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Former Miss America’s Australian nuclear tour clouded by Chinese AI blow to her employer

Royce Kurmelovs, Jan 30, 2025,  https://reneweconomy.com.au/former-miss-americas-australian-nuclear-tour-clouded-by-chinese-ai-blow-to-her-employer/

Miss America 2023 winner Grace Stanke has begun her Australian tour to promote nuclear power, just as the US energy giant that employs her has taken a big market hit after Chinese company DeepSeek claimed to have found a cheaper way to make AI.

Stanke, who flew into Perth on Wednesday, is a nuclear engineer who works in public relations for Constellation to promote nuclear technology, and has been brought out for an Australian tour by campaign group Nuclear For Australia in an attempt to drum up local support for the technology.

Nuclear For Australia is nominally headed by 18-year-old Will Shackel. But Stanke’s tour has reportedly been bankrolled by Australian businessman Dick Smith, who also provided the funding to establish the group.

The tour comes amid an aggressive expansion drive by Constellation, which holds a suite of nuclear and fossil fuel assets. According to the company’s 2024 Sustainability Report, nuclear makes up 67% of its generation capacity, with natural gas and oil making up 25% and renewables and storage accounting for 8%.

Constellation has increasingly been looking to capitalise on the development of AI as a driver in future electricity demand that it hopes to meet with nuclear power.

In September last year the company announced it would buy the Three Mile End nuclear facility under a deal to supply Microsoft with power to run its AI data centres.

Earlier in January, Constellation bought out rival Calvine for $US 27 billion, a move that meant it acquired the company’s gas-plants.

As gas-peaking plants currently help smooth out spikes in the wholesale electricity market by turning on during periods of high demand — at the expense of nuclear generators — the acquisition potentially gives Constellation greater influence over wholesale prices.

Late last week, President Donald Trump announced the US would pour $US 500 billion into AI development in what has been described as an “arms race” with China, a decision welcomed by Constellation CEO Joe Dominguez.

“President Trump is right that sustaining and enhancing America’s global AI dominance goes hand in hand with reliable, abundant American electricity,” he said. “Data center developers, generators, utilities, and other stakeholders should continue to work together to accomplish the President’s goals on behalf of the American people.”

On Tuesday, however, the assumption that power-hungry chipsets needed to train and run AI data centres would continue to drive demand for “clean” nuclear power ran into a wall.

Chinese firm DeepSeek announced it developed an open large-language model (LLM) that provides roughly the same service as ChatGPT with a smaller team and a fraction of the hardware as their US counterparts.

With the Chinese market subject to sanctions that limit access to the full-power graphics processing units (GPUs) needed to build their own models, the company was forced to find a workaround to do more with less.

These GPUs perform the calculations needed to drive LLMs and are manufactured by chipmaker Nvidia that was, until Wednesday, considered the world’s most valuable publicly-traded company with a market cap of $3.45 trillion. That changed with the latest news from DeepSeek.

In December, DeepSeek claimed it cost (USD) $5.6m and two months to develop its V3 model – a portion of what it cost to create ChatGPT. The accuracy of this figure, however, is questionable as the price of electricity is unknown.

Last week the company released the full version of its R1 model that it said is 30-times cheaper to run than equivalent models produced by US competitors such as OpenAI. The company has not released the training data, but has published papers outlining its methods, effectively allowing anyone to take DeepSeek work and expand upon it for free.

The announcement of a cheaper, less-demanding model triggered a massive 17% drop in Nvidia shares — wiping off $USD593bn, and knocked 20 per cent off the price of Constellation shares. By Thursday Constellation’s performance had partially recovered but not nearly enough to make up for Tuesday’s losses.

These events coincide with the arrival of 22-year-old Stanke, now a pro-nuclear influencer, in Australia to help local campaigns sell the technology to the Australian public.

Her tour includes appearances in Perth, Brisbane, Melbourne, Adelaide and Sydney, a parliamentary briefing and appearances at private events, including a community meeting in Lithgow, New South Wales.

The town selection is interesting as it has been a flashpoint for an anti-wind and anti-renewables campaign and has traditionally been a strong Nationals stronghold.

Lithgow falls within the federal seat of Calare which is currently held by federal independent Andrew Gee, who resigned from the National Party in 2022 over its opposition to the Indigenous Voice to Parliament.

January 31, 2025 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, spinbuster | Leave a comment

  University of Cumbria’s central role in new £4.9 million nuclear robotics and AI cluster.

 University of Cumbria is part of a consortium with
UK Atomic Energy Authority, University of Oxford and University of
Manchester to develop a new nuclear robotics and AI cluster linking Cumbria
and Oxfordshire. Awarded £4.9 million, the cluster is the largest of seven
new projects supported through an overall funding package of £22 million
from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Place Based Impact Acceleration Account
(PBIAA) scheme to strengthen emerging and existing research and innovation
clusters to kickstart economic growth and address regional needs.

 University of Cumbria 6th Jan 2025
https://news.cumbria.ac.uk/news/university-of-cumbrias-central-role-in-new-gbp-4-9-million-nuclear-robotics-and-ai-cluster

January 9, 2025 Posted by | Education, UK | Leave a comment

Congress Revives Cold War Tactics With New Anti-Communism School Curriculum

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act

Even many members of the Progressive Caucus voted in favor, proving that anti-communism is as popular on the left as it is on the right.

a quickly-escalating Cold War against China

 December 14, 2024  Alan MacLeod,  https://www.mintpressnews.com/congress-revives-cold-war-tactics-with-new-anti-communism-school-curriculum/288830/

Congress has just passed a new bill that will see the U.S. spend huge sums of money redesigning much of the public school system around the ideology of anti-communism. The “Crucial Communism Teaching Act” is now being read in the Senate, where it is all but certain to pass. The move comes amid growing public anger at the economic system and increased public support for socialism.

The Crucial Communism Teaching Act, in its own words, is designed to teach children that “certain political ideologies, including communism and totalitarianism…conflict with the principles of freedom and democracy that are essential to the founding of the United States.”

Although sponsored by Republicans, it enjoys widespread support from Democrats and is focused on China, Venezuela, Cuba and other targets of U.S. empire. The wording of the bill has many worried that this will be a centerpiece of a new era of anti-communist hysteria, similar to previous McCarthyist periods.

The curriculum will be designed by the controversial Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation and will ensure all American high school students “understand the dangers of communism and similar political ideologies” and “learn that communism has led to the deaths of over 100,000,000 victims worldwide.” It will also develop a series titled “Portraits in Patriotism,” that will expose students to individuals who are “victims of the political ideologies” in question.

A Discredited Book

The 100 million figure originates with the notorious pseudoscience text, “The Black Book of Communism.” A collection of political essays, the book’s central claim is that 100 million people have perished as a result of the communist ideology. However, even many of its contributors and co-writers have distanced themselves from it, claiming that the lead author was “obsessed” with reaching the 100 million figure, to the point that he simply conjured millions of deaths from nowhere.

Its methodology was also universally panned, with many pointing out that the tens of millions of Soviet and Nazi losses during World War II were attributed to communist ideology. This means that both Adolf Hitler himself and many of his victims are counted towards the vastly overinflated figure. The book was condemned by Holocaust remembrance groups as whitewashing and even lionizing genocidal fascist groups as anti-communist heroes.

The principal organization promoting the 100 million figure today is the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which has shown a similar level of both anti-communist devotion and methodological rigor. The group, set up by the U.S. government in 1993, added all worldwide COVID-19 deaths to the victims of communism list, arguing that the coronavirus was a communist disease because it originated in China. It is these people who will be designing the new curriculum that will be taught in social studies, government, history, and economics classes across the country.

China Hawks

One of the central goals of the bill is also to “ensure that high school students in the United States understand that 1,500,000,000 people still suffer under communism.” This is a clear reference to China, a rapidly developing country that, in just two generations, has gone from one of the poorest on Earth to a global superpower, challenging and even surpassing the United States on many quality-of-life indicators.

The bill goes on to detail how the school curriculum will “focus on ongoing human rights abuses by such regimes, such as the treatment of Uyghurs in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region” by the Chinese “regime” and its “aggression” towards “pro-democracy protests in Hong Kong,” and Taiwan, who it labels “a democratic friend of the United States.”

Furthermore, many of the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation’s “Witness Project” case studies – likely the source for the “Portraits in Patriotism” series – are from China. This includes Rushan Abbas, the founder and executive director of the Campaign for Uyghurs, a pressure group funded by CIA front organization, the National Endowment for Democracy. Abbas was also previously employed as a translator at the notorious Guantánamo Bay torture camp.

The U.S. is currently engaged in a quickly-escalating Cold War against China that includes channeling money and support to separatist movements, including those in Xinjiang, Hong Kong and Taiwan, as MintPress News has reported. In September, the House of Representatives passed a bill that authorized $1.6 billion to be spent on anti-Chinese messaging worldwide.

Latin America: a Model and a Target

The other major target of the bill will likely be socialist or communist-led governments in Latin America. The act’s sponsor is Maria Elvira Salazar, a Republican Congressperson representing Miami. A part of Florida’s famously conservative Cuban-American community, in 2023, she introduced the FORCE Act, which attempted to block any U.S. president from normalizing relations with Cuba unless its government is overthrown. She has repeatedly condemned President Biden for easing the (illegal) U.S. sanctions on Venezuela. And in July, she denounced what she described as the “socialist curse in Central America and the Caribbean,” singling out Cuban, Venezuela, Honduras, and Nicaragua as countries requiring regime change.

She is, however, an avid supporter of the far-right President of Argentina, Javier Milei, accepting his invitation to attend his inauguration. Argentina, she said, “is going to set the course and point of reference for the rest of Latin America as to the way that a country should be governed… Free market economy, small government, individual liberties, freedom, private sector, no corruption, that’s what we’re trying to do.”

Perhaps the only foreign country she praises more than Argentina is Israel, whose actions she has supported at every step, even going so far as to denounce what she called the “one-sided pressure for a ceasefire” in Gaza.

Salazar’s bill passed easily, 327-62, with limited opposition from Democrats or Republicans, who voted for and against it in roughly equal measures. Even many members of the Progressive Caucus voted in favor, proving that anti-communism is as popular on the left as it is on the right.

A New McCarthyism?

The imminent passing of the Crucial Communism Teaching Act harkens back to earlier anti-communist periods in American history, namely the Red Scare of the 1910s and the McCarthyist era of the 1940s and 1950s. During those times, organized labor movements were ruthlessly attacked, workers from all professions, including professors, government officials, and teachers, were fired en masse, and some of America’s brightest minds had their careers derailed due to their political leanings. This included singer Paul Robeson, actors like Charlie Chaplain and Marilyn Monroe, playwright Arthur Miller and scientist Albert Einstein.

The point of these operations was to break any opposition to the power of the state and big business and ensure the United States maintained its capitalist course. Today, however, fewer Americans than ever are happy with the current political and economic system. A recent Gallup study found that only 22% of the public are satisfied with how things are going, with a majority responding that they are “very dissatisfied.” Living standards have been stagnating or dropping for decades, and alternative economic systems are becoming more desirable. A 2019 poll from Axios found that 48% of adults under 35 prefer socialism to capitalism, including 57% of female respondents.

There are some signs that Washington is slowly moving towards a new McCarthyist era. President Trump, for example, has promised to carry out mass deportations of leftists once he becomes president, stating:

I will order my government to deny entry to all communists and all Marxists. Those who come to join our country must love our country. We don’t want them if they want to destroy our country… So we’re going to be keeping foreign Christian-hating communists, socialists, and Marxists out of America.”

“At the end of the day, either the communists destroy America, or we destroy the communists,” he explained. But he also stated that American citizens espousing anti-capitalist views would be purged. “My question is, what are we going to do with the ones that are already here, that grew up here? I think we have to pass a new law for them,” he said.

That Trump would actually deport millions of American citizens en masse appears like too drastic a step right now, but it is clear that both Democrats and Republicans are serious in their anti-communist convictions. Therefore, the Crucial Communism Teaching Act will likely only be the start of this campaign.

December 16, 2024 Posted by | Education, politics, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

Is big tech going all in on nuclear? Google and Microsoft have just pledged $45 billion on renewables

Sophie Vorrath, Dec 13, 2024, Renew Economy 
https://reneweconomy.com.au/is-big-tech-going-all-in-on-nuclear-google-and-microsoft-have-pledged-45-billion-spend-on-renewables/

Did you hear the one about big tech going nuclear? One of the lines being trotted out in support of nuclear power by shadow energy minister Ted O’Brien – and faithfully reproduced by the Murdoch press – is that everyone’s doing it, including global tech giants Google and Microsoft.

“Not only does Labor claim to know the economics of nuclear better than companies like Microsoft who signed a massive nuclear deal, but they also think they can run the numbers better than (US banks and financiers) who have come out in favour of nuclear energy,” O’Brien said in September.

Microsoft did announce, in September, a 20 year power purchase agreement with Constellation Energy to reboot one unit at the mothballed Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania and rebadge it as the Crane Clean Energy Centre.

Three Mile Island was, in 1979, the site of the worst commercial nuclear power accident in US history. It was shuttered in 2019 for economic reasons, with Constellation’s then parent company Exelon Corp, saying in 2017 that its closure was due to lack of financial rescue from the state.

This is not unusual. According to TechCrunch, in the last decade, seven nuclear reactors have been decommissioned in the US, while only two new ones have been switched on.

Notwithstanding the fact that restarting a nuclear plant that has been shut down for five years has never been done before (according to reports, Constellation Energy is reportedly seeking a taxpayer-subsidised loan it hopes will save it $122 million in borrowing costs) this somewhat baffling deal is expected to supply around 850 MW.

Google, meanwhile, in October announced plans to invest in small modular reactors to meet its own growing data centre needs and Amazon followed suit, with news of “three new agreements to support the development of nuclear energy projects,” again with a focus on the the as-yet commercially unproven SMR technology.

So, yes – all three of these companies have recently announced plans to invest in nuclear power – albeit in markets where it already exists (although not in the case of SMRs) and in technology and applications that are highly speculative.

Does this mean they have come over all Team Nuclear? Hardly.

Amazon, as it bragged in October, has been the largest corporate purchaser of renewable energy in the world for four years running, according to Bloomberg NEF, having invested billions of dollars in more than 500 solar and wind projects globally, which together are capable of generating enough energy to power the equivalent of 7.6 million US homes.

Amazon met its goal of sourcing 100% of the electricity its uses with renewable energy in 2023 – seven years ahead of the 2030 target.

Google announced just this week that it was funding $US20 billion ($A31 billion) worth of renewable power projects across the US, in a deal with Intersect Power and investment fund TPG Rise Climate to develop power to drive several gigawatt-scale data centers.

Microsoft, last week, joined a US investor Acadia Infrastructure Capital and other companies to launch the Climate and Communities Investment Coalition (CCIC) to develop a $US9 billion ($A14 billion) pipeline of renewable energy projects across the country, as reported in Reuters.

On its website, Microsoft says it invested in over 23.6 million megawatt-hours of renewable energy in 2023 financial year – “enough to power Paris with renewable electricity for about two years.”

Earlier this year, the company announced plans to procure some 9.5GW of solar panels from Qcells for PPAs through 2032 – adding about 1.5GW every year. In April Microsoft revealed in a job listing that it had more than 20GW of renewable energy under contract.

December 13, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Tony Blair think tank says UK needs to build new nuclear ‘at pace’.

“The latest example is today’s report for the Tony Blair Institute – which effectively ignores the poor comparative performance, costs and build times, of nuclear compared to zero carbon alternatives.“

“If it is inadvertently deceived by military pressures into ignoring the real growing obsolescence of nuclear power in the face of renewable alternatives, then
democracy itself is at risk.”

By Tom Pashby New Civil Engineer 2nd Dec 2024

The UK needs to build new nuclear “at pace” if it wants to remain competitive against similar countries pursuing nuclear power programmes, according to a report from the Tony Blair Institute for Global Change (TBIGC).

It structured its recommendations to the UK Government around
three main points. The first was that the UK should “create a modernised,
streamlined and efficient planning and regulatory regime for new nuclear
technologies. This would reduce delays and enhance the standardisation
required to unlock new low-cost projects at scale.”

It specifically called out the Office for Nuclear (ONR) Regulation, the UK Government’s
nuclear sector regulator, saying it recommended that the government require
the ONR “to regard approval of a single reactor as the basis for fleet
approval, to standardise design across deployment.” It also suggested:
“Introducing a two-year limit for the ONR and Environment Agency to
license nuclear reactors that are similar to previously licensed
designs.”

The report continued in its recommendations: “Second, the UK
government should use the conclusion of its ongoing SMR competition to help
kick-start the SMR pipeline.” It said this would “create options” for
the government to buy SMR capacity for use on the national grid.

And third, it said: “The government should deepen the UK-US partnership on SMR and
the deployment of advanced modular reactors (AMRs), also known as Gen IV
reactors, including cooperation on fuels, financing and supply-chain
development.”

Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLAs) says it is “the
voice for local authorities opposed to civil nuclear power and in favour of
renewables.” NFLAs policy adviser Pete Roche said: “Tony Blair’s
Institute is clearly not keeping up with the latest research which shows
that 100% renewable energy scenarios are perfectly feasible, require less
energy, cost less and create more jobs than business as usual scenarios.


“Instead it has fallen for a fantasy promoted by the nuclear industry
which can only increase our electricity bills and will fail to reduce
carbon emissions in time to protect us from rising temperatures.”

Academic says case for nuclear ‘at its weakest’ University of Sussex
professor of science and technology policy Andy Stirling said: “Whatever
opinion is held on issues around nuclear power, the same simple question
pops up, ‘Why has support for nuclear power grown most noisy, just as the
case is at its weakest?’

“The latest example is today’s report for
the Tony Blair Institute – which effectively ignores the poor comparative
performance, costs and build times, of nuclear compared to zero carbon
alternatives. “Over the past two decades, the relative competitiveness of
nuclear power and renewables-based zero carbon strategies has shifted
massively in favour of the latter.

As a recent Royal Society report
confirms, there is no level of nuclear contribution to UK electricity
supply that does anything other than raise electricity prices.” Stirling
went on to say it is “increasingly only in situations dominated by
entrenched military interests or shadily-funded thinktanks, that the
clamour of emotive nuclear outbursts is most loudly heard. “For media
coverage to become skewed by this noise threatens more than just energy
futures and the future efficacy of climate action.

“If it is inadvertently deceived by military pressures into ignoring the real growing
obsolescence of nuclear power in the face of renewable alternatives, then
democracy itself is at risk.”

 New Civil Engineer 2nd Dec 2024
https://www.newcivilengineer.com/latest/tony-blair-think-tank-says-uk-needs-to-build-new-nuclear-at-pace-02-12-2024/

December 6, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment

 Midlands Regional Hub for Nuclear Skills officially launched

 A new Midlands Regional Hub for Nuclear Skills has been endorsed by the
Nuclear Skills Delivery Board to help develop the future nuclear workforce.
The Hub was launched at an event hosted by the University of Derby with
Rolls-Royce as the prime sponsor.

The government, in partnership with the
civil and defence nuclear industry, are making significant long-term
investments in nuclear skills, jobs and education to help the sector fill
40,000 new jobs by the end of the decade. The National Nuclear Strategic
Plan for Skills (NNSPS) was launched in May 2024 to address the national
nuclear skills shortage and sets out targeted action that the UK will take
to ensure it has the required skills to support the UK’s nuclear
ambitions. Ensuring the delivery of the NNSPS is the Nuclear Skills
Executive Council (NSEC) which brings together CEOs from across key sector
organisations.

 Derby University 2nd Dec 2024 https://www.derby.ac.uk/news/2024/midlands-regional-hub-for-nuclear-skills-officially-launched/

December 5, 2024 Posted by | Education, UK | Leave a comment

‘Great British Nuclear Fantasy’ Mirrors SMR Hype in Canada

While Canada touts small modular nuclear reactors and U.S. investors run for cover, the United Kingdom will waste billions watching the industry slowly crumble, writes veteran journalist Paul Brown.

Paul Brown, Dec 01, 2024, https://energymixweekender.substack.com/p/great-british-nuclear-fantasy-mirrors

According to the United Kingdom’s Labour government, the country is forging ahead with large nuclear stations and a competition to build a new generation of small modular reactors.

Great British Nuclear, a special organization created by the last Conservative administration and continued by Labour, is charged with finding sites for new large reactors and getting a production line running to produce the best small modular reactors. These will be mass produced in as yet non-existent factories.


The state of play in the UK mirrors the unbridled hype in Canada, with provinces like Ontario putting nuclear ahead of more affordable, more genuinely green energy options and the industry brazenly hiring departing provincial cabinet ministers to guide its lobbying efforts. That’s in spite of independent analysts declaring SMRs a “Hail Mary” unlikely to succeed and pointing out that, in contrast to the private power market in the U.S., Canada’s mostly public utilities make it easier for SMR proponents to avoid transparency on costs—and let taxpayers/ratepayers assume the risk if things go wrong.

The UK government is cheered on by both the country’s trade unions and the right-wing press which otherwise spends much time attacking the renewables industry and pouring scorn on Labour’s drive to reach net zero.

However, two distinguished academics who have much spent of their careers studying the electricity industry have produced a comprehensive study that says this latest nuclear “renaissance” won’t happen. Better for the country to cut its losses now and cancel the program than continue to waste billions more pounds letting the nuclear industry crumble slowly, they say.

Prof. Stephen Thomas, emeritus professor of energy policy at Greenwich University in London and Prof. Andy Blowers, emeritus professor of social studies at the Open University, pull no punches. Their report is titled: “It is time to expose the Great British Nuclear Fantasy once and for all.”

Currently, the French electricity giant EDF is building two 1,600-megawatt European pressurized water reactors at Hinkley Point in Somerset. The project is 13 years later than EDF’s original schedule, and the cost has escalated from £18 billion when contracts were signed in 2016 to £35 billion in 2024 (and that is in 2015 prices). The first of the two reactor’s start-up date has this year been postponed until 2030 at the earliest.

With this flagship project costing so much, EDF, already deeply in debt, has declined to finance the second planned twin reactors of the same design at Sizewell C in Suffolk. Site preparation work for this station is under way and the British government has sunk £8 billion into the project already without yet making a final investment decision, even though it was promised earlier this year. This is because the government cannot yet find the private capital required to build the reactors. The two professors say the government should cut its losses now and pull the plug on the project.

Even more pointless according to the two academics is the small modular reactor competition which has four companies, Rolls Royce, Westinghouse, Holtec, and GE Hitachi, putting forward designs. All have the same basic idea, which is to build the reactors in factories and assemble them at sites all over Britain. This, they claim, would be more efficient than building large reactors, and therefore produce cheaper electricity.

The government has said it is prepared to spend £20 billion through 2038 to get these up and running. But the report points out that none of the designs have been completed, let alone tested, so there is no evidence that the claims for them can be justified. They point out nuclear power has “a long history of over-promising and not delivering.”

“Rigorous regulatory and planning processes are essential but are necessarily time-consuming, expensive, and place significant hurdles in the way of an accelerated nuclear program,” the report states. “Some projects may fail to gain site licences or planning permission and all will face substantial delays to the commencement of development.”

The report also points to climate change as a potential problem, since nearly all the potential sites are on coastlines vulnerable to sea level rise and storm surges.

“Despite the sound and fury, the Great British Nuclear project is bound to fail,” Blowers and Thomas conclude.

“No amount of political commitment can overcome the lack of investors, the absence of credible builders and operators, or available technologies, let alone secure regulatory assessment and approval,” they write. “Moreover, in an era of climate change, there will be few potentially suitable sites to host new nuclear power stations for indefinite, indeed unknowable, operating, decommissioning, and waste management lifetimes.”

The two authors acknowledge that “abandoning Sizewell C and the SMR competition will lead to howls of anguish from interest groups such as the nuclear industry and trade unions with a strong presence in the sector. It will also require compensation payments to be made to organizations affected. However, the scale of these payments will be tiny in comparison with the cost of not abandoning them.”

So “it is our hope that sanity and rationality may prevail and lead to a future energy policy shorn of the burden of new nuclear and on a pathway to sustainable energy in the pursuit of net zero.”

December 4, 2024 Posted by | Canada, spinbuster, UK | Leave a comment

Christian Nationalism Marches on With ‘Bible-Infused’ Texas Curriculum

“What we’re seeing here in Texas with these lessons is a larger national push to promote the idea that American identity and Christian identity are woven together, are one in the same,” said one professor.

Jessica Corbett, Nov 22, 2024, Common Dreams

Parents, teachers, and other critics of Christian nationalism were outraged by a Texas board’s Friday vote to approve a “Bible-infused” curriculum for elementary school students—part of a broader right-wing push to force Christianity into public education.

“They chose politics over what’s best for students, promoting an evangelical Christian religious perspective and undermining the freedom of families to direct the religious education of their own children,” declared the Texas Freedom Network, accusing the State Board of Education (SBOE) of ignoring warnings from religious studies experts, national media attention, and overwhelming negative feedback from the people they’re elected to serve.”

Like a preliminary vote Tuesday, eight of the SBOE’s 15 members voted to approve Bluebonnet Learning, instructional materials proposed by the Texas Education Agency. Three Republicans joined all four Democrats in opposing the curriculum. The deciding vote in favor of it was cast by Leslie Recine, a Republican recently appointed by GOP Gov. Greg Abbott to temporarily fill a vacant seat.

“In a state as diverse as Texas, home to millions of people from countless faiths and beliefs, the Texas Republicans on the State Board of Education voted to incorporate Biblical teachings into the state curriculum—completely undermining religious freedom,” said Texas Democratic Party Chair Gilberto Hinojosa in a statement after the final vote.

“This move has ultimately violated parents’ rights to guide their children’s faith while presenting teachers with additional needless challenges,” Hinojosa argued. “Our public schools should be focused on equipping students with the education and skills they need to succeed beyond grade school whether it’s pursuing a higher education or entering the workforce. The teaching of religious doctrine should stay in our places of worship where it belongs.”

Although the curriculum isn’t required, The Texas Tribunereported, “the state will offer an incentive of $60 per student to districts that adopt the lessons, which could appeal to some as schools struggle financially after several years without a significant raise in state funding.”

“Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks.”

Bluebonnet Learning features lessons from Christianity in reading and language arts materials for kindergarten through fifth grade………………………

Zeph Capo, president of the Texas arm of the American Federation of Teachers, urged districts “to resist the dollars dangled before them and refuse to use Bluebonnet Learning materials,” arguing that they violate the code of ethics for the state’s educators and “the separation of church and state by infusing lessons with Bible-based references more appropriate for Sunday Schools than public schools.”…………………………………………………………………….

Noting the current “moment of profound political division,” the union leader added that the vote “is the latest evidence that Christian nationalists have bought their way into every governing body of the state, including the SBOE. And they will not stop with inserting Biblical content in English textbooks. We can anticipate what will come next, whether that’s the erasure of contributions of marginalized populations in social studies or the minimalization of climate change in science.

The curriculum push coincides with an SBOE effort to restrict library materials. The ACLU of Texas said on social media that “the same politicians censoring what students can read now want to impose state-sponsored religion onto our public schools.”

The Tribunereported Thursday that “10 members on the board responsible for determining what Texas’ 5.5 million public schoolchildren learn in the classroom voted to call on the Texas Legislature, which convenes in January, to pass a state law granting them authority to determine what books are appropriate for school-age children.

Earlier this week, Mark Chancey, a religious studies professor at Southern Methodist University, toldFox 4 that he supports teaching religion in public schools, but in a fair and unbiased way, and he doesn’t agree with the state proposal…………………………………………………………..

At the federal level, Trump—who is set to return to the White House in January—has advocated for dismantling the U.S. Department of Education. For now, he has named Linda McMahon, a former wrestling executive accused of enabling sexual abuse of children, as his pick for education secretary. https://www.commondreams.org/news/christianity-in-schools?utm_source=Common+Dreams&utm_campaign=08cb74510b-Weekend+Edition%3A+Sun.+11%2F24%2F24&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_-3b949b3e19-600558179

November 27, 2024 Posted by | Education, Religion and ethics, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear hype ignores high cost, long timelines

November 18, 2024, Dennis Wamsted and David Schlissel,   https://ieefa.org/articles/nuclear-hype-ignores-high-cost-long-timelines?fbclid=IwY2xjawGqDMZleHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHa4pEgK_ocKG9gTiE0qK663dfc6SmO8F381Rlg6kefl44j9IUxx51qLUkg_aem_lYNxB1cdtOXGZOwGA6HDYQ 

Nuclear options are years away, while solar, wind, storage and geothermal are clean, cost-effective options ready now

Key Takeaways:

Nuclear power is being touted as a solution to meeting electricity demand spurred by the growth of artificial intelligence and data centers.

Announcements of new SMR plans have one thing in common: They’ve been very short on details.

Solar and geothermal plants are being built for less money and in much less time than even the most optimistic SMR designs.

Increasingly, nuclear power is being touted as a solution to meet growing electricity demand, but a new briefing note from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) shows that the hype is ignoring the fact that nuclear projects are expensive and take too long to get online.

The growth of artificial intelligence (AI) and data centers is creating increased demand for electricity, and announcements that the need will be met with nuclear—specifically, small modular reactors (SMRs)—have been coming quickly. The nuclear announcements are not only short on details, but also gloss over the fact that SMRs will not come online soon enough to meet the growing demand.

“It is time for companies and investors to stop and take a deep breath,” said Dennis Wamsted, IEEFA energy analyst and co-author of the report. “Restarting a limited number of recently closed conventional reactors is entirely different than building unproven and unlicensed SMRs. While some SMRs might bring additional power down the road, the reality is that solar and geothermal plants are being built for less money and faster than even the most optimistic SMR designs.”

The rush for electricity to power rising AI and data center demand is an issue that needs addressing now. SMRs are a next-decade resource, at best. Clean, cost-effective power options are available today for big tech and additional electricity needs. Utilities, developers, and large power users need to focus there and stop betting on expensive, unproven nuclear technologies that will not generate meaningful amounts of power for years to come.

November 21, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment

Media Coverage of Amsterdam Soccer Riot Erases Zionist Hatred and Violence

Elsie Carson-Holt 15 Nov 24,  https://fair.org/home/media-coverage-of-amsterdam-soccer-riot-erases-zionist-hatred-and-violence/

When violence broke out in Amsterdam last week involving Israeli soccer fans, Western media headlines told the story as one of attacks that could only be explained by antisemitism. This is the story right-wing Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu wants them to tell: “On the streets of Amsterdam, antisemitic rioters attacked Jews, Israeli citizens, just because they were Jews” (Fox News, 11/10/24).

Yet buried deep within their reports, some of these outlets revealed a more complicated reality: that many fans of Israel’s Maccabi Tel Aviv Football Club had spent the previous night tearing down and burning Palestinian flags, attacking a taxi and shouting murderous anti-Arab chants, including “Death to the Arabs” and “Why is there no school in Gaza? There are no children left there” (Defector, 11/8/24).

As Marc Owen Jacobs of Zeteo (11/9/24) wrote, the media coverage revealed

troubling patterns in how racial violence is reported; not only is anti-Arab violence and racism marginalized and minimized, but violence against Israelis is amplified and reduced to antisemitism.

Buried context

“Israeli Soccer Fans Attacked in Amsterdam,” announced NBC News (11/8/24). That piece didn’t mention until the 25th paragraph the Maccabi fans’ Palestinian flag-burning and taxi destruction, as if these were minor details rather than precipitating events.

Similarly, the Washington Post (11/8/24)—“Israeli Soccer Fans Were Attacked in Amsterdam. The Violence Was Condemned as Antisemitic”—didn’t mention Maccabi anti-Arab chants until paragraph 22, and didn’t mention any Maccabi fan violence.

James North on Mondoweiss (11/10/24) summed up the New York Times article’s (11/8/24) similar one-sided framing:

The Times report, which started on page 1, used the word “antisemitic” six times, beginning in the headline. The first six paragraphs uniformly described the “Israeli soccer fans” as the victims, recounting their injuries, and dwelling on the Israeli government’s chartering of “at least three flights to bring Israeli citizens home,” insinuating that innocent people had to completely flee the country for their lives.

Also at Mondoweiss (11/9/24), Sana Saeed explained:

Emerging video evidence and testimonies from Amsterdam residents (here, here and here, for instance) indicate that the initial violence came from Maccabi Tel Aviv fans, who also disrupted a moment of silence for the Valencia flood victims.

But despite that footage and Amsterdammer testimonies, coverage—across international media, especially in the United States—has failed to contextualize the counter-attacks against the anti-Arab Israeli mob.

Misrepresented video

Several news outlets outright misrepresented video from local Dutch photographer Annet de Graaf. De Graaf’s video depicts Maccabi fans attacking Amsterdam locals, yet CNN World News (11/9/24) and BBC (11/8/24) and other outlets initially labeled it as Maccabi fans getting attacked.

De Graaf has demanded apologies from the news outlets and acknowledgement that the video was used to push false information. CNN World News‘ video now notes that an earlier version was accompanied by details from Reuters that CNN could not independently verify. BBC’s caption of De Graaf’s footage reads “Footage of some of the violence in Amsterdam—the BBC has not been able to verify the identity of those involved.”

The New York Times (11/8/24) corrected its misuse of the footage in an article about the violence:

An earlier version of this article included a video distributed by Reuters with a script about Israeli fans being attacked. Reuters has since issued a correction saying it is unclear who is depicted in the footage. The video’s author told the New York Times it shows a group of Maccabi fans chasing a man on the street—a description the Times independently confirmed with other verified footage from the scene. The video has been removed.

‘Historically illiterate conflation’

Jacobin (11/12/24): “Far from acting like tsarist authorities during a pogrom, the police in Amsterdam seem to have cracked down far harder on those who attacked Maccabi fans than the overtly racist Maccabi hooligans who started the first phase of the riot.”

It is undoubtedly true that antisemitism was involved in Amsterdam alongside Israeli fans’ anti-Arab actions; the Wall Street Journal (11/10/24) verified reports of a group chat that called for a “Jew hunt.” But rather than acknowledging that there was ethnic animosity on both sides, some articles about the melee (Bret Stephens, New York Times, 11/12/24; Fox News, 11/10/24; Free Press, 10/11/24) elevated the violence to the level of a “pogrom.”

Jacobin (11/12/24) put the attacks in the context of European soccer riots:

There were assaults on Israeli fans, including hit-and-run attacks by perpetrators on bicycles. Some of the victims were Maccabi fans who hadn’t participated in the earlier hooliganism. In other words, this played out like a classical nationalistic football riot—the thuggish element of one group of fans engages in violence, and the ugly intercommunal dynamics lead to not just the perpetrators but the entire group of fans (or even random people wrongly assumed to share their background or nationality) being attacked.

But Jacobin pushed back against media using the word “pogrom” in reference to the soccer riots:

Pogroms were not isolated incidents of violence. They were calculated assaults to keep Jews locked firmly in their social place…. Pogroms cannot occur outside the framework of a society that systematically denies rights to a minority, ensuring that it remains vulnerable to the violence of the majority. What happened in Amsterdam, however, bears no resemblance to this structure. These were not attacks predicated on religious or racial oppression. They were incidents fueled by political discord between different groups of nationalists….

Furthermore, using that designation to opportunistically smear global dissent against Israel’s atrocities in Gaza as classically antisemitic only serves to trivialize genuine horrors. This historically illiterate conflation should be rejected by all who truly care about antisemitism.

Breaking with the Netanyahu government’s spin, former Israeli President Ehud Olmert said that the riots in Amsterdam were “not a continuation of the historic antisemitism that swept Europe in past centuries.” Olmert, unlike Western media coverage of the event, seemed to be able to connect the violence in Amsterdam to anti-Arab sentiment in his own country. In a more thoughtful piece than his paper’s news coverage of the event, New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman (11/13/24) quoted Olmert extensively:

The fact is, many people in the world are unable to acquiesce with Israel turning Gaza, or residential neighborhoods of Beirut, into the Stone Age—as some of our leaders promised to do. And that is to say nothing of what Israel is doing in the West Bank—the killings and destruction of Palestinian property. Are we really surprised that these things create a wave of hostile reactions when we continue to show a lack of sensitivity to human beings living in the center of the battlefield who are not terrorists?

The events in Amsterdam called for nuanced media coverage that contextualized events and condemned both anti-Jewish and anti-Arab violence. Instead, per usual, world leaders and media alike painted Arabs and Pro-Palestine protesters as aggressors and Israelis as innocent victims.

November 16, 2024 Posted by | Israel, media, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Nuclear lobby continues its infiltration of education

Alde Valley Academy students design Sizewell C power station

Alde Valley Academy students design Sizewell C power station. Students were
tasked with a unique challenge to design the planned Sizewell C nuclear
power station using digital Lego bricks.

East Anglian Daily Times 8th Nov 2024

November 10, 2024 Posted by | Education, UK | Leave a comment

Dangerous Hype: Big Tech’s Nuclear Lies

M.V. Ramana, November 1, 2024,  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/11/01/big-techs-nuclear-lies/

In the last couple of months, Microsoft, Google, and Amazon, in that order, made announcements about using nuclear power for their energy needs. Describing nuclear energy using questionable adjectives like “reliable,” “safe,” “clean,” and “affordable,” all of which are belied by the technology’s seventy-year history, these tech behemoths were clearly interested in hyping up their environmental credentials and nuclear power, which is being kept alive mostly using public subsidies.

Both these business conglomerations—the nuclear industry and its friends and these ultra-wealthy corporations and their friends—have their own interests in such hype. In the aftermath of catastrophic accidents like Chernobyl and Fukushima, and in the face of its inability to demonstrate a safe solution to the radioactive wastes produced in all reactors, the nuclear industry has been using its political and economic clout to mount public relations campaigns to persuade the public that nuclear energy is an environmentally friendly source of power.

Tech giants like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google, too, have attempted to convince the public they genuinely cared for the environment and really wanted to do their bit to mitigate climate change. In 2020, for example, Amazon pledged to reach net zero by 2040. Google went one better when its CEO declared that “Google is aiming to run our business on carbon-free energy everywhere, at all times” by 2030. Not that they are on any actual trajectory to meeting these targets.

Why are they making such announcements?

Greenwashing environmental impacts

The reasons underlying these companies investing in such PR campaigns is not hard to discern. There is growing awareness of the tremendous environmental impacts of the insatiable appetite for data from these companies, as well as the threat they pose to already inadequate efforts to mitigate climate change.

Earlier this year, the Wall Street company Morgan Stanley estimated that data centers will “produce about 2.5 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide-equivalent emissions through the end of the decade”. Climate scientists have warned that unless global emissions decline sharply by 2030, we are unlikely to limit global temperature rise to 1.5 degrees Celsius, a widely shared target. Even without the additional carbon dioxide emitted into the air as a result of data centers and their energy demand, the gap between current emissions and what is required is yawning.

But it is not just the climate. As calculated by a group of academic researchers, the exorbitant amounts of water required in the United States “to operate data centers, both directly for liquid cooling and indirectly to produce electricity” contribute to water scarcity in many parts of the country. This is the case elsewhere, too, and communities in countries ranging from Ireland to Spain to Chile are fighting plans to site data centers.

Then, there are the indirect impacts on the climate. Greenpeace documented, for example, that “Microsoft, Google, and Amazon all have connections to some of the world’s dirtiest oil companies for the explicit purpose of getting more oil and gas out of the ground and onto the market faster and cheaper.” In other words, the business models adopted by these tech behemoths depend on fossil fuels being used for longer and in greater quantities.

In addition to the increasing awareness about the impacts of data centers, one more possible reason for cloud companies to become interested in nuclear power might be what happened to cryptocurrency companies. Earlier this decade, these companies, too, found themselves getting a lot of bad publicity due to their energy demands and resulting emissions. Even Elon Musk, not exactly known as an environmentalist, talked about the “great cost to the environment” from cryptocurrency.

The environmental impacts of cryptocurrency played some part in efforts to regulate these. In September 2022, the White House put out a fact sheet on the climate and energy implications of Crypto-assets, highlighting President Biden’s executive order that called on these companies to reduce harmful climate impacts and environmental pollution. China even went as far as to banning cryptocurrency, and its aspirations to reducing its carbon emissions was one factor in this decision.

Crypto bros, for their part, did what cloud companies are doing now: make announcements about using nuclear power. Amazon, Google, and Microsoft are now following that strategy to pretend to be good citizens. However, the nuclear industry has its reasons for welcoming these announcements and playing them up.

The state of nuclear power

Strange as it might seem to folks basing their perception of the health of the nuclear industry on mainstream media, that technology is actually in decline. The share of global electricity produced by nuclear reactors has decreased from 17.5% in 1996 to 9.15% in 2023,  largely due to the high costs of and delays in building and operating nuclear reactors.

A good illustration is the Vogtle nuclear power plant in the state of Georgia. When the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission in 2011, it projected a total cost of $14 billion, and “in-service dates of 2016 and 2017” for the two units. The plant became operational only this year, after the second unit came online in March 2024, at a total cost of at least $36.85 billion.

Given this record, it is not surprising that there are no orders for any more nuclear plants.

As it has been in the past, the nuclear industry’s answer to this predicament is to advance the argument that new nuclear reactor designs would address all these concerns. But that has, yet again, proved not to be the case. In November 2023, the flagship project of NuScale, the small modular reactor design promoted as the leading one of its kind, collapsed because of high costs.

Supporters of nuclear power are now using another time-tested tactic to promote the technology: projecting that energy demand will grow so much that no other source of power will be able to meet these needs. For example, UK energy secretary Ed Davey resorted to this gambit in 2013 when he said that the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant was essential to “keep the lights on” in the country.

Likewise, when South Carolina Electric & Gas Company made its case to the state’s Public Service Commission about the need to build two AP1000 reactors at its V.C. Summer site—this project was subsequently abandoned after over $9 billion was spent—it forecast in its “2006 Integrated Resource Plan” that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.

This is the argument that the growth in data centres, propped up in part by the hype about generative artificial intelligence, has allowed proponents of nuclear energy to put forward. It remains to be seen whether this hype about generative AI actually materializes into a long-term sustainable business: see, for example, Ed Zitron’s meticulously documented argument for why OpenAI and Microsoft are simply burning billions of dollars and why their business model might “simply not be viable”.

In the case of the V.C. Summer project, South Carolina Electric & Gas found that its energy sales actually declined by 3 percent compared to 2006 by the time 2016 rolled around. Of course, that did not matter, because shareholders had already received over $2.5 billion in dividends and company executives had received millions of dollars in compensation, according to Nuclear Intelligence Weekly, a trade publication.

One wonders which executives and shareholders are going to receive a bounty from this round of nuclear hype.

What about emissions?

Will the investments in nuclear power by companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon help reduce emissions anytime soon?

The project expected to have the shortest timeline is the restart of the Three Mile Island Unit 1 reactor, which Constellation Energy projects will be ready in 2028. But if the history of reactor commissioning is anything to go by, that deadline will come and go without any power flowing from it.

Restarting a nuclear plant that has been shutdown has never been done before. In the case of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant in California, which hasn’t been shut down but was slated for decommissioning in 2024-25 till Governor Gavin Newsom did a volte-face, the Chair of the Diablo Canyon Independent Safety Committee explained why doing so was very difficult: “so many different programs and projects and so on have been put in place over the last half a dozen years predicated on that closure in 2024-25 and each one of those would have to be evaluated and some of them are okay, and some of them won’t be and some are going to be a real stretch and some are going to cost money and some of them aren’t going to be able to be done maybe”.

The cost of keeping Diablo Canyon open has been estimated by the plant’s owner at $8.3 billion and by independent environmental groups at nearly $12 billion. There are no reliable cost estimates for reopening Three Mile Island, but Constellation Energy, the plant’s owner, is already seeking a taxpayer-subsidized loan that would likely save the company $122 million in borrowing costs.

One must also remember that Microsoft already announced an agreement with Helion Energy, a company backed by billionaire Peter Thiele, to get nuclear fusion power by 2028. The chances of that happening are slim at best. In 2021, Helion announced that it had raised $500 million to build its fusion generation facility that would demonstrate “net electricity production” in three years, i.e., “in 2024”. That hasn’t happened so far. But going back further, one can see a similar and unfulfilled claim from 2014: then, the company’s chief executive had told the Wall Street Journal that the company hoped that its product would generate more energy than it would use “in the next three years” (i.e., in 2017). It is quite likely that Microsoft’s decision-makers knew of how unlikely it is that Helion will be able to supply nuclear fusion power by 2028. The publicity value is the most likely reason for announcing an agreement with Helion.

What about the small modular nuclear reactor designs—X-energy and Kairos—that Amazon and Google are betting on? Don’t hold your breath.

X-energy is an example of a high-temperature gas-cooled reactor design that dates back to the 1940s. There have been four reactors based on similar concepts that were operated commercially, two in Germany and two in the United States, respectively, and test reactors in the United Kingdom, Japan, and China. Each of these reactors proved problematic, suffering a variety of failures and unplanned shutdowns. The latest reactor with a similar design was built in China. Its performance leaves much to be desired: within about a year of being connected to the grid, its power output was reduced by 25 percent of the design power capacity, and even at this lowered capacity, it operated in 2023 with a load factor of just 8.5 percent.

Kairos, on the other hand, will be challenged by its choice of molten salts as coolant. These are chemically corrosive, and decades of search have identified no materials that can survive for long periods in such an environment without losing their integrity. The one empirical example of a reactor that used molten salts dates back to the 1960s, and this experience proved very problematic, both when the reactor operated and in the half-century thereafter, because managing the radioactive wastes produced before 1970 continued to be challenging.

Simply throwing money will not overcome these problems that have to do with fundamental physics and chemistry.

Just a dangerous distraction

Although Amazon, Google, and Microsoft claim to be investing in nuclear energy to meet the needs of AI, the evidence suggests that their real motive is to greenwash themselves.

Their investments are small and completely inadequate with relation to how much is needed to build a reactor. But their investments are also very small compared to the bloated revenues of these corporations. So, from the viewpoint of top executives, investing in nuclear power must seem a cheap way to reduce bad publicity about their environmental footprints. Unfortunately, “cheap” for them does not translate to cheap for the rest of us, not to mention the burden to future generations of human beings from worsening climate change and, possibly, increased production of radioactive waste that will stay hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years.

Because nuclear power has been portrayed as clean and a solution to climate change, announcements about it serve as a flashy distraction to focus public attention on. Meanwhile, these companies continue to expand their use of water and draw on coal and especially natural gas plants for their electricity. This is the magician’s strategy: misdirecting the audience’s attention while the real trick happens elsewhere. Their talk about investing in nuclear power also distracts from the conversations we should be having about whether these data centers and generative AI are socially desirable in the first place.

There are many reasons to oppose and organize against the wealth and power exercised by these massive corporations, such as their appropriation of user data to engage in what has been described as surveillance capitalism, their contracts with the Pentagon, and their support for Israel’s genocide and apartheid. Their investment into nuclear technology, and more importantly, hyping it up, offers one more reason. It is also a chance to establish coalitions between groups involved in very different fights.

M. V. Ramana is the Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs, University of British Columbia and the author of The Power of Promise: Examining Nuclear Energy in India.

November 4, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster | Leave a comment

‘You couldn’t make this up’: Expert pans Ontario nuclear option

SMH, By Bianca Hall and Nick O’Malley, October 28, 2024

Ontario subsidises its citizens’ electricity power bills by $7.3 billion a year from general revenue, an international energy expert has said, contradicting the Coalition’s claim that nuclear reactors would drive power prices down in Australia.

Opposition Leader Peter Dutton has repeatedly cited the Canadian province as a model for cheaper power prices from nuclear.

“In Ontario, that family is paying half of what the family is paying here in Perth for their electricity because of nuclear power,” Dutton said in March. “Why wouldn’t we consider it as a country?”

In July, Dutton said Canadian consumers paid about one-quarter of Australian prices for electricity.

Professor Mark Winfield, an academic from York University in Canada who specialises in energy and environment, on Monday said the reaction among people in Ontario to the comparison had ranged from disbelief to “you couldn’t make this up”.

Ontario embarked on a massive building spree between the 1960s and the 1990s, Winfield told a briefing hosted by the Climate Council and the Smart Energy Council.

In the process, he said, the provincial-owned utility building the generators “effectively bankrupted itself”. About $21 billion in debt had to be stranded to render the successor organisation Ontario Power Generation economically viable.

In 2015, the Canadian government approved a plan to refurbish 10 ageing reactors, but Winfield said the refurbishment program had also been beset by cost blowouts.

“The last one, [in] Darlington, east of Toronto, was supposed to cost $C4 billion and ended up costing $C14 [billion],” Winfield said.

“And that was fairly typical of what we saw, of a cost overrun in the range of about 2.5 times over estimate.”

In Melbourne, Dutton said while he respected new Queensland Premier David Crisafulli’s opposition to nuclear, he would work with “sensible” premiers in Queensland, South Australia and NSW on his plan, if he was elected………………………………………………..

Winfield said household bills were kept artificially low under the Ontario model, despite the high cost of refurbishing ageing nuclear facilities.

“There’s a legacy of that still in the system that we are effectively subsidising electricity bills to the tune of about $C7.3 billion a year out of general revenues. That constitutes most of the provincial deficit; that’s money that otherwise could be going on schools and hospitals.”

Dutton’s comments came as a parliamentary inquiry into the suitability of nuclear power for Australia continued in Canberra. Experts provided evidence on how long it would take to build a nuclear fleet, and the potential cost and impact on energy prices compared with the government’s plan to replace the ageing coal fleet with a system of renewables backed by storage and gas peakers.

……………………………………………………….. In its annual GenCost, CSIRO estimated earlier this year that a single large-scale nuclear reactor in Australia would cost $16 billion and take nearly two decades to build, too late for it to help meet Australia’s international climate change commitments, which requires it to cut emissions 43 per cent by 2030. It found renewables to be the cheapest option for Australia.

Dutton has so far refused to be drawn on the costs of his nuclear policy. Opposition energy spokesman Ted O’Brien said the Coalition would release costings before the next federal election, which must be held by May.

O’Brien told this masthead “expert after expert” had provided evidence that nuclear energy placed downward pressure on power prices around the world. ……………. https://www.smh.com.au/environment/climate-change/you-couldn-t-make-this-up-expert-pans-ontario-nuclear-option-20241028-p5klx1.html

October 29, 2024 Posted by | AUSTRALIA, Canada, spinbuster | Leave a comment

Alistair Osborne: Nuclear is waste of time and money

The National Audit Office has found that the Sellafield nuclear waste dump is still a mess,
with costs spiralling and projects delayed. As rebranding jobs go, it’s
hard to beat. Somehow, the nuclear lobby has managed to convince
politicians that the industry is not only green, but “clean”.

Just about all of them have fallen for it, not least our energy supremo Ed
Miliband. Here he is last month: “Homegrown clean energy from renewables
and nuclear offers us a security that fossil fuels simply cannot
provide”. On the energy security point, fair enough. But isn’t he
forgetting something about nukes that you don’t get with windmills and
sunbeams?

Luckily, the National Audit Office is not so easily taken in, as
it’s just proved with a nice reality check: its latest report on
Sellafield, the radioactive waste dump in Cumbria owned by the state-backed
Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA). True, there is a glimmer of good
news: the spending watchdog says the “management of major projects has
begun to improve”. But it must have been off a chronically low base,
given the problems the NAO finds.

As it notes, of the NDA’s 17 sites
“Sellafield is the UK’s most complex and challenging”: home to
“seven former nuclear reactors” and Britain’s “entire stockpile of
civilian-owned plutonium”. Indeed, much of the “highly hazardous”
stuff knocking around has been deemed by the government to “pose an
intolerable risk”. Cleaning it up is a thankless task, too. On NDA
estimates, it “will take until 2125”.

 Times 23rd Oct 2024, https://www.thetimes.com/business-money/companies/article/nuclear-is-waste-of-time-and-money-ljmxhqklh

October 25, 2024 Posted by | spinbuster, UK | Leave a comment

Nuclear lobby propagandises to kids AGAIN!

They did this in the past – with rather pathetic little comics and posters

Like this one, from Canadian uranium company Cameco

Department of Energy Goes Nuclear with New Comic Book – Office of Nuclear Energy, 23 Oct 24

What does dodgeball have to do with nuclear power?

You can find out in a new comic book released by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) that’s geared toward young readers.

The Spark Squad Nuclear comic book follows middle schoolers Jasmine, Aria and Thomas on their quest to collect enough “joules” to qualify for the regional power fair.

The students quickly find out just how “energy dense” uranium fuel is after meeting Aria’s old friend Dakota at a nearby coal facility, which was recently converted to a nuclear power plant.

Dakota then asks for the Spark Squad’s help to initiate a chain reaction by getting enough uranium particles to play dodgeball with “neutron balls” to split apart other Uranium-235 atoms.

This epic game of dodgeball results in a sustained nuclear reaction AND more than enough joules for the students to qualify for regionals!………….

Spark-ing Interest in Nuclear Energy 

The Spark Squad comic book and video were created by DOE to make nuclear power more accessible to younger audiences.  

We developed a special activity called “Dodgeball Fission” and also worked with our national labs to create a STEM toolkit for the comic book to help engage learners of all ages. It can be used both in-school and out-of-school with standards-aligned, ready-to-use activities for educators.

Nuclear and STEM 

The United States operates the largest fleet of reactors in the world with 94 units located at 54 sites across the country. 

And, if you don’t live near one of these plants, then you might not know just how good of a neighbor nuclear can be. 

These plants support thousands of high-paying jobs with salaries that are typically 30 percent higher than the local average. 

Nuclear plants also contribute millions of dollars each year to their communities through federal and state taxes that are used to improve local infrastructure projects and schools.

DOE estimates our nuclear capacity could triple by 2050 to help meet our rising energy demand with clean power. 

That means hundreds of thousands of new jobs could be created in the sector as current nuclear plants work to extend their operations and new plants come online. 

To help cultivate this future workforce, it’s important to engage youth at an early age with activities like this comic book and the accompanying activities to spark their interest in future STEM careers. 

You can also check out earlier Spark Squad comic books as the team explores hydropower.

The Spark Squad comic books were produced through a collaborative effort between the Office of Nuclear Energy, the Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy, the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, and Chromosphere Studio.  

 To explore more STEM activities related to nuclear power, check out our Navigating Nuclear Curriculum or visit our full suite of DOE STEM resources.  

 https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/department-energy-goes-nuclear-new-comic-book?fbclid=IwY2xjawGFBF9leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHdLM-idQxTS1kErOBso5ag3kYlNAjm1qHoCTt38mVxDrlqgf8IBwP-haUA_aem_Yd7COpwP3grZbyEr2-gLSg

October 24, 2024 Posted by | Education, USA | Leave a comment

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