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Nuclear missile ‘cover-up’ fears as secret pact allowing US to bring deadly weapons to UK revealed

US nuclear missiles could be delivered to the UK as the Mirror reveals Ministry of Defence chiefs signed off on a secret pact allowing American forces to bring deadly bombs to UK

Chris Hughes Defence and Security Editor and Ashley Cowburn Political Correspondent, 06 Apr 2025
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/nuclear-missile-cover-up-fears-34997771

British defence chiefs are at the centre of a ‘cover-up’ row over secretly exempting US troops from telling local authorities they are storing nuclear weapons. A declassified document proves former defence secretary Ben Wallace signed the ‘sensitive’ waiver which means local authorities are being left in the dark over the missiles.

The nuclear bust-up centres upon US air base RAF Lakenheath, home of F-35A Lightning II fighters, although the March 2021 waiver exempts all US bases in the UK. Not only are locals being kept in the dark over the possible nuclear missile storage but troops are also exempt from sticking to regulations applied to radiation risks. That means local authorities cannot draft disaster emergency plans.

The MoD was forced to declassify the Ben Wallace document down from ‘sensitive’ to prove to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament that legally they do not have to tell locals. It clearly says it was signed for ‘national security’ and that they are exempt from Ionisation Regulations 2017 and Radiation Regulations 2019.

Although it is not known publicly if RAF Lakenheath has US nuclear weapons on site, the exemption means nobody outside security-cleared personnel will ever know. CND General Secretary Sophie Bolt said: “The government’s exemption order smacks of a cover-up for a new generation of deadly US nuclear bombs that could be deployed in Britain.

“Nuclear weapons are the most destructive in the world. They put us all at risk every day. Yet the government is more concerned about its special relationship with the US than people’s safety.

“This declassified document shows that not only are US forces exempt from British nuclear safety laws at RAF Lakenheath, they are exempt at US bases right across Britain. This means that local authorities will never be told about any nuclear weapons present in their area. And will be under no legal obligation to produce emergency radiation plans.”

“The government doesn’t want people to know what’s going on. The government has to put a stop to these deadly nuclear risks. That means PM Keir Starmer should announce publicly that US nuclear weapons will not be stationed here.”

The exclusion of US troops from having to tell local authorities about the presence of nuclear weapons has infuriated politician critics in relation to blanket secrecy on nuclear weapons. Senior MP and former shadow chancellor John McDonnell stormed: “This is extremely concerning. “People need to know what risks their government is imposing on them. The ability to hold governments and the military to account is totally undermined by this level of secrecy. “

RAF Lakenheath first hit the nuclear spotlight again in 2022 when American plans to deploy nuclear weapons to the Suffolk airbase were revealed. It emerged again in department of defence documents showing plans to build accommodation for more US troops. The document stated the work was in preparation for the base’s “upcoming nuclear mission,” sparking controversy.

The US Office of the Under Secretary of Defence document sparked further fear as it stated the work was in preparation for the base’s potential ‘surety mission.’ The word ‘surety’ is understood to mean ‘nuclear weapons storage.’

But the UK Ministry of Defence said at the time it had a long-standing agreement within the department and its allies not to discuss nuclear weaponry. The following September a US government contracts award notice showed how £728,379.96 was to be spent on constructing guard facilities known as “hardened ballistic security shelters”.

Twenty-two blast resistant manoeuvrable cabins were being built with bulletproof metal flat sheets welded onto the frame to “to protect our high value assets”of RAF Lakenheath’s defence force, the 48th Security Forces Squadron (48 SFS). The specification for the windows included glass which could withstand an impact from a .30 calibre rifle.

In 2008 it was revealed nuclear bombs had been removed from RAF Lakenheath, which houses 4,000 service personnel and more than 1,500 British and US civilians. It is home to the US Air Force’s 48th Fighter Wing, which operates both the F-15E Eagle and the F-35A Lighting II fighter aircraft.

As well as normal combat duties it is believed the newer F-35A has been flight tested to use the latest variant of the B61-12 thermonuclear bomb. Defence specialising Janes Magazine said the B61-12 was capable of an explosive power of up to 340 kilotons, twenty times the power of the Hiroshima bomb.

On Friday an MoD spokesman, asked about the exemption, replied in a statement: “The UK and NATO have a long-standing policy to neither confirm nor deny the presence of nuclear weapons at any given location.

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Unsafe for Russia to restart Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, says Ukraine energy chief

Energoatom CEO, Petro Kotin, says ‘major problems’ need to be overcome before it can safely generate power

Guardian, Dan Sabbagh in Kyiv, 7 Apr 25

It would be unsafe for Russia to restart the occupied Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant and would take Ukraine up to two years in peacetime if it regained control, the chief executive of the company that runs the vast six-reactor site has said.

Petro Kotin, chief executive of Energoatom, said in an interview there were “major problems” to overcome – including insufficient cooling water, personnel and incoming electricity supply – before it could start generating power again safely.

The future of the Zaporizhzhia plant, Europe’s largest nuclear reactor, is a significant aspect of any negotiations to end the war in Ukraine. Seized by Russia in spring 2022 and shut down for safety reasons a few months later, it remains on the frontline of the conflict, close to the Dnipro River.

Russia has said it intends to retain the site and switch it back on, without being specific as to when. Alexey Likhachev, head of Russian nuclear operator Rosatom, said in February it would be restarted when “military and political conditions allow”.

Meanwhile, Donald Trump has expressed an interest in taking control of it, though this possibility is considered very remote.

Kotin said Energoatom was prepared to restart the plant but it would require Russian forces to be removed and the site to be de-mined and demilitarised.

He said such a restart by Ukraine would take anywhere “from two months to two years” in an environment “without any threats from militaries”, while a Russian restart during wartime “would be impossible, even for one unit [reactor]”.

Kotin said the six reactors could only be brought online after the completion of 27 safety programmes agreed with Ukraine’s nuclear regulator, including testing the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores because it had exceeded a six-year “design term”.

That raises questions about whether Russia could restart the plant after a ceasefire without incurring significant risk. The plant was already unsafe, Kotin said, given that it was being used as “a military base with military vehicles present” and there were “probably some weapons and blasting materials” present as well.

Russia has acknowledged that it has placed mines between the inner and outer perimeters of the plant “to deter potential Ukrainian saboteurs” while inspectors from the IAEA nuclear watchdog have reported that armed troops and military personnel are present at the site.

Last month, the US Department of Energy said the Zaporizhzhia plant was being operated by an “inadequate and insufficently trained cadre of workers”, with staffing levels at less than a third of prewar levels.

The US briefing said Ukrainian reactors, though originally of the Soviet VVER design, had “evolved differently” from their Russian counterparts and “particularly the safety systems”. Russian-trained specialists acting as replacements for Ukrainian staff were “inexperienced” in operating the Ukrainian variants, it said.

Kotin said an attempt to restart the plant by Russia would almost certainly not be accepted or supported by Ukraine. It would require the reconnection of three additional 750kV high-voltage lines to come into the plant, he said.

A nuclear reactor requires a significant amount of power for day-to-day operation, and three of the four high-voltage lines came from territories now under Russian occupation. “They themselves destroyed the lines,” Kotin said, only for Russia to discover engineers could not rebuild them as the war continued, he added.

Only two lines remain to maintain the site in cold shutdown, a 750kV line coming from Ukraine, and a further 330kV line – though on eight separate occasions shelling disrupted their supply of energy, forcing the plant to rely on backup generators.

Experts say a pumping station has to be constructed at the site, because there is insufficient cooling water available. The June 2023 destruction by Russian soldiers of the Nova Kakhova dam downstream eliminated the easy supply of necessary water from the Dnipro river………………………………………………….. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/06/unsafe-for-russia-to-restart-zaporizhzhia-nuclear-plant-energoatom-says

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

‘We thought it was the end of the world’: How the US dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966

Myles Burke https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250404-how-the-us-dropped-nuclear-bombs-on-spain-in-1966 7 Apr 25

In 1966, the remote Spanish village of Palomares found that the “nuclear age had fallen on them from a clear blue sky”. Two years after the terrifying accident, BBC reporter Chris Brasher went to find what happened when the US lost a hydrogen bomb.

On 7 April 1966, almost 60 years ago this week, a missing nuclear weapon for which the US military had been desperately searching for 80 days was finally found. The warhead, with an explosive power 100 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was carefully winched from a depth of 2,850ft (869m) out of the Mediterranean Sea and delicately lowered onto the USS Petrel. Once it was on board, officers painstakingly cut into the thermonuclear device’s casing to disarm it. It was only then that everyone could breathe a sigh of relief – the last of the four hydrogen bombs that the US had accidentally dropped on Spain had been recovered.

“This was not the first accident involving nuclear weapons,” said BBC reporter Chris Brasher when he reported from the scene in 1968. “The Pentagon lists at least nine previous accidents to aircraft carrying hydrogen bombs. But this was the first accident on foreign soil, the first to involve civilians and the first to excite the attention of the world.”

This terrifying situation had come about because of a US operation code-named Chrome Dome. At the beginning of the 1960s, the US had developed a project to deter its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, from launching a pre-emptive strike. A patrol of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers would continuously criss-cross the skies, primed to attack Moscow at a moment’s notice. But to stay airborne on these long looping routes, the planes needed to refuel while in flight.

On 17 January 1966, one such bomber was flying at a height of 31,000ft (9.5km) over the Almería region of southern Spain, and attempted a routine air-to-air refuelling with a KC-135 tanker plane. “I believe what happened was the bomber was closing at a too-high rate of closure speed and he didn’t stabilise his position,” US Maj Gen Delmar Wilson, the man in charge of dealing with the catastrophic accident, told Brasher, “with the result that they got too close and collided.”

The B-52 bomber’s impact with the refuelling plane tore it open, igniting the jet fuel the KC-135 was carrying and killing all four of the crew onboard. The ensuing explosion also killed two men in the B-52’s tail section. A third managed to eject, but died when his parachute did not open. The other four members of the bomber’s crew successfully bailed out of their burning plane before it broke apart and fell to earth, raining down both flaming aircraft fragments and its lethal thermonuclear cargo onto the remote Spanish village of Palomares.

Everyone kept talking about a ‘broken arrow’. I learnt then that ‘broken arrow’ was the code word for a nuclear accident – Capt Joe Ramirez

The huge fireball was seen a mile away. Thankfully, it did not trigger a nuclear explosion. The bomber’s warheads were not armed and had built-in safeguards to prevent an unintended atomic chain reaction. But the thermonuclear devices did have explosives surrounding their plutonium cores as part of the triggering mechanism. In the event of an accident, the bombs had parachutes attached to them designed to cushion the impact on landing and prevent radioactive contamination. And indeed, one undetonated bomb did land safely in a riverbed and was recovered intact the following day. Unfortunately, two of the plummeting nuclear bombs’ parachutes failed to open.

That morning, Spanish farmer Pedro Alarcón was walking to his house with his grandchildren when one of the nuclear bombs landed in his tomato field and blew apart on impact. “We were blown flat. The children started to cry. I was paralysed with fear. A stone hit me in the stomach, I thought I’d been killed. I lay there feeling like death with the children crying,” he told the BBC in 1968.

Devastation and chaos

The other hydrogen bomb also exploded when it hit the ground near a cemetery. These dual blasts created vast craters and scattered highly toxic, radioactive plutonium dust across several hundred acres. Burning aircraft debris also showered the Spanish village. “I was crying and running about,” a villager called Señora Flores told the BBC in 1968. “My little girl was crying, ‘Mama, Mama, look at our house, it is burning.’ Because of all the smoke I thought what she said must be true. There were a lot of stones and debris falling around us. I thought it would hit us. It was this terrific explosion. We thought it was the end of the world.”

Once the news that the bomber had come down with nuclear weapons aboard reached US military command, a huge operation was launched. At the time of the disaster, Capt Joe Ramirez was an US Air Force lawyer stationed in Madrid. “There were a lot of people talking, there was a lot of excitement in the conference room. Everyone kept talking about a ‘broken arrow’. I learnt then that ‘broken arrow’ was the code word for a nuclear accident,” he told BBC’s Witness History in 2011.

US military personnel were scrambled to the area by helicopter. When Capt Ramirez arrived in Palomares, he immediately saw the devastation and chaos wrought by the accident. Huge pieces of smoking wreckage were strewn all over the area – a large part of the burning B-52 bomber had landed in the school’s yard. “It’s a small village but there were people scrambling in different directions. I could see smouldering debris, I could see some fires.”

Despite the carnage, miraculously no one in the village was killed. “Nearly 100 tonnes of flaming debris had fallen on the village but not even a chicken had died,” said Brasher. A local school teacher and doctor climbed up to the fire-scarred hillside to retrieve the remains of the US airmen who had been killed. “Later still, they sorted the pieces and the limbs into five coffins, an act that was to cause a certain amount of bureaucratic difficulty when the Americans came to claim only four bodies from that hillside,” said Brasher.

Three of the B-52 crew who managed to eject landed in the Mediterranean several miles off the coast and were rescued by local fishing boats within an hour of the accident. The fourth, the B-52 radar-navigator, ejected through the plane’s explosion, which left him badly burned, and was unable to separate himself from his ejection seat. Despite this, he managed to open his parachute and was found alive near the village and taken to hospital.

However, this still left the problem of locating the plane’s deadly nuclear payload. “My main concern was to recover those bombs, that was number-one priority,” Gen Wilson told the BBC in 1968.

One of our nuclear bombs is missing

“The first night, the Guardia Civil [the Spanish national police force] had come to the little bar in Palomares, and that was about the only place that had electricity. And they had reported what they considered to be a bomb, so we immediately despatched some of our people to this riverbed which is not far from the centre of town, and, in fact, it was a bomb, so we placed a guard on that. And then the next morning, at first daylight, we started conducting our search, and I believe it was something in the order of 10am or 11am the following morning, we located two other bombs.”

This accounted for three of the nuclear bombs, but there was still one missing. By the next day, trucks filled with US troops had been sent from nearby bases, with the beach in Palomares becoming a base for some 700 US airmen and scientists urgently trying to contain any radioactive contamination and locate the fourth warhead.

“The first thing that you could see as the search really got underway in earnest was Air Force personnel linking up hand-by-hand and 40 or 50 people in a line. They would have designated search areas. There were some people with Geiger counters who started arriving, and so they started marking off the areas which were contaminated,” said Capt Ramirez in 2011. When US personnel registered an area contaminated with radiation, they would scrape up the first three inches of topsoil and seal it in barrels to be shipped back to the US. Some 1,400 tonnes of irradiated soil ended up being sent to a storage facility in South Carolina.

Both the US and Spain, which at the time was under the brutal rule of Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship, were keen to downplay the devastating accident. Franco was especially worried that radiation fears would hurt Spain’s tourism industry, a major source of revenue for his regime. In an effort to reassure the local population and the wider world that there was no danger, the US Ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, would end up taking a swim in the sea off Palomares coast in front of the international press just weeks after the accident.

But despite hundreds of US personnel conducting an intensive and meticulous search of the surrounding area for a week, they still couldn’t find the fourth bomb. Then Capt Ramirez spoke to a local fisherman who had helped rescue some of the surviving airmen who had splashed down in the sea. The fisherman kept apologising to Capt Ramirez for not being able to save one of the US flyers, whom he thought he had witnessed drifting down into the depths.

Capt Ramirez realised that the fisherman could have actually seen the missing nuclear bomb. “All the bodies had been accounted for, I knew that,” he said. The search then quickly shifted to the Mediterranean Sea, with the US Navy mobilising a flotilla of more than 30 ships, including mine-sweepers and submersibles, to scour the seabed. The exploration of miles of ocean floor was both technically complicated and a very slow process, but after weeks of exhaustive searching, a newly developed deep-diving vessel, Alvin, finally located the missing bomb in an underwater trench.

Nearly four months after it was first lost, the warhead was finally made safe and back in US hands. The next day, despite the secrecy with which the US military had surrounding its nuclear arsenal, it took the unusual step of showing the bomb to the world’s press. Ambassador Duke reasoned that unless people saw the bomb for themselves, they would never feel certain that it had actually been recovered.

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | history, incidents, Reference, Spain, USA | Leave a comment

How Many Nuclear Bombs Has The US Air Force Lost?

https://simpleflying.com/nuclear-bombs-us-air-force-lost/ 3 Aug 24 [excellent tables on original]

Summary

3 US nuclear bombs lost, never found
Possible unknown lost nuclear bombs worldwide
The Soviets lost nuclear torpedoes and missiles

According to a 2022 BBC article, the United States has lost at least three nuclear bombs that have never been found – they are out there somewhere, and the military has given up looking for them. In total, there have been at least 32 so-called US Force ‘broken arrow’ accidents since 1950. The United States is not just one of the foremost nuclear powers; it operates the unique Boeing E-4B Nightwatch (aka Doomsday) planes to serve as emergency flying command centers for the President and Joint Chiefs in case Washington comes under nuclear attack.

32 Broken Arrow accidents

These broken arrow incidents occur when an aircraft has jettisoned a nuclear bomb in an emergency or by mistake, or the aircraft carrying them crashes. A bad time for nukes was at the height of the Cold War between 1960 and 1968 when Operation Chrome Dome kept nuclear-armed airplanes in the air at all times.

“But three US bombs have gone missing altogether – they’re still out there to this day, lurking in swamps, fields and oceans across the planet.” – BBC

In January 1966, a B-52G bomber carrying four B28 thermonuclear bombs collided midair with a KC-135 tanker over Palomares, Spain. The three bombs that fell on the land were swiftly recovered, but one fell into the Mediterranean Sea. However, this 1.1-megaton warhead bomb was eventually retrieved by a robotic submersible. However, the Air Force was not always so fortunate, and bombs were not always found.

Sometimes, it is only by sheer luck that nuclear bombs haven’t exploded in accidents. In 1961, a B-52 broke up over Goldsboro, North Carolina, and dropped two nuclear bombs. While one was largely undamaged, investigations found that three of the four safeguards on the other bomb had failed.

Incidentally, the B-52H bomber remains one of the three strategic nuclear bombers of the US Air Force, and Congress wants to restore more of them to carry nukes again

The three American nuclear bombs lost

Tybee Island mid-air collision

On February 5, 1958, an F-86 fighter plane collided with a B-47 bomber carrying a 7,600-pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb. The bomb was then jettisoned to help prevent the B-47 from crashing and the bomb exploding. The bomb fell around Tybee Island near Savannah, Georgia. After a number of unsuccessful searches, the bomb was eventually declared lost in Wassaw Sound, and to everyone’s understanding, it remains there to this day.

Philippine Sea A-4 crash

In 1965, a US Navy Douglas A-4E Skyhawk attack aircraft was armed with a nuclear weapon when it fell off the Essex-class aircraft carrier, the USS Ticonderoga. This occurred around 68 miles from Japan’s Kikai Island near Okinawa. The aircraft, pilot, and the B43 thermonuclear bomb were never recovered (despite 10 weeks of searching) and remain in the ocean depths today. The pilot was Lieutenant Douglas M. Webster and the ocean depth is around 16,000 feet.

Thule Air Base crash

The third known nuclear loss came in January 1968 when a US B-52 bomber carrying four B28FI thermonuclear bombs crashed. A cabin fire forced the aircraft’s crew to abandon it before they could make an emergency landing at the Thule Air Base. Six of the seven crew ejected safely, while the seventh perished while attempting to bail out.

Pilotless, the zombie bomber crashed into sea ice in North Star Bar, Greenland; the crash triggered a conventional explosion that caused the nuclear payload to rupture and disperse (the area was left radioactively contaminated). After extensive Danish-American clean-up efforts, one secondary stage of one of the warheads was never found.

Unknown nukes lost from other powers

If it is unsettling to know there are three known American nuclear bombs out there, take a pause to think the ones known to the public are all American. The British, French, Pakistanis, Indian, Chinese, and likely the North Koreans and Israelis all have nuclear weapons – these countries could have lost nuclear bombs and never disclosed them.

But most terrifying were the Soviets and, later, the Russians. The Soviets and Russians have had many nuclear accidents, from the Chornobyl nuclear power plant disaster to the early K-9 number submarine meltdown to the later Kursk explosion. All that’s known of lost Soviet/Russian nukes are the ones lost on at least three submarines (the K-8. K-129, and K-278).

No one knows how many nukes were lost on Soviet aircraft (but it’s more likely a question of how many and not if they lost any). The Soviet Union amassed the world’s largest stockpile of nuclear weapons, reaching a mind-boggling 45,000 in 1986

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Reference, safety | Leave a comment

Russia pledges to help resolve Iran-US nuclear tensions

April 7 2025 –https://www.canberratimes.com.au/story/8936749/russia-pledges-to-help-resolve-iran-us-nuclear-tensions/

Russia is ready to do all it could to help resolve tensions between the United States and Iran around Tehran’s nuclear program, the Kremlin says.

Moscow has repeatedly offered to mediate between the two sides after warnings of military action against Iran by US President Donald Trump have rattled nerves across the region.

“We are in constant consultations with our Iranian partners, including on the topic of the nuclear deal,” Kremlin spokesman Dmitry Peskov told reporters on Monday.

“This process will continue, including in the near future. And, of course, Russia is ready to make every effort, to do everything possible to contribute to this problem’s resolution by political and diplomatic means.”

During his first term, Trump withdrew the US from a 2015 deal between Iran and world powers that placed strict limits on Tehran’s disputed nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief. Iran says it needs nuclear energy for peaceful purposes and denies it is seeking to acquire nuclear weapons.

Tehran has pushed back against Trump’s demands for direct talks, with a senior Iranian official issuing a warning over the weekend to neighbours that host US bases that they could be in the firing line.

Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said last week that Trump’s comments about bombing Iran only served to “complicate the situation” and cautioned that strikes could be “catastrophic” for the wider region.

Russia has for the most part refrained from such sharp criticism of Trump.

President Vladimir Putin has moved quickly since Trump took office to repair relations with the US in a rapprochement viewed with concern by Ukraine and its European allies.

Moscow has also deepened ties with Tehran since the start of the full-scale conflict in Ukraine with the two signing a strategic partnership treaty in January.

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, Russia | Leave a comment

Trump claims US held direct nuclear talks with Iran

Aljazeera, 7 April 25

The US president makes the claim in a media conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, while also threatening Tehran.

President Donald Trump has announced that the United States has begun direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, after Tehran had earlier dismissed Washington’s calls for the talks.

“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“And I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable,” he added, without providing further details.

Trump also warned that Iran would be in “great danger” if diplomatic efforts to curb its nuclear ambitions failed, adding that Tehran “can’t have nuclear weapons”.

Earlier this month, Trump told NBC News: “If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing”. He added that the bombing would be “the likes of which they have never seen before.”

Trump’s announcement of direct talks with Tehran would not be to Netanyahu’s “liking”, as the Israeli leader has long wanted to simply bomb Iran, said Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst.

“Trump has wanted a deal for a long time,” Bishara said. However, “Netanyahu certainly thinks Iran’s defences have been weakened by last year’s Israeli air strikes on Iran. And he sees this as a great opportunity, with US support, for Israel to finish off Iran.”

“In reality, Trump doesn’t want to enter a war with Iran while he is in the midst of trade wars with the rest of the world,” Bishara added.

‘Meaningless talks’

Over the weekend Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi described the prospect of direct negotiations with the US on Tehran’s nuclear programme as “meaningless”.

Araghchi’s remarks came after Trump said last month in a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he hoped there would be a negotiation between the countries.

Tehran, which maintains that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, has so far rejected Washington’s overtures, but has said it is open to indirect diplomacy – a stance repeated by Araghchi in Sunday’s statement.

In 2018, during his first presidency, Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, which had placed strict curbs on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran says its nuclear activities are solely for civilian purposes. Israel, the US’s top ally in the region, is widely believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

Netanyahu calls for Palestinians to leave Gaza

Speaking next to Netanyahu, who has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Gaza, Trump suggested that the war in Gaza could soon come to an end……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/7/trump-claims-direct-us-talks-with-iran-on-nuclear-deal-have-begun

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Manager at Hinkley Point C accepted a quad bike as a bribe, tribunal hears

Ashley Daniels accused of giving more work to engineering firm after gifts that also included £2,000 boxing tickets

Jamie Grierson, 8 Apr 25, Guardian

A senior manager at the Hinkley nuclear power plant accepted bribes such as an £11,000 quad bike to funnel extra work to a British engineering firm, an employment tribunal has heard.

Ashley Daniels was investigated by Hinkley’s owner, EDF, after he was given gifts such as £2,000 hospitality tickets for a boxing match and a refill for his Montblanc fountain pen, the tribunal in Bristol heard.

The hearing was told Daniels ensured more work was “directed” to a firm specialising in heavy lifting so that it could continue operating at the Somerset site.

The Guardian understands Daniels was dismissed by EDF.

The details have emerged in the judgment of a tribunal claim brought by an engineer called Garrick Nisbet, who sued his employer, Notus Heavy Lift Solutions – a subcontractor at Hinkley Point C – for unfair dismissal.

Hinkley Point C will be the first nuclear power station to be built in the UK for more than 30 years and is reported to have a price tag of up to £46bn…………………………………………………………..
https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2025/apr/07/manager-at-hinkley-point-c-accepted-a-quad-bike-as-a-bribe-tribunal-hears

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | secrets,lies and civil liberties, UK | Leave a comment

New EDF boss at mercy of ‘to-do list’ that ousted his predecessor

The new boss of French state-owned energy group EDF faces the same nearly
impossible tasks that led to the ousting of his predecessor: satisfying the
government’s often contradictory demands for cheap power to help industry
and the construction of costly new nuclear reactors.

Bernard Fontana, nominated as chief executive on March 21, is a seasoned industrialist who
has run EDF’s engineering arm Framatome for nearly nine years. He will
seek to avoid the fate of the previous chief executive Luc Rémont, removed
last month after just over two years because of repeated clashes with the
state.

On Fontana’s to-do list will be repairing relations with the
government, the company’s only shareholder, striking energy supply deals
with some of EDF’s biggest industrial clients, while also advancing plans
to build six nuclear reactors in just over a decade — a key initiative of
French President Emmanuel Macron, which was announced three years ago.

Fontana’s main challenge is to balance competing pressures of delivering
low rates for power, demanded by government and industry, while generating
profits that will help support vast investments required to launch new
nuclear reactors.

The company ran over budget and behind time on the
completion of Flamanville, a new nuclear reactor in northern France, and
faces budget and timing issues with the UK’s Hinkley Point. It has also
faced criticism that it is yet to outline timelines and costings for the
project to build the six new nuclear reactors, which were originally due by
the end of 2024.

Last month, the government pushed back the launch date
from 2035 to 2038, although observers have long considered the 2035 target
unachievable. In short, Fontana’s success will depend on whether he can
walk the tightrope of running EDF profitably while delivering the vast
capital outlay needed to reboot France’s nuclear sector. This will
require a major shift from Rémont’s uncompromising approach. “If
Fontana has taken the job, he’s understood the lesson [from Rémont’s
sacking]. If he hasn’t, he’s an idiot,” said another adviser.

FT 6th April 2025 https://www.ft.com/content/b9f39568-6029-4016-9c5f-0242dd8b9174

April 9, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | business and costs, France | Leave a comment

Iran rejects ‘meaningless’ direct talks with US

As war of words over nuclear weapons deal escalates, FM Araghchi says he wants talks on ‘equal footing’.

6 Apr 2025, https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/6/iran-foreign-minister-rejects-direct-talks-with-us

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araghchi has described the prospect of direct negotiations on its nuclear programme with the United States as “meaningless” amid mounting tensions between the two countries.

Araghchi’s remarks came in a statement on Sunday, after Trump said last month in a letter sent to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he hoped there would be a negotiation between their countries aimed at preventing Tehran from acquiring nuclear weapons.

Trump upped the ante last week, saying: “If they don’t make a deal, there will be bombing.”

Araghchi questioned Washington’s sincerity in calling for negotiations, saying on Sunday, “If you want negotiations, then what is the point of threatening?”

Araghchi said Iran wanted to negotiate on an “equal footing” with the US, describing it as “a party that constantly threatens to resort to force in violation of the UN Charter and that expresses contradictory positions from its various officials”.

In 2018, during his first term as president, Trump nixed the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, a deal between Iran and the permanent members of the United Nations Security Council that gave Iran sanctions relief in exchange for curbs on its nuclear programme.

Iran has since rolled back on its commitments under the agreement, amassing enough fissile material for multiple bombs, according to the International Atomic Energy Agency, which carries out inspections of Iranian nuclear sites.

Responding to Trump’s threat of war, Hossein Salami, the head of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps, said on Saturday that the country was “ready” for war.

“We are not worried about war at all. We will not be the initiators of war, but we are ready for any war,” the official IRNA news agency quoted Salami as saying.

But Tehran’s position in the region appears to have weakened amid the ongoing war in Gaza and beyond, with Israel’s decimation of Hezbollah’s leadership in Lebanon, and the toppling of another key partner, Syrian President Bashar al-Assad, last year.

Iran says its nuclear activities are solely for civilian purposes. Israel, the top US ally in the region, is widely believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

April 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international | Leave a comment

Youth Leading the Charge for a Nuclear-Free Future

Monday, March 3, 2025, United Nations Headquarters – Meetup with International Youth Advocating for a World Without Nuclear Weapons.

The 3rd Meeting of States Parties (MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) saw the participation of numerous young people from around the world who are passionate about creating a world without nuclear weapons.

Thanks to the initiative of SPARK youth, an opportunity for a meetup and exchange with young people from anti-nuclear peace organizations in the United States and Japan was made possible.

A total of 20 youth from various organizations, including SPARK, Peace Action New York State, Kakuwaka Hiroshima, Gensuikyo (Japan Council against Atomic and Hydrogen Bombs), and Gensuikin (Japan Congress Against A and H-Bombs), participated in the meeting. Jin-tae Shim, a first-generation atomic bomb victim from Korea, and Jung-Soon Han, a second-generation victim, were also present to support and encourage the youth.

………………………..Following the introductions, the group discussed a variety of topics, including their interest in peace issues, their countries’ nuclear policies, and what sparked their interest in nuclear disarmament. Many intriguing ideas were exchanged…………………….. https://abombtribunal.campaignus.me/34/?q=YToxOntzOjEyOiJrZXl3b3JkX3R5cGUiO3M6MzoiYWxsIjt9&bmode=view&idx=159477468&t=board

April 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | weapons and war | Leave a comment

ESA’s new documentary paints worrying picture of Earth’s orbital junk problem

By Monisha Ravisetti , April 3, 2025, https://www.space.com/the-universe/earth/esas-new-documentary-paints-worrying-picture-of-earths-orbital-junk-problem

There are a lot of satellites, and a lot of trash, around our planet — and the quantities are only going to get higher.

A new documentary short released by the European Space Agency presents an ominous statement within its first 20 seconds: “Around 70% of the 20,000 satellites ever launched remain in space today, orbiting alongside hundreds of millions of fragments left behind by collisions, explosions and intentional destruction.”

The approximately eight-minute-long film “Space Debris: Is it a Crisis?” attempts to answer its conjecture with supportive statistics and orbital projections.

For instance, it discusses how the rise of satellite constellations (think, SpaceX Starlink internet satellites) is bound to further increase the amount of stuff that orbits our planet — yet simultaneously, the amount of space junk will likely go up, too, due to shards of rockets tearing off during launch and out-of-commission spacecraft that can’t be returned to the ground in a timely manner.

Considering how quickly things in Earth orbit tend to zip around, a fragment of a spacecraft crashing into a satellite could greatly hinder that satellite; two satellites colliding could be catastrophic for both. Sometimes, debris even falls uncontrolled back to our planet.

The film also mentions that the kind of Earth orbit matters when discussing whether we’re in a space junk “crisis” — though unfortunately, orbits at risk appear to be those with satellites that help with communication and navigation, as well as our fight against another primarily human-driven crisis: global warming.

Still, the film emphasizes that solutions ought to be thought of carefully: “True sustainability is complex, and rushed solutions risk creating the problem of burden-shifting.”

You can watch the film on ESA’s website, linked just here.

April 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | space travel | Leave a comment

‘They’re everywhere’: workers warn of rat infestation at Somerset nuclear plant

Unions urge energy giant EDF to take action as concerns mount over health of construction staff.

Guardian, Jillian Ambrose, Sun 6 Apr 2025

Workers building the troubled Hinkley Point C nuclear reactor in Somerset have raised concerns that the construction site is overrun by rats.

The Unite and GMB trade unions are understood to have warned the developer, the French energy giant EDF, that urgent action is needed because the rodents are “everywhere”.

The growing vermin population has prompted fears over the health of the workforce building Britain’s first new nuclear power plant in a generation, which is running years late and billions of pounds over budget. A source on the site told the Observer: “They’re all over. You see them just sat there, looking at you. It is worse near the canteens, where I guess it started. But they are everywhere now.”

A second source confirmed that the trade unions had broached the issue with EDF, describing the number of rats on the site as “quite grim”.

“The more men working on the site, the more rubbish on the site – and the canteens are not clean either. It has just become worse over time,” the source added………………………………………………………….https://www.theguardian.com/world/2025/apr/06/theyre-everywhere-workers-warn-of-rat-infestation-at-somerset-nuclear-plant

April 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | environment, UK | Leave a comment

Raising Funds to Stop Lake District Coast Sub-Sea Nuclear Dump

Radiation Free Lakeland has launched a crowdfund appeal to raise enough
funds to send out a leaflet direct to all 250,000 households explaining the
importance of lobbying Cumberland Council to carry out a full debate and
vote before going any further down the road to delivery of a “geological
disposal facility” (nuclear dump) for hot nuclear wastes. The bare
minimum we would need is £1,800 and with your help we could just do this.
We could stop the nuclear juggernaut in its tracks and protect the Lake
District coast from becoming the world’s biggest, leakiest nuclear
sacrifice zone.

Radiation Free Lakeland 6th April 2025
https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2025/04/06/raising-funds-to-stop-lake-district-coast-sub-sea-nuclear-dump/

April 8, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear | Leave a comment

Inside the bizarre race to secure Earth’s nuclear tombs

outlandish ideas have included linguist Thomas Sebeok’s proposal of an ‘atomic priesthood’ that would pass on nuclear folklore (in much the same way that generations of clergy have been relaying the tenets of their respective faiths for thousands of years

“Our generation must find a way to bury the waste very deep to avoid radioactive pollution or exposure to people and animals up to one million years into the future.”

“Currently, about 75 per cent of the UK’s nuclear waste is already stored across 20 sites,” says Winsley. “People are surprised to hear you’re never far away from the most hazardous radioactive waste, wherever you are in the UK.

Jheni Osman, BBC Science Focus, April 5, 2025

With nuclear energy production increasing globally, the problem of what to do with the waste demands a solution. But where do you store something that stays dangerous for thousands of years?

Uniformed guards with holstered guns stand at the entrance and watch you lumber past. Ahead lies a wasteland of barren metal gantries, dormant chimney stacks and abandoned equipment.

You trudge towards the ruins of a large, derelict red-brick building. Your white hazmat suit and heavy steel-toe-capped boots make it difficult to walk. Your hands are encased in a double layer of gloves, your face protected by a particulate-filtering breathing mask. Not an inch of flesh is left exposed.

Peering into the building’s gloomy interior, the beam from your head torch picks out machinery and vats turned orange with rust. On a wall nearby, a yellow warning sign featuring a black circle flanked by three black blades reminds you of the danger lurking inside.

Apart from the sound of your own breathing behind your mask, the only thing you can hear is the crackling popcorn of your Geiger counter.

This is what entering the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant is like for nuclear researchers, including Tom Scott, professor of materials at the University of Bristol and head of the UK Government’s Nuclear Threat Reduction Network.

Prydniprovsky was once a large Soviet materials and chemicals processing site on the outskirts of Kamianske in central Ukraine. Between 1948 and 1991, it processed uranium and thorium ore into concentrate, generating tens of millions of tonnes of low-level radioactive waste.

When the Soviet Union dissolved, Prydniprovsky was abandoned and fell into disrepair.

“The buildings are impressively awful and not for the faint-hearted,” says Scott. “As well as physical hazards, such as gaping holes in the floor, there’s no light or power. And obviously there are radiological hazards. Until very recently, the Ukrainian Government didn’t have a clue what had gone on at the site, so there were concerns about the high radiation levels and ground contamination.”

When radiation levels are deemed too high for humans, Scott sends in the robots. ………………………….

Scott and his team are known as industrial nuclear archaeologists, and they’re working to find, characterise and quantify the ‘legacy’ radioactive waste at sites around the world.

“High-level radioactive waste gives off a significant amount of radioactivity, sufficient to make humans sick if they get too close,” he says. “Some of this waste will be dangerously radioactive for very long periods of time, meaning that it needs to be physically kept away from people and the environment to ensure that no harm is caused.”

But finding legacy waste like this, which has been amassing since the 1940s, is only part of the challenge. Once it’s been found, it has to be isolated and stored long enough for it to no longer pose a threat. And that’s not easy.

“Currently we’re storing our high-level wastes above ground in secure, shielded facilities,” Scott says. “Such facilities need to be replaced every so often because buildings and concrete structures can’t last indefinitely.”

Safely storing the nuclear waste that already exists is only the start of the problem, however. With the world moving away from fossil fuels towards low-carbon alternatives, nuclear energy production is set to increase, which means more waste is going to be produced – a lot more.

Currently, nuclear energy provides roughly nine per cent of global electricity from about 440 power reactors. By 2125, however, the UK alone is predicted to have 4.77 million m3 (168 million ft3) of packaged radioactive waste. That’s enough to fill 1,900 Olympic swimming pools.

Hence, the world needs more safe storage sites for both legacy and new nuclear waste. And it needs them fast.

Safe spaces

In the UK, most nuclear waste is currently sent to Sellafield, a sprawling site in Cumbria, in the north-west of England, with about 11,000 employees, its own road and railway network, a special laundry service for contaminated clothes and a dedicated, armed police force (the Civil Nuclear Constabulary).

Sellafield processes and stores more radioactive waste than anywhere in the world.

But more hazardous material is on the way, much of which will come from the new nuclear power station being built at Hinckley Point in Somerset. To keep pace, experts have been hunting for other, much stranger, disposal solutions.

It’s a challenge for nuclear agencies all around the world. All sorts of proposals have been put forward, including some bizarre ideas like firing nuclear waste into space. (The potential risk of a launch failure showering the planet with nuclear debris has silenced that proposal’s supporters.)

So far, the most plausible solution is putting the waste in special containers and storing them 200–1,000m (660–3,280ft) underground in geological disposal facilities (GDFs). Eventually, these GDFs would be closed and sealed shut to avoid any human intrusion.

These ‘nuclear tombs’ are the safest, most secure option for the long-term and minimise the burden on future generations.

“In the UK, around 90 per cent of the volume of our legacy waste can be disposed of at surface facilities, but there’s about 10 per cent that we don’t currently have a disposal facility for. The solution is internationally accepted as being GDFs,” says Dr Robert Winsley, design authority lead at the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services.

“We estimate that about 90 per cent of the radioactive material in our inventory will decay in the first 1,000 years or so. But a portion of that inventory will remain hazardous for much longer – tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.

“GDFs use engineered barriers to work alongside the natural barrier of stable rock. This multi-barrier approach isolates and contains waste, ensuring no radioactivity ever comes back to the surface in levels that could do harm.”

But how do you keep that radioactivity in the ground? Radioactive waste is typically classified as either low-, intermediate- or high-level waste.

Before being disposed of deep underground, high-level waste is converted into glass (a process known as vitrification) and then packed in metal containers made of copper or carbon steel. Intermediate-level waste is typically packaged in stainless-steel or concrete containers, which are then placed in stable rock and surrounded by clay, cement or crushed rock.

The process isn’t set in stone yet, though. Other materials, such as titanium- and nickel-based alloys, are being considered for the containers due to their resistance to corrosion.

Meanwhile, scientists in Canada have developed ultra-thin copper cladding that would allow them to produce containers that take up less space, while providing the same level of protection.

Rock solid

The hunt is also on to find facilities with bedrock that can withstand events such as wars and natural disasters (‘short-term challenges’, geologically speaking). Sites that won’t change dramatically over the millennia needed for nuclear waste to no longer pose a risk.

“A misconception is that we’re looking for an environment that doesn’t change, but the reality is the planet does change, very slowly,” says Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh.

“Our generation must find a way to bury the waste very deep to avoid radioactive pollution or exposure to people and animals up to one million years into the future.”

To achieve this, the site ideally needs to be below sea level. If it’s above sea level, rainwater seeping down through fractures in the rock around the site might become radioactive and eventually find its way to the sea.

When this radioactive freshwater meets the denser saltwater, it’ll float upwards, posing a risk to anything in the water above.

Another challenge is predicting future glaciations, which happen roughly once every 100,000 years. During such a period, the sort of glaciers that cut the valleys in today’s landscape could form again, gouging new troughs in the bedrock that might breach an underground disposal facility.

“Accurate and reliable future predictions depend on how well you understand the past,” says Haszeldine.

“Typically, repository safety assessments cover a one-million-year timeframe, and regulations require a GDF site to cause fewer than one human death in a million for the next million years. Exploration doesn’t search for a single best site to retain radioactive waste, but one that’s good enough to fulfil these regulations.”

Hiding places

In 2002, the US approved the construction of a nuclear tomb in an extinct supervolcano in Yucca Mountain, Nevada, about 160km (100 miles) north-west of Las Vegas.

…………. opponents cited concerns that it was too close to a fault line and, in 2011, US Congress ended funding for the project. Since then, waste from all US nuclear power plants has been building up in steel and concrete casks on the surface at 93 sites across the country.

Other sites have fared better, however. Already this year, construction has begun on a nuclear tomb in Sweden, expected to be ready in the 2030s, but it’s also the year the world’s first tomb – at a site in Finland, called Onkalo (Finnish for ‘cave’ or ‘hollow’) – could open its doors for waste………………..

In January 2025, the UK Government announced plans to permanently dispose of its 140 tonnes of radioactive plutonium, currently stored at Sellafield. In a statement, energy minister Michael Shanks cited plans to put it “beyond reach”, deep underground.

Three potential sites in England and Wales are being explored by Nuclear Waste Services, and one of Haszeldine’s PhD students is independently investigating a fourth off the Cumbrian coast. The offshore site appears to be hydro-geologically stable (even over glacial timescales), but it would be expensive and difficult to engineer.

……………………..The deep isolation approach costs less than a third of what it costs to construct a nuclear tomb and uses smaller sites, but the canisters are harder to recover if anything goes wrong.

Nevertheless, it’s a viable option for smaller nuclear countries and a second prototype is expected to undergo field testing at a deep borehole demonstration site in the UK in early 2025.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………“The half-life of plutonium 239 is about 24,100 years, but the requirement is to keep a ceramic in that state for up to a million years. Essentially, we’re trying to design materials that’ll last forever. I don’t think humans will be around in a million years’ time, so the work we do needs to outlast humanity.”

Hide and seek

But even after you’ve found a suitable site and buried the radioactive material safely inside it, you still need to warn future generations about what’s hidden inside.

The trouble is, even if humans are still around in a million years’ time, there’s no guarantee the languages our ancestors speak, or the symbols they use, will be anything like those of today.

In Japan, 1,000-year-old ‘tsunami stones’, which warned future generations to find high ground after earthquakes, have failed to prevent construction on vulnerable sites.

Even the radiation symbol we use today (that black circle flanked by black blades on a yellow background) isn’t universally recognised. Research by the International Atomic Energy Agency found that only six per cent of the global population know what it signifies.

That’s why scientists have been working with everyone from artists to anthropologists, librarians to linguists, and sculptors to science-fiction writers – to come up with other ways of warning future generations about nuclear tombs.

………………….outlandish ideas have included linguist Thomas Sebeok’s proposal of an ‘atomic priesthood’ that would pass on nuclear folklore (in much the same way that generations of clergy have been relaying the tenets of their respective faiths for thousands of years

…………………………….. While some back this active forgetting of future nuclear tombs, researchers like Scott are still trying to get everyone to remember the nuclear sites we’ve already forgotten. It’s like a game of nuclear ‘hide and seek’ – but the stakes are high, and there’s no room for error.

…………………Currently, nuclear tombs are our best bet, but it’s a burden humanity must shoulder for thousands of years, long after the benefits gained from nuclear technology will have faded.

“My personal opinion is, I don’t think we should allow future generations to forget about a geological disposal facility,” says Scott. “The material is both dangerous and, in longer timescales, potentially valuable. People need to be reminded of its presence.”…………………… https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/inside-the-bizarre-race-to-secure-earths-nuclear-tombs

April 7, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | UK, Ukraine, wastes | 1 Comment

The great trek for justice

At the heart of the matter for Lee is the devastating and continued destruction of the ecosystems on which all of us — human and animals — depend. The Fukushima radioactive water dump is just one of the most recent examples.

March 30, 2025, by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/03/30/the-great-trek-for-justice/

Won-Young Lee has walked from his homeland in South Korea to Tokyo. Now he’s on the march in the US, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

How far would you walk for a cause? In the case of South Korean anti-nuclear activist, Won-Young Lee, that distance has no limit.

Lee, 67, and the director of the Korea Land Future Research Institute and the Public Reporting Center for the Dangers of Nuclear Power Plants (PRCDN), will arrive in Washington, DC on April 8, having walked there from the United Nations in New York City, a journey he began on March 19. The distance is about 260 miles.

His cause this time is to draw attention to the continued dumping of highly radioactive waste water from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan into the Pacific Ocean. This is not Mr. Lee’s first walk, but he chose the dates deliberately to span the time between the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that began on March 11 and the April 26, 1986 Chornobyl reactor explosion in Ukraine.

This latest walk falls under the umbrella of what Lee has titled the “New Silk Road for Life and No-Nukes. Walking Planet Earth With Joy.” Together, the walks constitute a marathon that have taken Lee and other walkers through vast areas of the Asian continent, including Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Nepal and on through Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and through numerous countries in Europe. Lee himself has traversed 6,125 miles on foot.

He has been inspired, he says, by Gandhi’s ‘Salt March’ “that led to India’s independence,” and was also started, Lee says, “by a small number of people,” that grew into ever greater numbers.

That will of the people manifested again in 2023, during a trek of almost 1,000 miles undertaken by South Korean and Japanese citizens from Seoul, South Korea to Tokyo, Japan with stops that included one in Hiroshima.

Currently, as Lee marches resolutely from Manhattan to DC, he has encountered others who are equally inspired, often from Japan. Yoko Akashi, who marched with him in New Jersey, wrote that “even though we’re only two walking highways and shopping streets, people waved, honked cars and wanted to know more because they’re concerned.”

All of this is done with unbounded optimism. The purpose of the current walk is not only to engage with populations along the route but to try, once it reaches its destination in the nation’s capital, to convince members of Congress and even the White House, that the water dumping at Fukushima needs to stop.

“By marching, we can gain the support of citizens, get citizens to join the march, and as the procession gets longer, citizens can pressure politicians,” asserts Lee.

We have published numerous articles on our news site — Beyond Nuclear International — arguing against the dumping of at least 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from Fukushima into the Pacific, a procedure that will go on for years, even decades.

One of the more recent ones, by Tilman Ruff, sums up many of the arguments. Another earlier one from GENSUIKIN, also lays out the specific risks.

Lee’s organization has turned to the cartoon format to produce a booklet telling the story. It’s entitled STOP! Fukushima Nuclear Wastewater Dumping and can be downloaded from the PRCDN website in English here.

I met with Lee and a group of Korean activists on Capitol Hill in February, during a press conference led by Congressman Brad Sherman (CA-32), a senior member of the House Foreign Affairs Committee, to urge for the passage of his bipartisan legislation, the Peace on the Korean Peninsula Act.

The bill calls for swift and substantial diplomatic engagement in order to achieve a formal end to the Korean War – America’s longest war.

During the event, Lee expressed his hopes for a political change of policy over the dumping (I am afraid I did not share his optimism.) In a statement before his New York to Washington march began, Lee expressed the view that stopping the dumping was in the hands of the US president. “He is the only person to whom the Japanese prime minister bows his head,” Lee wrote. “If the US president asks the Japanese prime minister to stop, the dumping can be stopped.”

“Humanity has a responsibility to respect the survival of all living things in the ecosystem as well as its own future generations,” said a declaration put out before the latest walk launched. And yet, “the Japanese government is intentionally dumping potentially fatal nuclear contaminants into the sea.”

Both the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and the United Nations come in for deservedly harsh criticism as well. In the cartoon booklet, the IAEA is referred to as “Japan’s Brazen Enabler”. The UN, says the declaration, is “ignoring the spirit of the World Charter of Nature (1982), drawn up by themselves and the Earth Charter (2000), made by agreement at the Rio Environmental Conference, and are simply watching the destruction of our ecosystem.” Striking an uncharacteristically pessimistic note, it adds: “All of these things show that our international community is completely broken. At this rate, there is no hope for humanity.”

In conclusion, the march declaration offers the following:

The Japanese government, which has intentionally put humanity and the Earth’s ecosystem at great risk, must immediately stop dumping nuclear contaminated water and apologize to all living things on Earth.
The U.S. government and the IAEA, which support Japan’s ocean dumping of nuclear contaminated water, should immediately withdraw their support and seek safe measures for all living things on Earth.
The UN and the International Community must acknowledge and reflect on dereliction of their duty to stop Japan from dumping nuclear contaminated water into the ocean.
Global citizens, keep in mind that if we turn a blind eye to these errors, we are committing a crime to our descendants, and let us actively punish any country or power that intentionally commits such crimes.
Global citizens, let us be aware of our responsibility to protect the dignity of all life in the global village, and set the right guideposts.

Headline photo Won-Young Lee courtesy of the subject.

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published later this year.

April 7, 2025 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, South Korea | Leave a comment

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