on Monday on his first visit to Chile since becoming pope, and his sixth to Latin America.
The 81-year-old Argentinian pontiff will find a very different Chile than the one he first encountered as a student priest in the 1960s.
Socialist President Michelle Bachelet has presided over major change in the once deeply conservative country, decriminalising abortion, recognising civil unions for same-sex couples and introducing a bill to legalise gay marriage.
Preparations for the visit have been overshadowed by a recent report that almost 80 members of the Chilean clergy have been accused of the sexual abuse of minors since 2000, more than half of them convicted by a Vatican court.
Protests are expected over Francis’ appointment of a bishop in the southern city of Ororno who is accused of covering up for Fernando Karadima, an influential priest whom the Vatican convicted of abusing children in 2011.
In a sign of growing exasperation at Church inaction, activists from several countries meeting in Santiago on Monday launched a new global organisation, Ending Clerical Abuse (ECA).
The organisation “seeks to stop child sexual abuse by the clergy,” said one of its founders, Jose Andres Murillo.
The body aims to form a group of prosecutors “to bring to court these crimes against humanity,” said Sara Oviedo, former vice president of the UN Committee on the Rights of the Child.
PROTESTS PLANNED
During his three days in Chile, Francis will meet with victims of the military dictatorship of Augusto Pinochet, while there are no formal plans to meet victims of pedophile priests.
Bachelet, who will meet Francis on Tuesday, has called on Chileans to welcome the pope, though a positive reception may not be universal.
On Friday, five Catholic Churches in the capital were attacked – three of them with firebombs – by what police said was an anarchist group. Demonstrations are planned by feminist and gay rights groups.
The highlight of the three-day visit will be an open-air mass in a Santiago park on Tuesday.
At another mass at the airport in Temuco, the capital of the impoverished southern Araucania region, Francis is expected to draw attention on Wednesday to state persecution of the indigenous Mapuche people and also meet members of the community.
The Mapuche – some seven percent of the Chilean population – inhabited a vast territory before the arrival of Spanish colonists in 1541, and have long protested the loss of ancestral lands.
During his visit to Chile, the pope will also meet representatives of the poor and young people, as well as visit a women’s prison.
Authorities expect nearly a million Argentines, Bolivians and Peruvians to visit Chile to see the pope.
Francis sent “warm greetings” to his native Argentina in a telegram to President Mauricio Macri as he flew over the country on his approach to Santiago, though he made no mention of a much-awaited visit.
The former Archbishop of Buenos Aires has now visited all of Argentina’s neighbors except Uruguay on official tours – Brazil, Bolivia, Chile and Paraguay. Elsewhere in Latin America, he also travelled to Colombia and Ecuador.
The absence has raised questions in the Vatican and in Argentina.
Many consider that Francis’s homilies would be interpreted as carrying more political weight at home than may be acceptable, and – particularly given the pope’s defence of the poor – may be seen as pointed political attacks against Macri’s market-friendly austerity.
On Thursday, the pope will travel to Iquique in northern Chile, where he will preside over another open-air mass, on the shores of the Pacific Ocean, before travelling on to Peru’s capital Lima.
Peru is in the throes of a political crisis sparked by a controversial pardon for ex-president Alberto Fujimori, who was serving a 25-year sentence for human rights abuses, as well as another abuse scandal involving the clergy.
The US and Canada are bringing together foreign ministers from around 20 nations on Tuesday in Vancouver to discuss security and stability on the Korean Peninsula. It’s strange that many of the countries invited are not stakeholders in the situation, but those who participated under UN Command during the Korean War (1950-53). Washington seems to be reviving the long-forgotten multinational military alliance.
Yet the international community harbors little hope that the meeting can bear fruit as China, Russia and North Korea are not invited. There is widespread speculation about what the US hopes to achieve out of such a meeting.
The US and Canada were abruptly announced as co-hosts of the meeting on December 19 during US Secretary of State Rex Tillerson’s visit to Canada. Washington apparently has more intentions than simply reflecting on the 1950s war by bringing together nations that sent troops to the peninsula over 60 years ago while bypassing those highly relevant nations amid tensions in the region.
First of all, Washington wants to pressure Pyongyang by signaling that it is indeed preparing to use force. Those invited countries, no matter how many troops they sent, were participants in the Korean War.
Attending this meeting, they may not mean to repeat their actions, but Washington can thus tell Pyongyang that they stand ready to follow the US onto the peninsula.
Having had China and Russia demand it talk to North Korea, the US wants to justify the high pressure it has exerted on North Korea and get others’ endorsement for its policy on the peninsula.
Among the invitees are traditional US allies like Britain, Australia and New Zealand, and nations that have no relation to the nuclear issue but can be easily manipulated by the US, such as Ethiopia and Columbia.
While the US finds it too hard to manipulate the UN Security Council, with the Vancouver meeting Washington wants to highlight its dominant role in resolving the North Korean nuclear issue and cripple the clout of China and Russia. Washington can say these 20-some nations stand for the international community to make its extremely hard-line stance against Pyongyang more legitimate.
But the meeting will likely accomplish little. Over the peninsula, only international decisions made under the UN framework are legal and valid. No one can stop the US from pressuring North Korea to the utmost, but Washington will eventually be held accountable if war breaks out or even worse, nuclear weapons are employed.
The Donald Trump administration may possibly be holding the Vancouver meeting for his domestic audience. With a more hawkish policy toward North Korea than previous administrations, Trump has pushed US-North Korea confrontation toward a high-stakes climax. Hawaii’s false missile alert on Saturday set off wide-scale panic. Washington needs more support for its policy from countries beyond Japan and South Korea.
The recent Seoul-Pyongyang détente over the Pyeongchang Winter Olympic Games has placed the Vancouver meeting in a somewhat awkward position. At such a meeting with ulterior motives and little authority, what attendees need to do is just clap their hands for the organizers.
Fears over the security of Brazil’s two nuclear power plants have been raised after a heavily armed gang raided a secure workers’ condominium just a kilometre away and blew up two cash machines.
About 10 men held security guards hostage at around 3am on Monday, robbed guests at a party in a private club then escaped in a waiting speedboat from the Praia Brava condominium for workers at the Angra 1 and 2 nuclear reactors, run by state company Eletronuclear.
It was the second incident in a month: on 9 December, thieves exploded an ATM in the Mambucaba Condominium, another security-controlled workers’ village 15km away from the plants, near Angra dos Reis on the Rio de Janeiro state coastline.
Dr Paul Dorfman, a senior researcher at University College London’s Energy Institute, said that the use of “explosives and modern weaponry close to any nuclear plant” was a cause for worry, even if the explosion would not have caused direct damage to reactors.
“There are grave and increasing concerns about risk of attack to a nuclear plant across the world,” he said.
While reactors are encased in steel pressure vessels and layers of concrete, high-level radioactive spent nuclear fuel ponds are at greater risk. Older reactors like Angra 1, which began operating in 1982, have less sophisticated safety systems than more modern plants.
“If someone was to throw a few explosions around you could imagine what would happen,” Dorfman said.
Residents of the Praia Brava condominium, which is controlled by a private security firm, were terrified by the attacks.
“They were stunned,” said a relative of one family that lives in the condominium, who spoke anonymously for fear of reprisals. “Nobody imagined that this could happen.”
Local politicians have called for military protection for the area.
“It is an unbelievable situation,” said Thimoteo de Sá, a city councillor in Angra dos Reis, the nearest town 44 kilometres away. “This should be protected by the army at least – we are talking about a nuclear plant.”
On Friday, Eletronuclear closed cash machine at its four residential areas, the company said in an emailed statement.
“The entire security force of the company in Angra was put on notice, and the surveillance of the Angra nuclear power plant was reinforced,” it said. Security at the plants is overseen by the federal government, it said.
Brazil, Argentina and Mexico are the only three Latin American countries with functioning nuclear power plants.
Brazil is believed to have had a nuclear weapons programme, though it is unclear if it ever actually developed a weapon, and it renounced the ambitions in 1990. Brazil still mines its own uranium and is building a nuclear-powered submarine with French help.
Angra 1 and Angra 2 supply 3% of Brazil’s electricity. Work on a third reactor, Angra 3 began in 1984, was suspended two years later, began again in 2010 and ground to a halt again in 2015 after Eletronuclear officials were arrested as part of a sweeping corruption investigation.
Eletronuclear said it was looking for partners to finish Angra 3 and has signed memorandums of understanding with Russia’s state nuclear company Rosatom and the China National Nuclear Corporation.
Lying around 200km west of Rio de Janeiro, the “Green Coast” tourist area around Angra dos Reis has suffered from rising violent crime. In August, British tourist Eloise Dixon was shot and wounded when her family’s hire car drove into a community controlled by Rio drug gang the Red Command.
Police said the gang involved in the December ATM robberies targeted Santander bank cash machines because they have less sophisticated security systems.
“It is a gang specialised in this type of crime, it operates in other states and it had support from a gang here in Rio,” said Mauricio Mendonça, a detective from the Rio police’s robberies division.
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