nuclear-news

Governments would have to foot the bill for nuclear shipping

‘Essentially, the government stands behind the operator with an open chequebook’No global liability framework in place, and getting one could take decadesFinance and insurance give nuclear a chicken-and-egg problem

Declan Bush, 19 Jun 2026,

Governments would have to foot the bill for nuclear shipping

• ‘Essentially, the government stands behind the operator with an open chequebook’No global liability framework in place, and getting one could take decadesFinance and insurance give nuclear a chicken-and-egg problem

Governments will be on the hook for the potentially unlimited liability created by a nuclear incident at sea, Core Power’s annual nuclear conference was told. There are doubts they are keen to take such a burden on…………………… (Subscribers only) https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1157569/Governments-would-have-to-foot-the-bill-for-nuclear-shipping

June 23, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

The Trillionaire Economy

 June 17, 2026, ScheerPost Staff, https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/17/the-trillionaire-economy/

As Elon Musk crossed the trillion-dollar threshold following SpaceX’s historic public offering, millions of Americans received a very different economic message: their paychecks are buying less.

The juxtaposition could hardly be more stark.

On the same week that Musk became the first person in history to accumulate a trillion-dollar fortune, new economic data showed inflation-adjusted wages declining and many workers losing ground to rising energy costs and persistent inflation. While Wall Street celebrated a new age of technological wealth, ordinary Americans continued to struggle with housing costs, healthcare expenses, retirement insecurity, and fears that artificial intelligence may soon eliminate entire categories of jobs.

The story is larger than Elon Musk.

His trillion-dollar milestone is merely the most visible symbol of an economic system increasingly defined by extraordinary concentrations of wealth and power. According to economists cited in The New York Times report, the richest Americans now control a share of national wealth that would have been almost unimaginable even during the Gilded Age. The fortunes of a tiny handful of billionaires have grown faster than wages, productivity, and in many cases entire sectors of the economy.

The question confronting Americans is not whether Musk deserves his fortune. The deeper question is what happens to a democracy when wealth becomes so concentrated that individual fortunes rival the economic output of nations.

Extreme wealth inevitably translates into political influence. Billionaires can shape public policy, fund political movements, influence media ecosystems, purchase competitors, and increasingly determine the direction of technological development itself. As economist Gabriel Zucman argues, concentrated wealth does not merely distort markets—it can distort democracy.

This concern has become particularly acute in the age of artificial intelligence.

The same technologies creating vast new fortunes are also generating widespread anxiety among workers. Tech executives routinely warn that AI could eliminate millions of jobs while simultaneously assuring investors that productivity and profits will soar. Workers are effectively being told that their economic future may depend on technologies designed to replace them.

That contradiction helps explain the growing public unease.

For decades Americans were promised that economic growth would lift all boats. Yet many families increasingly experience an economy where stock market records coexist with unaffordable housing, rising healthcare costs, stagnant purchasing power, and declining economic security. Wealth exists in abundance, but access to it grows ever more unequal.

The SpaceX IPO may be remembered as a historic financial event. But it may also serve as a symbol of a deeper crisis: an economy capable of creating trillionaires while leaving millions uncertain about their future.

Whether that future produces broader prosperity or even greater inequality may prove to be one of the defining political questions of the coming decade.

June 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

UK to guarantee enriched uranium supplies to Ukraine

WNN, 17 June 2026

The UK has agreed to provide guarantees for a GBP210 million (USD282 million) loan for supplies of enriched uranium to Ukraine’s nuclear power producer, Energoatom, over the next two years.

The deal was agreed between the UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer and Ukraine’s President Volodymyr Zelenskyy during their meeting in London last week.

The financing, backed by UK Export Finance, builds on a previous two-year deal to supply nuclear fuel to Ukraine.

In November 2023, Urenco agreed to continue supplying Energoatom with enriched uranium until 2035, with an option to extend the contract to 2043………………….. https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/articles/uk-to-guarantee-enriched-uranium-supplies-to-ukraine

June 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

Governments would have to foot the bill for nuclear shipping

‘Essentially, the government stands behind the operator with an open chequebook’No global liability framework in place, and getting one could take decadesFinance and insurance give nuclear a chicken-and-egg problem

19 Jun 2026, Declan Bush, Llyoyd’s

Governments will be on the hook for the potentially unlimited liability created by a nuclear incident at sea, Core Power’s annual nuclear conference was told. There are doubts they are keen to take such a burden on………….. (Subscribersonly) https://www.lloydslist.com/LL1157569/Governments-would-have-to-foot-the-bill-for-nuclear-shipping

June 21, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

Gaza Genocide, Inc.: The Permanent-Conflict Industry

Imran Khalid for Foreign Policy in Focus, 12 June 26 https://scheerpost.com/2026/06/12/gaza-genocide-inc-the-permanent-conflict-industry/

 The international community’s approach to conflict resolution has undergone a profound and dangerous structural shift, moving away from the pursuit of political settlements toward the permanent administration of crisis. This transition is vividly apparent in Rafah, where the newly established National Committee for the Administration of Gaza (NCAG) has begun overseeing a reconstruction process stripped of any path toward genuine sovereignty or political renewal. What is being built instead is a sprawling, technocratic bureaucracy designed to manage human suffering indefinitely, transforming a site of active geopolitical dispossession into a permanent administrative holding pattern.

The rollout of Phase Two of the Trump administration’s Comprehensive Gaza Plan—secured with a UN Security Council endorsement—exposes the nakedly corporate logic underpinning modern foreign policy. By placing a “Board of Peace” stacked with billionaire financiers and political hawks like Marco Rubio, Tony Blair, Jared Kushner, Ajay Banga, and Marc Rowan in charge of post-conflict governance, Western hegemony has effectively financialized geopolitical containment. The plan treats Gaza not as a nation deserving of self-determination but as a high-risk economic asset to be secured, stabilized, and folded into regional trade corridors while its population remains permanently disenfranchised.

This containment model carries severe consequences both for the occupied population and the broader global order. For Palestinians, it institutionalizes a bleak daily reality of endless aid lines and checkpoints under an international apparatus that has traded the promise of liberation for technocratic stabilization. Globally, this reveals a deeper systemic reality: the traditional assumption that regional conflicts are temporary shocks awaiting a diplomatic fix has completely collapsed.

For global political and economic elites, perpetual instability is no longer a failure to be corrected but a baseline structural condition around which modern global capitalism is choosing to organize itself.

A Shift in Logic

In the twentieth century, major conflicts were viewed as massive disruptions to globalization. In the twenty-first, globalization is rapidly adapting itself around endless disruption. Entire corporate, financial, and bureaucratic systems now operationalize instability as a baseline condition rather than a temporary shock.

Private-sector logistics firms are securing long-term contracts to manage continuous delivery corridors into high-risk zones. Maritime conglomerates are permanently adjusting pricing models and routing assets around Africa as a structural business reality. Digital and physical infrastructure protection has transitioned from an annual insurance check-box to a core operational expense that drives tech-sector hiring and venture capital investment.

Markets are internalizing this shift. Oil prices no longer spike the way they once did after escalations because commodity investors increasingly price in chronic, localized instability rather than assuming systemic collapse. Capital markets are no longer asking whether a crisis will end but whether it can remain geographically contained. That distinction changes everything for how corporate treasuries allocate capital.

Gaza and Ukraine

Gaza illustrates this vividly. The NCAG’s reconstruction mandate and the Board of Peace’s integration of Gaza into the India–Middle East–Europe Economic Corridor (IMEC) show that crisis management itself has become a growth industry. Reconstruction is not about closure; it is about embedding instability into global supply chains.

This economic adaptation mirrors a deeper systemic fatigue within international governance. The post-Cold War era operated on the logic that major conflicts eventually reached closure, whether Bosnia after Dayton or Northern Ireland after the Good Friday Agreement. Today, that logic is spent.

Instead of diplomacy aimed at structural architecture, modern institutions are becoming highly efficient at administering instability rather than ending it. The UN’s Resolution 2803 did not declare peace; it endorsed a framework for managing crisis indefinitely. The NCAG’s mandate is to restore services under conditions of volatility, not to deliver closure.

Ukraine offers a parallel. Western institutions have become adept at stabilizing financial flows, managing refugee integration, and sustaining military aid—but without a credible path to settlement. Sudan’s humanitarian corridors are similarly managed as permanent relief operations. Gaza’s plan institutionalizes this model: reconstruction without resolution, administration without settlement.

Normalization

The third transformation is occurring inside the human infrastructure of the modern workplace, driven by algorithmic fatigue and the workspace paradox. The digital age has fundamentally altered how societies, consumers, and employees process global trauma.

Previous generations experienced major conflicts sequentially. Today’s professional workforce experiences them simultaneously, continuously, and instantly. In any given hour, a professional’s algorithmic stream displays corporate Slack messages alongside real-time updates from Gaza, Ukraine, Taiwan, and climate disasters.

This continuous exposure has created a dangerous psychological paradox. The global workforce is more emotionally connected to macro-level crises than at any point in history, yet constant exposure is triggering widespread psychological numbness and professional exhaustion. Public and corporate outrage surges rapidly, then stabilizes into fatigue. For leaders, managing a workforce under the weight of this continuous cognitive load is a quiet crisis in itself.

The ultimate danger of the era of permanent crisis is that it becomes intellectually and socially normalized. Once corporate strategies and public expectations internalize the assumption that global disruption never truly ends, ambition contracts. Leaders stop pursuing long-term expansions because planning horizons narrow from years to weeks. Innovation takes a backseat to survival and containment.

History offers a stern warning: the late Roman Empire did not collapse because every frontier failed simultaneously. It declined because permanent emergencies became routine, and tactical crisis management slowly replaced strategic renewal.

The modern international order risks entering a similar phase. Gaza, Ukraine, and shipping vulnerabilities matter immensely for their immediate human and material costs, but they matter even more because they reveal the new template of global operations. Trump’s Gaza plan, with its NCAG, Board of Peace, and IMEC linkage, is not just a reconstruction blueprint. It is a case study in how global institutions now design for permanence of crisis rather than its resolution.

The challenge for the next generation of business leaders is not simply navigating the next disruption but learning how to build sustainable, human-centric enterprises when disruption is the baseline condition. The permanent crisis economy is here: industries are monetizing instability, institutions are administering it, and workforces are absorbing it.

Gaza’s reconstruction framework, endorsed by the UN and operationalized by Trump’s Board of Peace, crystallizes this reality. It shows that the world’s most powerful actors are no longer promising closure. They are promising management.

For commerce, governance, and society, the task is clear: to resist the temptation to normalize crisis as the only horizon. Otherwise, the machinery of global order will become a treadmill of containment, and the ambition for renewal will fade. The permanent crisis economy may be the present reality, but it must not become a permanent destiny.

June 18, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

The Entire Human Species Has Been Turned Into A Profit-Generating Machine

Caitlin Johnstone, Jun 12, 2026, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/the-entire-human-species-has-been?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=201685469&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email

The human species has essentially been transformed into a giant machine to generate profit for corporations.

Under capitalism, humanity exists to serve the interests of the corporation. We are all livestock; beasts of burden used to carry margin expansion forward from quarterly statement to quarterly statement. Enjoyment of life has no value other than the extent to which it can be used to increase the net worth of the shareholders.

That’s why everyone’s so unhappy. We’re not living with purpose. We’re not working together to build a better world and a better future, we’re just pulling levers to turn gears to make the arrow line go up on the graph in the conference room. It’s a hollow, pointless way for people to live.

It makes our whole culture vapid and soulless.

Music is made to be as profitable as possible, which means giving it the broadest possible appeal using formulaic song structure calculated to cause a chemical response in the largest number of human brains.

Movies are designed to draw the largest possible box office revenue at the lowest possible risk to studios and investors, often by just rehashing a movie that’s already proven successful in the past or by slapping together a story about an IP with pre-existing mass appeal.

Food is made to be fast and addictive rather than nourishing.

Healthy human connection has been commodified as social media intertwines with friendships and dating apps insert themselves into the development of romantic relationships.

Human sexuality is being warped and twisted as internet porn normalizes violence and degradation for the maximum number of clicks.

Attention and engagement have been monetized, creating an information ecosystem dominated by conflict and gossip designed to appeal to our baser instincts.

Advertisement is injected into every possible corner of our waking sensory experience, with any available space where the eye might rest or the ear might listen being flooded with psychological manipulation compelling us to consume. They’ll start running commercials in our dreams the instant they have the technology to do so.

You spend eight hours at the office working to generate corporate profits, then you come home and consume products to profit other corporations. You need your beer and snacks to unwind, your streaming services and social media to distract your mind from the stress of it all, your online clothing purchase to try to feel good about yourself, and your prescription drugs to get to sleep at night. People live their entire lives like this.

And that’s those of us who are lucky enough to be living in the global north. In the global south you get wage slavery and exploitation with far more toil, far less relaxation time, and no cheap products made by impoverished workers on other continents with which to comfort yourself.

All of humanity has been roped into this mess. And for what? To make the numbers in some bank accounts increase. To get some green arrows pointing upward on the stock exchange. To enable a few billionaires to buy islands and elections.

All while destroying the biosphere we all depend on for survival.

This, we are told, is the best possible system we could possibly be living under.

I personally do not believe this is true. I personally believe we can have better. Those who benefit from this current arrangement are going to assure us it’s impossible and do everything they can to stop us from changing it, but we do have the means to reclaim the wealth, dignity and happiness that they have stolen from us.

They built this whole machine on our backs. All we need to do is stand up.

June 18, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment

We economists have done the maths: ‘growth’ is a doomed strategy – there is a better way

Our roadmap has been shaped by experts across the world, from UN agencies to grassroots movements. We call on political leaders at all levels to use it

Olivier De Schutter, Joseph Stiglitz, Jayati Ghosh, Thomas Piketty, Kate Raworth and Jason Hickel, 10 June 26, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2026/jun/10/economists-maths-growth-doomed-strategy-un-agencies-political-leaders

We live in an age of manufactured scarcity. In a world richer than ever before, roughly one 10th of the world’s population still lives in extreme destitution. Millions of people cannot afford enough food, proper housing or basic healthcare, while a tiny minority accumulates unprecedented wealth and power. At the same time, droughts, megafires, floods and heatwaves remind us that our economies are pushing the planet beyond its limits.

These are not separate crises. They are symptoms of an economic model that has reached the end of the road. Poverty and inequality are not accidents; they are predictable outcomes of policy choices: how we design tax systems, regulate labour markets, value care, structure public services and decide whose needs and whose voices matter. Crucially, if governments can manufacture poverty, they can also dismantle it.

For decades, the recipe was simple: grow the economy, and poverty would gradually disappear. But the promise that economic growth would “lift all boats” has not been kept. While national incomes expanded, wages stagnated, work became more precarious and public services were cut. At the top, fortunes ballooned; at the bottom, families turned to food banks. Growth has become decoupled from shared prosperity.

It has also become ecologically unsustainable. We are edging towards a “hothouse Earth”, where rising emissions and biodiversity loss are destabilising the conditions that support human life. Around 92% of excess global carbon emissions can be attributed to the global north, and the wealthiest 10% of individuals are responsible for nearly half of global emissions, while people in poverty are the first to face crop failures and rising food prices. An economic model that depends on endless expansion on a finite planet is not just unfair; it is dangerous.

Many low‑income countries still need growth to build roads, hospitals, schools, renewable energy and decent jobs. But the dominant path to growth – based on resource extraction, cheap and compliant labour, export dependence and deepening debt – has widened inequality and degraded the environment. The real question today is not whether growth continues, but what kind of economies we are building, who they serve and whether they allow everyone to live in dignity within planetary boundaries.

That is why we have come together to develop and support the “roadmap for eradicating poverty beyond growth”. The roadmap provides a range of alternatives on how to move beyond the narrow “grow-tax-transfer” approach that has shaped policy for decades. It is not a blueprint shaped by a handful of experts. It is the exact opposite: over 18 months, more than 400 people – UN agencies, national governments, academic experts, civil society organisations, trade unions, social and solidarity economy actors and grassroots movements, from the global north and south – worked to answer a simple question: how can we end poverty and reduce inequalities without treating GDP growth as the primary condition for progress? More than 350 signatories have put their names to the plan, including Jean Drèze, Pavlina Tcherneva, Tim Jackson, Bhumika Muchhala, Julia Steinberger, Ndongo Samba Sylla, Timothée Parrique.

We do not agree on every policy detail. But we are united in the conviction that our economies must be redesigned around the fulfilment of rights and collective wellbeing within planetary boundaries, rather than maximising output at any cost. Human rights here are not an afterthought; they are the organising principle for how we measure progress, set priorities and resolve trade‑offs. Social protection and public services are essential, but they cannot indefinitely compensate for economies that by design generate poverty wages, insecure jobs and unaffordable housing.

We need to change the rules upstream. That means, for instance, decent work and employment guarantees, living wages and fair remuneration, stronger unions and workplace democracy, tackling discrimination and valuing the paid and unpaid care work on which our societies depend. It means investing in children, housing, health, education and transport through universal public provisioning. It means public control of strategic assets, credit guidance to steer investment towards social and ecological priorities, and support for the development of the social and solidarity economy.

Implementing this vision means changing the rules of the global economy. Today, governments in the global south are chided for not doing enough to tackle poverty, while being squeezed by unilateral sanctions, restrictive trade agreements, unequal exchange and debt burdens rooted in centuries of colonial dispossession. About 3.4 billion people live in countries that spend more on debt servicing than on healthcare or education. Meanwhile, global supply chains enable a vast net transfer of labour and resources from south to north. International solidarity is therefore a legal and moral obligation rooted in the historical reality that many rich countries built their wealth by impoverishing the south, through patterns of extraction that continue today in new forms. A just transition beyond growth must include debt justice, increased south-south cooperation, reparative climate finance and support for universal social protection floors, rooted in the principles of non-domination and self-determination so that countries can chart their own sovereign economic futures.

Equally crucial is who gets to shape this transition. All too often, policies affecting people in poverty are designed without them – and sometimes against them. When welfare systems are built around suspicion, sanctions and humiliating conditions, they deepen stigma and deter people from claiming their entitlements. Those who live in poverty know better than anyone how systems can fail in practice. Their expertise must guide the design, implementation and monitoring of anti‑poverty strategies, from local councils to parliaments and international forums.

We are not starting from zero. Around the world, Indigenous struggles, feminist organising, trade unions and climate justice movements are defending and building alternative futures rooted in collective care and territorial rights. New coalitions of states are advancing new visions of global economic governance, and governments are experimenting with rights‑based anti‑poverty strategies, citizens’ assemblies and community wealth building. The UN and many partners are exploring “beyond GDP” indicators and new institutions, such as an international panel on inequality, to help chart this shift.

Our roadmap builds on these efforts, connects them and pushes them further. We offer it now as a common reference point for those who refuse to accept that poverty and ecological breakdown are the price to pay for how we currently define economic “success”. Governments and multilateral institutions have a choice: double down on a failing growth-first model or commit to eradicating poverty by transforming the economic rules that produce it.

Poverty is manufactured. That is the bad news – and the good news. What has been manufactured can be dismantled and replaced. We are putting concrete options on the table, all backed by detailed policy profiles that spell out evidence, implementation steps and real‑world examples. We call on political leaders at all levels to use them, to listen to those most affected, and to treat the end of poverty, the reduction of inequalities and the effective realisation of human rights as the measure by which economic policy should be judged.

• Olivier De Schutter is the chair of New Economies for Eradicating Poverty; Joseph Stiglitz is a Nobel laureate in economics; Jayati Ghosh is professor of economics at University of Massachusetts Amherst; Thomas Piketty is professor of economics at the Paris School of Economics; Kate Raworth is an economist at Oxford University’s Environmental Change Institute; JJason Hickel is a political economist and professor at the Autonomous University of Barcelona

June 16, 2026 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs | Leave a comment