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The News That Matters about the Nuclear Industry Fukushima Chernobyl Mayak Three Mile Island Atomic Testing Radiation Isotope

Wyoming’s Governor Gordon OK with the idea of nuclear waste dump

November 4, 2019 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

A USA Bill to make sensible but significant cuts to “nuclear weapons and delivery systems.”

New Bill Renews Debate on Nuclear Modernization,  https://www.cato.org/blog/new-bill-renews-debate-nuclear-modernization  November 1, 2019 By Eric Gomez 

On Tuesday, Senator Ed Markey (D-MA) and Representative Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) reintroduced bicameral legislation that would save U.S. taxpayers $75 billion on nuclear modernization costs over the next decade. The “Smarter Approach to Nuclear Expenditures Act,” or SANE Act, proposes sensible but significant cuts to “nuclear weapons and delivery systems.”

According to a press release from Sen. Markey’s office, the SANE Act will include the following:

  • Reduce the purchase of Columbia-class submarines from 12 to 8, cut the existing ICBM fleet from over 400 to 150, and reduce deployed strategic warheads from approximately 1,500 to 1,000 – saving $13.1 billion
  • Cancel the development of a new air-launched cruise missile and an associated warhead life extension program – saving $13.3 billion
  • Reduce to 80 the purchase of new B-21 long-range bombers – saving $11.6 billion
  • Cancel the development of new ICBMs and a new nuclear warhead – saving $13.6 billion
  • Cancel the development of a new submarine-launched cruise missile – saving $9 billion
  • Limit the plutonium pit production target to 30 per year – saving $9 billion

Sen. Markey stated that “The United States should fund education, not annihilation; that is our future…We need sanity when crafting America’s budget priorities, and more and improved nuclear weapons defies common sense.”

Rep. Blumenauer added that “these disastrous weapons will never be the answer to solving our complex and ever-changing national security threats…We should not be investing trillions of dollars of our budget on an outdated and irresponsible nuclear arsenal.”

At the time of the press release, the SANE Act was co-sponsored by Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and by eight members in the House. It has also been endorsed by several prominent organizations, including the Ploughshares Fund, Women’s Action for New Directions (WAND), Peace Action, Friends Committee on National Legislation (FCNL), Global Security Institute, and World Future Council.

Caroline Dorminey, policy director of WAND and my former colleague here at Cato, stated, “With defense budgets skyrocketing and a bow wave of costs bearing down on the Pentagon in upcoming years, now is the time for hard choices. Senator Markey, Representative Blumenauer, and cosponsors offer a clear alternative that will keep Americans safe without wasting their tax dollars on weapon systems that serve our past, not our future.”

Dorminey, who also co-edited Cato’s recently released America’s Nuclear Crossroads: A Forward-Looking Anthology with me and whose recommendations from her chapter on how best to manage nuclear modernization echo many of the proposals within the bill, also noted that “the SANE Act demonstrates [that] there are ample opportunities to craft a revised nuclear modernization plan that better reflects the shifting strategic priorities and evolution of threats facing the United States.”

Sen. Markey and Rep. Blumenauer have introduced various versions of the SANE Act in past years without success. Given current fiscal and political realities, perhaps this time will be different. Yet, whether the SANE Act passes or not, the legislation highlights the need for policymakers to have a robust debate on the merits of the modernization plan, if not America’s nuclear posture more broadly.

You can read the full bill here. To learn more about this and other pressing issues in nuclear deterrence and arms control, download a copy of America’s Nuclear Crossroads.

November 2, 2019 Posted by | politics, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Exelon wants tax-payer subsidies for nuclear reactors – threatens to close 4, otherwise.

Exelon threatens to close four nuclear plants in Illinois if Springfield doesn’t act https://www.thecentersquare.com/illinois/exelon-threatens-to-close-four-nuclear-plants-in-illinois-if/article_b4d2cc7e-fbff-11e9-9619-ab5ee6984f21.html, By Cole Lauterbach | The Center Square, Oct 31, 2019 

Exelon’s CEO said Thursday that four of the company’s nuclear facilities in Illinois could be shuttered if state lawmakers don’t take action to make them more profitable.

Exelon President and CEO Christopher Crane said in an earnings call Thursday that the company “can’t sit here for years and bleed cash and build up debt” by keeping four of our nuclear plants operating in the absence of legislation from Springfield that would make those plants more profitable.”

The company had previously said the Byron, Braidwood and Dresden plants were in danger of being shuttered. On Thursday, the company said the LaSalle plant also was at risk of closure.

“Some are more dire than others at this point and we need to move forward with the legislation to prevent the loss for the state from an environmental perspective and an economic perspective,” Crane said.

The four Illinois plants represent a significant portion of Exelon’s nuclear fleet.

At issue is the interaction between federal regulators and Exelon’s Illinois-based facilities that get green-energy credits, allowing those facilities to sell energy on the wholesale market at more competitive rates than other energy providers, such as coal plants.

Crane’s comments came two weeks after one of the company’s former executives, Exelon Utilities CEO Anne Prammagiore, abruptly retired and the corporation disclosed that it had been served with multiple subpoenas in connection to a federal probe involving state Sen. Martin Sandoval and the company’s lobbying practices. This week, Prammagiore also resigned as chair of the Federal Reserve Bank of Chicago, according to media reports.

A veteran legislator told Crain’s Chicago Business last week that it would be difficult for Exelon to get much done in Springfield until lawmakers know more about the federal investigations.

Two of Exelon’s nuclear facilities benefit from legislation that Crane said kept them open, which included rate increases on consumers.

November 2, 2019 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Wyoming legislators and their secret vote about nuclear waste dump

November 2, 2019 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Get the facts straight on nuclear energy

  To Editor of the Reformer, I was disturbed by the letter written by Kendall Neutron of San Diego, CA (“Nuclear waste can be dealt with safely”) and published in the Oct. 19-20 Reformer. Neutron claims to be a nuclear engineer who also claims to have a simple solution to the problem of safe storage and disposal of nuclear waste.I question the cost and safety of the solutions that are described.

Over 140 scientists from all over the world collaborated to write the book “Drawdown” edited by Paul Hawkin and published in 2017. They rank nuclear energy at No. 20 in the top 100 strategies to reduce or reverse global warming and describe these warnings:

Gen. 1 and 2 nuclear reactors (which include those built at Chernobyl and Fukushima and all those in the U.S.) use water to slow down nuclear chain reactions and use enriched uranium fuel. These are all located near major rivers or oceans making them capable of spewing nuclear radiation into major water supplies should any accident occur. The world watched this happen in Chernobyl and Fukushima, and to say that “nuclear energy is already the safest, cleanest, most eco-friendly, and least resource intensive way of generating constant power” is UNTRUE.

In addition to this, “Drawdown” reports this fact: “While virtually every other form of energy has gone down (in cost) over time, a nuclear power plant’s (cost) is four to eight times higher than it was four decades ago. According to the U.S. Department of Energy, advanced nuclear is the most expensive form of energy besides conventional gas turbines, which are comparatively inefficient. Onshore wind is a quarter of the cost of nuclear power.”

This is why the U.S. and Germany are closing down their older nuclear facilities and not planning new ones. China has 33 nuclear plants in operation and about 22 under construction as they move away from coal fired plants due to air pollution and global warming. China is also building solar and wind power at a very fast rate and producing electric vehicles of all kinds and is committed to reaching peak carbon dioxide in 2030 with a reduction of its carbon footprint from that day forward.

Let’s get the facts straight and continue to implement all kinds of less costly and less dangerous ways of producing and storing energy. In New England let’s work on replacing our last few aging nuclear plants with large offshore wind arrays such as Vineyard Wind which could produce at least 400 megawatts of power in its first stage of development.

November 2, 2019 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Turkey Has Long Had Nuclear Dreams

Ankara has been contemplating developing nuclear weapons since the 1960s.  Foreign Policy,  BY COLUM LYNCH,  NOVEMBER 1, 2019, 

In September, Turkish President Recep Tayyip Erdogan told members of his party that it is time for his country to acquire its own nuclear bomb.

Such a move would mark a sharp break from previous obligations by Turkey, a signatory of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which bars non-nuclear states from acquiring nuclear weapons. But this is not the first time that Turkey—which has played host to U.S. nuclear weapons since the late 1950s—has craved its own nuclear weapons program.

As part of our Document of the Week series, Foreign Policy is posting a copy of a Sept. 26, 1966, memo describing to then-Ambassador Parker T. Hart a troubling conversation Clarence Wendel, the U.S. minerals attache at the U.S. Embassy in Ankara, had with a “reliable” Turkish scientist on Turkey’s nuclear ambitions.

The memo, one of 20 previously declassified documents on nuclear weapons in Turkey compiled this week by the National Security Archive, claims the source disclosed that officials from Turkey’s General Directorate of Mineral Research and Exploration “had been asked to cooperate with General [Refik] Tulga and Professor Omer Inonu (Professor of Physics at METU) [Middle East Technical University] in a Turkish program to develop an ‘Atomic Bomb.’”

Wendel, according to the memo, had flagged a number of developments suggesting the claim may be credible, including: “Repeated Turkish assertions that a 200 mega-watt nuclear reactor is planned for Istanbul”; the stockpiling of reserves of 300 to 600 tons of uranium in low-grade ore deposits; and the “delaying and haggling tactics of the Turkish negotiators during discussions of the extension of the bilateral agreement on peaceful uses of atomic energy which primarily concerned the transfer of safeguards responsibility from the U.S.A. to the International Atomic Energy Agency.”……..https://foreignpolicy.com/2019/11/01/turkey-long-nuclear-dreams-erdogan-bomb/

November 2, 2019 Posted by | politics, Turkey | Leave a comment

No nuclear in South Africa’s future energy mix

South Africa’s future energy mix: wind, solar and coal, but no nuclear, The Conversation, Hartmut Winkler Professor of Physics, University of Johannesburg, October 30, 2019   South Africa has a new energy plan which covers 2019 to 2030. It follows cabinet’s recent adoption of a new Integrated Resource Plan for electricity generation.

The plan – which builds on a relatively well-received draft announced last year – makes some significant advances in changing South Africa’s energy mix. For example, it significantly ups the contribution of wind as well as solar power to South Africa’s overall energy allocation. The production of power from wind is expected to grow by 900% by 2030, and power from solar photovoltaic by 560%……

Ultimately economic realities dictate that coal and nuclear cannot compete with renewable technologies. These are already much cheaper, and their cost continues to drop by the year.

Even with maximum political will, a nuclear build cannot be realised without convincing investors and the public that it makes economic sense. It doesn’t……..https://theconversation.com/south-africas-future-energy-mix-wind-solar-and-coal-but-no-nuclear-111106

October 31, 2019 Posted by | politics, South Africa | Leave a comment

Brexit’s threat to Scotland’s environmental protection

Herald 28th Oct 2019,  SCOTLAND’S preparations to protect its world-renowned natural environment after Brexit remain “inadequate” and “urgent” action is needed to address gaps which it is feared will cause devastation, a major new report has revealed.
The report by Professor Campbell Gemmell, former head of Scottish
Environment Protection Agency, the national regulator, said there was a
need for a “new and coherent” governance system to act as a safeguard once
EU protections and oversight disappear after Britain’s departure from the
bloc. Last year, The Herald revealed Scottish Environment LINK’s concerns
that Scotland’s rarest species north of the Border face being obliterated
in the fall-out from Brexit unless urgent new laws and funding are brought
in to safeguard vital conservation work.https://www.heraldscotland.com/news/17996856.scots-natural-environment-risk-inadequate-brexit-plans/

October 29, 2019 Posted by | environment, politics, UK | Leave a comment

France’s government demands that EDF fix Flamanville nuclear reactor within one month

EDF given a month to draw up a fix for Flamanville’s nuclear woes French energy group under pressure to address faults highlighted in a new report.    https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6  David Keohane in Paris, 28 Oct 19.

The French government has given energy group EDF a month to deliver a plan to fix the litany of problems at the state-backed group’s over-budget flagship nuclear project at Flamanville. The planned plant at Flamanville in north-west France is considered a litmus test for the next-generation European Pressurised Reactor technology, and will help determine whether the French government will build further nuclear plants.
EDF had warned earlier this month that the cost of the project had ballooned by €1.5bn to €12.4bn, in part due to faulty weldings. On Monday, a government-commissioned report into the failings at Flamanville lambasted EDF. It pointed to several issues besetting the wider French nuclear industry, including a lack of specific skills at EDF, poor project management and headaches the group has had in integrating the nuclear business of its failed competitor Areva.

 “This is a failure for the entire French nuclear power industry, we must recognise this failure and treat it and address all the consequences,” Bruno Le Maire, French finance minister, said at a press conference in Paris.

 Flamanville was “supposed to have cost €3bn and its construction was supposed to have lasted four and a half years; it will now cost four times as much, and its construction will last for 15 years,” Mr Le Maire added.

 A decision by French president Emmanuel Macron on whether to build new nuclear plants comes as the government aims to cut the percentage of nuclear electricity used in France from 72 per cent to 50 per cent. Even as the overall percentage generated by nuclear drops, new plans may need to be build as older ones are shut.
Construction at Flamanville has been delayed until the end of 2022, having previously been scheduled for the end of 2019. EDF, which is controlled by the government, is also gearing up for an internal reorganisation of its structure.
 For EDF, the quid pro quo for reorganising itself is the hope of a new higher price for its nuclear energy — assuming it can be agreed with Brussels.
 Flamanville is just one of three projects being built in Europe using the next-generation EPR technology. The other two are the Olkiluoto project in Finland, which is more than a decade late, and the UK’s Hinkley Point, which is also delayed and mired in controversy over its high costs.   https://www.ft.com/content/877eedae-f987-11e9-a354-36acbbb0d9b6

October 29, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, France, politics | Leave a comment

The reprehensible pro nuclear campaign for bailing out nuclear power in Ohio

Melting Ice, Crumbling Nukes, Cecile Pineta Newsletter Sunday, October 27, 2019 For anyone following or attempting to follow nuclear energy news in the United States, what’s been going on in the State of Ohio is a solid indicator of just where we stand, technologically, and from a style of government standpoint.

Without going into stupefying background detail, I’ll try to sum up the Ohio situation with help from the summary published Oct. 26 by Bob Fitrakis and Harvey Wasserman who have been birddogging this issue for decades now. And I quote:

  • In July, the gerrymandered Ohio Legislature passed HB6, a massive

[1 billion-dollar] bailout to keep the two dying nukes operating on Lake Erie, [Davis-Besse, and Perry].

  • Akron-based First Energy is bankrupt…[demanding] a promised $1 billion bailout.
  • Signature gatherers were offered as much as $2,500 to turn over their signed petitions. [Contrast this with receiving only $.25 cents a signature.]

While disrupting legitimate [signature] gatherers, pro-nuke thugs aggressively collected multiple duplicate signatures for a fake non-binding petition.

Deep Pockets

  • First Energy then claimed it had gathered more than 800,000 “pro-nuke’ signatures.
  • First Energy accompanied [thug] assaults with a massive radio/TV/mailer campaign [with the ridiculous claim that] “Chinese Communists” were buying Ohio’s grid.
  • OACB’s court filing showed that state regulations imposed on certification have vastly reduced the number of referenda Ohioans can vote on.
  • Wednesday last, Oct. 26, a federal judge rejected OACB’s request for more time to gather signatures, and sent the case to the Ohio GOP-dominated Supreme Court.
  • OACB is rumored to have about 225,000 signatures on hand, 40,000 short of the threshold. Far more will be needed to overcome a [Republican] Secretary of State certain to disallow as many as [possible].
  • [And here’s the kicker:] Polls show Ohioans [who will be the rate-payers] vehemently opposed to the bailout. [That’s why] most observers believe if it [got] on the ballot, the referendum would pass by a large margin.
  • [But] should Federal appeals fail, and the Ohio Supreme Court refuse the request for more time, the referendum process will have suffered a potential death blow nationwide. It will mean Fascist thugs will be free to assault legitimate signature gatherers at will.

This last point is the main take-away. First Energy mounted this campaign in major Ohio cities: Youngstown, Akron, Toledo, and Columbus among them. It underwrote its million-dollar-plus cost-of-doing business in flyers, TV/radio/mailer announcements. It paid thousands of goon-disrupters to do their thuggish business on the streets.

At play is a $1 billion bailout. A million-dollar cost-of-doing business is a mere investment, a drop in the corporate bucket. At issue is that its cost will be passed directly to ratepayers.

Core tests conducted at Davis Besse show that its containment vessel is critically embrittled. Should there be an accident (like Three-Mile Island for example} Lake Erie is at serious risk of nuclear contamination. First Energy’s ratepayers draw their water from Lake Erie, the fourth largest of the Great Lakes and source of fresh water for Canadians and Americans living in the area.

Already in 2011, following the nuclear catastrophe at Fukushima, I covered the issue of Davis Besse’s critical embrittlement in Devil’s Tango: How I Learned the Fukushima Step by Step.

That was 8 years ago….. https://devilstangobook.blogspot.com/2019/10/melting-ice-crumbling-nukes.html?showComment=1572237519303#c7332297197888828316

October 28, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | 1 Comment

National nuclear commission strategy for Marshall Islands

Marshalls endorses nuclear commission strategy,  https://www.rnz.co.nz/international/pacific-news/401921/marshalls-endorses-nuclear-commission-strategy    The Marshall Islands government has endorsed the adoption of a national nuclear commission strategy for the next three years.

The strategy honours the legacy of Marshallese nuclear heroes and heroines who fought and continue to demand accountability for their communities.

The strategy was mandated in the Marshall Islands parliament, or Nitijela, as part of the National Nuclear Commission Act of 2017.

It focuses on five broad themes for nuclear justice: compensation, health care, the environment, national capacity, and education and awareness.

From 1946 to 1958, the US used the Marshall Islands to test its nuclear weapons.

The commission also aims to establish an independent panel of scientists and specialists in fields related to radiation exposure, to provide the republic’s citizens access to trusted, independent science.

The commission’s chair, Rhea Moss-Christian, said the NNC strategy was a tool for all Marshallese, whether living in the islands or overseas, to use in their individual and collective efforts to respond to the devastation resulting from the US nuclear weapons testing program in the Marshall Islands.

“It is also a resource for our partners and friends outside the Marshall Islands to understand the nuclear testing impacts that persist today and how they can support the Marshallese people,” Ms Moss-Christian said.

October 28, 2019 Posted by | OCEANIA, politics, wastes, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Governments manipulate social media – Twitter executive is a British army psychological operations officer

governments have a long history of trying to manipulate the media,” and are steadily moving into the realm of social media.
Facebook’s gigantic user base and its design make it an enormously influential media organization, one that can make or break politicians’ chances.
there is one rule for the powerful and quite another for the rest of us, and how the big social media platforms are increasingly acting like arms of Western governments, adopting their perspectives on what are and are not acceptable political viewpoints.

Media Ignore Unmasking of Twitter Exec as British Psyops Officer  https://fair.org/home/media-ignore-unmasking-of-twitter-exec-as-british-psyops-officer/comment-page-1/#comment-3169114  

Government penetration and control over media of little interest to those who are subject to it, ALAN MACLEOD, 24 Oct 19, A recent investigation from independent news outlet Middle East Eye (9/30/19) uncovered that a senior Twitter executive is, in fact, an officer in the British Army’s 77th Brigade, a unit dedicated to psychological operations (psyops), propaganda and online warfare.

Gordon MacMillan, who joined the social media company in 2013, is its head of editorial for the Middle East and North Africa. While both Twitter and the British Army attempted to distance themselves from the implications of the report, it is unclear why MacMillan would have this role if not to manipulate and propagandize the public. (The British Ministry of Defense describes psyops as a way of getting “the enemy, or other target audience, to think and act in a way which will be to our advantage”—BBC, 6/20/08.)

For media so committed to covering news of foreign interference with US public opinion online (see FAIR.org, 8/24/16, 12/13/17, 7/27/18), the response was distinctly muted.The story did not appear at all in the New York Times, Washington Post, CNN, CNBC, MSNBC, Fox News or virtually any other mainstream national outlet. In fact, the only corporate US outlet of any note covering the news that a person deciding what you see in your Twitter feed is a foreign psyops officer was Newsweek, which published a detailed analysis from Tareq Haddad (10/1/19). When asked by FAIR why he believed this was, Haddad agreed it was major news, but downplayed the idea of media malevolence, suggesting that because it was a small British outlet breaking news involving a British officer, US media may have overlooked it.

Yet the bombshell was also largely downplayed in the UK press as well, with only the Independent, (9/30/19), the London Times (10/2/19) and the Financial Times (9/30/19) producing reports on the news, bland and even-toned as they were. There was no other reporting of it in the national press, including in the BBC or the Guardian, the latter having already “gotten rid of everyone who seemed to cover the security services and military in an adversarial way,” according to one current employee.
Furthermore, the news was the focus of alarmed reports in alternative media (Moon of Alabama, 9/30/19; Consortium News, 10/2/19), as well as from foreign government-owned outlets that have been labeled propaganda mills, and have been demoted or deleted from social media platforms like Twitter, YouTube and Facebook. Turkey’s TRT World (10/1/19), Venezuela’s TeleSur English (10/1/19), Iran’s Press TV (9/30/19), and Russia’s Sputnik (9/30/19) and RT (9/30/19) all immediately covered the scandal, suggesting the lack of Western coverage was a political rather than a journalistic choice.

Deep State and Fourth Estate

Haddad also noted that “governments have a long history of trying to manipulate the media,” and are steadily moving into the realm of social media. Regular FAIR readers will already know this. Last year Facebook announced that, in its fight against “fake news,” it had started working with the National Democratic Institute and the International Republican Institute, two organizations involved in covertly assisting the overthrow of foreign governments through propaganda campaigns, among other methods (FAIR.org, 9/25/18). It also began partnering with the Atlantic Council (FAIR.org, 5/21/18), a NATO-funded think tank, whose board of directors is a who’s who of ex-CIA chiefs, army generals and Bush-era neocon politicians. That the likes of Henry Kissinger, Condoleezza Rice and David Petraeus are deciding what Facebook’s 2.4 billion worldwide users see in their news feed is tantamount to state censorship on a global scale (FAIR.org, 8/22/18).
Facebook’s gigantic user base and its design make it an enormously influential media organization, one that can make or break politicians’ chances. Media (e.g., New York Times, 11/1/17; Buzzfeed News, 4/18/19; USA Today, 4/22/19) have consistently implied that a relatively small Russian ad campaign on the platform swung the 2016 election in favor of Donald Trump. Less well known is that an American advertising team met with far-right party Alternative für Deutschland at Facebook headquarters in Berlin to devise a campaign of micro-targeting ads on the platform that led to a massive increase in their vote, the strongest fascist showing in Germany since the 1940s (FAIR.org, 6/19/19).

A Fact-Free Zone

Facebook has rules against accepting advertisements containing “deceptive, false or misleading content.” Yet earlier this month, it announced it was rescinding these rules for political ads, allowing politicians who pay them to lie to its users. Referencing the long run-up to the 2020 election, where it is sure to cash in on both sides, a spokesperson justified the decision on the grounds of free speech: “We don’t believe that it’s an appropriate role for us to referee political debates.” It did note, however, that it would continue to ban ads by non-politicians that “include claims debunked by third-party factcheckers, or, in certain circumstances, claims debunked by organizations with particular expertise.”

Yet factchecking organizations are not neutral arbiters of truth, but part of an increasingly elite class of people with their own biases and preconceptions. In practice, they have tended to espouse a “centrist” ideology—a word with its own problems (FAIR.org, 3/23/19)—and are hostile to anyone challenging the status quo from either right or left. Factcheckers have been carrying out something of a war against Bernie Sanders’ campaign, constantly rating the Vermont Senator’s statements as misleading or untrue without due reason.

Furthermore, the choice of who gets to decide what is true and what is false is an important one. Facebook has already partnered with conservative magazine the Weekly Standard, a publication that was crucial in pushing arguably the greatest fake news stories of the 21st century: those of Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Saddam Hussein’s links to 9/11 (Extra!, 9/09). “There is no debate about the facts” that “the Iraqi threat” to the US is “enormous” and that Saddam’s henchmen helped Osama Bin Laden, it wrote in 2002 (1/21/02). Yet Facebook picked this organization to help it gauge the veracity of viral stories across its platform.

Silencing Dissent Online

In September, Twitter suspended multiple accounts belonging to Cuban state media. And along with Facebook and YouTube, it also suspended hundreds of Chinese accounts it claimed were attempting to “sow political discord in Hong Kong” by “undermining the legitimacy” of the protest movement. These social media giants have already deleted thousands of Venezuelan, Russian and Iranian accounts and pages that were, in their own words, “in line with” those governments’ positions. The message is clear: Sharing opinions that do not fall in line with official US doctrine will not be tolerated online.

In contrast, Western politicians can continually flout Twitter’s terms of service with no consequences. Sen. Marco Rubio threatened Venezuelan President Nicolas Maduro with torture and execution, sharing a video of Moammar Gadhafi being tortured and killed in a not-so-subtle message that broke multiple Twitter rules. Meanwhile, Donald Trump announced that we would “totally destroy” North Korea with “fire and fury,” and promised he would bring about the “official end” of Iran if it angered him again. Twitter has continually refused to delete tweets like that on the grounds that this would “hamper necessary discussion,” although it later saw fit to delete those from Iran’s Ayatollah Ali Khamenei.

Decisions like these highlight how there is one rule for the powerful and quite another for the rest of us, and how the big social media platforms are increasingly acting like arms of Western governments, adopting their perspectives on what are and are not acceptable political viewpoints.

October 26, 2019 Posted by | 2 WORLD, media, politics, secrets,lies and civil liberties | Leave a comment

For the climate’s sake, the $multibillion nuclear industry bailouts must stop

October 26, 2019 Posted by | business and costs, climate change, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Rick Perry, as Energy Secretary, “solved” nuclear waste problem by reclassifying high level waste as low level

October 24, 2019 Posted by | politics, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

UK govt postpones decision on Wylfa nuclear project

Wylfa: Anglesey nuclear power plant planning decision deferred, BBC,

By Steffan Messenger, 22 Oct 19, BBC Wales environment correspondent A decision on whether to give a stalled £13bn nuclear power project planning permission has been deferred.Business Secretary Andrea Leadsom wants more information on environmental and other impacts for Wylfa Newydd on Anglesey.

She had been widely expected to back the proposals, granting what is known as a development consent order (DCO).

Hitachi shelved the scheme, the biggest energy project ever proposed in Wales, over funding issues.

Developers Horizon Nuclear Power had earlier said the decision would “heavily influence” how the project progresses.

Ms Leadsom has now given a deadline by the end of the year – and invited comments from Natural Resources Wales, the Office for Nuclear Regulation, Anglesey council and other bodies. She wants more assurances on various aspects – from biodiversity, visual impact, flooding and construction noise – and any risk to the Sandwich tern, which has a colony nearby.…….

Opponents of nuclear power have called on Ms Leadsom to dismiss the planning application and focus on renewable sources of electricity. Dylan Morgan of People Against Wylfa B said it was “obvious the developers are keen to get planning permission in order to try and sell the site”.

“But that’s easier said than done at the moment given the pretty perilous state of the global nuclear industry and the hopeless economics.”……. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk-wales-50139360

October 24, 2019 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

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