Hiding Britain’s H-bomb secrets https://www.theguardian.com/global/2018/dec/27/hiding-britains-h-bomb-secrets Sue Rabbitt Roffis alarmed at files being withdrawn by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority That the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority has withdrawn files relating to the development of the British H-bomb in Australia 70 years ago (Nuclear weapons and energy files removed from archives, 24 December) is indeed alarming to those of us trying to get behind the smokescreens already set up by the Ministry of Defence’s closing access to files over the past decades.
My own research has been into why Sir Mark Oliphant, Australia’s premier nuclear physicist and a prime mover in the Tube Alloys group that showed the Americans how to build atomic bombs in time to use in the second world war, never spoke out about the contamination (from H-bomb tests) of his beloved home state of South Australia and further eastward just weeks before the 1956 Olympic Games took place in Melbourne.
He told me in 1993: “The Brits thought they could ensure any fallout or contamination was not too big. They were very pigheaded about it. The people in control were very haphazard about the estimates.” Why didn’t he speak out about the residual radioactive contamination at Monte Bello, Maralinga and Emu Field, even when he was governor of South Australia? He replied: “You can really decontaminate Maralinga by leaving it alone. Plutonium alpha particles contamination, I think, is grossly overplayed. The Aborigines are using it to the full. At the same time it was very naughty of the British to leave it, and to think of spreading it that way in the first place was very nasty. The British people were very reticent about revealing contamination, especially regarding food contamination. They hugged that to their chests very closely.”
I suggest that Sir Mark Oliphant was Australia’s – and Britain’s – J Robert Oppenheimer. The evidence is set out on my website www.rabbittreview.com and was mostly found in the files I accessed in the UK National Archives.
Framatome partners with McAfee to support energy industry cybersecurity 24 May 2018,Framatome signed an agreement with McAfee, the device-to-cloud cybersecurity company, to distribute cybersecurity solutions to energy transmission, distribution and generation facilities worldwide. Together, Framatome and McAfee will work with these facilities to help protect their digital assets and support the reliable production of electricity.
“In a rapidly evolving digital landscape, holistic and robust cybersecurity programs are critical to protecting nuclear energy facilities and electrical power and distribution infrastructure,” said Catherine Cornand, senior executive vice president of Framatome’s Installed Base Business Unit. “This partnership with McAfee will enhance our ability to provide customers with the right combination of cutting-edge technologies and expertise.”…….http://www.framatome.com/EN/businessnews-1331/framatome-partners-with-mcafee-to-support-energy-industry-cybersecurity.html
Historical papers removed from public view by Nuclear Decommissioning Authority
Thousands of archive files relating to Britain’s nuclear weapons and atomic energy programmes have been withdrawn without warning from public view.
A vast cache of material dating from 1939 until the 1980s and including more than 1,700 files about the creation of Britain’s first nuclear bombs at Aldermaston has been unexpectedly withdrawn by the National Archives within the last week, researchers have reported.
The files were withdrawn at the instruction of the government’s Nuclear Decommissioning Authority, according to the National Archives. They range from the private papers of Sir John Cockcroft, the Nobel Prize-winning physicist who split the atomic nucleus, to reports of atomic bomb tests carried out as part of the creation of Britain’s nuclear deterrent in Australia and the Pacific. Attempts to access them online are met with the message: “This record is closed whilst access is under review.”
Neither the National Archives at Kew nor the NDA were able to comment on Sunday about why they had been removed. Speculation among academics who rely on the papers for their research ranged from whether the NDA had realised there was something in the files that shouldn’t have been made public to more prosaic suggestions such as a reorganisation of the files or a shift in location.
The papers are in two sections. The records of the Atomic Weapons Establishment (AWE) and its predecessors concern the research, development and testing of Britain’s atomic weapons including bomb trials, feasibility reports on new systems and notes on the theoretical physics behind nuclear weapons.
They include files with titles such as “structural vulnerability of aeroplanes to blast from atomic bomb” and “measurement of air blast using petrol cans and toothpaste tubes”.
The records of the United Kingdom Atomic Energy Authority largely concern the civilian nuclear energy programme. They include photographs detailing the construction of nuclear reactors and daily log books from nuclear power stations.
“We would like to know what is going on,” said Jon Agar, a professor of history of science and technology at University College London. “We would be alarmed as historians that it has been taken out of public view. These are important records for understanding the nuclear project in the UK. A couple of days ago a PhD student noticed that everything in the catalogue is coming up as temporarily retained. We are scratching our heads. It is all a bit mysterious.”
A spokeswoman for the National Archives said: “We have been asked to temporarily withdraw these records, which is why they now appear on our catalogue as ‘access under review’. For further information, please speak to the transferring authority.”
The transferring authority is the NDA, which comes under the auspices of the Department for Business, Energy and Industrial Strategy.
A spokesman for the NDA said he could not yet explain why the records had been removed, but said: “The NDA is absolutely committed to openness and transparency.”
The French nuclear group Orano, [or is it Framatome?] formerly Areva, is in the sights of the national prosecutor’s office that investigates suspicions of corruption in Mongolia, it was learned, Wednesday, December 19,from sources close to the case. These suspicions of “bribery of a foreign public official” involve one of the service providers of Orano, the consulting firm Eurotradia International.
Anti-corruption campaign in Mongolia
In October 2013, under the chairmanship of Luc Oursel, Areva entered into a strategic partnership to exploit two uranium deposits in the Gobi Desert (southeast) with Mongolian Mon-Atom and Japan’s Mitsubishi. The agreement came after more than ten years of exploration of the French group in Mongolia, but it remained uncertain until the last moment. The project had sparked strong environmental opposition in this huge country of three million inhabitants, whose subsoil is rich in ores (uranium, copper, gold, coal).
The case is part of an anti-corruption campaign in Mongolia where, in another case, two former prime ministers were jailed in April for controversial deals with the mining giant, Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto.
US Nuclear Energy Policy & Khashoggi Murder: Appeasement Or Threat? Clean Technica, December 12th, 2018 by Tina Casey “…………..The Nuclear Energy Connection
Either way, that brings us around to the idea that the corporate world needs to step up and press for meaningful action on the Khashoggi case, since the White House is falling down on the job.
In particular, the tech sector is feeling the pressure not only because of its financial ties to Saudi Arabia, but also because of the high profile of its biggest players.
That brings us right back around to the nuclear energy angle, where the US nuclear company TerraPower has been making waves.
TerraPower was formed back in 2006 and crossed the CleanTechnica radar during COP 2015, when it popped up in relation to a newly launched investor umbrella organization called the Breakthrough Energy Coalition.
Breakthrough is a tech incubator with a focus on clean energy and rapid decarbonization, and nuclear energy makes the cut.
As a global organization, Breakthrough can provide TerraPower with a platform for pitching its technology overseas — a key consideration, given the morbid state of demand for new nuclear power plants here in the US.
So far TerraPower has been focusing on foreign markets, particularly China, for its new technology.
If all of this is beginning to ring some bells, that’s where the tech and Silicon Valley connections kick in.
Gates is also the chair of the Breakthrough Coalition’s Breakthrough Energy Ventures, where you’ll find a host of other familiar top-dollar investors with an interest in decarbonization including Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson, Vinod Khosla, and Michael Bloomberg.
Saudi Arabia is represented among Breakthrough members through Prince Alwaleed bin Talal, who is Chairman of Alwaleed Philanthropies and a supporter of Gates’s “giving pledge.”
Saudi Arabia is also represented among the 24 countries (including the EU) that support the Mission Innovation clean energy initiative, which is in turn receives considerable support from Breakthrough, so there’s that.
Not for nothing, but as of last August the Department of Energy has supported a TerraPower molten salt reactor project with $28 million in cost-shared funds.
When Will The Silicon Valley Crickets Stop Chirping And Start Acting?
All this is by way of saying that when it comes to the Saudi government, the Khashoggi murder, and the cash flow, all roads lead back to Silicon Valley and the US tech sector.
The New York Times raised a red flag on Saudi financial ties to Silicon Valley last year. Among other developments since then, Tesla has been ramping up its profile in the country, and Google has expressed interest in building data centers there.
Perhaps it’s not fair for the tech sector to take all the heat, but on the other hand these are the guys who promised to make life better for millions if not billions of people all over the world. More is expected of them than, say, the CEO of a local pest control company.
The Trump family’s financial ties with Saudi Arabia seem to be the driving force behind Trump’s response to the Khashoggi murder, and now it seems those same ties have silenced the US tech sector.
The fact is that the Khashoggi murder is not going away. New details about the murder are emerging on a regular basis, and even Trump’s Republican allies have finally stirred into action.
In the latest development, today the US Senate is reportedly set to debate cutting off US support for the Saudi-lead war in Yemen. The measure has been linked directly to outrage over the country’s role in the Khashoggi killing.
Meanwhile, CleanTechnica is reaching out to TerraPower for comment, so stay tuned for more on that.
To understand the implications of JEDI, we must realize that the information being gathered and sorted will inevitably be used for the targeting and killing of not only opposing government-based military forces, but also nongovernmental individuals and groups who are viewed as political or potential military threats by the US.
The transfer of a massive amount of military information into a privately owned and built cloud, as will happen with the creation of JEDI, raises the possibility that the owner or owners of that cloud will — because of their knowledge of the cloud structure, capabilities and content — become more powerful than military and elected officials.
Amazon is seeking to build a global “brain” for the Pentagon called JEDI, a weapon of unprecedented surveillance and killing power, a profoundly aggressive weapon that should not be allowed to be created.
Amazon has built a vast, globally distributed data storage capacity and sophisticated artificial intelligence programs to propel its retail business that it hopes to use to win a $10 billion Pentagon contract to create the aforementioned “brain” that goes by the project name Joint Enterprise Defense Infrastructure, a moniker obviously concocted to yield the Star Wars acronym — JEDI.
As of the October 12, 2018, deadline for submitting proposals for JEDI, Amazon is the betting favorite for the contract, which will go to just one bidder, in spite of protests by competitors, chief among them Microsoft and IBM. The Pentagon appears likely to select a winner for the contract in 2019.
s Tehran-backed group called ‘Charming Kitten’ increased cyber attacks following Trump sanctions, The National ,Associated Press December 16, 2018 Government-backed Iranian hackers scrambled to break into the personal emails of US Treasury officials after harsh economic sanctions were reimposed on Tehran last month, a cybersecurity group said.
The hacking group, nicknamed Charming Kitten, also took aim at foreign nuclear experts in data tracked by Certfa analysts in the UK.
In another sign of how deeply cyber espionage is woven into the fabric of US-Iranian relations, nuclear deal defenders and detractors, Arab atomic scientists, Iranian civil society figures and Washington think-tank employees were on the hackers’ hit list.
US President Donald Trump placed sanctions on Iran’s energy, shipping, shipbuilding and financial sectors on November 4.
How Radioactive Poison Became the Assassin’s Weapon of Choice, Matter, 26 Nov 2013, The mysterious life and brutal death of a Russian dissident.
TUCKED INTO THE Millennium Hotel on London’s Grosvenor Square, the Pine Bar is a place of hush and shadows. Dark wood panelling, leather seats, and black shaded chandeliers cosset those who seek discretion in style. Head barman Norberto Andrade has hidden many celebrities in its recesses during his 27 years of service, including James Bond stars Sean Connery and George Lazenby.
The three Russians who ordered drinks on the chilly afternoon of November 1, 2006 had little of the lethal glamour one might expect of spies. ………
The men eventually left, and Andrade cleared the table. As he poured the remaining tea away, he noticed that the consistency of the liquid that tipped into the sink was strange. Gooey. He couldn’t have known it as he puzzled over its weird yellow tinge, but the man who’d been sipping the tea was a 43-year-old Russian dissident called Alexander Litvinenko, and the tea itself, draining away into the London sewers, was lethally radioactive. …….
During the night, his temperature plummeted, yet he begged for the windows to be opened so he could gulp down more of the freezing November air.
“It looks like they’ve poisoned me,” he said to his wife.
The next night she called an ambulance: doctors took a cursory look, diagnosed a stomach infection, and sent him home. But two days later he was sicker yet. His doctor immediately sent him to Barnet General, a bright local hospital not far from his home. When Litvinenko told the medics his theory — that he’d been poisoned by the Russian security services — they suggested he call a psychiatrist. The probability, they thought, was that his sickness had a far more routine cause: food poisoning from an unfortunate lunchtime dose of sushi.
The doctors treated Litvinenko with a heavy dose of antibiotics. And yet his body continued to break down. ………….
Polonium-210 spits out alpha particles. Normally, alphas aren’t a problem. Their huge size means that even a barrier as thin as a few inches of air — or a layer of human skin — stops them before they can do any harm. But if a high dose finds its way inside a human body, the damage can be immense. “An alpha particle leaves the equivalent of a motorway as it goes through tissue,” says Wakeford. “Sufficient cells in your body would commit suicide that you’d die.”
Polonium-210 is unusual in another way, too: it leaves the body relatively quickly. It sheds radiation so fast that the amount of poison in the body decreases by half in less than two months. “It’s sufficiently long lived that it’ll be around for a bit, but after that will leave no trace,” says Wakeford.
Polonium-210 is very rare in that it is almost a pure alpha emitter. When it gives out alpha particles there’s hardly any chance of there being a gamma particle emitted as well. You need a special instrument to look for alpha particles, because they’re so easy to block. ”
In short, it’s deadly, hard to find and doesn’t hang around. “And that,” says Wakeford, “is why it makes such a good poison.”……….
Polonium is hugely radioactive, firing off a massive bombardment of alpha particles — and without any screening, the delicate mechanisms of the body’s internal organs get the full dose. As the atoms try to stabilize, alpha particles crash into nearby body tissue, knocking electrons from the molecules they encounter. Each time they do, the trail of wrecked cells expands; the poison turns them cancerous, or kills them off entirely.
And that is just the beginning………..
THE IDEA OF POISONING — radioactive or otherwise — is not new to Russian intelligence. According to former Russian intelligence officer Boris Volodarsky, now a historian and one-time associate of Litvinenko, the Russians have a history of substance assassination going back nearly a century. It was Lenin who ordered the establishment of their first laboratory, known simply as the ‘Special Room’, for developing new lethal toxins.
“There is also a long succession of poisonings by Russian intelligence services in different countries, starting in the early 1920s,” he says.
At its height, says Volodarsky, the Soviet Union had the largest biological warfare program in the world. Sources have claimed there were 40,000 individuals, including 9,000 scientists, working at 47 different facilities. More than 1,000 of these experts specialized in the development and application of deadly compounds. They used lethal gasses, skin contact poisons that were smeared on door handles and nerve toxins said to be untraceable. The idea, at all times, was to make death seem natural — or, at the very least, to confuse doctors and investigators. “It’s never designed to demonstrate anything, only to kill the victim, quietly and unobtrusively,” Volodarsky writes in The KGB’s Poison Factory. “This was an unbreakable principle.”
Murderous poisons come in three varieties: chemical, biological, and radiological. It’s believed that the first Soviet attempt at a radiological assassination took place in 1957. The target was Nikolai Khokhlov, a defector who had left for the United States a few years earlier. He became drastically ill after drinking coffee at an anti-communist conference he was speaking at in West Germany. After his collapse, he was successfully treated at a US army hospital in Frankfurt for what was believed to be poisoning by radioactive thallium.
In the years before Litvinenko’s murder, a series of other killings bore similar hallmarks. In 2004, Roman Tsepov, a prominent and controversial political operative from St Petersburg, died after being poisoned with an unidentified radioactive substance on a visit to Moscow. The year before, Yuri Shchekochikhin had died in similarly mysterious circumstances. An investigative journalist and member of parliament, he had exposed a series of scandals, including an FSB racket that laundered money through the Bank of New York. His death came after a brief, undiagnosed illness with familiar symptoms: hair loss, vomiting, red blotches, fatigue. He was due to fly to the United States to meet FBI agents just days later.
The Russians may not be the only ones to have used nuclear technology for targeted execution, however. East Germany’s secret police, the Stasi, are alleged to have used radioactive poisons and even deployed modified x-ray machines to irradiate and injure political prisoners. They also used radiation as a tool, surreptitiously tagging dissidents with chemicals so they could trace and track them with Geiger counters.
And in November 2013, scientists in Switzerland announced that they had found heightened levels of polonium in the remains of the former Palestinian leader, Yasser Arafat. Investigations began two years previously, when researchers discovered the strange news that some of the personal items that Arafat had been wearing shortly before his death appeared to be contaminated with high levels of polonium-210 and were emitting alpha radiation. It was a finding that raised difficult questions for those who may have wanted to get rid of him.
But still, Russia’s ability to source and use radioactive poisons seems to be pre-eminent. Only about 100 grams of polonium are manufactured each year, and just three countries are known to produce it reliably: Israel, the United States, and Russia. And 97 percent of that supply is manufactured in one place — a converted nuclear weapons facility that operates under high security, on the banks of the Volga, 450 miles south east of the Kremlin.
The case for official Russian involvement in Litvinenko’s death was growing. And there was more evidence to come: unbeknown to them, the assassins had left a trail — and it seemed to lead east…………
Rallies will demand that the Australian government exercise its undeniable diplomatic and legal powers to insist that the British government immediately and unconditionally allow Assange to leave the United Kingdom and return to Australia if he so chooses. The courageous journalist must be provided with a guarantee, by both the Coalition and Labor, that Canberra will categorically reject any US application for Assange’s extradition
SEP meeting and livestream on December 16: What next in the fight to free Julian Assange? WSW By the Socialist Equality Party (Australia) , 28 November 2018As this year draws to a close, WikiLeaks publisher and Australian citizen Julian Assange remains effectively imprisoned inside the Ecuadorian embassy in London, denied sunlight and medical care, and blocked from communicating with the outside world. A court document, which surfaced in November, confirms that the US government has filed and sealed criminal charges against Assange, on the basis that his media organisation, WikiLeaks, published leaked information revealing US war crimes and anti-democratic imperialist intrigues.
The information vindicates the fight waged by Assange and his defenders against an arrest warrant, issued against him in 2010, obligating him to answer “questions” over false allegations that he had committed sexual assault in Sweden. The allegations were fabricated in order to provide ammunition for various pro-US layers to discredit Assange and to create the conditions for him to be rendered to a country that could rapidly extradite him to the US. The American ruling elite is determined to make an example of Assange by putting him on trial for “espionage” or “conspiracy,” in order to intimidate every journalist and whistleblower. Continue reading →
WASHINGTON — As President Donald Trump delivered his inaugural address on the steps of the U.S. Capitol in January, his new national security adviser, Michael Flynn, sent a text to a former business associate telling him that a plan to build nuclear power plants in the Middle East in partnership with Russian interests was “good to go,” according to a witness who spoke with congressional investigators.
Flynn had assured his former associate that U.S. sanctions against Russia would immediately be “ripped up” by the Trump administration, a move that would help facilitate the deal, the associate told the witness.
The witness provided the account to Rep. Elijah Cummings of Maryland, the ranking Democrat on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, who detailed the allegations in a letter Wednesday to the panel’s chairman, Rep. Trey Gowdy, Republican of South Carolina.
Cummings did not identify the witness, whom he described as a whistleblower. But he asked Gowdy to issue a subpoena to the White House for documents related to Flynn, saying the committee has “credible allegations” that Flynn “sought to manipulate the course of international nuclear policy for the financial gain of his former business partners.”
Robert Kelner, an attorney representing Flynn, declined to comment. White House lawyer Ty Cobb said, “I respectfully decline to comment on anonymous information which impacts the special counsel investigation.” He was referring to the ongoing inquiry on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential campaign.
According to a whistleblower, a Flynn business associate bragged that Flynn would end sanctions on Russia to clear the way for this project.
By Andrew Prokopandrew@vox.comOn President Donald Trump’s Inauguration Day, a former business parter of incoming National Security Adviser Michael Flynn allegedly bragged that Flynn told him Trump would quickly lift US sanctions on Russia — a move that would pave the way for a controversial plan to build nuclear plants across the Middle East, with Russian help.
That’s the explosive, but unverified, allegation of a whistleblower cooperating with House Democrats probing the myriad scandals surrounding Flynn, who pleaded guilty earlier this month to lying to the FBI about his contacts with a senior Russian diplomat.
The allegation has been made public by Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD), the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee — who is demanding that his Republican counterpart on the committee investigate Flynn and others involved in the matter more aggressively.
The project in question — promoted by a group of former senior US military officers, and often described as a “Marshall Plan” of sorts — would involve US companies working with Russian companies to build and operate nuclear plants in the Middle East, and export spent fuel from those plants.
In June 2015, Flynn flew to Egypt and Israel to “gauge attitudes” on the proposal, Newsweek’s Jeff Stein has reported. And one of the companies involved in the project covered his travel expenses and wrote him a check for $25,000 for the trip, though it’s not clear if Flynn cashed the check.
But reports over the last few months have suggested that Flynn continued to promote the project after the election, and even after he had been sworn in as national security adviser.
One businessman involved in the project — Alex Copson of ACU Strategic Partners — even dubbed it the “Trump/Putin M.E. [Middle East] Marshall Plan,” according to an email obtained by Reuters.
Now, new allegations are coming from a whistleblower who says he met Copson at a Washington, DC, event on Inauguration Day — and that Copson had some very interesting things to say about the project.
Michael Flynn’s business partner allegedly said this project was a pretext for expanding the US military presence in the Middle East
According to the whistleblower, Copson flat-out said the following things:
That he “just got” a text message from Flynn saying the nuclear plant project was “good to go,” and that his business colleagues should “put things in place”
That Flynn was making sure sanctions on Russia would be “ripped up,” which would let the project go forward
That this was the “best day” of his life, and that the project would “make a lot of very wealthy people”
That the project would also provide a pretext for expanding a US military presence in the Middle East (the pretext of defending the nuclear plants)
That citizens of Middle Eastern countries would be better off “when we recolonize the Middle East”
The whistleblower said that Copson quickly displayed what he claimed to be a text message from Flynn that appeared to have been sent during Trump’s inauguration speech. But the whistleblower says he or she could not read the actual message. Still, he or she claims to have been disturbed enough by the interaction to have documented it at the time.
Perhaps most intriguingly of all, Cummings writes that he told Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s team about all this some time ago — and that they asked him to delay publicly revealing this information “until they completed certain investigation steps.”
Cummings added: “They have now informed us that they have done so.”
More than $1m of industry funding is being funnelled into a runoff election to decide who pays for a power company’s botched project – shareholders or the people?
This is a convoluted tale of secret corporate money in politics, the capture of regulators by those they are meant to regulate, incompetence, and greed.
We learned this week that more than $1m in dark money – secretly sourced political spending – is pouring into Tuesday’s runoff election for Georgia’s Public Service Commission (PSC).
The PSC is powerful; by setting rates it determines how much Georgians pay for electricity each month, and among its mandates is to safeguard the public interest by regulating Georgia’s energy industry.
But PSC elections have tended to fly under the radar, and they’ve long been dominated by candidates vetted and approved by Georgia Power – Georgia’s monopoly energy company – and its owner, the Southern Company.
So what’s with all the dark money this time around?
There are four key players in this drama: the Southern Company, which owns Georgia Power; a political committee called “Georgians for a Better Future”; a lobbying group called Nuclear Matters; and a powerful trade group called the Nuclear Energy Institute.
Spending these unprecedented sums in support of the incumbent Republican commissioner, Chuck Eaton, is “Georgians for a Brighter Future”, established just weeks ago for the specific purpose of intervention in our PSC runoff, in which Eaton faces a vigorous challenge from the Democratic rising star Lindy Miller.
Just three weeks into its existence, “Georgians for a Brighter Future” has been lavishly and swiftly funded for this mission by Nuclear Matters, the Washington-based “non-profit” that lobbies for the nuclear energy industry.
Thanks to America’s corrupted campaign finance laws, Nuclear Matters’ funders are secret. But the likely sponsors are not hard to establish. Nuclear Matters itself is an arm of the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nationwide nuclear industry’s trade association (we used to call them cartels), funded in part by the Southern Company.
Georgia Power’s CEO, Paul Bowers, is on Nuclear Matters’ board of directors. Former Georgia PSC chairman and diligent industry servant Stan Wise sits on its “advocacy council”. So does University of Georgia professor David Gattie, who provides consistent academic cover for Georgia Power’s business agenda and has not to my knowledge disclosed whether he receives industry funding.
Wise, according to reporting in The Atlanta Journal-Constitution, “resigned [from the PSC] earlier this year but hung on to his post long enough to join Eaton and three other members in green-lighting Georgia Power’s plan to continue construction on two new nuclear reactors at Plant Vogtle, a project now running five years behind schedule with billions of dollars in cost overruns.”
Here the purpose of this dark money assault on Georgia voters becomes clearer.
Plant Vogtle is Georgia Power’s – and therefore the Southern Company’s – nuclear power station in eastern Georgia. In 2013 the Southern Company began construction of two new reactors at Vogtle, backed by $8.3bn in federal loan guarantees.
Then the Southern Company proceeded to botch the project. Now years behind schedule and billions over budget, we face a classic political dilemma: who will pay? Georgia Power, the Southern Company, and their shareholders? Or Georgia Power’s customers – the people?
Not surprisingly, the Southern Company is determined that Georgia’s energy consumers – “ratepayers” – should pay for billions in cost overruns. Under our country’s perverse rules of corporate governance, this is, I suppose, rational. The alternative is that their shareholders and executives take a haircut.
Enter Democrat Lindy Miller, the first-time candidate, who fought her way against the odds into this runoff. Miller is no opponent of nuclear energy and she supports continued construction of Plant Vogtle to deliver cheap energy to Georgia without massive greenhouse gas emissions. She just doesn’t think Georgia ratepayers should pay for the Southern Company’s gross failure to meet a budget or a schedule.
It seems that’s just not acceptable to the Southern Company. As with the investment bankers and rating agencies who were bailed out despite their responsibility for the 2008 financial crisis, the Southern Company wants the public to bear the cost of its malpractice.
So we see this massive, 11th-hour political intervention in support of Eaton, the Southern Company’s chosen candidate. Why? Because he will reliably vote to saddle Georgia’s teachers, firefighters, veterans, retirees and working families with higher energy bills to bail out his powerful benefactors.
This story presents a microcosm of much that is wrong with American politics. The Southern Company’s dominance of Georgia’s PSC is what policy nerds call “regulatory capture”. With a relatively modest investment of millions, this multibillion-dollar industry is attempting to buy a seat on the public body that regulates it, even though Georgia law nominally forbids regulated entities from funding candidates for regulatory offices.
This money, like so much political spending, is laundered through a series of lobby groups and “non-profits” to obscure its origins and the agenda behind it. Dark money political spending, which is meant to mislead the public and serves only the interests of concentrated corporate power, should be banned by Congress and state legislatures.
It’s worth recalling that the Southern Company in its present form was born of trust-busting action ordered by the United States Congress. In 1947, its parent company, Commonwealth & Southern Energy, was dissolved by the Securities and Exchange Commission under the anti-trust authority of the Public Utility Holding Company Act. So the Southern Company as we know it now was born, ironically, of anti-trust action.
Fast-forward 71 years. Unrestrained corporate consolidation is once again crushing consumers and competitors in nearly every major sector of the US economy, while behemoth firms and trade groups wield virtually limitless political power. The Southern Company, the monopoly power giant, would force citizens to subsidize its own inefficiency, and they’re using their financial and political muscle to buy this seat on the PSC and evade financial responsibility.
There are good arguments for scale in energy production. But perhaps it’s time to revisit the anti-trust victories of the early 20th century.
Radio-active legacy of Zuptoid nuclear interference – Yelland, BIZ News, By Chris Yelland, 3 Dec 18, Independent reports are being received by EE Publishers that energy minister Jeff Radebe has requested the Necsa board to provide reasons why it should not be removed, and that issues relating the Necsa chairman are central to this matter.
It appears that the issues raised by the minister with the board concern matters of governance, engagements with Russian nuclear interests and possible unauthorised research reactor deals with Russia’s Rusatom, overseas trips by the Necsa chairman, unauthorised media releases, articles and/or communications, and apparent conflicts of interest.
Formal questions have been put to Minister Radebe, to Necsa chairman Dr Kelvin Kemm and to Necsa CEO Phumzile Tshelane, including a request for confirmation as to whether the reports being received are correct or not……
Necsa is the Nuclear Energy Corporation of South Africa, a state-owned enterprise undertaking R&D and commercial activities in the field of nuclear energy and radiation sciences, and the production of medical nuclear radioisotopes and associated services. Necsa is also responsible for processing source material, including uranium enrichment, and co-operating with other institutions, locally and abroad, on nuclear and related matters.
Over the last few years, Necsa has been embroiled in a number of debilitating operational, financial and governance challenges.
As a result of safety procedure lapses, Necsa’s NTP Radioisotopes plant, which produced a significant share of the world’s commercial medical nuclear radioisotope, Molybdenum-99, was shut down by South Africa’s National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) in November 2017, which lasted almost a full year. ………
It was announced in mid-November that the NTP Radioisotopes plant was back in operation after conditional approval to restart was given by South Africa’s National Nuclear Regulator (NNR).
NTP Radioisotopes normally has a revenue of about R1.3bn a year, providing a contribution of more than 50% to the revenue of the Necsa group. The closure of the NTP production plant for a year has therefore obviously had a devastating financial impact.
There are also wider concerns regarding the financial health of Necsa. The Auditor General (AG) has raised ongoing concerns about inadequate financial provisions by Necsa for decommissioning and dismantling (D & D) costs at the end-of-life of Necsa’s SAFARI-1 research reactor.
As a result, Necsa’s annual financial statements for the year ending 31 March 2018, which were due to be published by end September 2018, have still not been tabled.
NIS 28th Nov 2018 In response to a parliamentary question in July this year the Ministry of Defence said that publishing the nuclear safety rating given by its internal regulator would endanger national security.
Until 2015 the MoD published an annual report by the Defence Nuclear Safety Regulator (DNSR), which is responsible for the safety of nuclear weapons, submarine reactors and defence nuclear transport.
All the annual reports from April 2015 onwards have been censored. The MoD began releasing DNSR’s annual reports
in 2007, when it began doing so in order to avoid a freedom of information (FOI) tribunal hearing brought by the journalist Rob Edwards.
In 2015 the DNSR was brought together with several other internal MoD safety bodies to form the Defence Safety Authority (DSA). From that time the DNSR annual report was summarised alongside assessments of the safety record in other ‘domains’ of MoD activity. Each domain is given a Safety Assurance statement, where the level of safety assurance is rated either ‘substantial’, ‘limited’ or ‘none’. These cover both the safety standards in that domain and the capacity of the MoD’s internal regulator to provide that assurance. In the 2016/17 DSA report a separate assessment is made for each of these two aspects.
The Shadow Minister for Peace and Disarmament, Fabian Hamilton, asked the MoD to release the Safety Assurance
rating for the years when the DNSR reports were not being released. In response the MoD once again claimed that releasing the information would endanger national security, and confirmed that the 2017/18 report would also not be released, but said that “[t]his does not prevent the effective management and independent assessment of the Defence Nuclear Programme, nor prevent its duty holders being held to account” https://www.nuclearinfo.org/article/government-safety-transport/government-claims-releasing-nuclear-safety-assessment-would-risk
L’express 29th Nov 2018 , Areva: new suspicions of corruption. Anne Lauvergeon’s former right hand
man is suspected of having received money on a contract signed by the
group. After ” atomic Anne ” – the nickname of Anne Lauvergeon, when she
was the powerful boss of the French nuclear group – “radioactive Seb”?
Sebastien de Montessus, a former executive of Areva, recently renamed Orano
, and who was long the darling of Lauvergeon, is shipped as its former
president in the gigantic case Uramin – the purchase by the company of
paid uranium deposits a fortune, whereas they concealed essentially sand
and wind.
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