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Why Bunkers Won’t Save The Super Rich

Inside the doomsday culture of the elites.

• Jessica Wildfire, November 26 2024,  https://www.the-sentinel-intelligence.net/why-bunkers-wont-save-the-super-rich/?ref=ok-doomer-newsletter

If you ever wonder if you’re taking the end of the world too seriously, you can always google “doomsday bunkers” and see what the billionaires are up to. Also, Germany just started designing an app to help its citizens find a fallout shelter in case Putin ever makes good on his nuclear threats.

Five years…

That’s how long you’d last in the Survival Condo, a luxury bunker built into an abandoned missile silo. It’s what Bradley Garrett describes as a geoscraper, an inverse skyscraper designed to withstand the collapse of civilization. This thing has everything a disaster movie could want.

The operation is run by Larry Hall, a former military contractor and entrepreneur who once designed hardened data centers.

From House Beautiful:

There’s a general store, an indoor pool and spa, a gym, medical first aid center, a library, a classroom, a bar and more.

But features like the direct shooting range, digital weather station, monolithic dome cap, and security command center remind guests of the structure’s war zone history. “The mission is to protect residents from a whole wide range of threats,” Hall said. “Everything from viral or bacterial threats and chemicals to volcanic ash, meteors, solar flares and civil unrest,” he says.

The place also has at least one remote-controlled rifle turret. As the guy in charge says, “You can kill people like it’s a video game.” I wouldn’t be surprised if they’ll have drones and robots soon. This underground fortress also boasts three military-grade air filtration systems, at $30,000 each.

The cost of a suite here runs into the millions.

A Saudi Prince tried to buy one of Hall’s latest projects outright. He turned them down out of principle. As Hall himself admits, any bunker needs social cohesion to ensure survival. Even at the end of the world, people need to feel normal. Otherwise, they go bonkers… inside their bunkers.

Over the last decade, prepping has turned into a multi-billion dollar industry, filled with companies ready to capitalize on everyone’s growing sense of dread about the future. And yet, nobody does it like the rich. They’re spending millions of dollars on bunker palaces with moats, water cannons, and secret tunnels lined with flame throwers. I’m not even kidding.

Read this:

“The client [a business mogul] was saying, ‘I want to make sure that no one can get to my family,’ so we wound up literally building a 30-foot-deep lake [around the compound] skimmed with a lighter-than-water flammable liquid that can transform into a ring of fire.”

When they’re not preparing for the end of the world, the rich can use their water canons to play games or “blow rainbows in the air.”

Yep, some bunkers double as theme parks.

Obviously, it’s no fun to have a bunker if you can’t show it off to all your rich friends. According to a 2017 piece in The New Yorker, that’s exactly what the bankers and hedge fund managers do. They get together over wine.

They brag about their doomsday plans.

Luxury bunkers surged in popularity at the start of the pandemic, but they have a long heritage. Governments around the world have built thousands of them over the last century with hundreds of billions in taxpayer money. As militaries abandon the originals for better designs, the ultra rich have been snatching them up and flipping them. There’s a real booming dooming market for apocalyptic real estate, explored by Garrett in his book Bunker.

Yeah, bunker flipping.

It’s a thing.

If Douglas Rushkoff’s Survival of The Richest whet your curiosity for the doomsday culture of the super rich, then Bunker satisfies it and then some. Toward the end, I was going, “Jeez another one…?”

(That’s a good thing.)

With enough subtility to avoid pissing off his interview subjects, Bradley Garrett answers every question I ever had about bunkers, specifically if they even stood a chance of surviving real doom.

Let’s dig in.

November 30, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment

US Congress wants to turn the nuclear regulator into the US industry’s cheerleader—again

the new act does not cite the Atomic Energy Act’s original safety standard of “adequate protection” (Section 182), but rather a watered-down version of “reasonable assurance of adequate protection.” In the law, words matter.

By Victor Gilinsky | November 21, 2024, Victor Gilinsky is a physicist and was a commissioner of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission during the Ford, Carter, and Reagan administrations.  https://thebulletin.org/2024/11/congress-wants-to-turn-the-nuclear-regulator-into-the-us-industrys-cheerleader-again/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter11212024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_NuclearRegulatorIndustryCheerleader_11212024

The US Congress overwhelmingly approved the ADVANCE Act in July to accelerate licensing of “advanced” reactors. These consist mainly of fast reactors, which radically differ from those operating today, and include “fusion machines.” There were no public hearings on the act, and it shows every sign of having been written by interested parties and with little vetting.

The Energy Department and the US nuclear industry are promoting fast reactor demonstration projects, the prime being TerraPower’s Natrium project in Wyoming. The project broke ground in June but still awaits a full construction permit. No commercial reactors of this type are operating today. TerraPower foresees selling hundreds of such reactors for domestic use and export. The new law is largely directed at clearing the way for the rapid licensing of such reactors by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). It does so in part by providing additional resources but also—more ominously—by weakening the agency’s safety reviews and inspections in the name of efficiency.

Efficiency over safety. The act’s insidious approach is, first, to direct the NRC to modify its “mission statement” to add a provision that its licensing and safety reviews will “not unnecessarily limit the benefits of nuclear energy to society.” The addition sounds innocuous: No one is going to defend unnecessary work. But the message is clear. To make sure it works its way down to the daily decisions made by NRC’s safety engineers, the act then gives the commissioners one year to supply Congress with a report on what guidance they will provide to the professional engineering staff to “ensure effective performance” under the new mission.

In a bureaucracy, you get what you incentivize for: Congress wants the commissioners to make clear to safety reviewers that every hour they will take is an hour that society will be deprived of nuclear energy (and someone’s grandmother will sit in the dark). This sort of pressure spells trouble. The safety of complex systems with inherent dangers is a subtle trade and requires unbiased attention to avoid serious errors. That is especially true of newly commercialized technology. NRC safety reviews and inspections are especially critical in protecting the public because, with nuclear power, there is no customer feedback loop like there is with, say, commercial flying. If people get worried about flying, they can vote for more safety by not buying tickets. Once a nuclear plant is turned on, there is realistically not much the public can do.

The Energy Department’s web page said the new law would help to “build new reactors at a clip that we haven’t seen since the 1970s.” But the department seems to forget that the 1970s spurt of licensing—encouraged by the commissioners of the old Atomic Energy Commission—resulted in light-water power reactors with many safety problems. These problems were then left for the newly independent NRC to resolve, taking years and leading to considerable expense.

Weaker definition of safety. For Congress to address the mission statement of a federal agency is itself strange. Mission statements, like “vision” statements, are products of business schools and management consultants and are typically brief generalities that hardly anyone pays much attention to. The Energy Department says its mission is “to ensure the security and prosperity of the United States by addressing its energy, environmental, and nuclear challenges.” Congress could have told the department to speed up the reactor development process, but it didn’t. Instead, it acted on the assumption that the stumbling block to a nuclear future lies in the NRC licensing system.

The ADVANCE Act acknowledges the need for the NRC to continue to enforce the safety requirements of the Atomic Energy Act while pursuing the goal of “efficiency.” But in doing so, the new act does not cite the Atomic Energy Act’s original safety standard of “adequate protection” (Section 182), but rather a watered-down version of “reasonable assurance of adequate protection.” In the law, words matter.

The commission has been using that weaker standard of safety for some years—not legitimately, in my view. The new act now validates it. The NRC lamely claims that the additional three words are just explanatory—needed to avoid the implication that “adequate protection” would mean perfect safety—and do not affect the basic standard. But the commissioners don’t dare apply that logic to the security part of the NRC’s responsibilities, which, if they did, would read: “to promote reasonable assurance of the common defense and security.” There is no question that the addition changes the meaning.

Deja vu. For Congress to put the onus on NRC’s safety engineers to speed along the reactors of a yet-untested type is reminiscent of the situation before the 1974 Energy Reorganization Act separated the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) regulators from the agency’s reactor developers. The 93^rd Congress did not give the nuclear regulators independent status out of some concern for administrative neatness. It was done because the AEC commissioners neglected their safety responsibilities. The AEC kept the regulatory staff on a short leash, mainly so that they would not get in the way of the project the commissioners cared most about—as it turns out, also a demonstration fast reactor that was supposed to be followed by hundreds and even thousands of commercial orders. In the end, it all came to nothing. Glenn Seaborg, the then-chairman who was largely responsible for the debacle, would later admit: “[N]one of the [underlying] assumptions proved correct.”

We’ve gone through several iterations of nuclear power over-enthusiasm since the AEC thought fast reactors would soon power the world: The “nuclear renaissance” during the George W. Bush administration was to produce dozens of power reactor orders by 2010; then its Global Nuclear Energy Partnership was going to build fast reactors to burn spent fuel and obviate the need for additional geologic storage; and now fast power reactors are hyped again. None of the earlier expectations worked out. But each time, the certainty of the predictions was used to lean on the regulators to smooth the way. The ADVANCE legislation’s assumption that many orders for fast reactors will soon be coming and that the NRC must be disciplined to avoid a holdup has the makings of another such episode.

Congress’s main concern about the NRC should be that it is an effective protector of public safety.

November 24, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment

When you combine AI and nuclear power, the results can be catastrophic 

by Linda Parks, opinion contributor  – 11/10/24,  https://thehill.com/opinion/energy-environment/4981304-microsoft-ai-nuclear-power-dangers/?fbclid=IwY2xjawGeg21leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHWYiopnuIePPG9Ljv_TROxe6zZNXuK_9Be67zrRjotECxbLEyeCYwMBE3A_aem_aflz3yBO4ySUH5GvKjedCQ

The recent news that Microsoft has made a deal to restart the Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant to run its AI data centers brings together two technologies that have each been described as having the potential for a “nuclear-level catastrophe.”

Putting aside whether AI is mature enough to be feeding it with astronomical amounts of our energy supplies, powering it with renewable energy is critical for our energy future and safety.

Mark Jacobson, director of Stanford’s atmosphere and energy program, finds that “Every dollar spent on nuclear is one less dollar spent on clean renewable energy and one more dollar spent on making the world a comparatively dirtier and more dangerous place, because nuclear power and nuclear weapons go hand in hand.”

It is a fallacy to think that nuclear power is reasonable when compared with renewable energy sources. In fact, nuclear energy and its carcinogenic radioactive waste is the most dangerous and fiscally risky energy option.  

The deal that Gov. Gavin Newsom and California State Legislature struck with Pacific Gas and Electric to extend the life of its last nuclear plant, the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant, will saddle California ratepayers with some of the highest electricity rates in the nation for years to come. Yet such rate increases are unnecessary thanks to the state’s rapid transition to renewable energy and an estimated 13,391 MW of battery storage — well above the 2,200 MW produced by Diablo Canyon’s reactors.  

Now is the time to be clear-eyed and double down on renewable energy. With the energy demands of AI increasing, other states are considering following the same expensive and dangerous path as Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island Nuclear Power Plant, the site of the country’s worst commercial nuclear accident. Even with Microsoft’s investment, the deal is reliant on massive government subsidies. Without those government handouts, powering AI data centers with nuclear power doesn’t pencil out.  

Nuclear plants cost billions of dollars to build and billions of dollars to upgrade. That’s why the nuclear industry depends on tax dollars, tax credits (like Three Mile Island), and ratepayers to pay higher electricity bills.

That same transfer of costs onto the backs of the public occurs if there’s a nuclear accident. A “nuclear-level catastrophe” at a nuclear power plant would leave the public with uninsurable property loss, astronomical clean-up costs and, more importantly, the very real human costs — particularly to young children, who are most vulnerable to radiation. The lack of any solution for nuclear waste disposal further extends the risk of radiation exposure out tens of thousands of years into the future

When the safety of nuclear plants becomes questionable, like at Diablo Canyon (unknowingly built along active earthquake faults) and with Fukushima, Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and the Santa Susana Field Lab all happening in our lifetimes, it becomes abundantly clear that nuclear accidents happen. The fallout isn’t worth the risk.  

Big tech needs to find more energy-efficient ways to run AI data centers, and direct its major energy investments, along with the government, to clean renewable energy that doesn’t make our world dirtier and more dangerous. 

Linda Parks is on the board of Mothers for Peace, an organization committed to the decommissioning of the Diablo Nuclear Power Plant. She is executive director of Save Open-space and Agricultural Resources in Ventura County and is on the board of the Environmental Defense Center. She served on the Ventura County Board of Supervisors from 2003-2022 and was a mayor and councilmember of Thousand Oaks. While a supervisor, she chaired the Ventura County Regional Energy Alliance and was a founding member and vice chair of the Clean Power Alliance.  

November 11, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment

The non-proliferation considerations of nuclear-powered submarines

Alexander Hoppenbrouwers |Research Intern at the Vienna Center for Disarmament and Non-Proliferation (VCDNP) 28 Oct 24  https://europeanleadershipnetwork.org/commentary/the-non-proliferation-considerations-of-nuclear-powered-submarines/

Since its announcement in late 2021, the AUKUS security partnership has sparked heated debate about its impact on global security. Critics of the partnership argue that it would provide nuclear-powered submarines fuelled with high-enriched uranium to Australia, a non-nuclear weapon state under the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT). Non-nuclear weapon states can conclude a so-called Article 14 arrangement in such situations, which means that routine safeguard measures by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to ensure that the fuel is not diverted for the production of nuclear material for a weapons programme would temporarily not be applied. Some states have called this a nuclear proliferation risk.

The political and legal considerations in Article 14 arrangements have been, and continue to be, extensively discussed. Relatively little attention has been paid to the technical factors related to the nuclear-powered submarine programme that would influence an Article 14 arrangement. Exploring technical issues shows that the main potential proliferation risks associated with an Article 14 arrangement are located outside of the actual use of nuclear material to fuel the submarine, and that the IAEA will need to ensure that classification concerns do not stand in the way of adequate verification measures during this period.

Article 14 and diversion

Article 14 refers to a standard part of the safeguards agreement that non-nuclear weapon states must conclude with the IAEA. Under an Article 14 arrangement, routine safeguards procedures are not applied to nuclear material to be used in non-proscribed military activities (as opposed to the proscribed use as nuclear explosives) since applying them would reveal classified military information. They are replaced by other measures that allow the IAEA to provide credible assurance that this nuclear material is not diverted. When evaluating the risk of diversion, much of the current literature focuses on the scenario where a state uses the non-application of safeguards as an opportunity to covertly remove the nuclear material from the submarine.

Looking at technical issues shows the challenge associated with such diversion. In the case of AUKUS, to remove nuclear material, the metal submarine hull designed to withstand tremendous water pressure would need to be cut open with heavy machinery. The submarine’s fuel would then be extracted from the reactor, requiring specialised facilities. Fuel for a nuclear submarine, however, cannot easily be used for the production of nuclear material for a weapons programme: it comes in the form of fuel rods surrounded by metal or ceramic cladding rather than the uranium or plutonium metal form used in weapons programmes. The uranium in this fuel would need to be chemically separated from other materials before it could be used to produce nuclear material for a weapons programme. All the above steps cannot be carried out quickly enough to outpace international reaction, so it would have to be done in covert facilities without alerting other states to the fact that a submarine worth billions of euros had disappeared and an underground weapons programme had been launched. Hatches in the hull can provide easier access to the nuclear material, but the fuel used by submarines with hatches consists of uranium that is lower enriched – and thus less proliferation-sensitive – than the uranium AUKUS submarines will use.

The main potential proliferation risks associated with an Article 14 arrangement are located outside of the actual use of nuclear material to fuel the submarine. Alexander Hoppenbrouwers

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This suggests that two other technical issues will decide the diversion risks of an Article 14 arrangement. Firstly, how easy it is to use the fuel in question to produce nuclear material for a weapons programme. In addition to the ease of separating uranium from other materials mentioned above, this ease is determined by the enrichment of uranium. This refers to the percent of the total material that is fissile. Nuclear-powered submarines make use of uranium enriched to levels between around five and 97 percent, while weapons programmes generally require enrichment of 90 percent or higher. Secondly, how much access the state has to the type of nuclear facilities needed for the production of nuclear material for a weapons programme. Enrichment and reprocessing facilities play a key role in this regard.

The ability of the IAEA to carry out verification related to these two technical issues may be limited by classification concerns. Knowing the technical specifications of submarine fuel can help outsiders deduce what the submarine’s capacities, such as speed or operational range, might be. To avoid this, states may try to limit verification measures that could reveal technical specifications, such as routine safeguards. This could also apply to activities outside of the fuel’s use in the submarine, for example when the fuel is being fabricated.

What diversion risks should Article 14 discussions focus on?

Considering the above technical concerns, three main diversion risks present themselves. First, a state could use an excuse to remove nuclear fuel from the submarine when it returns to port. For instance, the state could claim that the submarine is undergoing maintenance unrelated to the nuclear material, which would reveal classified information if observed. A believable excuse may allow the state to gain a head start in the lengthy process of removing nuclear material described earlier by reducing international scrutiny.

Second, a state could attempt to divert nuclear material that is still in the fuel cycle. If it successfully argues that safeguards should not be applied to some nuclear facilities, reduced oversight offers an opportunity: for instance, the state could try to divert nuclear material being converted into fuel.

Third, a state could use the nuclear-powered submarine programme as an excuse to develop its nuclear capabilities. If a state domestically produces fuel for a submarine that requires high-enriched uranium, it has a chance to build a reserve of nuclear material—not yet converted into submarine fuel—that could be diverted before the international community has an opportunity to respond.

These diversion risks suggest that an Article 14 arrangement should pay close attention to four key measures:

• There should be minimal and ideally no non-application of safeguards outside of the use of fuel in the submarine.
• Oversight should be given over the transportation of nuclear material, and its presence in facilities should be verified, including in a classified form.
• Verification measures should be carried out when nuclear material is placed in and removed from the submarine.
• The nuclear material’s presence in the submarine should regularly be verified.

Furthermore, discussions on Article 14 arrangements should consider a submarine programme’s impact outside the arrangement itself. In this context, any potential increase in a state’s ability to produce nuclear material for a weapons programme should be met with increased international monitoring.

TThe negotiations of the document on which Article 14 is based gives the IAEA solid arguments to apply safeguards to nuclear material when it is not used as fuel in the submarine, including during transportation between facilities. Alexander Hoppenbrouwer

What could the IAEA’s approach to Article 14 negotiations be?

The closer verification measures get to the finished form of the fuel and to the submarine, the more a state will object to them due to their potential to reveal information about the submarine’s operational capacity. When the IAEA pursues its goal of providing credible assurance that nuclear material is not diverted, the main obstacle it will encounter is the need to balance its objective with Article 14’s enshrinement of the protection of classified knowledge.

The IAEA can insist on at least the first three of the four points laid out above. The negotiations of the document on which Article 14 is based clearly established that the non-application of safeguards does not extend to activities that are not intrinsically military, specifically naming enrichment and reprocessing. While the status of fuel fabrication activities is less clear, this gives the IAEA solid arguments to apply safeguards to nuclear material when it is not used as fuel in the submarine, including during transportation between facilities. It also suggests that the IAEA should be able to verify that fuel has entered an intrinsically military activity, namely when it is installed in the submarine. Regarding the fourth point, it is unlikely that the IAEA will regularly be able to carry out verification measures in or around the submarine. However, seeing the submarine in operational use would confirm the presence of nuclear material on board. The IAEA could, therefore, seek to ensure that it can carry out some verification measures whenever the submarine returns to port for longer-than-usual periods of time, adjusted based on how long the extraction of nuclear material from the submarine is estimated to take.

The European Leadership Network itself as an institution holds no formal policy positions. The opinions

October 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety | Leave a comment