Becoming a responsible ancestor – about America’s nuclear wastes.
This country, with the world’s largest inventory of high-activity radioactive waste, has not fashioned even a shadow of a strategy for the material’s permanent disposition.
in any case, the burdens would fall on future generations.
Bulletin, By Daniel Metlay | January 13, 2025
After more than four decades of intense struggle, the United States found itself in an unenviable and awkward position by 2015: It no longer had even the barest blueprint of how to dispose of its growing inventory of high-activity radioactive waste.[1] Under the leadership of Rodney Ewing, former chairman of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, and Allison MacFarlane, former chairman of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, a steering committee composed of a dozen specialists set out to prepare the so-called “reset” report on how to reconstruct that enterprise.[2] In the study’s words: “Reset is an effort to untangle the technical, administrative, and public concerns in such a way that important issues can be identified, understood, and addressed (Steering Committee 2018, 2).”
One of its key recommendations was that a non-profit, single-purpose organization should be established by the owners of the country’s nuclear powerplants to replace the Department of Energy as the implementor of a fresh waste-disposal undertaking.[3]
To appreciate these suggestions, one must first understand how the United States found itself in its current predicament.
How did the United States get here
The roots of the United States’ waste-disposition program can be found in a study prepared by a panel working under the auspices of the National Academy of Sciences (National Research Council 1957). The group’s principal advice was that high-activity waste should be entombed in conventionally mined, deep-geologic repositories such as salt mines.
Early attempts to find a site for the facility met with unanticipated technical difficulties and unflinching opposition from state officials (Carter 1989). President Jimmy Carter appointed an Interagency Review Group to suggest a pathway to unsnarl the Gordian Knot (IRG 1978). Among other things, it counseled the president that a new waste-management program should be established within the Department of Energy. It should investigate multiple potential locations in a variety of geologic formations and choose the one bearing the soundest technical characteristics for development of a repository.
President Ronald Reagan signed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act in January, 1983 (NWPA 1982). The legislation captured the consensus that had emerged around the lion’s share of the Interagency Review Group’s ideas. In particular, the law contained four strategic bargains that were requisite to its passage:
Two repositories would be built, the first in the west and a second in the east, to ensure geographic equity and geologic diversity.- Site-selection would be a technically driven process in which several different hydrogeologic formations would be evaluated against pre-established guidelines.
- States would be given a substantial voice in the choice of sites.
- Upon payment of a fee, the Department of Energy would contract with the owners of nuclear powerplants to accept their waste for disposal starting in January 1998.
By the time Congress enacted the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act a mere five years later, all the bargains had been breached in one way or another (NWPAA 1987; Colglazier and Langum 1988).
Derisively labeled the “Screw Nevada” bill, the new law confined site-selection to Yucca Mountain, located both on and adjacent to the weapons-testing area. Hardly surprisingly, the state mounted an implacable and sustained challenge to the actions of the Department of Energy, including investigations to evaluate the technical suitability of Yucca Mountain and opposition to the license application that the department submitted to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (Adams 2010).
…………………………………………………………………………………… President Obama directed the new secretary of the Energy Department, Steven Chu, to empanel the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future (BRC 2012). Ostensibly not a “siting commission,” it nonetheless proposed a “consent-based” process that was dramatically at odds with the method used to choose the Yucca Mountain site. In addition, the new leadership sought, unsuccessfully as it turns out, to withdraw the license application before the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Ultimately, funding for the project ran out even during President Donald Trump’s administration, and the Yucca Mountain Project faded into history.
Left in its wake is the current state of affairs. This country, with the world’s largest inventory of high-activity radioactive waste, has not fashioned even a shadow of a strategy for the material’s permanent disposition.
The Department of Energy detailed the consequences of the absence of a policy with its analysis of the No-Action Alternative in the Environmental Impact Statement for Yucca Mountain (DOE 2002, S-79).[4] Under this scenario, the adverse outcomes are seemingly modest—but the calculations exclude effects due to human intrusion as well as sabotage, precisely the rationales for the disposal imperative.
At best, the nation has been left with the regulator’s vague assurance that the owners of the waste can safely extend its storage on the surface for roughly 100 years (NRC 2014). This abdication of accountability—kicking the burden down the road—transforms our generation into irresponsible ancestors.
Why has the United States gotten there
Many independent and reinforcing factors have led to this nation’s precarious moral circumstances. Five of them are worthy of note.
First, striking a balance between protecting the national interest in the disposition of the waste versus state and local interest in warding off a possible calculated risk has proven to be a constant struggle. The Interagency Review Group proposed the nebulous notion of “consultation and concurrence” to suggest that a host state must provide its consent before the repository-development process could proceed to the next step.
Congress morphed that idea into the much weaker “consultation and cooperation” when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act. But it did authorize the host-state to raise an objection to the president’s selection of the site. That dissent could, however, be overridden by a majority vote in each chamber. As the Yucca Mountain case illustrated, once intensive investigations at a proposed repository location gained momentum and the prospect of restarting site selection lurked in the future, sustaining a protest was only an abstract possibility.
Second, the regulatory regime for approving a repository system was plagued by controversy. In the mid-1980s, the Environmental Protection Agency promulgated radionuclide release standards, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission issued licensing rules for a generic repository. Directed by Congress in 1992, both agencies later released Yucca Mountain-specific regulations. These protocols proved to be methodologically contested and subject to criticism for changing the “rules of the game.”
Third, the Department of Energy has failed to merit public trust and confidence. A survey conducted by the Secretary of Energy Advisory Board at the height of the Yucca Mountain controversy conclusively demonstrated this reality: None of the interested and affected parties believe that the Department of Energy is very trustworthy. See Figure 1.[on original]
Nor did that deficit of trust and confidence shrink in the coming years. The Blue Ribbon Commission’s and Reset reports underscored this endemic problem. The Department of Energy’s recent initiative to craft a consent-based procedure for siting a federal consolidated interim storage facility positioned restoring public trust at the core of its activities.
Fourth, the Department of Energy’s execution of a stepwise approach to constructing a disposal facility was practically and conceptually flawed. Its license application composed a narrative about how it would meet the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s regulation mandating that the material be able to be retrieved from an open repository once it was emplaced. That account did not detail the conditions under which the waste might be removed; it did not suggest where it might go; nor did it indicate what might be done if the repository proved to be unworkable. Like extended storage, retrievability of the waste would somehow take place if and when necessary. But, in any case, the burdens would fall on future generations.
Fifth, the Department of Energy encountered difficulties persuasively resolving technical uncertainties. Its license application rested on the premise that the corrosion-resistant Alloy-22 waste packages and the titanium alloy drip shields, which might divert water from the packages, would function to limit the release of radionuclides into the environment. Whether those engineered structures would perform as anticipated in a hot and humid repository may still be an open question. ………………………………….
What should be done
It would be unfair to reproach the Department of Energy alone for all the difficulties that the US waste-disposition program has confronted over the years; sometimes it just was dealt a poor hand by others. Nonetheless, in this writer’s view, reviving that effort demands, among other transformations, a modification in the organization that will execute it in the future.
Indeed, institutional design in the United States is hardly a novel concern. Included in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act was a provision directing the secretary of the Department of Energy to “undertake a study with respect to alternative approaches to managing the construction and operation of all civilian radioactive waste management facilities, including the feasibility of establishing a private corporation for such purposes (NWPA 1992).” That analysis advocated a Tennessee Valley Authority-like corporation, which was labeled “FEDCORP,” to take on the responsibility of constructing and operating a repository (AMFM 1995).
The Blue Ribbon Commission also concluded that:
A new [single-purpose] organization will be in a better position to develop a strong culture of safety, transparency, consultation, and collaboration. And by signaling a clear break with the often troubled history of the U.S. waste management program it can begin repairing the legacy of distrust left by decades of missed deadlines and failed commitments (BRC 2012, 61).
It, too, advised that a FEDCORP should replace the Department of Energy.
An examination of national waste-disposal undertakings indicates that countries do have several options for structuring their missions. See Figure 2 below [on original].
That multiplicity of alternatives led the majority of the Reset Steering Committee, after intense discussion and consideration, to decide that a more radical approach ought to be adopted. As the group observed: “The track record of nuclear utility-owned implementors abroad…makes at least a prima facie case for considering the creation of a not-for-profit, nuclear utility-owned implementing organization (NUCO) (Steering Committee 2018, 35).”
Of the four nations relying on nuclear utility-owned implementing organizations, three—including Finland, Sweden, and Switzerland—have selected repository sites, and another, Canada, may be on the cusp of doing so. In pointed contrast, only one of the nine countries employing other organizational designs have launched a determined set of site investigations, let along definitely and unequivocally chosen a location to build a repository.
Removing disposal authority from the Department of Energy and passing it on to a nuclear utility-owned implementing organization also permits the full integration of the nuclear fuel cycle. With the exception of disposition, every element is the responsibility of some industrial firm: uranium exploration and conversion, fuel manufacture and configuration, enrichment, reactor design and construction, spent fuel reprocessing (if permitted by law or regulation and if deemed economical), and temporary storage of spent fuel on and off reactor sites.
……………………………………………By creating a nuclear utility-owned implementing organizations, reactor owners can more easily negotiate adjustments with their industrial partners.
But transitioning from the Department of Energy to a nuclear utility-owned implementing organization is unlikely to be a frictionless process. Policymakers in government and industry will have to resolve many particulars. For instance, of central importance is the question of who should pay for the reconstructed program. Since the Nuclear Waste Policy Act’s passage four decades ago, utilities have paid a fee of $0.001 (one mil) per kilowatt of electricity produced. In addition, Congress has periodically appropriated funds to dispose of weapons-origin high-activity waste. Those resources have all been deposited in the Nuclear Waste Fund with the expectation they would pay the full life-cycle costs of the disposition effort.
At the end of Fiscal Year 2024, the Nuclear Waste Fund balance was $52.2 billion dollars (DOE 2024).[5] f a nuclear utility-owned implementing organization were established, one possibility would be to transfer the body of the fund to the new organization. However, the nuclear utility-owned implementing organization might be limited to spending for disposition only the amount of interest that the waste fund generates. In Fiscal Year 2024, that amount was roughly $1.9 billion a year. Notably that income was approximately four times what the Department of Energy spent during the last full year of the Yucca Mountain Project (Consolidated Appropriations Act 2008). Consequently, the new implementor should have sufficient resources to sustain a robust effort. (Under this approach, nuclear utilities would continue to be responsible for storing their spent fuel.)
Another question that would have to be determined is the fate of weapons-origin high-activity radioactive waste. Conceivably the Federal Government might resurrect its own repository effort, perhaps at Yucca Mountain or through a contemporary siting project. Alternatively, the most cost-effective option might be to pay the nuclear utility-owned implementing organizations a disposition fee through congressional appropriations.
Finally, given the weight to its additional responsibilities, the nuclear utility-owned implementing organization must demonstrate that it will be a trustworthy implementor……………………………………………………………….
But for this arrangement to be most effective, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission itself must be viewed more widely as trustworthy…………………………………………………………………………………
Other reforms beyond switching the implementor will urgently be necessary, such as improving the technical credibility of studies to determine the suitability of a potential repository site and structuring a sound step-by-step developmental process. Without the full slate of improvements, this generation will be stuck in the role of irresponsible ancestors. So, the reader should consider this essay as a broader call to action, if only for our children and grandchildren’s sake. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-01/becoming-a-responsible-ancestor/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Radioactive%20fallout%20in%20Tokyo%20after%20Fukushima&utm_campaign=20250113%20Monday%20Newsletter
Patrick Lawrence: The Nihilism of Antony Blinken
It is not, or not only, the extent of Blinken’s incompetence, which even this carefully staged presentation cannot obscure. We knew he was not up to the job Biden gave him from his first months on the seventh floor at State. It is his, Blinken’s, moral vacancy that must disturb us most. He is one of those hollow men Eliot described in his famous poem of this name. This is a man who professes “values”—“our values,” as he puts it—but has none, who stands for nothing other than the rank opportunity uniquely available with access to power. I have never heretofore thought of Antony Blinken as at heart a nihilist. But on his way out the door, this seems the most truthful way to understand him.
Blinken’s approval of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, couched in the cotton-wool language to which Blinken always resorts when he wants to turn night into day, failure into success.
January 13, 2025 By Patrick Lawrence , ScheerPost
Readers write from time to time thanking me for keeping up with The New York Times so they don’t have to do so themselves. I understand the thought, and they are most welcome in all cases. But we have now the case of The Times’s lengthy interview with Antony Blinken, published in the Sunday Magazine dated Jan. 5. Yes, I have read it. And this time I propose others do the same. This is one of those occasions when it is important to know what Americans are supposed to think — or, better put, the extent to which Americans are not supposed to think.
It is sendoff time for the outgoing regime. You can imagine without my help what kind of piffle this is engendering, if you have not already noticed.
USA Today’s Washington bureau chief, Susan Page, threw President Biden a seven-inning game’s worth of softballs this week, producing a Q & A all about “legacy” and “inflection points,” the glories of American hegemony (“Who leads the world if we don’t?”) and how Joe could have defeated Donald Trump last November but was, after all, “talking about passing the baton” even when everything we read indicated he had no intention of doing so.
……………………. Journalism with American characteristics, no other way to name it. Not a single question about the Gaza crisis, genocide, Ukraine, China. Not even a mention of Russia. And what in hell, now that I think of it, will fill the shelves in a Joseph R. Biden, Jr., Presidential Library? This is really my question.
O.K., USA Today is a comic book—“McPaper,” we used to call it—and it is folly to expect anything more than fatuous pitter-patter out of Joe Biden (or anyone interviewing him) at this late stage in the proceedings. But The Times is not a comic book, its day-to-day unseriousness notwithstanding, and Blinken purports to gravitas and authority. Herein lies the problem. In his lengthy exchange with Lulu García–Navarro, Biden’s secretary of state renders a sober-sounding account of the world as the retiring regime now leaves it that is so shockingly far from reality as to be frightening.
“Today as I sit with you, I think we hand over an America in a much, much stronger position, having changed much for the better our position around the world,” Blinken asserts at the outset of this interview. “Most Americans,” he adds a short time later, “want to make sure that we stay out of wars, that we avoid conflict, which is exactly what we’ve done.” Go ahead, let your jaw drop. Blinken’s 50 minutes with The Times are an assault on reason, on truth. And as such they are an incitement to ignorance, precisely the condition that lands this nation in the incalculable trouble Blinken proposes we pretend is not there.
It is not, or not only, the extent of Blinken’s incompetence, which even this carefully staged presentation cannot obscure. We knew he was not up to the job Biden gave him from his first months on the seventh floor at State. It is his, Blinken’s, moral vacancy that must disturb us most. He is one of those hollow men Eliot described in his famous poem of this name. This is a man who professes “values”—“our values,” as he puts it—but has none, who stands for nothing other than the rank opportunity uniquely available with access to power. I have never heretofore thought of Antony Blinken as at heart a nihilist. But on his way out the door, this seems the most truthful way to understand him.
This is the man who swiftly made an utter mess of U.S.–China relations when, two months after taking office, his first encounters with senior Chinese officials blew up in his face during talks in an Anchorage hotel conference room. Sino–American ties have been one or another degree of hostile ever since. This is the man who, a year later, led the way as Biden provoked Russia’s self-protecting intervention in Ukraine. He, Blinken, has ever since refused negotiations. This is the man who, a year after that, began his continuing defense of Israel’s genocide in Gaza. It has been Blinken and Nod in action in each case.
This is the man who—a couple of notable moments here—celebrated World Press Freedom Day in London in May 2021, while Julian Assange was in a maximum-security prison a few miles away. “Freedom of expression and access to factual and accurate information provided by independent media are foundational to prosperous and secure democratic societies,” Blinken had the nerve to declare, citing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights as he did so. This is the man who perjured himself last May, when, under oath, he told Congress the State Department had found no evidence that Israel was blocking humanitarian aid to Gaza. (I take this occasion to praise Brett Murphy once again for breaking this story in ProPublica.)
Now we can settle in and listen to Blinken converse with his interlocutor from The Times.
Blinken on relations with China:
“We were really on the decline when it came to dealing with China diplomatically and economically. We’ve reversed that…. And I know it’s succeeding because every time I meet with my Chinese counterpart, Wang Yi, the foreign minister, he inevitably spends 30 or 40 minutes, 60 minutes complaining about everything we’ve done to align other countries to build this convergence in dealing with things that we don’t like that China is pursuing. So to me, that is the proof point that we’re much better off through diplomacy.“
This account of the regress of the U.S.–China relationship on Blinken’s watch is beyond bent. First, there is no record of Wang Yi, China’s distinguished foreign minister, ever complaining to Blinken or any other U.S. official about Washington’s alliances in East Asia. China’s complaints have primarily (but not only) to do with the Biden regime’s incessant assertion of American hegemony in the Pacific, its provocative conduct on the Taiwan and South China Sea questions, and its efforts to subvert an economy with which the U.S. can no longer compete.
Second, not even Japan, South Korea, and the Philippines, with which Washington has indeed strengthened military ties, are now “aligned” against China. They, along with all other East Asians, can read maps, believe it or not. And the whole of the Pacific region will favor balanced ties with the U.S. and China as long as you and I are alive. Drawing East Asians together in some kind of Sinophobic “convergence” is a long dream from which the Washington policy cliques simply cannot awaken.
Finally and most obviously, if antagonizing another major power is a measure of diplomatic success, the nation such a diplomat purports to represent is in the kind of trouble to which I alluded earlier.
Footnote: It has been a sad spectacle these past three years as a parade of Biden regime officials, Blinken chief among them, has marched to Beijing and failed one by one to repair the damage done in Anchorage. In their dealings with Blinken, Wang and Xi Jinping, China’s president, have treated Biden’s top diplomat as if he were a junior high school student who flunked geography.
Blinken on Russia and Ukraine:
“So first, if you look at the trajectory of the conflict, because we saw it coming, we were able to make sure that not only were we prepared and allies and partners were prepared, but that Ukraine was prepared. We made sure that well before the Russian aggression happened, starting in September and then again December, we quietly got a lot of weapons to Ukraine to make sure that they had in hand what they needed to defend themselves, things like Stingers, Javelins that were instrumental in preventing Russia from taking Kyiv, from rolling over the country, erasing it from the map, and indeed pushing the Russians back….
In terms of diplomacy: We’ve exerted extraordinary diplomacy in bringing and keeping together more than 50 countries, not only in Europe, but well beyond, in support of Ukraine and in defense of these principles that Russia also attacked back in February of that year. I worked very hard in the lead up to the war, including meetings with my Russian counterpart, Sergey Lavrov, in Geneva a couple of months before the war, trying to find a way to see if we could prevent it, trying to test the proposition whether this was really about Russia’s concerns for its security, concerns somehow about Ukraine and the threat that it posed, or NATO and the threat that it posed, or whether this was about what it in fact it is about, which is Putin’s imperial ambitions and the desire to recreate a greater Russia, to subsume Ukraine back into Russia. But we had to test that proposition. And we were intensely engaged diplomatically with Russia. Since then, had there been any opportunity to engage diplomatically in a way that could end the war on just and durable terms, we would have been the first to seize them. “
Where to begin? Give me a sec to catch my breath.
Blinken and his colleagues anticipated Russia’s invasion before it started in February 2022 because the Biden regime provoked it to the point Moscow had no other choice. Washington spent the autumn of 2021 arming Kiev, just as Blinken recounts, but Blinken makes no mention of the two draft treaties the Kremlin sent Westward that December—one to Washington, one to NATO in Brussels—as the proposed basis for negotiating a durable new security settlement between Russia and the Atlantic alliance. This was dismissed out of hand as a “non-starter,” the British-ism the Biden regime favored at the time. Blinken skips over this opportunity to develop productive diplomatic channels like a mosquito across a pond.
His idea of diplomacy, indeed, was limited to gathering one of those coalitions of the willing (or coerced) the American imperium has long favored, in this case to back the proxy war to come. There was not then and has not been since any serious effort to negotiate a settlement in Ukraine. Blinken seems actually to believe (or he pretends to believe) that there was never any question of Moscow’s legitimate security concerns: It was all about the Kremlin’s plan to “erase” Ukraine in the cause of the Russia’s neo-imperial ambitions. Somehow this proposition was tested and proved out, and I would love to know how.
I am reminded once again of that moment, a few months into the war, when Blinken pulled aside Sergei Lavrov for a private exchange after formal talks at the Kremlin. As I wrote subsequently, when he asked Moscow’s long-serving foreign minister if it was true Russia wanted to reconstruct the Czarist empire, Lavrov stared, turned, and left the room—no reply, no handshake, no farewell, just an abrupt exit. How could a diplomat of Lavrov’s caliber possibly entertain such a question? We are left with two alternatives, readers. Either Tony Blinken is extremely dim-witted to misinterpret Russia’s position this badly, or Tony Blinken is a very formidable liar.
My conclusion: He is both.
Footnote: Blinken has not spoken to Lavrov since that pitiful occasion in mid–2022 — or to any other senior Russian official so far as we know. And the Biden regime has on two occasions, most famously in Istanbul a month after the Russian invasion began, actively scuttled talks between Kiev and Moscow that could have ended the war.
We come to Blinken on Israel, Gaza, and the Palestinians.
Blinken spent a great deal of his time with García–Navarro explaining his views of the Gaza crisis. And for the most part he stayed with the tedious boilerplate with which we are already familiar. The Biden regime supports Israel’s right to defend itself. He has dedicated himself to making sure the Palestinians of Gaza “had what they needed to get by.” The impediments to a ceasefire and a return of hostages are all on Hamas, not the Netanyahu regime.
Has Israel committed war crimes? Do we witness a genocide? Have the Israelis blocked food aid? You can’t expect straight answers out of Blinken on these kinds of questions, and García–Navarro got none. What she got was Blinken’s approval of Israel’s mass murder in Gaza, couched in the cotton-wool language to which Blinken always resorts when he wants to turn night into day, failure into success. Yes, he allowed, the Netanyahu regime could have made some minor adjustments at the margin and the slaughter would have looked better. But there is no erasing Blinken’s ratification of Israeli terrorism, his judgment that it has been a success — or García–Navarro’s failure to call him on this, a topic to which I will shortly return.
There is one remark Blinken made in this sendoff Q & A that has stayed with me ever since I watched the video of it and then read the transcript. It concerns the Gaza crisis, but it expands in the mind like one of those sponges that grow large when wetted. “When it comes to making sure that Oct. 7 can’t happen again,” Blinken said, “I think we’re in a good place.”
I can hardly fathom the implications of this extravagantly thoughtless assertion. There is no understanding of the human spirit in it. It takes no account of the enduring aspirations of the Palestinians people, I mean to say, and so displays the shallowest understanding of the events of Oct. 7, 2023. It presumes, above all, that the totalized violence of uncontrolled power is some kind of net-positive and can prevail in some lasting way, and that there is no need to trouble about what is just, or what it ethical, or what is irreducibly decent, or a commonly shared morality, or, at the horizon, the human cause as against (in this case) the Zionist cause.
This sentence takes us straight to Antony Blinken’s nihilism. As he leaves office he mounts not only an assault on reason, as I argued above, or our faculties of discernment, but altogether an assault on meaning. The working assumption is that he or she who controls the microphones and megaphones is free to say whatever it is of use to say. It does not require any relationship to reality, only to expedience. This is what I mean by nihilism.
“I don’t do politics,” Blinken flippantly tells García–Navarro early in their time together. “I do policy.” García–Navarro lets this go, as she does so much else. It is prima facie ridiculous, a hiding place in which García–Navarro allows Blinken to take shelter. Policy is politics: They are inseparable, no exceptions. In this case, Blinken cannot possibly expect the world beyond America’s shores to take seriously his assessment of the world as the Biden White House leaves it. This interview is all politics all the time: It is strictly for domestic consumption, intended not only to salvage a reputation — one beyond salvaging in my view — but to continue the grinding business of manufacturing consent. ……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Watch the video of Lourdes “Lulu” Garcia-Navarro’s time with Blinken. As is easily detected, she reads from a script and remains resolutely faithful to it regardless of what Blinken says. She purports to be otherwise, but she is a supplicant. She pretends to challenge Blinken on this or that question, but it is all faux, pose. None of Blinken’s lies, misrepresentations, and plain disinformation come in for serious scrutiny. It is merely on-to-the-next-question.
This is not journalism. It is spectacle, a theatrical reenactment of journalism — another case of journalism with American characteristics. It is not the creation of meaning, either: It is the destruction of meaning. I have already noted my term for this. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The saving grace of García–Navarro’s encounter with Tony Blinken, and a little to my surprise, lies in the comment thread appended to the published piece. There are 943 comments at this writing. And there are some voices of approval, certainly.
But my goodness are the critics many. Here are a few straight off the top of the thread:
Jorden, California.
Blinken has tarnished the office of Secretary of State. Silly is not the word, not even irresponsible but diabolical. Just bad on so many levels…. The Biden administration will mark the sudden decline of American hegemony …. U.S. foreign policy needs a much needed injection of realist logic now.
From “Rockin’ in the Free World,” Wisconsin:
For readers who want to further marvel at the creature that is Tony Blinken, watch his performance of “Rockin’ in the Free World” from last winter in Ukraine. It is truly cinematic in its irony as he facilitates U.S.–backed genocide. Could not write it better. That’s when I realized how much I viscerally hate this guy, how pathological his lack of self-awareness is[.]
And from David in Florida:
Yes, it’s called being delusional or incompetent or utterly negligent! Good job Blinkin! You and Biden undermined the final support of the Democratic Party. Sure you and your overlords will be fine with I’ll[sic] gotten gains. The rest of us won’t.
……………………………………….more https://scheerpost.com/2025/01/13/patrick-lawrence-the-nihilism-of-antony-blinken/
Report: Israel Refusing To Commit to a Permanent Gaza Ceasefire as Part of Hostage Deal
According to Haaretz, Israel’s position is one of the main disputes in the current negotiations
ANTIWAR.com by Dave DeCamp January 12, 2025
One of the main disputes in the ongoing Gaza hostage and ceasefire negotiations in Qatar is Israel’s refusal to commit to ending the war after a potential deal’s second phase, Haaretz reported on Sunday.
A permanent ceasefire has been one of Hamas’s main demands, and the report said the Palestinian group wants the genocidal war to end after the second phase of the deal.
Instead of committing to a permanent ceasefire, the report said there will be an attempt to present a US commitment to “work with Israel towards ending the war.” That would mean the deal would hinge on a US promise to pressure Israel to end military operations in Gaza, and there would be no actual commitment from Israel.
The Haaretz report comes as US officials are insisting that a deal is “very close.” Hamas officials have also told the media that negotiations have been moving in a positive direction and that they were waiting for the Israeli officials Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu sent to Qatar to approve their latest draft proposal.
Officials from the incoming Trump administration are also saying that a deal could happen soon, including Steve Witkoff, who will serve as Trump’s envoy to the Middle East and has been involved in the latest negotiations.
Trump himself has repeatedly threatened there would be “hell to pay” if Hamas didn’t start releasing Israeli hostages by his inauguration. Vice President-elect JD Vance elaborated on what that might mean in an interview on Sunday.………………………………… more https://news.antiwar.com/2025/01/12/report-israel-refusing-to-commit-to-a-permanent-gaza-ceasefire-as-part-of-hostage-deal/
CBS’ 60 Minutes Exposes the Biden Administration’s Complicity in Gaza Genocide, Interviews the Whistleblowers
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
Juan Cole, 01/13/2025 Ann Arbor (Informed Comment) https://www.juancole.com/2025/01/administrations-complicity-whistleblowers.html
– The amazingly brave Cecilia Vega at CBS’ 60 Minutes did a groundbreaking segment on Sunday in which she interviewed US government officials involved with the Israeli war on Gaza, who resigned in protest either explicitly or implicitly. She also screened the sort of horrific footage of the aftermath of Israeli attacks in Gaza, with the gory parts left in. Here is the transcript.
American television news has almost completely ignored Israeli (and US) war crimes in Gaza, which have been taking place daily, but are not apparently deemed “news” at CNN, MSNBC, Fox, CBS, ABC, etc.
Here let me just excerpt some statements by the former US government officials:
Hala Rharrit was an American diplomat working on human rights: “What is happening in Gaza would not be able to happen without U.S. arms. That’s without a doubt.”
“I would show the complicity that was indisputable. Fragments of U.S. bombs next to massacres of– of ch– mostly children. And that’s the devastation. It’s been overwhelmingly children.” (Emphasis added.)
“I would show images of children that were starved to death. In one incident, I was basically berated, “Don’t put that image in there. We don’t wanna see it. We don’t wanna see that the children are starving to death.”
Hala Rharrit: The level of anger throughout the Arab world, and I– I’ll say beyond the Arab world– is palpable. Protests began erupting in the Arab world, which I was also documenting, with people burning American flags. This is very significant because we worked so hard after the war on terror to strengthen ties with the Arab world.
[Cecilia Vega: You believe that this has put a target on America’s back, you’ve said.]
Hala Rharrit: 100%.
Hala Rharrit: Yes. I don’t say them lightly. And I say it as someone that myself has survived two terrorist attacks. My first assignment was in the U.S. Embassy in Yemen. I survived a mortar attack. I say it as someone who has worked intensely on these issues and has intensely monitored the region for two decades.
After three months of the Gaza War in 2023, she was told her reports were no longer needed.
Josh Paul spent 11 years as a director in the State Department’s Bureau of Political – Military Affairs.
Josh Paul: Most of the bombs come from America. Most of the technology comes from America. And all of the fighter jets, all of Israel’s fixed-wing fleet– comes from America.
Josh Paul: There is a linkage between every single bomb that is dropped in Gaza and the U.S. because every single bomb that is dropped is dropped from an American-made plane.
Josh Paul: After October 7th, there was no space for debate or discussion. I was part of email chains where there were very clear directions saying, “Here are the latest requests from Israel. These need to be approved by 3:00 p.m.”
Josh Paul: “This came from the president, from the secretary and from those around them.”
Josh Paul: I would argue exactly the opposite. I think the moment of October 7th was a moment of incredible worldwide solidarity with Israel. And had Israel leveraged that moment to press for a real, just and lasting peace, I think we would be in a very different place now in which Israel would not be facing this increasing isolation around the world and in which its hostages would be free.
Andrew Miller was the deputy assistant secretary of state for Israeli-Palestinian affairs.
Andrew Miller: The Israelis were using those bombs in some instances to target one or two individuals in densely packed areas. And in enough instances, we saw that was in question, how Israel was using it. And those weapons were suspended.
Andrew Miller: There were conversations from the earliest days about U.S. desires and expectations for what Israel would do. But they weren’t defined as a red line.
Andrew Miller: I’m unaware of any red lines being imposed beyond the normal language about complying with international law, international humanitarian law, the law of armed conflict.
Andrew Miller: I believe the message that Prime Minister Netanyahu received is that he was the one in the driver’s seat, and he was controlling this, and U.S. support was going to be there, and he could take it for granted.
Andrew Miller: There is a danger– that if the U.S. was not providing support to Israel, Hezbollah, Hamas, Iran would see that as an opportunity to go after Israel. However, we could have said, we are taking this step because we believe this class of weapons– is being used inappropriately. But if you use this moment to accelerate your attacks against Israel, then we are going to immediately lift our prohibition.
Andrew Miller: Yes. I think it’s fair to say Israel does get the benefit of the doubt. There is a deference to Israeli accounts of what’s taken place.
Here is the segment on YouTube:
Biden policy on Israel-Gaza sparks warnings, dissent, resignations | 60 Minutes
The UK military’s secret visits to Israel
Top British officers have made at least five unpublicised trips to Tel Aviv to meet Israeli officials, one to discuss ‘future operations’ in the Middle East.
MARK CURTIS, 9 January 2025, https://www.declassifieduk.org/the-uk-militarys-secret-visits-to-israel/?utm_source=drip&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=What+you+might+have+missed
The most senior figures in the UK military made at least five unpublicised visits to Israel in the months after it began striking Gaza in October 2023, Declassified has found.
British government data shows that Admiral Sir Tony Radakin, the chief of the defence staff and the UK’s top soldier, visited Israel on 21 January 2024.
On the trip he met the Israeli military’s chief of staff, Herzi Halevi, “to discuss future operations in the region”.
By then, Israel had already killed around 25,000 Palestinians, as international condemnation mounted.
This was Radakin’s second known visit to Israel, after he accompanied then defence secretary Grant Shapps on an official trip in December 2023. Shapps’ visit was disclosed at the time by the British government.
Radakin is also known to have visited Halevi again in Israel in August last year, while in November the Israeli soldier was invited by Britain’s Ministry of Defence (MoD) to attend a meeting in London.
Halevi was given special immunity by the UK authorities to avoid the possibility of being arrested for war crimes while in Britain.
Another senior UK figure who has visited Israel is the head of the Royal Air Force (RAF), Air Chief Marshal Sir Richard Knighton, who undertook a trip on 9 January 2024, for purposes which are undeclared in the government data.
The RAF has since flown hundreds of spy missions over Gaza, in aid of Israeli intelligence. The UK says that only information related to Hamas hostage-taking is passed to Israel from these flights, which take off from the UK’s sprawling military and intelligence base on Cyprus.
‘UK-Israel bilateral’
James Hockenhull, the head of Strategic Command – the UK military’s senior leadership body – also quietly visited Tel Aviv for a “UK-Israel bilateral” on 28 December 2023.
This was one day before the South African government filed its genocide case against Israel at the International Court of Justice.
Six weeks later, on 13 February 2024, Hockenhull hosted an Israeli general, Eliezer Toledano, in London, in a further unpublicised visit.
Toledano serves as the head of the Israeli military’s Strategy and Third-Circle Directorate, which focuses on Iran.
Also visiting Israel have been other senior MoD officials, such as General Charles Stickland, the Chief Joint Operations at the UK’s Permanent Joint Headquarters which is responsible “for the command and integration of UK global operations”.
Stickland visited Israel on 18 March 2024, described in the government documents as “MoD Directed attendance at meetings to be held in Tel Aviv”.
On the same day, Paul Wyatt, the MoD’s Director General for Security Policy, was also “meeting counterparts” in Tel Aviv.
‘Tacit approval’
The unpublicised visits by senior UK figures raise further concerns about the level of military assistance Britain is providing to Israel.
Chris Law, the SNP MP for Dundee Central said: “This new information will only fuel suspicions that successive UK governments have given tacit approval to and are complicit in what many are now considering to be a genocide in Gaza.
“The UK government must be up-front about the full extent of the British armed forces’ involvement in Gaza and detail precisely what support they have given throughout this conflict to the Israeli Defence Forces. This must include details of any further visits by senior military figures to Israel.”
He added: “The UK government may think that it is being clever by withholding this information, but ultimately it will only cede ground to misinformation and encourage guesswork. By detailing the exact involvement of British military figures, the UK government can prove once and for all that they are not complicit in this tragedy.”
In addition to the RAF’s surveillance flights over Gaza, Declassified has also documented British military training of Israeli personnel in the UK, arms supplies to the Israeli military after Britain announced limited sanctions, and the use of UK airspace to send weapons to Israel.
An MoD spokesperson said: “As part of the concerted UK effort, along with allies and partners, to reach a peaceful resolution to the ongoing conflict in Gaza, senior defence officials have visited Israel for routine diplomatic visits.”
They added: “Discussions included the UK calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza and the need for all parties to comply with international humanitarian law while recognising Israel’s right to security.”
Amazon Is Censoring My Most Recent Magazine Issue
Caitlin Johnstone Jan 14, 2025
Without explanation Amazon has blocked and unpublished my last issue of JOHNSTONE magazine which features my painting of Luigi Mangione on the cover. The link to order it is now dead. When I asked for an explanation or appeal they just sent a template response referring me back to their publishing rules.
So that’s annoying. The pay-what-you-want ebook of the issue is still available for anyone who wants it.
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In her bid to secure her confirmation as Trump’s next Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard is now pledging to support Section 702 of the FISA Act. This notorious law allows for the warrantless surveillance of Americans, and in congress Gabbard had previously fought to repeal it.
This is how the national security state works. You don’t change the machine, the machine changes you. Anyone who starts off opposing the imperial status quo of authoritarianism, warmongering and corruption either finds themselves excluded from the halls of power or adapts new positions in favor of the status quo.
The Australian political-media class has been rending its garments over a ridiculously fake incident of antisemitic graffiti at a synagogue in Sydney, which features both swastikas and the words “Free Palestine” right next to each other.
It’s weird how few people I see calling this what it so obviously is. Apparently we’re all supposed to take very seriously the idea that either (A) Nazis are spray painting the words “Free Palestine” next to their swastikas, or (B) that supporters of Palestinian rights are spray painting Nazi symbols next to their pro-Palestinian slogans. Apparently we’re all truly expected to pretend we don’t know some Israel supporter did this themselves to provide political cover for the genocide in Gaza.
It is always okay to express skepticism about dubious incidents of “antisemitism” in today’s political environment. Israel’s supporters are shitty, evil people who support genocide, and faking antisemitic incidents is a standard hasbara tactic with a well-documented history…………………………………… https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/amazon-is-censoring-my-most-recent?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=154758013&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
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How Fukushima’s radioactive fallout in Tokyo was concealed from the public
Because of the controversy surrounding Satoshi’s paper and the lack of research on the health impacts of these particles, it remains unclear to what extent Tokyo residents have been exposed to dangerous radiation levels as a result of the Fukushima accident.
Because CsMPs are so small, typically two microns or less in diameter, if humans breathe them, they could potentially reach the bottom of the lung, and be lodged into sacs known as alveoli, where the lung generally cannot expel them.
By unit of mass, CsMPs are much more radioactive than even spent reactor fuel
Japanese radiochemist Satoshi Utsunomiya found that air samples from March 15, 2011, in Tokyo contained a very high concentration of insoluble cesium microparticles. He immediately realized the implications of the findings for public safety, but his study was kept from publication for years.
Bulletin, By François Diaz-Maurin, January 13, 2025 [excellent illustrations]
On March 14 and 15, 2011—three days after the Great East Japan Earthquake and its resulting tsunami hit the Fukushima nuclear power plant—explosions at two of the plant’s reactor buildings released a huge amount of invisible radioactivity. These radioactive plumes were blown away by the wind, descending over the surrounding area and into the ocean. Eventually, the radiation emitted from the Fukushima plants spread over the entire Northern Hemisphere. It also spread to Japan’s capital, Tokyo.
Following the explosions, Japanese researchers rushed to collect and study radioactive materials from the soil and the air to find out what had happened inside the reactors, believed now to have melted down because their cooling systems failed. On March 13, the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Technology Research Institute, the agency responsible for measuring the air quality of particulate matter in the Tokyo area, started to collect air samples more frequently. This effort was part of the Tokyo metropolitan government’s emergency monitoring program for environmental radiation, which aimed to detect gamma-emitting nuclides in airborne dust. The filters revealed that at around 10 a.m. on March 15, 2011, a large plume of radioactivity reached Tokyo, some 240 kilometers (149 miles) south of Fukushima. All samples taken on March 14 and March 15 showed spikes in radioactivity.
The institute’s researchers published their first results in the journal of the Japan Radioisotope Association in June 2011 (Nagakawa et al. 2011); they estimated the total exposure dose to humans from radioactive substances, including iodine 131 and cesium 137 found in airborne dust, foodstuffs, and drinking water from the Setagaya ward in the old Tokyo City. Extrapolating from their measurements from March 13 to May 31, they calculated the corresponding annual cumulative dose of radiation in that part of Tokyo as being 425.1 microsieverts, which is less than half the annual dose limit to the public recommended by the International Commission on Radiological Protection. In a second conference publication in English (Nagakawa et al. 2012), the researchers extended their monitoring period to October and estimated that the total annual effective dose due to inhalation for adults in the Tokyo metropolitan area from the Fukushima radioactive plumes was far lower, at 25 microsieverts.
But two years after the accident, Japanese scientists discovered a new type of highly radioactive microparticle in the exclusion zone around the Fukushima plant. The microparticles, which had been ejected from the Fukushima reactors, contained extremely high concentrations of cesium 137—a radioactive element that can cause burns, acute radiation sickness, and even death. Satoshi Utsunomiya, an environmental radiochemist from Kyushu University in southwestern Japan, soon found that these particles were also present in air filter samples collected in Tokyo in the aftermath of the Fukushima accident.
The controversy surrounding his attempts to publish his findings nearly cost him his career and prevented his results from being widely known by the Japanese public ahead of the 2020 Summer Olympics in Tokyo.[1] Scientists still don’t know if these highly radioactive microparticles present significant danger to people, and Satoshi is one of the very few scientists who is focused on trying to find out. “We have the measurements now that tell that the particles did pass over population centers and were being deposited in places,” Gareth Law, a radiochemist from the University of Helsinki, told me. “We should answer the question.”
The discovery
In May 2012, Toshihiko Ohnuki, an accomplished environmental radiochemist then at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency (JAEA), visited Yoshiyasu Nagakawa at the Tokyo Metropolitan Industrial Technology Research Institute, also known as TIRI. Nagakawa was the first author of two TIRI studies on radiation exposure in Tokyo, and Ohnuki asked Nagakawa if he could obtain some air samples for further analysis. Ohnuki had already studied how radioactive cesium fallout from Fukushima reacted with components of contaminated soil. Now, he wanted to do the same with the airborne dust samples from Tokyo.
Nagakawa gave Ohnuki five small filters that had been collected from the Setagaya ward in old Tokyo City at different times on March 15, 2011—the day the radioactive plume reached Tokyo. Ohnuki received the samples without restriction on their use, and no written agreement was made.[2]
Back in his laboratory at JAEA, Ohnuki performed autoradiography of the five samples, revealing many radioactive spots on all of them. The bulk radioactivity on each sample was measured to be between 300 counts per minute for the filter that covered the midnight to 7 a.m. period and 10,500 counts per minute between 10 a.m. and 11 a.m. on March 15.[3] The radiation rate was so high that Ohnuki had to cut some of the filters into small pieces, less than one square centimeter, to keep from saturating the scanning electron microscope. Ohnuki stored the unexamined filters for future analysis.
Months later, in August 2013, four researchers from the Meteorological Research Institute in Japan reported for the first time about a new type of spherical radioactive cesium-bearing particle that had been ejected in the early days of the Fukushima accident (Adachi et al. 2013). The researchers had collected air samples on quartz fiber filters at their institute in Tsukuba, located 170 kilometers southwest of the Fukushima plant. Their findings, published in Scientific Reports, were about to revolutionize the way environmental radiochemists understood the radioactive fallout from Fukushima.
Back in the lab, the researchers placed the filters on an imaging plate and inserted them into a portable radiography scanner. The images revealed many black dots, which indicated the presence of radioactive materials on the filters, with a maximum radioactivity level measured on the sample at 9:10 a.m. on March 15, 2011, four days after the Fukushima accident began. The researchers placed this sample under a scanning electron microscope and then into an energy-dispersive X-ray spectrometer to directly observe the shape and composition of the radioactive materials on the filters. What they saw stunned them………………………………………………………………
Shocking results
The newly discovered entities were initially called spherical cesium-bearing particles, but Satoshi and his co-workers coined the term cesium-rich microparticles, or CsMPs, in 2017, which is now what researchers call them generally (Furuki et al. 2017). CsMPs had not been noted in earlier major reactor accidents.
Scientists knew the microparticles came from the Fukushima reactors because their isotopic ratio between cesium 134 and cesium 137 matched the average ratio for the three damaged reactors calculated by the Oak Ridge National Laboratory.[5] Because these particles emanated from the Fukushima reactors, Satoshi and the other scientists studying them thought that they may contain evidence about reactions that occurred during the accident. But the environmental radiochemist’s curiosity was also triggered by the unique features of these microparticles: Their size is very small, typically two to three microns, even smaller than one micron in some cases.[6] And the cesium concentration in each of the particles is very high relative to their size.
After Satoshi obtained four small pieces of the Tokyo air filters, he designed what he calls “a very simple procedure” to find out whether the filters contained cesium-rich microparticles. In April 2015, he took autoradiograph images of the four pieces, confirming what Ohnuki had already seen with a digital microscope at JAEA. Then Satoshi moved to characterize the structural and chemical properties of the particles using scanning electron microscopy (SEM) and atomic-resolution transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Although the procedure’s design was simple, executing these steps would prove to be extremely difficult.
In July 2015, as Satoshi was busy working on the Tokyo air filters in his lab at Kyushu University, Ohnuki received a note from Nagakawa, the TIRI researcher who had provided the samples, asking him to return them so they could be reanalyzed. In his e-mail, Nagakawa did not specify the motive for his request, which appeared innocuous: “Please return at least some of the materials we gave you for reanalysis … if the location is unknown, it can’t be helped.”
Ohnuki immediately sent Nagakawa two filters from March 15, including the filter from 10 a.m. to 11 a.m. that had the highest level of radioactivity and contained the largest number of radioactive spots. Ohnuki added that he had discarded the other three filters after he analyzed them in 2013.
Nagakawa also asked Ohnuki whether he was planning to publish papers based on the samples. Ohnuki explained that he stopped analyzing them after his inconclusive attempts in 2013, but did not mention he had given Satoshi part of the filters for study.[9]
Satoshi was now ready to publish his results in a scientific journal. These were important findings that the scientific community needed to know. But Satoshi also understood that they could create a public relations crisis in Japan because his findings contradicted previous statements that played down the implications for public health of Fukushima fallout in Tokyo.
The Goldschmidt Conference—the foremost such international meeting on geochemistry—that year was held in the Japanese city of Yokohama. Satoshi was invited to give a plenary talk and present his research on environmental contamination from the Fukushima disaster (Utsunomiya 2016). During the talk, he presented his new findings on the Tokyo air filters. His talk received a lot of attention and was even reported by several Japanese and international newspapers. After his presentation, the scientific chair of the conference, Hisayoshi Yurimoto, said: “Very interesting results. And also very shocking results.”[1
In April and June 2016, Satoshi conducted dissolution experiments and quickly confirmed that the CsMPs were insoluble in water. The experiments also showed that most of the cesium activity on these filters came from CsMPs. In fact, up to 90 percent of the cesium radioactivity came from these microparticles, not from soluble forms of cesium—meaning that most of the cesium radioactivity detected during the March 15 plume in Tokyo was from CsMPs.
Between 2016 and 2019, a Kafkaesque sequence of events circled about Ohnuki, the former JAEA researcher who gave Satoshi the Tokyo air filter samples, and Satoshi. During that sequence of events, Satoshi’s research paper was accepted for publication by a prestigious scientific journal after peer review—but the journal delayed publication of the paper for years, eventually deciding not to publish it based on mysterious accusations of misconduct that, it turned out, were unwarranted. As a result, Satoshi’s findings were not made widely known, saving the Japanese authorities a possible public relations crisis as the summer Olympics in Tokyo neared. Because of the controversy surrounding Satoshi’s paper and the lack of research on the health impacts of these particles, it remains unclear to what extent Tokyo residents have been exposed to dangerous radiation levels as a result of the Fukushima accident.
I worked to reconstruct the sequence of events related to Satoshi’s research paper to find out whether the controversy over its publication was the result of some unethical practice on his part; competition between research laboratories; or attempted suppression of scientific results. The account that follows is based on the review of dozens of e-mails, letters, reports, and transcripts of phone conversations the Bulletin has obtained, as well as on multiple interviews with people directly involved in the events.
In August 2016, the leader of Nagakawa’s research group at TIRI, Noboru Sakurai, sent an e-mail to Ohnuki urging him to return filter samples he had earlier obtained from TIRI to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where Ohnuki was now employed. Ohnuki responded that the filters had already been sent, but Sakurai maintained they had not received them. Ohnuki had asked a staff member of the research group he used to work in at the Japan Atomic Energy Agency to send the samples he had left there, but the samples were not sent. Because the samples were studied in a controlled area, theymay have been disposed of together with other Fukushima-related samples that had been stored at JAEA.
In October, as Ohnuki dealt with insistent requests that he return the filter samples, Satoshi submitted two research manuscripts to the journal Scientific Reports, one on the first successful isotopic analysis of individual cesium-rich microparticles based on soil samples collected from the exclusion zone at Fukushima, and one on the first characterization of the CsMPs from the Tokyo air filter samples that he had presented during his talk in Yokohama. Both articles were accepted in early January 2017 after peer review.[11]
The Tokyo paper, titled “Caesium fallout in Tokyo on 15th March, 2011 is dominated by highly radioactive, caesium-rich microparticles,” was co-authored by three graduate students from Satoshi’s lab—Jumpei Imoto, Genki Furuki, and Asumi Ochiai, who conducted the experiments—and three Japanese collaborators: Shinya Yamasaki from the University of Tsukuba who contributed to the measurement of samples; Kenji Nanba of Fukushima University, who contributed to the collection of samples; and Toshihiko Ohnuki, who had obtained the samples. The paper included two international collaborators who were world experts in the study of radioactive materials, Bernd Grambow of the French National Center for Scientific Research at the University of Nantes in France and Rodney C. Ewing of Stanford University, who contributed to the research ideas and participated in the analysis of the data. Satoshi was the lead author of the study.
……………………………………………..On the day of the visit, Moriguchi sent an e-mail to Ohnuki, pressing him to inform TIRI about the planned publication. “This type of information makes government agencies very sensitive,” Moriguchi wrote. “If the results obtained from these valuable sample collections conducted at a research institute under the administration were to incur the displeasure of government agencies and it becomes difficult to obtain cooperation from research institutions, we are concerned that this could hinder future research using these types of samples.”
…………………………………………………..Almost immediately, Sakurai moved to block the publication, according to e-mails obtained by the Bulletin.
………………………………………………………………………………………In July 2017, TIRI increased the pressure by sending a formal complaint to the Tokyo Institute of Technology, where Ohnuki was now employed. In a letter that the researchers were not able to see until a year after it was sent, TIRI accused Ohnuki of “suspected acts violating internal regulations, researcher’s ethics and code of conduct” in providing Satoshi with samples from TIRI without the institute’s consent.
As the issue became more political and involved more institutions, Satoshi continued his research on CsMPs and presented two other papers about Fukushima at the next Goldschmidt Conference in Paris in August 2017. Later that month, under pressure from the Tokyo Metropolitan Institute of Industrial Technology, the Tokyo Institute of Technology opened a formal investigation of Ohnuki on suspicion of improper research activities with Satoshi. “It was like a court,” Satoshi said of being called before the compliance committee. Except that, unlike in a trial, he did not know the exact terms of what they were accused of. “The team at TIRI didn’t even allow Kyushu University to show me this letter,” Satoshi said. “So at that point, I didn’t understand what the problem was.”
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. Cleared but still harassed
During the investigation, Satoshi almost gave up on publishing the paper based on examination of the filters in Tokyo. He told the committee members that he would probably withdraw the paper, then “in press,” from Scientific Reports. Both the committee members and TIRI were pleased. “But then I talked to Rod [Ewing], and we did something clever,” Satoshi explained. They would not withdraw the paper; instead, they would keep it “in press” until the investigation was over.
…………………………………………………………………………….Tokyo Tech initiated a pressure campaign against Ohnuki and Satoshi to get the samples back…………………………………..
Satoshi did not want to give the samples away. “These are the only evidence to prove our article,” he said.
………………………………………………………“I sent all the samples to Stanford,” Satoshi said. Satoshi sent the air filter samples through regular postal services “in a UPS package.”[15] On September 13, Kyushu University’s executive vice president, Koji Inoue, called Satoshi to his office and yelled at him, urging him to give back the samples. Satoshi told Inoue that it was too late; he had already sent the samples to Stanford “for further investigation.”
Now the samples were secured, but Satoshi still needed his paper to be published.
……………………………………………………………………….. Thompson’s article in Scientific American was published on March 11, 2019, mentioning the fact that the paper had been rejected (Thompson 2019).
In June 2019, Satoshi and his co-authors posted their paper on arXiv (Utsunomiya et al. 2019), thereby making the findings public—two-and-a-half years after its acceptance by Scientific Reports. Ohnuki’s name does not appear in the list of co-authors on the arXiv paper, and Satoshi did not acknowledge TIRI for providing the samples.
……………………………………………………………………………………. After the paper was made public, the researchers received some attention, but not the visibility commensurate with the implications that the study had for public health in Japan.[16] The three institutions—TIRI, Tokyo Tech, and Kyushu University—were all “very happy,” Satoshi said. “People may think that we lost, but for me, we actually protected science.“
New risks
In the early days after the Fukushima accident, radiochemists thought that the situation was very different from Chernobyl. The three reactor-core damage events at Fukushima were considered to be of low energy, meaning that no actual explosion of the reactors had occurred, as was the case for Chernobyl. This led radiochemists to assume that radioactive particles probably had not come out of the reactors or, at least, not in large volume. A lot of the early post-accident research, therefore, focused on the traditional environmental radiochemist approach of collecting soils and sediments, doing bulk analysis, and learning from that.
It was only after scientists discovered the existence of cesium-rich microparticles that researchers, including Satoshi, realized that particles had actually been ejected from the reactors.
…………………………………………………………………………Because they were unknown until recently, CsMPs pose new risks that are still underappreciated by the research community and public authorities.
Once formed, radioactive cesium 137 has a half-life of about 30 years, after which half of the nuclides will have decayed into stable barium 137, whereas the other half will remain radioactive. CsMPs tend to accumulate, forming hotspots that contain many of the particles.[17] Hotspots of the microparticles have been found inside and outside abandoned buildings in the Fukushima exclusion zone and in other places (Fueda et al. 2023; Ikenoue et al. 2021; Utsunomiya 2024a). “They’re actually there in great numbers in many places, and then that’s when the health questions start to come in,” Law said. Despite their great numbers and potential risks, hotspots of CsMPs have not been systematically mapped around Fukushima. “When we visited the exclusion zone, we could still see some hot spot occurrences on the roadside without any protection,” Satoshi said. “We shouldn’t be able to access freely that kind of hot spots.”
Because CsMPs are so small, typically two microns or less in diameter, if humans breathe them, they could potentially reach the bottom of the lung, and be lodged into sacs known as alveoli, where the lung generally cannot expel them.[18] Scientists don’t know what would happen then. For instance, a typical immune system response would consist of some kind of clearance mechanism that seeks out foreign bodies and tries to either envelop or dissolve them. But it is still unknown how exactly CsMPs would dissolve in lung fluids.
Most knowledge about breathing and radioactive particulates is based on the assumption that particles dissolve, and researchers have calculated the rates for their dissolution in the human body. But because CsMPs don’t dissolve easily, once inhaled, they will likely stay longer in the human body. Researchers believe that, because CsMPs are so slow to dissolve, they may stay much longer—certainly for several months, maybe longer—in the body, compared to hours or days for suspended cesium.[19]
By unit of mass, CsMPs are much more radioactive than even spent reactor fuel. Some researchers from the Japan Atomic Energy Agency have shown that cultured cells exposed to the radiation from suspended CsMPs display a stronger local impact compared to what is known from previous radiological simulation studies using soluble radionuclides (Matsuya et al. 2022). Scientists are only now seeing some emerging evidence that the point-source nature of the radioactivity from CsMPs could lead to damage to cell systems. This is qualitatively different from the conventional estimate of internal radiation dose at the organ level based on uniform exposure to soluble cesium.
Despite the new risks that CsMPs might pose, the study of their impacts has received little interest.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………….Satoshi continues to study CsMPs actively and regularly presents his results to the Goldschmidt Conference and publishes his results in scientific journals. He and his collaborators work relentlessly to understand better the fate of CsMPs in the environment and their impacts on human health. In 2024, Satoshi received the Geochemical Society’s Clair C. Patterson Award in recognition of his innovative contributions to the understanding of CsMPs.[21]……………… more https://thebulletin.org/premium/2025-01/how-fukushimas-radioactive-fallout-in-tokyo-was-concealed-from-the-public/?utm_source=SocialShare&utm_medium=Facebook&utm_campaign=Facebook&utm_term&fbclid=IwY2xjawHyUndleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHb1H3gK2UVzfBC5I7-s75EVtx4t5Q9uUi2MspvTqpluEOqbarYJJnhIwUA_aem_ok6x3HQOxccGg2I-7KnZjA
The Great British Nuke Off
by beyondnuclearinternational, https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2025/01/12/the-great-british-nuke-off/
It’s time to expose the sham plan for new nuclear power, write Andy Blowers and Stephen Thomas in their new report
The following is the introduction and the conclusion from the report, “It is time to expose the Great British Nuclear Fantasy once and for all”. Read the full report.
In April 2022, the then UK Prime Minister, Boris Johnson, set a target of 24GW (equivalent to eight stations like Hinkley Point C) of new nuclear capacity to be completed in Great Britain by 2050. At the heart of the proposal was the creation of a new government owned entity, Great British Nuclear (GBN), with a mission of ‘helping projects through every stage of the development process and developing a resilient pipeline of new builds’ designed to ensure energy security and to meet the UK’s commitment to achieving net zero.
The new Labour Government, elected in July 2024, has been emphatic about the scaling up of renewables, and has confirmed that nuclear power ‘will play an important role in helping the UK achieve energy security and clean power’. While not explicitly committing to the 24GW target, the new Government expressed its belief that a scale expansion of new nuclear projects was a necessary part of the energy mix for the transition to achieving net zero carbon by 2050.
The Government is expected to continue with GBN but in a clearly subordinate role to its new creation, Great British Energy, its vehicle for driving development and investment into projects that will enable the energy transition to achieve net zero by 2050.
There has, so far, been little government recognition of the sheer difficulty of achieving a vast expansion of nuclear energy. As so often in the past, the nuclear programme has barely got off the ground and the flagship project of the new nuclear programme, Sizewell C, had, by October 2024, yet to receive a Final Investment Decision (FID) apparently because of the lack of interested investors.
In an attempt to keep the project from collapsing while it tries to find investors, Government has chosen to invest £8bn in the project, in addition to Electricité de France’s (EDF’s) contribution of about £700m, just to get it to FID, a process budgeted by EDF in 2016 to cost only £458m. Small Modular Reactors in which much hope is vested barely exist beyond the drawing boards and by the time they could be deployed, if all goes to plan, it will be too late for SMRs and Sizewell C to make any significant contribution to achieving ‘Net Zero’.
The recipe for expanding nuclear and overcoming the problems that have meant previous large nuclear programmes came to little remains the same as that of the previous government: create a flow of large nuclear projects starting with an FID for Sizewell C; bring Small Modular Reactors to commercial availability by 2029 and start ordering them then; and streamline the planning and regulatory processes.
Achieving these objectives in whole or in part will be impossible. In addition, the nuclear programme remains encumbered by its traditional ethical and sustainability problems, if anything, more so. The prevailing fear of nuclear accidents and radiation risks has intensified as nuclear is increasingly exposed to cyber-attack and the palpable threats from terrorism and warfare.
The accidents at Chernobyl and Fukushima, and the threats to Zaporizhzhia in Ukraine and Russia’s Kursk plant at the heart of the Russo-Ukraine war provide chilling evidence of dangers that are likely to materialise sometime somewhere.
With its embedded relationship to the bomb, nuclear energy is implicated in existential catastrophe. The other existential threat comes from accelerating Climate Change which will inundate some coastal sites, create problems of cooling water and, render the legacy of wastes scattered at vulnerable sites an unmanageable problem for generations far into the future.
We may well ask why, in the face of such deficiencies and dangers and with evidence of flagging momentum, this fantastical project is still proceeding? The answer lies in a powerful combination of political ambition, nuclear industry and trade union lobbying purveying the promise of skills, jobs investment, export markets and wealth associated with nuclear development and its supply chain. A mainstream discourse of nuclear as a mainstay of base load supply, energy security and the goal of net zero has been nurtured, to which powerful interests unthinkingly subscribe. Inertia ensures the persistence of the fantasy.
Yet, all the evidence in terms of renewables competition, the opportunity costs and long term economic and security risks of a swerve to new nuclear indicates a vast gulf between rhetoric and reality. In this paper it is our purpose to address the realities and to demonstrate why new nuclear expansion is not only impossible but acts as a barrier to achieve a rapid energy transition powered by renewable technology, storage and energy efficiency.
In the face of the evidence, we consider it reasonable to conclude that any expansion of civil nuclear power in the UK beyond that already committed is unachievable.
The history of nuclear power worldwide is of ambitious programmes falling far short of plans, with huge delays and time overruns. The impact of these failures has been masked by less than expected electricity demand growth and the availability of quicker and cheaper alternatives.
However, there has been a significant opportunity cost to money wasted on these ill-fated policies. For decades UK governments have been seduced by claims from the nuclear industry that, this time, a major nuclear programme will go to plan. More than ever before, the latest programme will be dependent on huge quantities of public money with financial risks falling squarely on the public.
It strains credibility that, with a massive hole in the finances and urgent priorities in health and welfare, the justice system, education and infrastructure, the idea of plugging the nuclear black hole will be met with universal enthusiasm.
The signs are all too clear, the rhetoric has no concrete foundations and the programme will vaporise slowly, perhaps but with inevitable termination. Future demand is again being over-estimated and cheaper, quicker alternatives exist.
The real cost of nuclear power continues to rise and the delays increase, while the cost of alternatives continues to fall. The latest prices for off-shore and onshore wind, and solar photovoltaic are about half the likely price for new nuclear. The IEA reported that over the 10 years from 2013-23, battery costs fell by more than 80%.
Authoritative analysis by an Oxford University team found that UK energy demand could be halved by 2050 with substantial welfare benefits in terms of reducing fuel poverty.
While government documents on nuclear invariably speak of things moving ‘at pace’, the reality is that in the period since the 24GW programme was announced, delays have mounted. In only two years, the completion date for Hinkley Point C went back up to four years and Sizewell C’s FID has been delayed by at least three years.
By October 2024, more than two years after it was announced, GBN barely exists. It has no permanent executive, no premises and no independent budget and its staff are temporary secondees.
GBN’s first substantive task was to complete the SMR competition and award contracts. In October 2023, it expected this to happen in spring 2024. It now seems likely this will not happen until the end of 2024, so a task expected to take about 6 months will, if there are no more delays, take 15 months.
The new Labour administration has yet to say whether GBN will remain as a separate body or whether it will be absorbed into its own new creation, Great British Energy. This uncertainty could delay the decision further.
Despite the sound and fury, the GBN project is bound to fail. Its contribution to achieving net zero by 2050 will be nugatory. No amount of political commitment can overcome the lack of investors, the absence of credible builders and operators or available technologies let alone secure regulatory assessment and approval.
Moreover, in an era of climate change there will be few potentially suitable sites to host new nuclear power stations for indefinite, indeed unknowable, operating, decommissioning and waste management lifetimes.
And there are the anxieties and fears that nuclear foments, the danger of accidents and proliferation and the environmental and public health issues arising from the legacy of radioactive waste scattered on sites around the country.
Abandoning Sizewell C and the SMR competition will lead to howls of anguish from interest groups such as the nuclear industry and trade unions with a strong presence in the sector. It will also require compensation payments to be made to organisations affected. However, the scale of these payments will be tiny in comparison with the cost of not abandoning them.
It is our hope that sanity and rationality may prevail and lead to a future energy policy shorn of the burden of new nuclear and on a pathway to sustainable energy in the pursuit of net zero.
Professor Andy Blowers is a British geographer and environmentalist and Emeritus Professor of the Faculty of Arts & Social Sciences at the Open University. Professor Stephen Thomas is a professor at the University of Greenwich Business School, working in the area of energy policy.
U.S. nuclear spent fuel liability jumps to $44.5 billion
Nov 27, 2024, https://www.ans.org/news/article-6587/us-spent-fuel-liability-jumps-to-445-billion/
The Department of Energy’s estimated overall liability for failing to dispose of the country’s commercial spent nuclear fuel jumped as much as 10 percent this year, from a range of $34.1 billion to $41 billion in 2023 to a range of $37.6 billion to $44.5 billion in 2024, according to a financial audit of the DOE’s Nuclear Waste Fund (NWF) for fiscal year 2024.
The estimated liability excludes $11.1 billion already paid out to nuclear power plant owners and utilities for the DOE’s breach of the standard contract for the disposal of spent fuel (10 CFR Part 961), which required the DOE to begin taking title of spent nuclear fuel for disposal by January 1998. Owners of spent fuel routinely sue the federal government for the continued cost of managing the fuel. The recovered costs are paid out from the Treasury Department’s Judgement Fund and not from the DOE.
According to the audit, conducted by the independent public accounting firm of KPMG, the liability estimate “reflects a range of possible scenarios” regarding the operating life of the current fleet of nuclear power reactors. The estimate is also based on when the DOE thinks it may begin taking spent fuel. In May, the DOE received initial approval (Critical Decision-0) for a consolidated interim storage facility for spent fuel that, if constructed, would be operational by 2046.
The Department of Energy Nuclear Waste Fund’s Fiscal Year 2024 Financial Statement Audit was released by the DOE Office of Inspector General on November 14.
The fund: The NWF, which was intended to finance the DOE’s disposal of spent fuel, had a balance of $52.2 billion as of September, according to the KPMG audit.
The NWF was funded through annual fees—initially, $0.001 for every kilowatt hour provided by a nuclear power plant—levied by the DOE on owners and generators of spent fuel. The DOE stopped collecting annual NWF fees, however, in 2014 following an order by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit, which found that the DOE failed to justify the continued imposition of the fee following the suspension of the Yucca Mountain repository project.
‘Alarming’ environmental breaches at nuclear sites spark calls for tougher action
Paul Dobson, Rob Edwards, January 12, 2025
The Dounreay nuclear facility in Caithness was found to be in breach of
rules on eleven occasions in recent years, making it one of the most
frequent offenders in Scotland. Dounreay – which houses radioactive waste
– was a hub of nuclear research between the 1950s and 1990s but is now
the site of the largest nuclear clean up in Scotland.
There was also a breach at the Faslane naval base, although this did not involve
radioactivity. The findings come from data released to The Ferret by the
Scottish Government’s green watchdog, the Scottish Environment Protection
Agency (Sepa). The agency kept a further 25 sites which had broken rules
secret. The Ferret understands this is because they house radioactive
materials which governments fear could be targeted by terrorists aiming to
build a dirty bomb.
The Ferret 12th Jan 2025,
https://theferret.scot/environmental-breaches-spark-calls-tougher-action/
UK will explore nuclear power for new AI data centre plan
The UK is planning special districts for constructing data centers and
will explore dedicating nuclear energy to the sites as part of a Labour
government project to boost technology growth and the ecosystem for
artificial intelligence. These “AI Growth Zones” will include enhanced
access to electricity and easier planning approvals for data centers, the
government said on Sunday. It said the first such zone will be in Culham,
home of the UK Atomic Energy Authority.
Bloomberg 12th Jan 2025,
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-01-12/uk-will-explore-nuclear-power-for-new-ai-data-center-plan
S. Korea’s nuclear agency launches investigation into abnormal discharge of radioactive waste
Xinhua 2025-01-12, https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202501/12/WS6783d766a310f1265a1da509.html
SEOUL — South Korea’s nuclear safety agency has launched an investigation into the abnormal discharge of liquid radioactive waste from a nuclear reactor to the southeast of the country, Yonhap news agency said Sunday.
The Nuclear Safety and Security Commission (NSSC) received a report from Korea Hydro & Nuclear Power (KHNP), the operator of nuclear power plants, at about 10:23 am local time (0123 GMT) Sunday that the liquid waste of a radioactive storage tank in the Wolseong No 2 nuclear power plant in Gyeongju, North Gyeongsang province was discharged into the ocean without going through a sample analysis.
The KHNP took measures to block leakage immediately after finding the tank outlet valve was open while preparing to release the liquid waste into the ocean, the NSSC said in a bulletin posted on its official website.
According to the KHNP’s analysis of samples left in the tank, the concentration of the leaked liquid waste, estimated at about 29 tons, stood at normal levels.
The NSSC said it had dispatched experts to the power plant in a bid to investigate the exact amount and the cause of the leakage, planning to check any environmental impact by collecting seawater near the power plant.
The agency promised to announce the results of the investigation once available
EDF’s UK nuclear plan – salt marsh consultation delay reaction
Author: LDRS, 11th Jan 2025
EDF has been urged to “end the uncertainty” over its plans to turn part of North Somerset into a salt marsh after it announced it was delaying the plans.
The power company, which is building Hinkley Point C, wants to create 340 hectares of new salt marsh habitats along the Severn — including at Kington Seymour in North Somerset — to compensate for the 44 tonnes of fish expected to be sucked into the power plant’s cooling systems each year. Farmers and the communities who could see their land become salt marsh have expressed dismay at the plans.
A consultation on the plans had been set to launch this month — but now EDF has said it is marking sure all options are “fully explored” and is delaying the consultation until later in 2025. A letter sent to people in the areas affected on Monday said: “We have listened carefully to all views and the feedback has provided us with a great deal of insight as we consider what proposals to put forward in our public consultation.”
But the letter has not impressed locals. Local councillor Steve Bridger, who represents the Yatton ward which includes Kingston Seymour on North Somerset Council, said: “It is clear to me that EDF’s preference is to find voluntary ways to meet its planning obligations, so I would ask that they end the uncertainty for residents and businesses and just drop their proposals to create salt marsh and put their energy into a genuine and open conversation with our communities to develop a strategy that protects all our residents and funds all sorts of biodiversity gains in North Somerset that we actually want and need.”
Claire Stuckey, whose parents’ land and a business faces becoming part of the Kingston Seymour salt marsh, said: “We have unanimous community opposition and significant evidence it won’t work. It’s their decision what they are going to do.”
Farmers and landowners found out their lands were being looked at in September, when they received letters from EDF. Ms Stuckey said that EDF’s statement that they needed more time to look at their options “goes against the original excuse for their heavy handed approach.”
EDF is also looking at Littleton-upon-Severn in South Gloucestershire, and Rodley and Arlingham in Gloucestershire — where the plans have also met with outrage — as potential locations for salt marsh. The controversial plans were debated in Parliament in October, and North Somerset Council resolved in November to write to the government to urge it to block the plans.
But EDF says it has to find a way to compensate for the deaths of fish in its cooling system as it draws in water from the Severn Estuary. Although it does have a fish return mechanism to reduce the numbers of fish killed — the first British nuclear power station to have one — it is predicted that 44 tonnes of fish a year will slip through the mechanism.
The planning permission for Hinkley Point C originally stipulated that it would use loudspeakers by the water intakes on the sea floor to scare off fish, but EDF has warned it would be dangerous for divers to install the speakers and instead proposed creating salt marshes to compensate for the dead fish………….
Rayo 11th Jan 2025,
https://hellorayo.co.uk/greatest-hits/bristol/news/edf-consultation-delay/
While Los Angeles burns, AI fans the flames
Artificial intelligence is a water-guzzling industry hastening future climate crises from California’s own backyard.
By Schuyler Mitchell , Truthout, January 11, 2025
“………………………………………………. Trump’s latest smear campaign is little more than political football. But the renewed attention on California’s water does highlight ongoing tensions over the conservation and management of this finite resource. As the climate crisis worsens, it’s expected to exacerbate heat waves and droughts, bringing water shortages and increasingly devastating fires like those currently scorching southern California. The situation in Los Angeles is already a catastrophe. Climate change-induced water shortages will make imminent disasters even worse.
In the face of this grim reality, it’s worth revisiting one of the major water-guzzling industries that’s hastening future crises from California’s own backyard: artificial intelligence (AI).
Silicon Valley is the epicenter of the global AI boom, and hundreds of Bay Area tech companies are investing in AI development. Meanwhile, in the southern region of the state, real estate developers are rushing to build new data centers to accommodate expanded cloud computing and AI technologies. The Los Angeles Times reported in September that data center construction in Los Angeles County had reached “extraordinary levels,” increasing more than sevenfold in two years.
This technology’s environmental footprint is tremendous. AI requires massive amounts of electrical power to support its activities and millions of gallons of water to cool its data centers. One study predicts that, within the next five years, AI-driven data centers could produce enough air pollution to surpass the emissions of all cars in California.
Data centers on their own are water-intensive; California is home to at least 239. One study shows that a large data center can consume up to 5 million gallons of water per day, or as much as a town of 50,000 people. In The Dalles, Oregon, a local paper found that a Google data center used over a quarter of the city’s water. Artificial intelligence is even more thirsty: Reporting by The Washington Post found that Meta used 22 million liters of water simply training its open source AI model, and UC Riverside researchers have calculated that, in just two years, global AI use could require four to six times as much water as the entire nation of Denmark.
Many U.S. data centers are based in the western portion of the country, including California, where wind and solar power is more plentiful — and where water is already scarce. In 2022, a researcher at Virginia Tech estimated that about one-fifth of data centers in the U.S. draw water from “moderately to highly stressed watersheds.”
According to the Fifth National Climate Assessment, the U.S. government’s leading report on climate change, California is among the top five states suffering economic impacts from climate crisis-induced natural disaster. California already is dealing with the effects of one water-heavy industry; the Central Valley, which feeds the whole country, is one of the world’s most productive agricultural regions, and the Central Valley aquifer ranks as one of the most stressed aquifers in the world. ClimateCheck, a website that uses climate models to predict properties’ natural disaster threat levels, says that California ranks number two in the country for drought risk.
In August 2021, the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation declared the first-ever water shortage on the Colorado River, which supplies water to California — including roughly a third of southern California’s urban water supply — as well as six other states, 30 tribal nations and Mexico. The Colorado River water allotments have been highly contested for more than a century, but the worsening climate crisis has thrown the fraught agreements into sharp relief. Last year, California, Nevada and Arizona agreed to long-term cuts to their shares of the river’s water supply.
Despite the precarity of the water supply, southern California’s Imperial Valley, which holds the rights to 3.1 million acres of Colorado River water, is actively seeking to recruit data centers to the region.
“Imperial Valley is a relatively untapped opportunity for the data center industry,” states a page on the Imperial Valley Economic Development Corporation’s website. “With the lowest energy rates in the state, abundant and inexpensive Colorado River water resources, low-cost land, fiber connectivity and low risk for natural disasters, the Imperial Valley is assuredly an ideal location.” A company called CalEthos is currently building a 315 acre data center in the Imperial Valley, which it says will be powered by clean energy and an “efficient” cooling system that will use partially recirculated water. In the bordering state of Arizona, Meta’s Mesa data center also draws from the dwindling Colorado River.
The climate crisis is here, but organizers are not succumbing to nihilism. Across the country, community groups have fought back against big tech companies and their data centers, citing the devastating environmental impacts. And there’s evidence that local pushback can work. In the small towns of Peculiar, Missouri, and Chesterton, Indiana, community campaigns have halted companies’ data center plans.
“The data center industry is in growth mode,” Jon Reigel, who was involved in the Chesterton fight, told The Washington Post in October. “And every place they try to put one, there’s probably going to be resistance. The more places they put them the more resistance will spread.” https://truthout.org/articles/while-los-angeles-burns-ai-fans-the-flames/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=3634e1951f-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_01_11_08_34&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-3634e1951f-650192793
Outgoing CIA director says ‘no sign’ Iran developing nuclear weapons
William Burns stated that the Islamic Republic made a decision in 2003 not to pursure nuclear weapons and has not changed its policy
The Cradle News Desk, JAN 12, 2025
Outgoing CIA director William Burns stated in an interview on 10 January that Iran does not have a nuclear weapons program, following a decision it made in 2003, and that the US is concerned about the revival of ISIS.
In an interview with state broadcaster National Public Radio (NPR) to discuss his time as director of the notorious spy agency under President Joe Biden, Burns was asked whether Iran may accelerate its efforts to obtain nuclear weapons given the setbacks the Islamic Republic and its allies in the regional Axis of Resistance have sustained over the past year.
Burns answered that “the Iranian regime could decide in the face of that weakness that it needs to restore its deterrence as it sees it and, you know, reverse the decision made at the end of 2003 (an oral fatwa issued by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei) to suspend their weaponization program.”
However, Burns clarified, “We do not see any sign today that any such decision has been made, but we obviously watch it intently. “
He added that Iran’s weakness could instead lead to negotiations for a nuclear deal similar to the one signed by Iran and the United States under President Obama in 2014. President Trump later withdrew from the deal following intense lobbying by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
“You know that that sense of weakness could also theoretically create a possibility for serious negotiations, too. And, you know, that’s something the new administration is going to have to sort through. I mean, it’s something I have a lot of experience in with the secret talks a decade ago, a little more than a decade ago with the Iranians. So, you know, that’s that’s also a possibility,” Burns stated………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://thecradle.co/articles-id/28431
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