“Rushing deadly weapons to the far-right and openly genocidal Israeli government without congressional review robs American voters of their voice in Congress,” said one critic.
Hours after United States Ambassador Robert Wood on Friday acted alone to veto a United Nations Security Council resolution demanding an immediate cease-fire in Gaza, the Biden administration again illustrated its growing isolation in continuing to back Israel’s onslaught as it bypassed Congress to send more weapons to the country’s extreme right-wing government.
The U.S. Defense Department posted a notice online Saturday saying U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken had informed Congress that a government sale of 13,000 rounds of tank ammunition was moving forward, even though Congress had not completed an informal review of the transaction.
The State Department invoked an emergency provision of the Arms Control Export Act to bypass the review process generally required for weapons sales to foreign nations. The sale, which Congress has no power to stop now that the provision has been invoked, was valued at more than $106 million.
“Rushing deadly weapons to the far-right and openly genocidal Israeli government without congressional review robs American voters of their voice in Congress, emboldens Netanyahu to kill more Palestinian civilians, and furthers stains our nation’s standing in the world,” saidEdward Ahmed Mitchell, national deputy director of the Council on American–Islamic Relations (CAIR).
Mitchell noted that the sale was finalized as media outlets confirmed Israeli tanks have “deliberately targeted and slaughtered journalists in Lebanon.”
“The Biden administration’s decision is an affront to democracy and an act of moral insanity,” he said.
The State Department notified congressional committees of the sale around 11:00 pm EST Friday, hours after a new Pew Research poll showedthat only 35% of Americans support the Biden administration’s backing of Israel’s attacks on Gaza. The Israel Defense Forces have now killed more than 17,700 Palestinians in Gaza in just over two months, while claiming they are targeting Hamas.
Thirteen members of the U.N. Security Council on Friday voted in favor of a humanitarian cease-fire, while the U.K. abstained from voting. The U.S. vetoed the resolution in a move CAIR condemned as “unconscionable.”
“It is not clear what level of suffering by the Palestinian people would prompt our nation’s leaders to act in their defense,” said CAIR national executive director Nihad Awad.
Also on Saturday, the global charity Save the Children warned that at least 7,685 children under age five in Gaza are now so malnourished—a result of Israel’s total blockade of the enclave that began in October and the delivery of just a small fraction of the aid that is needed—that they require “urgent medical treatment to avoid death.”
“The repeated failure of the international community to act signifies a death knell to children,” said Jason Lee, country director for Save the Children. “I’ve seen children and families roaming the streets of what hasn’t been flattened in Gaza, with no food, nowhere to go, and nothing to survive on. Even the internationally-funded humanitarian aid response—Gaza’s last lifeline—has been choked by Israeli-imposed restrictions.”
“Gaza’s children are being condemned to further bombardment, starvation, and disease,” said Lee. “We must heed the lessons from the past and must immediately prevent ‘atrocity crimes’ from unfolding.”
The intensifying opposition to Israel’s U.S.- and U.K.-backed bombardment of Gaza was made apparent by an estimated 15,000-20,000 people who marched through London on Saturday to demand a cease-fire.
The pledge and discussions around it have continued to focus on the likely dead end of small modular nuclear reactors and more Gen IV technologies and designs, indicating that the nuclear industry and countries engaged in it haven’t internalized the lesson that innovation and nuclear generation scaling aren’t compatible.
COP28 has some good news stories to go with the bad. Prominent among the good news was the Double Down, Triple Up pledge pushed by the Global Renewable Alliance and signed onto by almost 120 countries. A somewhat similar pledge related to nuclear is receiving a lot of media coverage as well. But what do these pledges mean, how likely are they to come to fruition and what countries are missing in action?
Let’s start with nuclear, as it’s much less likely to bear significant fruit. What’s the pledge? To triple nuclear generation capacity by 2050. There are about 440 nuclear reactors in operation today, most of them aging out with significant retirements over the next 20 years eliminating most of them without significant refurbishment costs. There are fewer nuclear reactors in operation today than there were in 2005, and the next decade will see that trend accelerate. 2050 would an achievable time frame if all current nuclear generation countries launched a Nuclear New Deal right now and mobilized their government and industry for a significant scale up. Is that occurring or likely to?
How many countries signed up for it? Only 22, which is interesting, as there are about 30 countries with commercial nuclear generation at present. The full list per the US DOE is the United States, Bulgaria, Canada, Czech Republic, Finland, France, Ghana, Hungary, Japan, Republic of Korea, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco, Netherlands, Poland, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Sweden, Ukraine, United Arab Emirates, and United Kingdom.
What major nuclear generation countries are missing from the list? China and India. What does that mean? It’s somewhat difficult to tell. China has the world’s biggest nuclear program today, but it’s been struggling. It didn’t meet its 2020 targets. It’s very unlikely to meet its 2025 targets. It peaked in 2018 with seven GW-scale reactors, averaged three reactors per year since, and this year has only put one GW scale reactor and one 210 MW small Gen IV developmental reactor into commercial operation. The growth trend isn’t positive. Meanwhile, renewables, storage and transmission are seeing exponential growth rates. More on that later. Perhaps China doesn’t think it can actually triple nuclear or perhaps it thinks relying on what actually has proven to be very effectively scalable is more sensible.
India is interesting in a different way. They were the only country to build almost entirely small reactors, 300 MW CANDU designs. They pivoted to GW scale reactors in the past couple of decades for the same reason everyone else did, thermal efficiencies that emerge at scale that allow electricity to be relatively cheap. But they’ve run into the same problems as most western countries in the past 30 years, significant budget and schedule overruns. They’ve been electrifying and building renewables successfully, so perhaps they don’t want to overcommit, or simply realize that they don’t have the conditions for success.
The countries pledging to triple nuclear generation have some other oddities. France is already at 75% of annual generation from nuclear. While electricity demand is going to increase, is France really expecting to 225% of current electricity demand from a single form of generation? It’s already a more heavily electrified economy than many European ones because of its nuclear fleet. Similarly, most of the smaller eastern European countries already get 20% to 33% of electricity from nuclear plants, so tripling relatively inflexible capacity is questionable.
What non-nuclear countries are pledging to become nuclear countries? Ghana, Moldova, Mongolia, Morocco and Poland. What does tripling of nuclear capacity mean in countries which have no nuclear reactors at all? Poland and Mongolia are the two most developed economies but the remainder do not have the in-country economies and technical skills for a nuclear generation program.
What would be required for tripling of nuclear capacity? Each country would have to create a national high-priority deployment program. They’d have to pick a single, GW scale and proven design and actively prevent engineers from tinkering with it. They would have to have military alignment and discipline with the expectation of creating at least the potential for nuclear weapons. The countries would have to have crash human resource development and security clearance programs. They’d have to build two or more dozen of the same reactors in a 20-40 year time frame to preserve the knowledge of the master builders, construction and regulatory approval teams. As I’ve noted, successful nuclear generation programs are governmental programs with corporate junior partners, not free market friendly deployments.
Do any of the countries who are signatory to the non-binding pledge have the conditions for success? Not right now, and it’s difficult to see them achieving them. Part of the reason I’m tracking the natural experiment of nuclear vs renewables in China is that it’s one of the few countries that could create the conditions for success, and it hasn’t. The big thing it’s failed at is sticking to a single, GW scale reactor design. It now has I believe nine different designs in operation. I ascribe that to industrial export policy trumping nuclear generation policy. China could fix that, but it’s unlikely that they will as they want to sell what countries are interested in buying, and country preferences are all over the map.
The pledge and discussions around it have continued to focus on the likely dead end of small modular nuclear reactors and more Gen IV technologies and designs, indicating that the nuclear industry and countries engaged in it haven’t internalized the lesson that innovation and nuclear generation scaling aren’t compatible.
All in all, this non-binding pledge doesn’t seem like that big a deal to me. And while I put nuclear at 5% of the global energy mix in the end game, up in absolute and relative terms, I don’t consider that the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency and World Nuclear Association’s analysis showing it’s a requirement for net-zero to be much more than self-serving assessments. As I noted on a call to global institutional investors recently, there will be nuclear generation in the mix for a variety of reasons unrelated to it being necessary.
The tripling up and doubling down pledge, on the other hand, is a big deal. The best count I’ve seen is that 118 countries have signed up to triple renewables generation capacity and doubling the rate of efficiency programs by 2030. This is also non-binding, and also has some nuances and headwinds, but it’s much more achievable and likely…………………………………………………………………………………………………… more https://cleantechnica.com/2023/12/10/what-do-cop-28-double-down-triple-up-nuclear-commitments-mean/
An extension has been agreed for the dismantling of the parts of the original shelter facility most at risk of collapse. The structure was built in 206 days following the 1986 accident at Ukraine’s Chernobyl nuclear power plant.
The licence for the storage of radioactive waste within the shelter has been extended from 2023 to 2029, with a 2025 deadline for the development of a new design for the dismantling of “unstable structures with an unacceptably high probability of collapse”, and a 31 October 2029 deadline for completion of the dismantling.
The Shelter Object – also known as the ‘sarcophagus’ – still contains the molten core of the reactor and an estimated 200 tonnes of highly radioactive material. The stability of the structure has developed into one of the major risk factors at the site. A project to shore up the structure was completed in mid-2008, but at that time the maximum life of the stabilised structures was determined as the end of 2023…………………………………..
The NSC is the largest moveable land-based structure ever built – with a span of 257 metres, a length of 162 metres, a height of 108 metres and a total weight of 36,000 tonnes equipped – and with a lifetime of 100 years has been designed to allow for the eventual dismantling of the ageing makeshift shelter from 1986 and the management of radioactive waste. It has also been designed to withstand temperatures ranging from -43°C to +45°C, a class-three tornado, and an earthquake with a magnitude of 6 on the Richter scale.
Because of its vast dimensions the structure had to be built in two halves which were lifted and successfully joined together in 2015. The process of sliding the entire arched structure from its assembly point into position over unit 4 was completed on 29 November 2016. The original licence, from the State Nuclear Regulatory Inspectorate of Ukraine, for decommissioning was issued in 2019 following fitting out and more than a year of pilot operation and testing of the New Safe Confinement building.
Non-nuclear states gathered in New York are decidedly anti-nuclear in outlook and approach
By Tom Unterrainer, chair, Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament
The non-nuclear majority met in New York between 27 November and 1 December for the Second Meeting of States Parties (2MSP) to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). This coming together was not simply ‘non-nuclear’ but decidedly anti-nuclear in outlook and approach.
The TPNW represents many things: a ‘work in progress’, a part of international law, a mechanism for the eventual abolition of nuclear weapons and similar. What it represents politically, at the time of coming into force and since, is a full-frontal rejection of ‘nuclearism’ and a challenge to the nuclear-armed world. 2MSP saw discussion and decision making on how to embed this aspect of the Treaty.
Between 15 and 27 October 1953, the British government carried out ‘Operation Totem’ over an area in Southern Australia. Totem I and Totem II were atmospheric nuclear tests and together with five additional ‘non-critical’ tests, Britain delivered death and catastrophe on the First Nations people inhabiting the area.
These people “felt the ground shaking and the black mist rolling”, as Karina Lester put it on the floor of 2MSP. “We know our lands are poisoned”, she went on, clearly stating that “we want governments to recognise what they have done.”
What the British government did in 1953 was to consign a people and their land to death, destruction and continuing – intergenerational – harm.
The British government has refused to recognise or make recompense for what it did over seventy years ago and recently affirmed that it would not do so now. This roadblock to justice must be challenged, as should the other roadblocks to peace and justice that are erected by nuclear-armed states.
The Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has been engaged on the question of Britain’s legacy of nuclear colonialism and recently agreed a resolution at our 2023 Policy Conference to enhance this work. The message coming loud and clear from 2MSP is that this aspect of our work is urgently necessary and incredibly important. Even in states like the UK which possess nuclear weapons and which take a hostile approach to the TPNW, the overall message and intent of the Treaty has universal applicability.
The theme of ‘universalisation’ was prominent at 2MSP, with a series a working papers, proposals and speeches made to address the concept. In an early ‘thematic debate’, a representative of the International Committee of the Red Cross outlined some of what this could mean. For example, highlighting and embedding the anti-nuclear consensus that any nuclear use would have an enormous humanitarian impact; being clear that nuclear possession is “not exceptional” and does not stand above and beyond international law…………………………………………………………………………………………….
What is clear is that the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament can and will play an important role in pressing forward with ‘universalising’ anti-nuclear ideas, including those embodied in the TPNW.
It is also clear – and this is one of the more positive aspects of such international meetings – that CND and our supporters are the representatives of majority non-nuclear and anti-nuclear thinking in the UK. Given Britain’s nuclear-armed status and nuclear alliances, our work – and the work of the TPNW community globally – is as important as ever. https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2023/12/10/a-resounding-rejection-of-nuclearism/
Israel supporters are like, “No no you don’t understand, the side that’s killing babies and incinerating families and assassinating journalists and starving civilians and bombing cultural heritage sites and carpet bombing entire neighborhoods and driving an indigenous people off their land are the GOOD guys.”
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There is literally nothing Israel could do that its supporters wouldn’t defend. Try to fill in the blank in “Israel could _______ and people would defend it” with something that wouldn’t be true. Most of the insanely evil things you could put in that space are already actually being done. Genocide? They’re already doing that. Murdering babies? They’re already doing that. Killing thousands of children? Already doing that. Deliberately targeting and assassinating journalists, artists and scholars? Already doing that.
Israel supporters will defend any evil — literally any evil — as long as it is being perpetrated by their favorite regime. There are zero constraints of any kind, because Israel supporters are completely uninterested in morality. If they were, they wouldn’t be supporting one of the most immoral governments on this planet even after all it has done in the last two months.
Part of the problem is the widespread consensus that October 7 means Israel is justified in doing literally anything in response, no matter how heinous. Israel could exterminate the entire population of Gaza and its supporters would still be saying “WHAT ABOUT OCTOBER 7??”
A new Israelis study found that Israel is killing civilians in Gaza at a significantly higher rate than civilians were killed in the world wars of the 20th century. Military analysts have said that the destruction in northern Gaza is comparable to the most aggressive World War II bombing campaigns in places like Dresden, Hamburg and Cologne.
US officials were reportedly shocked when Israeli officials indicated they were preparing to inflict civilian casualties in Gaza that would be reminiscent of world war horrors, and then, in typical Israeli fashion, they went and did even worse…………………………………………………………..
Bipartisan efforts to extend and expand a program granting compensation to victims of government-caused nuclear contamination are faltering. It is set to expire in June.
NYT, By Catie Edmondson, Reporting from the Capitol, Dec. 8, 2023
More than two decades ago, Congress declared that victims of government-caused nuclear contamination who developed cancer and other serious illnesses — including uranium miners and those exposed to radiation from Manhattan Project-era atomic tests — should receive federal compensation.
“The health of the individuals who were unwitting participants in these tests was put at risk to serve the national security interests of the United States,” read the law enacted in 1990. “The United States should recognize and assume responsibility for the harm done to these individuals.”
Now that statute, known as the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act, is in peril, set to expire in June without a clear path for renewal. And an effort to broaden it substantially beyond Cold War-era victims, to others who have been harmed by the aftereffects in the decades since, has run into a brick wall on Capitol Hill.
The Senate voted overwhelmingly in July to attach legislation renewing and expanding the program to the annual defense policy bill. But in the final version negotiated behind doors by congressional leaders, that measure, sponsored by Senators Josh Hawley, Republican of Missouri, and Ben Ray Luján, Democrat of New Mexico, was dropped.
Republicans objected to its hefty price tag, which congressional scorekeepers estimated could top $100 billion.
In an angry floor speech on Thursday, Mr. Hawley said the move amounted to Congress “rescinding” the apology it had made to victims decades ago.
“That allows this program to expire,” he said. “That turns its back on the tens of thousands of good Americans who have sacrificed for their country, who have dutifully given their health and in many cases their lives to this country, and gotten nothing.”……………………………………………………………..
The Cameco company, which owns, among other things, a uranium refinery in Blind River, is planning the creation of a site burying nuclear waste in this community.
Francis Beaudry, The Times Hub, 6 Dec 23
Environmental organization Northwatch is sounding the alarm over a proposed nuclear waste landfill that could be installed near the community of Blind River, in northern Ontario, in the case of a dismantling of nuclear facilities in the south of the province.
Northwatch criticizes the actions of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission (CNSC) and nuclear fuel producer Cameco, which allegedly agreed not to make public plans to dismantle its Port Hope facilities.
These plans, according to the organization, include the creation of an underground nuclear waste disposal site at Blind River.
Cameco operates three uranium fuel manufacturing plants for nuclear power plants in Ontario. Its production and conversion plants are in Port Hope, on the north shore of Lake Ontario, located about an hour east of Toronto.
The company also owns a uranium refinery, which is located in Blind River, on the north shore of Lake Huron.
According to Brennain Lloyd, coordinator project for Northwatch, the preliminary plan for dismantling the Port Hope facilities, which was submitted by Cameco, does not contain enough details.
Brennain Lloyd claims that Cameco neglects the need for consultation in the file of its preliminary decommissioning plan.
They published a four-page summary, lots of photos, a very basic description of their dismantling plans for their three factories, she says.
What they are planning is to dismantle their facilities in Port Hope, and then send the material, which is radioactive, to a nuclear tomb that hasn’t even been built yet. They say they are planning to build this site on the grounds of their Blind River facilities, she explains.
In addition to the proximity of this potential landfill site to the Great Lakes, Ms. Lloyd deplores that the summary does not provide for public consultations.
If the CNSC gives advance approval to this decommissioning plan and in 30 years they put this plan into action, will they tell the population who have fears that they missed their chance and that this plan was approved a long time ago, she questions.
A Cameco spokesperson said by email that there was no timetable for ‘a dismantling of the Port Hope facilities……………………………..
Protestors claim Europe’s largest nuclear facility is jeopardising safety of locals
Sellafield facility chiefs hotly deny that the cats pose any risk to public safety
Protestors have claimed villagers living close to a giant facility known as the UK’s ‘nuclear Narnia’ have been invaded by swarms of ‘radioactive’ cats. Strays roaming wild across the Sellafield nuclear site on the Cumbrian coast pose a risk because they are ‘literally pooing plutonium’, the anti-nuke campaigners say.
The colony of feral cats grew after they were fed scraps by workers at Sellafield, which is Europe’s largest nuclear facility, and sheltered under the warmth of giant steam pipes for decades.
The group, called Radiation Free Lakeland (RAFL), claim to have consulted experts and found that the cats’ faeces contain detectable traces of plutonium and caesium. A theory firmly denied by chiefs at Sellafield, who say the strays – nicknamed ‘atomic kittens’ by locals – pose no risk to the public. However, MailOnline has seen documents which prove some of Sellafield’s 11,000 employees have been threatened with disciplinary action if they feed the cats because it encourages them to congregate around the offices.
From Alaska to Florida, people in the US once again took to the streets en masse to demand a permanent ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza and an end US aid to Israel. The Shut It Down for Palestine Coalition, composed of several organizations including the International Peoples’ Assembly, the Palestinian Youth Movement, the ANSWER Coalition, and National Students for Justice in Palestine, called for a day of action on December 8, to continue putting pressure on Israel and the US one week after Israel resumed its genocidal violence against Gaza. This coalition of organizations is bringing together the Palestine solidarity movement to disrupt major centers of power across the country.
Many of the December 8 actions happened simultaneously to the United States vetoing a UN Security Council draft resolution that would have demanded an immediate humanitarian ceasefire.
Early in the morning, the demonstration was brought directly outside of Secretary of State Antony Blinken’s home in McLean, Virginia. Demonstrators chanted, “Blinken Blinken rise and shine, you’re committing genocide!” Last week, Blinken met with Israel’s war cabinet in occupied Jerusalem, after which he urged Israel to limit civilian casualties. Many suspect that he gave the greenlight for Israel to end its temporary pause in aggression and resume full-scale attacks. The death toll of Palestinians killed by Israel in Gaza has crossed 17,700……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/10/as-the-us-vetoes-un-ceasefire-resolution-the-people-take-the-streets-for-palestine/
The reputation of the ICC could be completely destroyed if crimes against Palestine are not thoroughly investigated, says American attorney Stanley Cohen
In the first weeks of the Gaza-Israel war, the ICC’s prosecutor issued a statement in which he said that impeding aid to Gaza could be a crime, but was later revealed to have traveled to Israel and is being accused of stalling the courts investigation into war crimes. “If this is not a case that calls for an international tribunal, then the Rome Statute should be null and void,” says American attorney Stanley Cohen, speaking to RT.
On October 29, International Criminal Court (ICC) prosecutor, Karim Khan, issued a warning to the Israeli government that impeding the transfer of aid into Gaza could give rise to “criminal responsibility” under the Rome Statute. However, during his speech delivered in the Egyptian capital, Cairo, Karim Khan notably placed much greater focus on the Hamas-led attack of October 7 than on anything the Israeli military had committed in the Gaza Strip. Following the ICC prosecutor’s remarks, there have been questions raised as to whether the court will prove useful in addressing crimes committed across Palestine-Israel.
Renowned American attorney Stanley Cohen addressed Karim Khan’s remarks in Cairo. Cohen said that Khan “made rather affirmative declaratory arguments about what Hamas, what the Qassam brigades, did do, how, when, where, what happened. In the absence of any independent examination, in the absence of any independent evidence, based upon, to some degree, propaganda distortion, alternative intelligence information, which was put out there.” Cohen went on to state that “if I were one of the attorneys representing Palestinians in front of the ICC, given the commentary that the prosecutor made, I might ask him to recuse himself.”
In March of 2021, the ICC officially opened a probe into what it says are war crimes that may have been committed in Palestine – by all parties involved – since June 13, 2014. This would technically mean that crimes recently committed could be subject to an investigation and those responsible may, in theory, be prosecuted. Also, in 2021, Israel’s top human rights group, B’tselem, along with Human Rights Watch, declared that the Israeli government was operating a regime of Apartheid against the Palestinians. In 2022, Amnesty International followed suit, issuing its own lengthy report that demonstrated why it also had decided to accuse Israel of the crime of Apartheid. The ICC has the right, under the Rome Statute, to prosecute those who commit the crime of Apartheid.
However, as the US-based think tank Arab Center Washington DC noted in September, “little has been done” over the past two years by the ICC, despite the prosecutors’ “professed desire to improve the credibility of the court and his private protestations that he cares about the question of Palestine.” Despite Israel having stated that it “will not cooperate” with the ICC, protesting its announced probe into war crimes in 2021, the families of Israelis killed on October 7 have urged the court to launch an investigation into alleged crimes committed by Hamas. This puts the Israeli government in a tough position, as it has repeatedly stated that the ICC has no jurisdiction in their territory. Hamas, on the other hand, welcomed the ICC probe into war crimes, while defending its own actions.
Commenting on the question of why the ICC has yet to move towards indicting those responsible for crimes committed in the occupied Palestinian territories, Stanley Cohen replied:
“They returned an indictment against Putin on the basis of ex parte claims, certainly probable cause, within four days. In the case of Israel you’ve had nine years to find, investigate and corroborate systemic violations of international law, the violation of the law of war, human rights violations, collective punishment, violations of the humanitarian code, crimes against humanity. War crimes.”
Cohen also added the following: “I don’t know why it’s taken two years… There should be an ongoing investigation right now. I was involved in the preliminary applications for the ICC. There have been, just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of declarations, of affidavits, of videos, of films, of admissions, of statements over the last nine years now, that the ICC has. The cynic in me imagines or wonders whether this, the same piece would’ve taken the speed if the targets were African, if they were black, because the ICC has a history of moving with deliberate speed when it involves African defendants or targets, or people of color.”
Since the child death toll in Gaza alone, as a result of Israel’s war on the besieged coastal enclave, is more than six times times higher than the total Israeli civilian death toll from October 7, it begs the question as to whether the ICC is viewing crimes committed against Palestinians with the same seriousness. If that case goes forward, and investigates the never ending list of war crimes committed across Palestine-Israel, it could perhaps rescue some of the legitimacy of the court, which has been repeatedly accused by African leaders of wrongful targeting. In fact, due to the majority of the ICC’s indictments having been handed out to those on the continent of Africa, some have even suggested that the ICC should be renamed the African Criminal Court.
To make matters worse, once it was revealed that ICC prosecutor Karim Khan had traveled to Israel, he quickly made plans to meet with Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas and Palestinian human rights groups. However, human rights groups based in the occupied territories rejected his request to meet. Ammar Al-Dwaik, director general of the Independent Commission for Human Rights (ICHR) said that “the way this visit has been handled shows that Mr Khan is not handling his work in an independent and professional manner.”
According to Stanley Cohen, “there are lots of options” beyond the International Criminal Court when it comes to the prosecution of war crimes, including the International Court of Justice (ICJ). “You also then have the situation of courts with universal jurisdiction such as South Africa and Spain and about a dozen or so other countries, which I have no doubt will also be initiating investigations under universal jurisdiction,” he said.
Whether the ICC acts now will either be its saving grace, or irreparably stain the reputation of the court forever. The sheer scale of the atrocities that are now being committed in Gaza is difficult to even describe, with more tonnage of explosives being dropped on the besieged territory than the nuclear bomb used by the United States against Hiroshima. Meanwhile, food, water, medical aid, fuel and electricity are being prevented from entering, or in other cases are being severely limited. Some 1.5 million civilians have been displaced and around 20,000 people killed, while upwards of 30,000 have been injured.
US Deputy National Security Advisor Jon Finer said Thursday that the Biden administration has not set a deadline on Israel’s war in Gaza and reiterated US opposition to a ceasefire.
“We have not given a firm deadline to Israel, not really our role. This is their conflict. That said, we do have influence, even if we don’t have ultimate control over what happens on the ground in Gaza,” Finer told the Aspen Security Forum.
Financial Timesreported last week that the Israeli onslaught is expected to last over a year. US officials told CNN that they expect the current phase of the war, which involves constant airstrikes and a ground operation, would continue into 2024, and then Israel would narrow down its targeting to specific Hamas members, possibly by January.
Finer said the US supports Israel’s goal of ensuring that “Hamas can no longer govern,” although Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has repeatedly stated his objective is the elimination of Hamas altogether. Finer said the US is “not in place yet of asking Israel to stop or for a ceasefire.”
There’s no indication that Israel is successfully taking out Hamas fighters, as its bombardment has incurred a massive civilian death toll. Gaza’s Health Ministry said Thursday that 17,177 Palestinians have been killed since Israel unleashed its campaign on October 7, and about 70% of the dead are women and children.
Fierce battle raging over Sizewell C in Suffolk is in stark contrast to the tranquil nature of this picturesque historic fishing village. Despite its relaxing vibes, this tiny historic fishing village is at the centre of a bitter battle over whether a massive nuclear power station should be built on its shores.
It is a struggle that could not only determine Sizewell’s future, but the whole of Britain’s. Were it not for its existing power station and plans to build an even bigger one next door, you would never have guessed that this small, remote place would be at the centre of a struggle of national importance.
Two of my colleagues — Evan Gershkovich in Moscow and Julian Assange in London — languish in prisons for doing their job: keeping you informed. Russia and the U.S., knowingly or not, are following Joseph Stalin’s press playbook. A case in point: the Stalinist persecution of U.S. journalist William (Bill) Nathan Oatis in Cold War Czechoslovakia, which mirrors the contemporary prosecutions of my colleagues.
To Bill Oatis, as to Assange and Gershkovich, journalism was less a job than a vocation. He worked on school newspapers from the age of 12 and dropped out of college in 1933 to take a job at his hometown newspaper, the Marion, Indiana, Leader-Tribune. From there, he moved to the Associated Press (AP) bureau in the state capital, Indianapolis. (His managing editor, Drysdale Brannon, recalled, “He was a factual reporter and probably the most conscientious man who ever worked on the staff.”) Diverted from journalism to the Army for three years during World War II, he returned to the AP, first to its New York news desk, then to London and in 1950 to Prague, Czechoslovakia, as bureau chief…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The issue that unites Oatis, Gershkovich and Assange is not only the prosecution of journalists for doing their jobs. It is censorship of everything the state believes we have no right to know. Censorship by state and church has done more to deprive humanity of knowledge and to stunt creativity than any other method of control. Knowing that prison awaits you if you expose state crimes in the U.S. or propaganda lies in Moscow has an inhibiting effect. Many journalists will not, indeed do not, take the risk…………………………..
Historian Erin Maglaque has written how centuries of Catholic censorship in early modern Europe spawned self-censorship, lamenting “the art and literature that was never made, the religious and scientific ideas that remained unwritten — unthought, even — because of the existence of the Index [of Prohibited Books], the congregation [of the Faith], and the Inquisition tribunal.” Stalin’s secret police, and their contemporary incarnation in the Russian Federal Security Service and the U.S. national security state, stand in the Inquisitorial tradition of deciding what you and I may (and may not) read and therefore know. It is for that Gershkovich and Assange suffer the anguish of isolation in their dungeons. https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/10/the-us-condemned-stalins-prosecution-of-journalists-now-it-uses-his-playbook/
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now.
Note: This is part two of a two-part blog series on the impacts of climate change on nuclear power plants. Check out our first blog post on the impact of increasing ambient temperatures.
Climate action isn’t simply about reducing emissions—it’s also about addressing local environmental concerns and minimizing risks to human health and safety. With that in mind, if nuclear power is going to have a role in addressing climate change, stronger safety and environmental regulations will be needed.
Unfortunately, this approach is missing from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which in January voted in a 3-to-2 decision to water down recommendations from its own staff to reevaluate seismic and flooding hazards at nuclear sites. “This decision is nonsensical,” Commissioner Jeff Baran wrote in his dissent, “Instead of requiring nuclear power plants to be prepared for the actual flooding and earthquake hazards that could occur at their sites, NRC will allow them to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced than it is today.”
The January ruling came almost eight years after staff scientists released a list of recommendations in direct response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. With the approval (and pending approvals) this year to rollback multiple safety regulations , the U.S. nuclear fleet, the oldest in the world, cannot afford to wait another decade to strengthen safety and environmental regulations in preparation of climate change–in this case, rising sea levels.
What are the Risks?
Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of water to prevent fission products in the core and spent nuclear fuel from overheating (incidentally making nuclear the most water intensive energy source in terms of consumption and withdrawal per unit of energy delivered). That’s why over 40 percent of the world’s nuclear plants are built along the coasts, with that number rising to 66 percent for just plants under construction. Unable to run on the electricity it generates itself to power the pumps that provide cooling water to the core and to the spent nuclear fuel stored onsite, a nuclear plant must rely on the grid or backup generators to ensure cooling water circulation. Any hazard that cuts off access to those sources of power restricts access to cooling water, ultimately risking a nuclear meltdown and off-site release of radiation, as happened during the flooding of Fukushima.
Flooding evaluations conducted by the NRC concluded that 55 of the 61 evaluated U.S. nuclear sites experienced flooding hazards beyond what they were designed to handle. Even more alarming, in 2014, the flood barriers at Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Plant–one of the few plants reported to be prepared for disaster but which had been missing proper seals for decades–gave way to 50,000 gallons of water after heavy rainfall.
Storm surges like the one at St. Lucie Nuclear plant and extreme weather events, as witnessed in Fukushima, pose very real risks to both operational and decommissioned plants, almost all of which (in the US) will continue to store nuclear waste onsite for decades until a permanent storage solution is found. Coupled with increasingly rising sea-levels, these risks will continue to grow. Even under a very low scenario of 1°C warming by midcentury, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment reports that the “frequency, depth, and extent of both high tide and more severe, damaging coastal flooding will increase rapidly in the coming decades.” And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that 1.5°C of warming could be reached in as little as 11 years.
While all energy technologies will be impacted in some way by the increasing severity of natural disasters and sea level rise, the failure of nuclear power plants can result in irreversible health and environmental consequences on top of social and economic damages, including worst of all the release of radiation that can remain lethal for thousands of years. Under government estimates, the Fukushima meltdown resulted in the displacement of 165,000 people, cleanup and compensation costs of up to $200 billion, and a timeline of 30 to 40 years. Experts say, however, that true costs could reach $500 billion and decontamination timelines could be underestimated by decades.
Nuclear in East Asia
Despite initial vocal opposition from the public in many East Asian countries that have slowed down nuclear buildout after Fukushima, the direction of government policies for nuclear development in East Asia remain mostly unchanged, and have simply resulted in rather a more conservative, moderate pace. In fact, this pace has sustained much of nuclear development in East Asia, home to many countries that have found nuclear power as an attractive solution to addressing the dilemma between achieving energy security for an increasing population and decarbonizing to mitigate global climate change.
Of the 56 nuclear power plants currently in construction around the world, 33 of them are in Asia; 16 in China alone. As observed in the graph below, [on original] if all nuclear units that are currently under construction reach completion, East Asia is slated to become the region with the largest number of operating nuclear power plants, 93 percent of which will reside along the coast.
What is alarming is that East Asia and the Pacific region is uniquely vulnerable to sea-level rise. A 2015 report by Climate Central found that of the top 10 countries most likely to be affected sea level rise for 4°C warming, seven are in Asia. Similarly, in a study by the World Bank, China and Indonesia will be the most vulnerable to permanent inundation. Given the heightened flooding risks in Asia, strengthening the authority of regulatory structures that oversee the safety of nuclear build out will be increasingly important.
What’s the Plan?
Fukushima was a lesson to the global community that even one of the world’s most technologically advanced and experienced countries can fail to prevent a nuclear meltdown. To prepare for the realities of rising sea levels that pose unique risks to different nuclear plants, regulators must require climate adaptation plans and heightened safety oversight. Nonetheless, at the international scale, not much work is being done to address these sea-level rise concerns.
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), in recognizing that the “world is ill-prepared for the risks from a changing climate,” conducted a study on the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to climate change, which is not yet available to the public. Since 2014, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has begun to include a section about the impacts of climate change on nuclear energy in its annual Climate and Nuclear Power Report. Yet even as these international organizations detail the many hazards changing climate poses to nuclear reactors, preventative and/or adaptation measures do not seem to be prioritized or encouraged, especially for existing nuclear plants.
“Outside of their Scope” at Home
Similar attitudes are held here in the U.S. Perched at the southern tip of Florida, the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is seeking to be the first U.S. nuclear plant permitted to run for 80 years. Initially refusing to consider sea-level rise in the environmental review of the license extension, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released a revised draft this year, only to come to the following conclusion: It’s outside of the scope of the agency.
If new information about changing environmental conditions (such as rising sea levels that threaten safe operating conditions or challenge compliance with the plant’s technical specifications) becomes available, the NRC will evaluate the new information to determine if any safety-related changes are needed at licensed nuclear power plants,” the NRC report said.
The report arrives at this conclusion by utilizing lower-bound sea level rise estimates from the 2018 U.S. Climate Change assessment, rationalizing that the report “assigns very high confidence to the lower bounds of these projections and medium confidence to the upper bounds.” As highlighted by this Bloomberg analysis released this year, nuclear plant operators are not only allowed to perform their own flood risk estimates but are also able to decide what assumptions are made, with review from the NRC.
The uncertainty that comes with sea-level rise projections obviously exists. In securing the safety of such critical infrastructure, however, using the highest sea-level rise estimates is the only way to ensure that all actions that can be taken against a potential threat are taken. On the other hand, relying on the lowest storm surge estimates is akin to receiving a warning about a potential threat, and taking the bare minimum actions to prepare for it.
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now. With the world’s scientists calling attention to the climate crisis ahead of us, action must be taken to ensure nuclear plants are part of the solution, not the problem.
Nuclear energy generated 2,546 terawatt-hours (TWh) of electricity worldwide last year, accounting for 9.2% of total gross electricity generation, the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) showed.
Proponents of nuclear say as a low-carbon power source it could be vital in helping countries meet climate targets, but several plants around the world are coming to the end of their life expectancies and many new ones have faced delays.
The most nuclear power in the world is generated in the United States, followed by China.
Nuclear energy has regained some popularity recently as countries search for low-carbon power sources, but long lead times, high costs and climate impacts put the prospect of nuclear as a solution at “virtually zero”, the WNISR said.
As of mid-2023, a total of 407 reactors were operating in 32 countries, four less than a year earlier and 31 below a 2002 peak of 438, the report said.
The slow progress of construction has lifted the average age of a reactor to 31.4 years by the end of 2022, up from 31 years in mid-2022, the report said.
Some 58 reactors representing 58.6 gigawatts (GW) of additional capacity were under construction by mid-2023, five more than in 2022, with four in five reactors being built in Asia or Eastern Europe and over half facing years-long delays, the report said.
Nuclear is also continuing to fall behind renewables in terms of cost, as reactors are seen as more expensive and taking longer to build.
The adjusted cost of nuclear energy – which compares the total lifetime cost of building and running a plant to lifetime output – is nearly four times that of onshore wind, the report said.
Reporting by Forrest Crellin Editing by Mark Potter
