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President Donald Trump and his administration have no plans to use Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository

Nuclear waste disposal at Yucca Mountain a no-go for Trump, Energy exec affirms, 

President Donald Trump and his administration have no plans to use Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste repository, according to Mark Menezes, the current under secretary of energy and the president’s pick to be the next No. 2 at the U.S. Department of Energy.

“Let me be very clear about this,” Menezes said Wednesday during his U.S. Senate Energy and Natural Resources Committee nomination hearing. “The president has been very clear on this.”

The under secretary in his remarks applauded and supported Trump – who has vacillated on the matter in the past – “for taking action when so many others have failed to do so.”

The president’s fiscal year 2021 budget blueprint, trillions of dollars, included no money for Yucca Mountain and, instead, emphasized alternative, innovative approaches for the long-term, safe storage of nuclear waste and spent fuel. Previous Trump budget requests included $120 million and $116 million for the mothballed Nevada repository.

Yucca Mountain, relatively near Las Vegas, was identified decades ago as the nation’s potential nuclear storehouse. Congress in 2002 approved of the remote locale. But the project soured under President Barack Obama and has failed to gain significant traction since, much to the disappointment of some South Carolina lawmakers.

U.S. Rep. Jeff Duncan, R-S.C., has described Yucca Mountain as a national solution to a national problem; U.S. Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., has described it as a “world-class repository.”

Menezes’ Wednesday comments – at the behest of Sen. Catherine Cortez Masto, a Nevada Democrat and staunch opponent of Yucca Mountain – are a dramatic pivot away from comments he made in February before a House energy subcommittee.

What we’re trying to do is to put together a process that will give us a path to permanent storage at Yucca,” Menezes said at the time, describing the president as “frustrated” that “we have not been able to get the resources or the authorization that we need to be able to license Yucca.”

Trump that same month – days prior to the House hearing, in fact – wrote on Twitter: “Nevada, I hear you on Yucca Mountain and my Administration will RESPECT you!”

Cortez Masto on Wednesday said she wanted “to put this to bed” and give Menezes an opportunity to set things straight.

May 22, 2020 Posted by | politics, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Brazil’s nuclear reactor build delayed, completion now due in 2027, Covid-19 effect

May 22, 2020 Posted by | Brazil, health, politics | Leave a comment

Nuclear power policy now a low priority for Philippines govt

May 21, 2020 Posted by | Philippines, politics | Leave a comment

Trump wants USA to hugely increase its nuclear weaponry

Trump Says U.S. Nuclear Arsenal Must Be ‘Greatly’ Expanded, Bloomberg, By  Alex Wayne, December 23, 2016
  •  Russian president said his arsenal also should be strengthened
  •  Obama has sought to both modernize and reduce U.S. weapons

President-elect Donald Trump said Thursday the U.S. should increase its nuclear arsenal, an apparent reversal of a decades-long reduction of the nation’s atomic weaponry that came hours after Russian President Vladimir Putin reiterated calls for his country’s arsenal to be reinforced.

“The United States must greatly strengthen and expand its nuclear capability until such time as the world comes to its senses regarding nukes,” Trump said in a Twitter post…….(subscribers only) https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2016-12-22/trump-says-u-s-nuclear-arsenal-must-be-greatly-expanded

May 19, 2020 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

Over 120 local and national organizations urge U.S. Congress to help nuclear frontline communities.

May 19, 2020 Posted by | health, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Coronavirus likely to put a dint in USA’s nuclear weapons spending

ORDER FROM CHAOS, How COVID-19 might affect US nuclear weapons and planning Brookings Institute, Steven Pifer, May 18, 2020   Editor’s Note:  As it examines the administration’s proposed fiscal year 2021 defense budget, Congress should carefully consider the trade-offs and press the Pentagon to articulate how it weighed the trade-offs between nuclear and conventional forces, writes Steven Pifer. This piece original appeared in the National Interest.

The Department of Defense has begun to ratchet up spending to recapitalize the U.S. strategic nuclear triad and its supporting infrastructure, as several programs move from research and development into the procurement phase.  The projected Pentagon expenditures are at least $167 billion from 2021-2025. This amount does not include the large nuclear warhead sustainment and modernization costs funded by the Department of Energy, projected to cost $81 billion over the next five years.
Nuclear forces require modernization, but that will entail opportunity costs. In a budget environment that offers little prospect of greater defense spending, especially in the COVID19 era, more money for nuclear forces will mean less funding for conventional capabilities. That has potentially negative consequences for the security of the United States and its allies. While nuclear forces provide day-to-day deterrence, the Pentagon leadership spends most of its time thinking about how to employ conventional forces to manage security challenges around the world. The renewed focus on great power competition further elevates the importance of conventional forces. It is important to get the balance between nuclear and conventional forces right, particularly as the most likely path to use of nuclear arms would be an escalation of a conventional conflict. Having robust conventional forces to prevail in or deter a conventional conflict in the first place could avert a nuclear crisis or worse.

NUCLEAR WEAPONS AND BUDGETS

For the foreseeable future, the United States will continue to rely on nuclear deterrence for its security and that of its allies (whether we should be comfortable with that prospect is another question). Many U.S. nuclear weapons systems are aging, and replacing them will cost money, lots of money. The Pentagon’s five-year plan for its nuclear weapons programs proposes $29 billion in fiscal year 2021, rising to $38 billion in fiscal year 2025, as programs move from research and development to procurement. The plan envisages a total of $167 billion over five years. And that total may be understated; weapons costs increase not just as they move to the procurement phase, but as cost overruns and other issues drive the costs up compared to earlier projections……….

Some look at these figures and the overall defense budget (the Pentagon wants a total of $740 billion for fiscal year 2021) and calculate that the cost of building and operating U.S. nuclear forces will amount to “only” 6-7 percent of the defense budget. That may be true, but how relevant is that figure?

By one estimate, the cost of building and operating the F-35 fighter program for the U.S. Air Force, U.S. Navy and U.S. Marines over the program’s lifetime will be $1 trillion. Amortized over 50 years, that amounts to $20 billion per year or “only” 2.7 percent of the Defense Department’s fiscal year 2021 budget request. The problem is that these percentages and lots of other “small” percentages add up. When one includes all of the programs, plus personnel and readiness costs as well as everything else that the Pentagon wants, the percentages will total to more than 100 percent of the figure that Congress is prepared to appropriate for defense.

OPPORTUNITY COSTS

The defense budget is unlikely to grow. Opportunity costs represent the things the Pentagon has to give up or forgo in order to fund its nuclear weapons programs. The military services gave an indication of these costs with their “unfunded priorities lists,” which this year total $18 billion. These show what the services would like to buy if they had additional funds, and that includes a lot of conventional weapons…………

These are the opportunity costs of more nuclear weapons: fewer dollars for aircraft, ships, attack submarines and ground combat equipment for conventional deterrence and defense…………..

If the United States and its allies have sufficiently robust conventional forces, they can prevail in a regional conflict at the conventional level and push any decision about first use of nuclear weapons onto the other side (Russia, or perhaps China or North Korea depending on the scenario).The other side would have to weigh carefully the likelihood that its first use of nuclear weapons would trigger a nuclear response, opening the decidedly grim prospect of further nuclear escalation and of things spinning out of control. The other side’s leader might calculate that he/she could control the escalation, but that gamble would come with no guarantee.  It would appear a poor bet given the enormous consequences if things go wrong. Happily, the test has never been run.

This is why the opportunity costs of nuclear weapons programs matter. If those programs strip too much funding from conventional forces, they weaken the ability of the United States and its allies to prevail in a conventional conflict—or to deter that conflict in the first place—and increase the possibility that the United States might have to employ nuclear weapons to avert defeat………

The United States and NATO still retain the option of first use of nuclear weapons. If the U.S. president and NATO leaders were to consider resorting to that option, they then would be the ones to have to consider the dicey bet that the other side would not respond with nuclear arms or that, if it did, nuclear escalation somehow could be controlled.

Assuring NATO allies that the United States was prepared to risk Chicago for Bonn consumed a huge amount of time and fair amount of resources during the Cold War…….

In modernizing, maintaining and operating a safe, secure and effective nuclear deterrent, the United States should avoid underfunding conventional forces in ways that increase the prospect of conventional defeat and/or that might tempt an adversary to launch a conventional attack. If Washington gets the balance wildly out of sync, it increases the possibility that the president might face the decision of whether to use nuclear weapons first—knowing that first use would open a Pandora’s box of incalculable and potentially catastrophic consequences.

GETTING THE BALANCE RIGHT IN THE COVID19 ERA

This means that the Department of Defense and Congress should take a hard look at

May 19, 2020 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Ministry of Defence’s poor management of contracts for nuclear infrastructure projects

MPs slam MoD’s ‘utter failure’ to improve contract management as nuclear project costs soar

Civil Service World  by Beckie Smith on 18 May 2020 

‘The department knows it can’t go on like this,’ says PAC chair   The Ministry of Defence’s poor management of contracts has left taxpayers picking up the bill after nuclear infrastructure projects have swelled beyond their planned time and budget, a public spending watchdog has found.

The Public Accounts Committee found three nuclear infrastructure projects had together gone £1.45bn over budget and were each between 1.7 and 6.3 years because of problems with their contracts’ design and management.

The committee’s inquiry examined three projects: the building of a nuclear warhead assembly and disassembly facility, known as MENSA, at AWE Burghfield; the Rolls Royce-owned and operated Core Production Capability facilities at Raynesway, where the department is upgrading facilities for nuclear reactor core production; and the BAE Systems-owned Barrow shipyard facility to allow modular build of Dreadnought-class submarines.

The MoD was unable to explain why it had made repeated mistakes designing and managing the contracts – which represent the three biggest nuclear infrastructure projects it is managing – despite being warned about the same issues in the past, PAC said in a report last week.

The MPs said that both PAC and the National Audit Office had been warning of similar contracting mistakes for more than 30 years. The MoD had also “failed to learn lessons from comparable projects in the civil nuclear sector and in the United States”, they added.

The PAC report followed a NAO finding in January that “inherent uncertainties of early designs [in the three contracts] do not incentivise site operators, or their sub-contractors, to negotiate and share risks, increasing risks for the department”.

“It is therefore disappointing to see that in their early days the department made the same mistakes, also experienced by others, as were made more than 30 years ago,” the NAO report said.

The ministry said it “immensely regretted” the waste of money but admitted costs could keep rising because the contracts had left the government to assume financial risk……. https://www.civilserviceworld.com/articles/news/mps-slam-mods-utter-failure-improve-contract-management-nuclear-project-costs-soar

May 19, 2020 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Britain’s Ministry of Defence continues its costly mistakes in nuclear weapons and submarines

Dundee Courier 16th May 2020, A Fife MP has lifted the lid on “astonishing and deeply worrying”
mistakes made by the Ministry of Defence, which have led to the costs of replacing Britain’s nuclear weapons and nuclear submarines soaring by a staggering £1.35 billion.

Glenrothes and Central Fife SNP MP Peter Grant, who sits on parliament’s Public Accounts Committee, has described the situation as “unacceptable” following the release of a new report that
suggests errors made by the MoD are being repeated more than 30 years after
they were first highlighted by Britain’s public spending watchdog.

https://www.thecourier.co.uk/fp/news/local/fife/1318748/staggering-1-35bn-wastage-on-nuclear-subs-contracts-unacceptable-says-fife-mp/

May 18, 2020 Posted by | politics, UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

French government tries to downgrade radiation risk, avoid compensating Polynesian victims of nuclear testing

Outrage in Tahiti over French nuclear law moves,  https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/416865/outrage-in-tahiti-over-french-nuclear-law-moves  There has been an outcry in French Polynesia over moves by the French National Assembly to slip a clause about compensation over nuclear weapons testing into Covid-19 legislation.

A French Polynesian member of the French Assembly Moetai Brotherson said it was a scandal that this was added into deliberations when French Polynesia’s members were away from Paris because of the pandemic.

The nuclear test veterans organisations, Moruroa e tatou and Association 193, also expressed outrage.

The French government wants to re-introduce the concept of neglible risk of the tests in compensation cases after a court ruling had done away with it.

Over a 30-year period of France’s weapons tests in the South Pacific some of the atmospheric blasts irradiated most islands.

Mr Brotherson said he had only just heard about the National Assembly move and wondered what the French Polynesian people had ever done to be so detested by the French state.

Hiro Tefaarere of Moruroa e tatou said he was outraged but not surprised about the way France was going about it.

He said all presidents, from de Gaulle to Macron, couldn’t care less about Polynesians, and although France was responsible for public health in Tahiti it failed to keep a register to see how many people died because of fallout from the weapons tests.

Auguste Uebe Carlson, who heads Association 193, said France kept refusing to recognise the impact of the tests, using instead propaganda to say they were clean or a thing of the past.

He said nothing was recognised, with health problems now being attributed to poor diet and life-style choices.

ast year, French Polynesia’s social security agency calculated that it had so far spent $US770 million on health care costs for people deemed to have radiation-induced illnesses.

May 18, 2020 Posted by | France, OCEANIA, politics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Profiteering from the pandemic, the Pentagon and nuclear industry exploit the situation

Beware the Pentagon’s Pandemic Profiteers, Hasn’t the Military-Industrial Complex Taken

enough of Our Money?  POGO,  BY MANDY SMITHBERGER | FILED UNDER ANALYSIS | MAY 04, 2020    This piece originally appeared on TomDispatch.com.

At this moment of unprecedented crisis, you might think that those not overcome by the economic and mortal consequences of the coronavirus would be asking, “What can we do to help?” A few companies have indeed pivoted to making masks and ventilators for an overwhelmed medical establishment. Unfortunately, when it comes to the top officials of the Pentagon and the CEOs running a large part of the arms industry, examples abound of them asking what they can do to help themselves.

It’s important to grasp just how staggeringly well the defense industry has done in these last nearly 19 years since 9/11. Its companies (filled with ex-military and defense officials) have received trillions of dollars in government contracts, which they’ve largely used to feather their own nests. Data compiled by the New York Times showed that the chief executive officers of the top five military-industrial contractors received nearly $90 million in compensation in 2017. An investigation that same year by the Providence Journal discovered that, from 2005 to the first half of 2017, the top five defense contractors spent more than $114 billion repurchasing their own company stocks and so boosting their value at the expense of new investment.

To put this in perspective in the midst of a pandemic, the co-directors of the Costs of War Project at Brown University recently pointed out that allocations for the Food and Drug Administration, the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and the National Institutes of Health for 2020 amounted to less than 1% of what the U.S. government has spent on the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan alone since 9/11. While just about every imaginable government agency and industry has been impacted by the still-spreading coronavirus, the role of the defense industry and the military in responding to it has, in truth, been limited indeed. The highly publicized use of military hospital ships in New York City and Los Angeles, for example, not only had relatively little impact on the crises in those cities but came to serve as a symbol of just how dysfunctional the military response has truly been.

Bailing Out the Military-Industrial Complex in the COVID-19 Moment

Demands to use the Defense Production Act to direct firms to produce equipment needed to combat COVID-19 have sputtered, provoking strong resistance from industries worried first and foremost about their own profits. Even conservative Washington Post columnist Max Boot, a longtime supporter of increased Pentagon spending, has recently recanted, noting how just such budget priorities have weakened the ability of the United States to keep Americans safe from the virus. “It never made any sense, as Trump’s 2021 budget had initially proposed, to increase spending on nuclear weapons by $7 billion while cutting Centers for Disease Control and Prevention funding by $1.2 billion,” he wrote. “Or to create an unnecessary Space Force out of the U.S. Air Force while eliminating the vitally important directorate of global health by folding it into another office within the National Security Council.”

In fact, continuing to prioritize the U.S. military will only further weaken the country’s public health system. ……..

How Not to Deal With COVID-19

Along with those military-industrial bailouts came the fleecing of American taxpayers. While many Americans were anxiously awaiting their $1,200 payments from that congressional aid and relief package, the Department of Defense was expediting contract payments to the arms industry. Shay Assad, a former senior Pentagon official, accurately called it a “taxpayer rip-off” that industries with so many resources, not to speak of the ability to borrow money at incredibly low interest rates, were being so richly and quickly rewarded in tough times. Giving defense giants such funding at this moment was like giving a housing contractor 90% of upfront costs for renovations when it was unclear whether you could even afford your next mortgage payment.

Right now, the defense industry is having similar success in persuading the Pentagon that basic accountability should be tossed out the window. ……..

Unfortunately, as COVID-19 spread on the aircraft carrier the USS Theodore Roosevelt, that ship became emblematic of how ill-prepared the current Pentagon leadership proved to be in combatting the virus. Despite at least 100 cases being reported on board—955 crewmembers would, in the end, test positive for the disease and Chief Petty Officer Charles Robert Thacker Jr. would die of it—senior Navy leaders were slow to respond. Instead, they kept those sailors at close quarters and in an untenable situation of increasing risk. When an emailed letter expressing the concerns of the ship’s commander, Captain Brett Crozier, was leaked to the press he was quickly removed from command. But while his bosses may not have appreciated his efforts for his crew, his sailors did. He left the ship to a hero’s farewell. ……… https://www.pogo.org/analysis/2020/05/beware-the-pentagons-pandemic-profiteers/

May 16, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

If You Like Covid-19, You’ll Love Nuclear War

Might this unsteady and unseemly American president soon become subject to still more serious forms of personal dissemblance and/or psychological debility? Leaving aside Trump’s largely unprecedented and breathtaking venality,[5] his open indifference to history and above all his continuing malfeasance and shameless dishonesty, should he still be allowed to decide whether we Americans should live or die?
If You Like Covid-19, You’ll Love Nuclear War  Prof. Louis René Beres, Modern Diplomacy  May 11, 2020    Even now, after some many staggering and irreversible leadership mistakes on Corona virus – grievous errors that could eventually cost the lives of very many Americans – President Donald J. Trump continues to hold undiminished US nuclear weapons authority.
Though a great many American voices will respond angrily to any conjunction of these two discrete threats as manipulative or unfair, such responses would still ignore a core commonality. Incontestable and irremediable, this stubbornly shared connection on disease and war concerns Mr. Trump’s indifference to approaching complex problems analytically.

It also reveals his incapacity to feel even a scintilla of human empathy for other human beings.

What does all this really mean? In what specific policy directions should we Americans now be propelled? Continue reading →

May 12, 2020 Posted by | politics, Trump - personality, USA | 1 Comment

Alabama joins Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia to criminalize fossil fuel protests

the Alabama legislation is the most concerning, Gibson said. “It’s pretty cynical,” he said. “It’s a combination of deterrent against would-be protesters and revenge insurance if anyone dares engage in nonviolent direct action against pipelines or polluting facilities.”
Yet Another State Quietly Moves To Criminalize Fossil Fuel Protests Amid Coronavirus   https://www.huffingtonpost.com.au/entry/alabama-fossil-fuel-pipeline-protest-criminalize_n_5eb590b4c5b6197b8461d550?ri18n=true&ncid=engmodushpmg00000004  

In March, Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia passed laws restricting pipeline protests. Alabama is poised to become the fourth.

By Alexander C. Kaufman  10 May 20 Alabama lawmakers this week advanced legislation to add new criminal penalties to nonviolent protests against pipelines and other fossil fuel projects, setting a course to become the fourth state to enact such measures amid the chaos of the coronavirus pandemic.

The bill would designate virtually any oil, gas or coal equipment or facilities in the state as “critical infrastructure” and severely prohibit where aerial drones that watchdog groups depend on to track pollution can fly. The legislation would make any action that “interrupts or interferes” with pipelines, storage depots or refineries a Class C felony, punishable with at least one year in prison and up to $15,000 in fines.

Kentucky, South Dakota and West Virginia enacted similar measures in March, just as states started implementing lockdowns to contain the outbreak of COVID-19, the respiratory illness caused by the virus.

The Alabama Senate passed the bill on March 12, just befohe Alabama Senate passed the bill on March 12, just before state officials, alarmed at the spread of the virus, postponed legislative hearings for a month. When the capitol reopened in Montgomery on May 4, state Democrats remained in their home districts, but enough Republican lawmakers returned to restart work on the legislation. On Monday, the House version of the bill was introduced and referred to the committee that oversees utilities and infrastructure. Continue reading →

May 11, 2020 Posted by | civil liberties, climate change, Legal, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Ukraine’s Energy ministry limits operations of nuclear power plants

Energy ministry limits operations of nuclear power plants   UNIAN Information Agency  9 May 20 Ukraine   “…..This week, the issue of a nuclear power units’ shutdown widely reverberated in a public discourse. From May 5, only 10 of 15 nuclear power units have been operating in Ukraine (four were put on scheduled repairs and one was put into reserve mode). According to the operating schedule for 2020, nine nuclear power units will operate at limited capacities. The government decided to take such a step in connection with the drop in electricity consumption caused by quarantine and record generation from renewables.

That is, generation has increased significantly, while consumption has fallen. Under these conditions, the relevant ministry resorted to extraordinary measures: to limit operations at nuclear power plants….”     UNIAN: https://www.unian.info/economics/week-s-balance-cabinet-extend

May 11, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, Ukraine | Leave a comment

South Africa’s financially difficult nuclear ambitions

South Africa to develop plan for new 2,500 MW nuclear plant, CAPE TOWN, May 7 (Reuters) – South Africa will soon start developing a plan for a new 2,500 megawatt (MW) nuclear power plant, the energy ministry told lawmakers on Thursday.

Africa’s most industrialised economy, which operates the continent’s only nuclear power plant near Cape Town, said last year that it was considering adding more nuclear capacity in the long term, after abandoning in 2018 a massive nuclear expansion championed by former president Jacob Zuma.

Analysts had expressed serious concern about Zuma’s project for a fleet of nuclear plants totalling 9,600 MW because it would have put massive additional strain on public finances at a time of credit rating downgrades. …..

The presentation showed South Africa wanted to complete the procurement of the new nuclear plant by 2024 but gave no indication as to when it wanted construction of the plant to start or for when the plant would come online……

financing those nuclear ambitions could be difficult at a time that the country’s recession-hit economy is being hammered by the coronavirus pandemic, with this year’s budget deficit expected to stretch into double digits.

Answering questions, Energy Minister Gwede Mantashe said on Thursday that the government would first “test the market” and hear what potential investors or consortia had to say about building the new nuclear facility……  https://af.reuters.com/article/southAfricaNews/idAFL8N2CP8M8

May 11, 2020 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Pandemic may force USA to cut back on bloated spending on nuclear weapons

May 9, 2020 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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