So far, federal and provincial taxpayers have been footing the bill for Small Nuclear Reactor development in Canada, with little private sector investment—meaning the investor scrutiny and cost controls that torpedoed the NuScale project are muted at best.
Would Canadian taxpayers be OK with continuing to shell out up to a trillion dollars for a technology with no proven track record of producing reliable, affordable electricity?
So far, federal and provincial taxpayers have been footing the bill for SMR development in Canada, with little private sector investment—meaning the investor scrutiny and cost controls that torpedoed the NuScale project are muted at best. Would Canadian taxpayers be OK with continuing to shell out up to a trillion dollars for a technology with no proven track record of producing reliable, affordable electricity?
Near the end of 2023, the government published its second nuclear fantasy of the year. The December statement declares that Canada will work with other countries to “advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050.”
In a sprinkling of public relations fairy dust, the declaration is labeled “COP28”, although written well before the two-week climate summit in Dubai. The nuclear declaration managed to attract only 25 endorsing countries, in contrast to the official COP28 pledge to triple renewable energy and energy efficiency by 2030, signed by 123 countries and eventually adopted by consensus in the final COP declaration.
The currently operating power generating capacity of all nuclear plants in the world is 365 gigawatts. Tripling that total by 2050, in the next 26 years, will mean reaching close to 1,100 gigawatts. Looking back 26 years, the power capacity of the global nuclear fleet has grown an average of 0.8 gigawatts each year. At that rate, nuclear capacity in 2050 will be a mere 386 gigawatts.
And tripling today’s nuclear capacity would require the industry to overcome the significant setbacks and delays in new reactor construction that have plagued it forever with no solution in sight, while building an additional large number of reactors to replace old ones shut down over the same period.
Earlier last year, the Canada Energy Regulator (CER) published the country’s previous nuclear fantasy document, with scenarios that also projected roughly a tripling of nuclear generation capacity by 2050. Canada’s six nuclear plants currently produce about 13 gigawatts of power; a tripling would bring that to 39 GW. The CER report envisions this new nuclear capacity coming from so-called small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs).
Only two public utilities in Canada are proposing to build SMRs: NB Power in New Brunswick, and Ontario Power Generation (OPG). The most authoritative report to date on SMRs, from the U.S. National Academies, found that the designs planned for New Brunswick—a molten salt reactor and a sodium-cooled reactor—are unlikely to reach commercial deployment by 2050.
OPG is promising that its SMR design, a 300-megawatt boiling water reactor, will be the first in the world to be deployed commercially starting in 2030, although the design has not yet been licenced to build in Canada or anywhere else. Assuming that this unit is chosen for widespread deployment in Canada, nearly 90 would need to be built and operating effectively on the grid between 2030 and 2050 to achieve the proposed tripling. Given the known construction time overruns for nuclear power plants, this also is impossible.
The news on the SMR front from around the world has been bleak—especially in the United States, which has been trying to commercialize SMR designs for more than a decade. The flagship SMR design in the U.S., the NuScale light-water reactor, was the first to receive design approval by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission. However plans to build an array of NuScale reactors were shelved in November when the estimated construction costs ballooned to US$9.3-billion (C$12.8-billion) for 462 megawatts and potential customers fled. Earlier this month, NuScale laid off nearly half of its work force.
Assuming the NuScale construction costs of $27.7 million per megawatt would be an acceptable price range to customers in Canada, that would give the OPG design, also a light-water reactor, a cost of $8.3 billion per unit. If 90 units were built as a way to triple nuclear energy capacity, the total price tag would be $747 billion. That assumes that costs won’t go up during construction, as has been the case with the majority of nuclear projects in Canada and around the world.
So far, federal and provincial taxpayers have been footing the bill for SMR development in Canada, with little private sector investment—meaning the investor scrutiny and cost controls that torpedoed the NuScale project are muted at best. Would Canadian taxpayers be OK with continuing to shell out up to a trillion dollars for a technology with no proven track record of producing reliable, affordable electricity? Particularly when the energy efficiency, solar, and wind technologies explicitly favoured by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change as the quickest path to emission reductions are already proven, affordable, and ready for prime time?
Last month’s bogus “COP28” nuclear declaration is posted on the Natural Resources Canada website. Like its counterpart in the United States, the Department of Energy, NRCan is the department responsible for promoting the interests of the nuclear industry. In both the United States and Canada, that industry has been failing for decades, and one of its strategies for securing government support has been to appeal to geopolitical interests. In recent years, that appeal has usually involved pointing out how Western countries are falling behind Russia, the largest exporter of nuclear power plants, and China, which has built more nuclear plants than any other country over the past decade.
The U.S. government has responded by using its diplomatic clout to promote nuclear energy, especially small modular reactors. In Washington, Energy and Natural Resources Minister Jonathan Wilkinson delivered Canada’s statement on nuclear energy that linked Canadian exports of uranium and nuclear technology to energy security in response to Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. This geopolitical context explains why Russia and China were conspicuously missing from the list of signatories to the declaration to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050.
The nuclear industry’s other argument to stay alive is the bogus claim that it can help solve climate change. But as veteran energy modeller and visionary Amory Lovins pointed out: “To protect the climate, we must abate the most carbon at the least cost—and in the least time—so we must pay attention to carbon, cost, and time, not to carbon alone.” The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power.
Meanwhile, the website of Environment and Climate Change Canada, the department truly responsible for the country’s international climate commitments, has a genuine COP28 statement that does not mention nuclear. Instead, it highlights “groundbreaking goals to triple renewable energy, double energy efficiency, and, for the first time ever… a historic consensus to move away from fossil fuels in energy systems.”
Tripling nuclear energy by 2050 is a nuclear industry fantasy and complete make-believe. Tripling renewable energy and doubling energy efficiency by 2030 is sensible and doable, as long as the requisite political will is present. It is past time to get real about the energy generation technologies we need to be supporting.
Susan O’Donnell is Adjunct Research Professor and leader of the CEDAR project at St. Thomas University in Fredericton, New Brunswick. M.V. Ramana is Professor and Professor and Simons Chair in Disarmament, Global and Human Security at the University of British Columbia.
At COP28, the latest United Nations Climate gathering, nuclear power received more attention. Saudi Arabia committed to developing nuclear electrical generation. China is constructing 21 large nuclear reactors. Some people believe a massive nuclear build out will avert the climate crisis. The 436 reactors now operating produce about 10 percent of the global electricity. It would take 10,000 additional reactors to completely decarbonize the global economy.
It is true that an operating reactor produces no greenhouse gases (GHG), but when the whole life cycle of a reactor is analyzed, including construction and fuel enrichment, a standard 1,000MW reactor releases GHG comparable to a natural gas power plant. Even that evaluation is incomplete, as it excludes complete decommissioning of a large nuclear plant (never been done), and long-term storage of high level nuclear waste (not yet done even after 70 years).
Nuclear corporations were blackmailed into business. After the atomic destruction in Japan, the US government wanted a happy face for the atom, so Atoms For Peace promoted “power too cheap to meter.” The electrical industry was told to develop nuclear power, or the government would do it, putting them out of business. This was a bluff, but nobody knew it then.
Economically, nuclear power is a bust. Reactors are large, expensive, and centralized, making construction more an art than manufacturing. Costs consistently comes in over budget and behind schedule, making nuclear power more expensive than solar or wind, even including storage. Even operating an existing nuclear reactor is more costly than building renewable projects. While solar, wind, and battery costs are dropping every year, nuclear costs keep increasing. Small modular reactors (SMR), heralded as the salvation of the nuclear industry, suffer the same cost problems, plus a lack of customers. The only SMR project in the US was just canceled due to cost overruns.
Uranium is a finite commodity, and used inefficiently. A reactor core contains tons of highly processed enriched uranium. After a few years, when only 5 percent of the uranium has been consumed, the core must be replaced. When fission byproducts build up, performance degrades to the point of economic inefficacy. Millions of tons of highly radioactive “spent” fuel are stored at reactor sites. The best uranium deposits have already been developed, leaving only poorer quality ore. Most low level enriched uranium comes from Russia.
But the real economic costs come when a reactor breaks. Designed to last for 40 years, decisions were made in the beginning with incomplete information, with multiple units built on those designs in order to make nuclear construction seem profitable. So far, the worst US designed reactor failures were the 40 year old units at Fukushima, in 2011. Complete cleanup cost estimates are over $1T. Actual repairs have yet to begin, because radioactivity is too high for even robots to function for very long, let alone humans.
The only reactors still operating in California are the 40 year old pair at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo. Heavy radioactivity embrittles metal, making it more prone to shock failure. Several earthquake faults have been identified near the site, including one right through the plant. PG&E has done embrittlement tests, but refuses to release the results to the public, claiming “proprietary rights”. The Diablo Canyon reactors were recently granted a 5-year extension, with no changes required to the existing, aging equipment.
A reactor failure due to a seismic event could affect a large area of central California, from LA to San Francisco and inland to Nevada, depending on which way the wind blows. But PG&E would not be liable for any damages beyond $13B, due to the Price Anderson Act, a sweet heart deal the US made when the nuclear industry began. Every liability insurance policy written has an exclusion for nuclear damages. This all helps the nuclear industry seem profitable.
Nuclear power highlights a fundamental capitalist problem: the conflict between safety and profits. Each reactor is so powerful, that any accident can become catastrophic faster than humans can react. It is so expensive, that the incentive is enormous to cut costs to be more profitable. Add in limited corporate financial liability, and you get a recipe for disaster.
Fukushima shows the “small probability, high impact” nature of a failed nuclear reactor. The economics of even a properly operating reactor fail basic capitalist reasoning. To leave a habitable planet for our descendants, we have to do better.
Crispin B. Hollinshead lives in Ukiah. This and previous articles can be found at cbhollinshead.blogspot.com.
Both CNN and The Washington Post have been caught engaging in some pretty shady journalistic malpractice with their Israel reporting in recent days.
In a new article titled “CNN Runs Gaza Coverage Past Jerusalem Team Operating Under Shadow of IDF Censor,” The Intercept reports that all of CNN’s reporting on Israel and Palestine is funneled through a bureau in Jerusalem which slants reporting to benefit Israeli information interests and is subject to regulation by Israeli military censors. The Intercept also reports that last year CNN “hired a former soldier from the IDF’s Military Spokesperson Unit to serve as a reporter” at the onset of the war on Gaza.
Unnamed CNN staff told The Intercept that CNN’s iron-fisted protocols for regulating information related to the Israel-Palestine issue have had a “demonstrable impact on coverage of the Gaza war”.
“‘War-crime’ and ‘genocide’ are taboo words,” the anonymous CNN staff member said. “Israeli bombings in Gaza will be reported as ‘blasts’ attributed to nobody, until the Israeli military weighs in to either accept or deny responsibility. Quotes and information provided by Israeli army and government officials tend to be approved quickly, while those from Palestinians tend to be heavily scrutinized and slowly processed.”
The Intercept reports that the former IDF spinmeister has been bylined in dozens of CNN stories since the attack on Gaza began, with one report being “little more than a direct statement released from the IDF.”
Kind of makes you wonder why CNN doesn’t just cut out the middleman and run all its reporting directly through IDF headquarters in Tel Aviv. Seems like it would be a bit more efficient, and certainly a lot more honest.
Meanwhile The Washington Post has been caught assigning a reporter with a history of anti-Palestinian bias to write a smear piece on independent media outlets Electronic Intifada and The Grayzone for their critical reporting on Israel’s ongoing massacre in Gaza.
As Electronic Intifada’s Ali Abunimah highlighted on Twitter, when Dwoskin was at Columbia University twenty years ago she was authoring Nakba denialist claims that Palestine never existed and that prior to Israel’s formation the land was inhabited only by “desert Bedouins without a sense of national identity as we know it today.”
It’s bad enough for The Washington Post to be attacking independent media for asking the critical questions and doing the real journalism the Post itself should also be doing, but to assign someone with a public history of egregiously anti-Palestinian rhetoric to the task is especially lacking in journalistic integrity.
“If I’m following, a reporter that has denied the fact that Palestinians existed before the state of Israel is allowed to cover Israel/Palestine and write about ‘misinformation’ for Washington Post?” tweeted award-winning journalist Laila Al-Arian of Abunimah’s revelation.
Neither of these instances will come as a surprise to anyone who has been paying critical attention to the amazingly awful reporting the western mass media have been churning out about the Gaza assault these last three months, but they do offer some rare insight behind the curtain into how the sausage gets made.
The biggest misconception about propaganda is that it is something that happens to other people, and is done by other countries. Westerners like to think of themselves as free-thinking people whose worldviews are formed by facts and truth, contrasting themselves with nations like North Korea and China where populations are viewed as being subjected to conformity-enforcing propaganda. They believe that if propaganda does occur in the west, it comes here from nations like Russia trying to corrupt our minds and weaken our trust in our institutions, or if the propaganda is domestic in origin it only affects people in other political parties.
In reality the typical western mind has been marinating in domestic propaganda throughout its entire life, and its worldview has been manufactured for it by powerful manipulators who benefit from its intellectual compliance with their interests. The indoctrination into the mainstream western worldview began in school, and it continues throughout adulthood with the help of mainstream media outlets like CNN and The Washington Post.
If we’re ever to have a healthy civilization, we’re going to have to wake up from the propaganda-induced coma we’ve been placed in so we can begin pushing against the cage walls we’ve been indoctrinated our whole lives into ignoring and start using the power of our numbers to force real change in the systems which govern our world. Luckily the atrocities that have been taking place in Gaza have been rapidly waking people up, because it turns out there’s only so much propaganda spin you can put on the murder of thousands of children.
The more people become aware that our civilization is built on deception and everything we’ve been told about the world is a lie, the closer we get to living in a truth-based society where nothing like the Gaza massacre would ever be permitted to occur.
“…………………………………………………………………………………………………… Eighty-seven years after I got here the blue dot is now in serious trouble. Not the dot itself, but all of us creatures riding on it. My eighty-seven year ride coincides precisely with the time we have been living with the knowledge about nuclear fission. As I have contemplated it most of my life I have been compelled to conclude that nuclear electricity, so-called nuclear power, has never been a normal economic activity, it has never paid its way, and still does not, it has always relied on vast injections of money and resources from taxpayers and electricity users, decreed by governments.
Civil nuclear power has been in effect a cover story, to disguise the true reason for pouring so much of our wealth into this dangerous sinkhole. In the eyes of governments, the key nuclear activity has been to stockpile terrifying quantities of nuclear explosives for use as weapons, nuclear political power, in which someone says, in effect, unless you do what I want, or give me what I want, I’ll obliterate this blue dot.
As climate change makes more and more of the blue dot uninhabitable, conflicts are breaking out world-wide. We have to hope that some people, some of our fellow dot-riders, some states-people, can find a way to defuse the nuclear threat.
If there’s one thing Blinken and his cohorts understand, it’s that you’re not supposed to describe the evil things you want to do in evil-sounding language. You’ve got to tapdance gracefully around the actual depravity you intend to inflict, uttering flowery prose about humanitarian concerns and compassion for both sides to keep everyone dazzled and hypnotized while the killing machines are quietly rolled out in the background. You’ve got to be eloquent and elusive about your murderousness.
“The United States rejects recent statements from Israeli Ministers Bezalel Smotrich and Itamar Ben Gvir advocating for the resettlement of Palestinians outside of Gaza. This rhetoric is inflammatory and irresponsible. We have been told repeatedly and consistently by the Government of Israel, including by the Prime Minister, that such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government. They should stop immediately.
“We have been clear, consistent, and unequivocal that Gaza is Palestinian land and will remain Palestinian land, with Hamas no longer in control of its future and with no terror groups able to threaten Israel. That is the future we seek, in the interests of Israelis and Palestinians, the surrounding region, and the world.”
The offending statements by Ben Gvir and Smotrich promoted the idea of “encouraging” Palestinians to flee Gaza en masse, absurdly referring to this hypothetical outcome as “voluntary migration” despite the fact that Israel has been doing everything in its power to make living in Gaza impossible.
You will note, probably without surprise, that the statement contains nothing but empty scolding. No mention is made of the faintest possibility of any consequence of any kind being brought to bear should Israeli officials continue to openly advocate for eliminating the Palestinian population of Gaza and replacing it with Jewish settlements. This is because the US has no intention of actually doing anything to hinder Israel’s ethnic cleansing agendas.
And make no mistake, that absolutely is Israel’s agenda. The State Department can claim all it wants that “such statements do not reflect the policy of the Israeli government” and that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has assured Washington that there are no plans to resettle Palestinians outside of Gaza, but Netanyahu himself has been publicly contradicting this claim with increasing brazenness.
Just last week at a Likud party meeting Netanyahu explicitly said that his government is working on finding countries who would be willing to “absorb” Palestinian refugees from Gaza, claiming that the world is “already discussing the possibilities of voluntary immigration.”
Indeed, it’s fair to say that the extreme-right ministers Ben Gvir and Smotrich are not actually saying anything on this front that is significantly different from what Netanyahu himself has been saying. Bibi’s just a bit more polite about it, with Ben Gvir openly thumbing his nose at the State Department’s remarks saying “we aren’t another star on the American flag” and “facilitating the relocation of hundreds of thousands from Gaza will allow those in the Israeli Gaza border communities to return home and live securely while safeguarding the IDF soldiers.”
In fact, one could easily argue that Netanyahu as well as Ben Gvir and Smotrich have been entirely in alignment with the State Department’s own language on this subject. The idea of “voluntary immigration” does not contradict the position asserted by Secretary of State Antony Blinken that the US vision for Gaza involves “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza — not now, not after the war.”
Notice Blinken’s careful insertion of the word “forcible” there. His wording makes it clear that the US would only object if Palestinians were actually forced onto ships or marched across the Egyptian border at gunpoint, as middle east analyst Mouin Rabbani recently observed on Twitter:
“Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when US Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be ‘no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza’. Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of ‘voluntary’ displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.”
So contrary to its self-righteous moral posturing, the State Department is not actually upset with Ben Gvir and Smotrich for advocating the ethnic cleansing of Gaza. They’re just upset they said the quiet part out loud.
If there’s one thing Blinken and his cohorts understand, it’s that you’re not supposed to describe the evil things you want to do in evil-sounding language. You’ve got to tapdance gracefully around the actual depravity you intend to inflict, uttering flowery prose about humanitarian concerns and compassion for both sides to keep everyone dazzled and hypnotized while the killing machines are quietly rolled out in the background. You’ve got to be eloquent and elusive about your murderousness. Like Obama.
The US war machine is every bit as depraved as the state of Israel, and the Biden administration is just as culpable for the horrors being unleashed in Gaza as Netanyahu and his goons. Ignore their words and watch their actions. Don’t let them dazzle you with their feigned concern for human rights.
Australians should be wondering why the Centre for Independent Studies (CIS), one of the country’s proudest think tanks, has just established a body promoting nuclear energy that appears to have little to justify it. If the CIS truly believes in the project, surely it would have sought a leader with a stellar resumé?
Earlier this year, environmental journalist George Monbiot warned that the chance of simultaneous harvest failures in the world’s major breadbaskets was “much worse than we thought.” He poured his fury onto the old industries deploying as many Atlas Network-style “junktanks (‘thinktanks’), troll farms, marketing gurus, psychologists and micro-targeters as they need to drag our eyes away from what counts, and leave us talking about trivia and concocted bullshit instead.”
The 500+ global “partner” bodies of the Atlas Network have, for decades, been forming metastasising entities such as “think” tanks to create the sense of a chorus of academic or public support for the junk science and junk political economies that serve their funders. The primary goals have been to liberate plutocrats from any tax or regulation, and fossil fuel bodies have been amongst their most prolific donors.
By contrast with the billions spent to “stop collapse from being prevented,” the effort to prevent Earth systems collapse is led by people “working mostly in their own time with a fraction of the capacity.”
The Atlas strategy involves networking promising ultra-free market spruikers with the astonishing sums of money that fossil fuel and similar industries spend to promote their goals. The spruikers can be trained and cross-connected. Some are helped to create benign-named bodies that describe themselves as think tanks or academic institutes (beachheads) in universities. They found fake grass roots bodies (astroturfing) to pressure politicians into believing that there is public support for a policy. Youthful scholars or strategists co-opted and funded by the machine go on to export the work into politics and the media.
One Australian example is the founder of the Australian Taxpayer Alliance, Tim Andrews. He was a graduate of the Koch Associate Program, a year-long training program at the Charles Koch institute, and worked at the Atlas-partnerAmericans for Tax Reform for two years. Koch is one of the most significant figures in the Atlas Network’s spread. Andrews is now a member of the UK Atlas Partner, the Taxpayer Alliance Advisory Council.
High profile mining figures in particular unite many of these bodies. In Australia, Hugh Morgan’s name, for example, is present in many of their histories. He assisted Greg Lindsay in turning the CIS from a “part-time hobby” into the more serious institution that it became. Morgan was described in the Sydney Morning Herald in 1985 as “the most important conservative figure in Australia. He is not merely an outspoken captain of industry, he is at the centre of a large and growing network of activists who are seeking to reshape the political agenda in this country.”
In America there is an extensive web of such networks and bodies that interact together. The Atlas Network is important for its international forays into 100 countries, working to infect debate with this American ideology that overwhelmingly promotes the right of corporations to extract resources at any cost to the nation exploited.
There has of late been something of a global nuclear PR push, but it’s perhaps been oddly timed in that not everything has been going its own way. The USA’s flagship NuScale Small Modular Reactor (SMR) has taken a dive. It was seen as the pioneer for cheap fast-build mini-reactors, a scaled down but otherwise conventional pressurised water reactor. But, despite some speculative funding, it was looking increasingly dodgy financially, with lawyers circling like vultures.
And then the big Idaho Falls NuScale project was cancelled. WIRED said this had been on the cards since ‘the utilities backing the plant were spooked by a 50% increase in the projected costs’. That was not seen as good news for other SMRs further back in development. Some see it all as a bit of a dangerous gamble.
Maybe not the right time then for the UK to launch what amounted to a promotional report ‘Made in Britain: The Pathway to a Nuclear Renaissance’. Produced by the All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) it says that the UK government decision to invest in Sizewell C was a turning point. Well yes- it recognises that few others are likely to! Unlike with Hinkley Point C, with China playing a financial support role- although it recently halted that. To that extent, unless the UAE can be enticed to step in, if Sizewell C goes ahead, it will be ‘made in Britain’, though, as with Hinkley, most of the technology will be imported.
However, progress on funding and project contacts is all going rather slowly. Sir John Armitt, chair of the National Infrastructure Commission, said that ‘at the moment, we’re not making any progress really on Sizewell C, there is no deal being done with EDF… so we don’t see nuclear as really having a significant part to play in any new stations other than Hinkley before 2035.’ And, making it even harder for any potential investors, the government wants new tighter Regulated Asset Base funding rules– perhaps they are getting nervous about likely costs to consumers?
Nevertheless, the APPG seem confident that all can be made well soon- with the newly established Great British Nuclear (GBN) organisation seen as playing key role. APPG calls on the government to ‘commit the funding to GBN necessary to build its developer capabilities and to invest directly in at least the first two SMR projects & next large-scale project,’ on the way to 24GW by 2050. It welcomed the £20bn SMR contract value figure that the government mentioned last year, but that’s not been confirmed. And would the big Rolls Royce SMR be chosen to make it all UK? Rolls certainly thinks it will be the winner...
Globally, while there are some new nuclear projects underway or planned, for example in China, it all still mostly looks a bit uncertain. It is true that, ever optimistic, the nuclear lobby keeps talking its future up. Over 20 nations, led by the United States, including the UAE, South Korea, Japan, France, the Netherlands, Poland, Sweden and the UK, issued a call at COP28 climate summit in the UAE to triple global nuclear power capacity by 2050.
However, despite that being twenty years after the 2030 target date for renewables to be tripled, as pushed by Bloomberg NEF and also backed at COP28 (see later), several commentators said that, even by then, the triple nuclear target was unlikely to be reached – it would need unprecedented expansion. And the annual World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR), which emerged at more or less the same time as the COP nuclear statement, certainly made clear that nuclear was already being far outstripped by renewables globally.
A significant reversal of its prospects does not seem unlikely. Indeed, as an earlier article in the FT had noted, even the International Atomic Energy Agency has forecasts that, given expected growth energy demand, over the next 20 years, the nuclear industry share in the global energy mix, roughly10% of the world’s electricity generation today, will remain flat, if not decrease slightly, unless there are very ambitious construction plans.
So maybe that’s why are we seeing such optimistic projections- otherwise nuclear will be sidelined. We have been here before with ambitious nuclear projections and plans- which failed to materialise. A recent study has looked back at why earlier scenario model-based predictions had not come true, and it may be that we may be about to see a repeat exercise.
Of late, there have certainly been some scenarios with major expansion of nuclear, for example, in the IPCC Sixth Assessment Report, with nuclear capacity doubling by 2050. However, it also said renewables were much more efficient at reducing carbon and there are many scenarios with renewables accelerating very rapidly. That’s not surprising given the recent fall in their cost. Though, sadly, aided by inflation pressures due to the rise in the costs of fossil fuels, it seems to be taking a while for new funding patterns to be adopted, and for linked energy demand stabilisation programmes to be introduced. That being so, a recent study has suggested that ‘there is the risk that considerable public and private funds will be invested in developing technologies for the commercial use of nuclear energy despite the fact that other technologies are expected to offer a significantly better cost-performance ratio with fewer economic, technical, and military risks’.
Of course it can be argued that we will need to expand both nuclear and renewables and certainly there are strong lobby pressures to do that- or else, it is claimed, we will face ever expanding fossil fuel use and carbon emissions. But are nuclear and renewables equally valuable and capable of rapid expansion? To many, renewable expansion does look more credible- at COP28 118 countries renewed their pledge to triple renewable power by 2030, a target backed by the EU and shared by IRENA. That, along with investment in energy saving and demand management, should arguably help us to cut global use of fossil fuel, and the consequent carbon emissions, faster than investment in nuclear and at less cost.
However, it won’t be easy, and that’s just for power. And although there are scenarios suggesting that, given careful energy management, 100% of all energy globally could come from renewables by 2050, there’s a long way to go to get to that. Some may be tempted to look to carbon capture to help on the way for a while, although it’s hard to see that being cheap or easy. Like nuclear, with CCS projects failing or stalled, it looks more like another costly dead-end diversion. What’s wrong with accelerating the full range of green energy systems– renewables, energy storage and smart demand management, which of course includes energy efficiency?
Over the past two months, Raytheon/RTX — which develops and sells weapons systems used by the Israeli Defense Forces — has seen stock prices skyrocket and company executives discuss the rise in violence as a financial opportunity.
According to UMass Dissenters organizers, the company is deeply entrenched at the college through recruitment practices and the Isenberg School of Management, which has a close educational and financial partnership with the weapons manufacturer.
A UMass Dissenters organizer discusses the growing youth-led antiwar movement and how they are organizing against weapons manufacturers and the war in Gaza.
In January 2020, Dissenters — a grassroots, youth-led antiwar movement — began with the mission to connect violence against Black and brown communities in the U.S. to the systems of oppression that fund, arm and enable global militarism. While born from the legacy of the U.S. antiwar movement, Dissenters takes an intersectional approach that connects global wars with corporate elites, local police, border walls, surveillance and prisons. Operating across the country through campus chapters, training fellowships and a strong social media presence, Dissenters has been organizing for college divestment from weapons manufacturers, ending campus recruitment from military-affiliated companies and disbanding campus police departments.
Since Oct. 7, in the aftermath of the Hamas attack and the subsequent siege of Gaza, Dissenters chapters have doubled down on antiwar organizing, holding local and national rallies, sit-ins, student walkouts and training events both on and offline. One campus chapter — at the University of Massachusetts, Amherst — has organized protests, disruptions to sports games, and a sit-in at the chancellor’s office to pressure its university to cut ties with the weapons manufacturer Raytheon, now known as RTX.
Over the past two months, Raytheon/RTX — which develops and sells weapons systems used by the Israeli Defense Forces — has seen stock prices skyrocket and company executives discuss the rise in violence as a financial opportunity. According to UMass Dissenters organizers, the company is deeply entrenched at the college through recruitment practices and the Isenberg School of Management, which has a close educational and financial partnership with the weapons manufacturer.
I spoke with Bre Joseph, a UMass Amherst senior and organizer with the campus chapter of Dissenters. We discussed organizing college students against weapons manufacturers, the radicalizing impact of activist arrests, and the lessons learned from successes and setbacks.
In relation to the siege on Gaza, what are the main goals or demands of the UMass Dissenters chapter?
Number one is that the school must divest and cut ties with weapons manufacturers like Raytheon, but also Boeing, Lockheed Martin, General Dynamics, Northrop Grumman and so on. Our second demand is that the administration must call for an immediate end to Israel’s siege on Gaza and end U.S. funding. A third demand is that the administration must replace weapons manufacturers with jobs working toward a demilitarized future.
I think that third one acknowledges that — while moving away from Raytheon as a campus partner would technically decrease opportunities afforded to UMass students — the onus is on the campus to replace jobs that increase death and violence with jobs that are sustainable and help the earth. We’ve heard students express this on an app called Yik Yak where you can post anonymously. It’s usually unserious, but every now and then I’ll open it and see people say, “I’m an engineering major, and I’m tired of having Raytheon pushed down my throat as an employment option. I don’t want to build bombs. I don’t want to make money for this company that’s killing people. I want better options.” That’s really been our goal from the beginning — get those jobs out and center a demilitarized future instead of militarizing it further.
How does intersectionality both inform and impact Dissenters’ organizing? ………………………………………………………………..
How has UMass Dissenters organized to inform and mobilize students on the connections between the campus and weapons manufacturers?
In terms of education, we have a document that we’ve made public via our Instagram and emails we’ve sent out to interested students really detailing UMass’s connection to Raytheon — and detailing Raytheon’s connection to the IDF and the war on Palestinians. At our weekly meetings, we’ve also had things like teach-ins for interested students. We’ve also crashed Raytheon information sessions to do this thing we call “being the common sense,” where we ask recruiters: “What exactly would students be building? What exactly is making the company money?” We ask the questions they don’t really want to answer but that they need to to be held accountable…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. more https://scheerpost.com/2023/12/17/inside-the-youth-led-fight-for-a-demilitarized-future/
Humans inhabit two very different worlds simultaneously: the real world and the narrative world. The world of concrete material reality, and the world of mental stories about reality.
There’s the material reality of presents piled under the Christmas tree, and then there’s the story parents tell small children about how those presents got there. There’s the material reality of military explosives ripping human bodies to shreds, and then there’s the story the powerful tell the world about how and why that’s happening.
What we are seeing with Gaza is manufactured narrative splatting against reality over and over again. The western empire churns out propaganda narratives about what Israel is doing, and those narratives are crashing headlong into raw video footage and concrete facts in ways you don’t often see.
Here are some examples of made-up narratives:
• October 7 was an unprovoked attack
• This a war of defense and Israel has a right to defend itself
• Jewish people can’t be safe unless they have a homeland in which they receive preferential treatment over other ethnic groups
• There cannot be peace until Hamas is eliminated
• All civilian casualties are the fault of Hamas
Here are some examples of objective reality:
• Raw video footage of civilians who’ve been burned, mutilated and ripped apart by Israeli military explosives
• Photos of dead children who’ve been killed in Israeli airstrikes
The former category consists entirely of insubstantial thought fluff; they’re stories people made up to advance their own agendas, and have no objective reality in and of themselves. The latter category consists of the concrete realities of the material world.
Relatively few people are fully aware of just how extensively mental narrative dominates human consciousness, and how this has allowed human civilization to be dominated by whoever can control what our society’s dominant narratives are. The US-centralized empire, of which Israel is a part, has succeeded in establishing a system of narrative control whose sophistication and efficacy has no parallel or precedent.
But in Gaza it isn’t working. It isn’t working because there’s no amount of propaganda spin you can put on raw data that is self-evidently unacceptable and inexcusable. No matter how much propaganda spin you heap on top of a video of a dismembered child, you cannot persuade me that it is fine and acceptable.
This is a very, very big problem for the empire. There is panic happening behind the scenes. What’s happening in Gaza is unspeakably horrific, and Israel’s atrocities must end immediately. But if there’s any silver lining in all this horror, it’s that people are being snapped out of the imperial propaganda matrix like never before.
LAST WEEK, Secretary of State Antony Blinken hosted a meeting with leaders of human rights organizations to mark the 75th anniversary of the adoption of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights by the United Nations. But through subtle stage management, the State Department arranged for Blinken’s praise for human rights to be recorded and promulgated — while the world was not able to hear the retorts from human rights advocates who criticized America’s backing of Israel’s war on Gaza.
The Universal Declaration was a landmark in history. While it was only a statement of principles, and so did not have legal force in itself, it was broadly inspirational and has formed the basis for numerous subsequent treaties and laws. According to Guinness World Records, it’s been translated into more languages than any other document — over 550, from Abkhaz to Zulu.
After the December 7 meeting, the internet exploded in bitter laughter at Blinken, and it’s easy to understand why. At the start of the meeting at the State Department, Blinken informed the assemblage that “the universality of human rights is under severe challenge and rights are being violated in far too many places … And of course we see atrocities in the midst of conflict.” Yes, of course. Just one day later, on December 8, the U.S. vetoed a resolution at the U.N. Security Council calling for a ceasefire in Israel’s war on Gaza.
Notably, the Universal Declaration states that “everyone has a right to a nationality.” The Universal Declaration was adopted on December 10, 1948, one day before U.N. Resolution 194 was passed. Resolution 194 famously stated that, in the wake of the establishment of Israel earlier that year, Palestinian refugees “wishing to return to their homes and live at peace with their neighbors should be permitted to do so at the earliest practicable date.” This anniversary has not been commemorated with an event at the State Department.
Indeed, the whole process with Blinken was as distastefully funny as the Russian government’s own recent celebration of the Universal Declaration’s anniversary, in which it spoke of its deep concern over “the human rights situation in Ukraine.” This is where the U.S. government’s stage management comes in.
There were four human rights organizations in attendance, all represented by their top officials: Amnesty International (Agnès Callamard), Human Rights Watch (Tirana Hassan), the Committee to Protect Journalists (Jodie Ginsberg), and Freedom House (Michael Abramowitz).
We know this because all four leaders appeared in the above photo happily tweeted out by Blinken himself. And all four groups confirmed their presence to The Intercept. But when asked, the State Department refused to name who was in attendance because, it explained, this meeting took place in a “private setting.”
In addition to the photo provided by Blinken, you can watch a video of this private setting on the State Department’s publicly available website. At 0:59, as Blinken natters on, you can see one of his bored functionaries glancing at his watch.
What actually happened is that, as the Committee to Protect Journalists puts it, “the State Department made clear that Secretary Blinken wanted to make a statement on the record but the meeting was private.”
In other words, the U.S. government insisted that there be a public section of the meeting at the start, in which Blinken spoke and the human rights leaders would be photographed listening to him. Then, these photographs and Blinken’s words were distributed to the world. But the human rights leaders’ words were not.
Asked about his own experiences in such situations, Kenneth Roth, Hassan’s predecessor as head of Human Rights Watch, says that “there is nothing inherently wrong with having an off-the-record meeting with government officials … but it is odd for the Biden administration to mark the 75th anniversary of the Universal Declaration with an off-the-record meeting.” Roth explains that the Universal Declaration had modest influence in the decade after its adoption because it was considered undiplomatic for governments to criticize others by name. However, that changed in the 1960s and 1970s. “A commemoration of the Declaration that embraced what has made the document so impactful,” Roth contends, “would have been an on-the-record meeting in which abusive governments were unabashedly singled out by name.”
Human Rights Watch and Freedom House both declined to provide any details about what their officials told Blinken, stating that the post-photo op section of the meeting was off the record.
However, Amanda Klasing, Amnesty International’s national director for government relations and advocacy, did comment. Callamard, she says, “urged Secretary Blinken to seize the current inflection point, be consistent in the US’s attention to human rights, and send the message that human rights apply equally to non-US allies and to its closest friends. She made clear that this is especially urgent today, as Amnesty International has documented that the government of Israel – one of the US’s closest allies – is flagrantly violating international humanitarian law in its attacks on Gaza. She urged him to see the need for an immediate ceasefire and a stop to the transfer and sale of arms to the government of Israel in the existing context.”
The Committee to Protect Journalists was also willing to describe its leader’s remarks. According to CPJ, Ginsberg “most certainly brought our full-range of deep and urgent concerns regarding journalists in Gaza. The ongoing disaster is a top priority for us. Ginsberg underscored that more than 60 journalists have been killed (the vast majority Palestinians in Gaza), the increasingly difficult conditions, and the broader clampdown on the press and arrests including the West Bank. Notably, we strongly reiterated our demand for accountability in the likely targeting of journalists in southern Lebanon. In doing so, we stated our deep concern that the pattern of journalists being killed with impunity by the Israel Defense Forces is a long one.”
Roth, for his part, adds that “we don’t need another symbol of the Biden administration’s commitment to human rights. … A more meaningful way to celebrate the Universal Declaration would have been to visibly enforce it in the human rights black hole that the Middle East has largely become for the Biden administration.”
In a nice touch by the State Department, the meeting was held in its Thomas Jefferson State Reception Room, so the participants were overseen by both a statue and a painting of Jefferson. Jefferson was America’s first secretary of state, as well as the author of the Declaration of Independence — in some ways the progenitor of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Jefferson also enslaved 600 people over his lifetime and raped his dead wife’s half-sister, whom he owned. He thus is perhaps America’s greatest exemplar of our history of soaring rhetoric combined with a much grimier reality.
IAEA Director General Rafael Grossi was at a COP28 event on 1 December 2023 in Dubai. He kicked off the nuke lobby push the IAEA Statement on Nuclear Power as a climate solution .
This slimy, silver-tongued propagandist is adept at couching the nuclear push in mealy-mouthed weasel words that are blandly acceptable to the public. The mantra will be “making use of all low-carbon energy sources”. The theme will be nuclear-not as the major star of climate action, but “part of the energy mix”, – and of course – requiring tax-payer funding.
You’ve got to hand it to Grossi – a master at deceptive language . He will cover himself, mouthing some concerns about proliferation, about the safety of the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Station, but his essential message is that nuclear is safe, clean, and deserves government funding. He minimises nuclear power’s history of accidents.
This UN agency wields huge influence internationally. It was set up – post the Hiroshima bombing, to make the nuclear industry look good.
At the climate summit The UK and USA governments eagerly jumped on the bandwagon, pushing for a tripling of nuclear power by 2050. Another 20 governments joined the push, but 179 other governments did not.
The sad reality is – that Mr Grossi and all these currently powerful politicians do not know how to cope with the obscene costs and horror of scrapping the world’s old toxic crumbling nuclear facilities . So forf thdem, their best option is to push on with the nuclear madness.
After all, they’ll soon retire on their fat superannuations, and leave the next generation with this horrible problem in a heated world.
Since October 7, the day the escalation in Israel/Palestine began (FAIR.org, 10/13/23), American media outlets have persistently described the fighting as an “Israel-Hamas war.” From October 7 through midday on December 1, the New York Times, Wall Street Journal and Washington Post have combined to run 565 pieces that use the phrase “Israel-Hamas war.”
This paradigm has been a dominant way of covering the violence, even though Israel has been clear from the start that its assault has not been narrowly aimed at Hamas. At the outset of the Israeli onslaught, Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Gallant (Times of Israel, 10/9/23) said: “I have ordered a complete siege on the Gaza Strip. There will be no electricity, no food, no fuel, everything is closed.” Oxfam later said that such restrictions on Palestinians’ ability to eat—which left 2.2 million people “in urgent need of food”—mean that Israel is deploying a policy wherein “starvation is being used as a weapon of war against Gaza civilians.”
A day later, Israeli military spokesperson Adm. Daniel Hagari (Guardian, 10/10/23) said that “hundreds of tons of bombs” had already been dropped on the Gaza Strip, and admitted that “the emphasis is on damage and not on accuracy.”
The indiscriminate nature of Israel’s assault is clear. The United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs reported on November 24 that “over 1.7 million people in Gaza, or nearly 80% of the population, are estimated to be internally displaced.” On November 25, the Swiss-based Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor reported that Israel had killed 20,031 Palestinians in Gaza, 18,460 of whom (or 92%) were civilians, since October 7.
Thus, while Israel has openly acknowledged that it is carrying out indiscriminate violence against Palestinians, US media outlets do Israel the favor of presenting its campaign as if it were only aimed at combatants. “Israel-Gaza war” comes closer to capturing the reality that Israel’s offensive is effectively against everyone living in Gaza. Yet “Israel-Gaza war” appears in 265 pieces in the three papers, exactly 300 fewer than the obfuscatory “Israel-Hamas war.”
Consider also the Euro-Mediterranean Human Rights Monitor finding that Israel has slaughtered 8,176 children. If 41% of all the Palestinians Israel has killed in the first seven weeks of its rampage have been children, and 8% have been combatants, then it is less an “Israel-Hamas war” than an Israeli war on Palestinian children.
Characterizing what has happened since October 7 as an “Israel-Hamas war” fails to adequately capture the scope and the character of Israel’s violence. Describing the bloodbath in Palestine this way obscures that grave violence is being visited upon virtually all Palestinians, whatever their political allegiances and whatever their relation to the fighting.
Cognitive dissonance
Corporate media have often stuck to the “Israel-Hamas war” approach even when the information the outlets are reporting shows how inadequate it is to conceive of Israel’s attacks in that way. For instance, the New York Times (10/20/23) ran a story about Israel ordering 1.2 million Gaza residents to evacuate their homes, and still classified the evacuation as part of the “Israel-Hamas war.” The Izz ad-Din al-Qassam Brigades, Hamas’ armed wing, is estimated to have 30,000–40,000 fighters (Axios, 10/21/23).
The Wall Street Journal published a short piece (11/6/23) that noted:
The United Nations said that the Israel-Hamas war has killed the highest number of UN workers in any single conflict. The UN said that over 88 workers in its Relief and Works Agency [UNRWA], the largest humanitarian organization in the Gaza Strip, have been killed since October 7.
But UNRWA did not itself use the “Israel-Hamas war” narrative in the report to which the Journal referred, instead opting for “escalation in the Gaza Strip.” Indeed, Israel killing UN workers at a rate of almost three each day would seem to fall outside the bounds of an “Israel-Hamas war,” but that’s how the paper categorizes the violence. (“Israel’s war on the UN” falls well outside the bounds of the ideologically permissible in the corporate media.)……………………………… more https://fair.org/home/israel-hamas-war-label-obscures-israels-war-on-palestinians/
The following is a statement from Extinction Rebellion, UK, in light of misrepresentations of their movement by a former team member now working for a pro-nuclear front group.It alleges that Environmental Progress, its new employee, Zion Lights, its founder, Michael Shellenberger, and the group’s predecessor, Breakthrough Institute (still operating as well) have ties to big corporations and to climate denial.
There have been a number of stories in the press in the last few weeks with criticisms about Extinction Rebellion by Zion Lights, UK director of the pro-nuclear lobby group Environmental Progress. It appears that Lights is engaged in a deliberate PR campaign to discredit Extinction Rebellion.
For any editors who might be considering platforming Lights, we would like to make you aware of some information about the organisation she works for and her employer, Michael Shellenberger.
ENVIRONMENTAL PROGRESS & MICHAEL SHELLENBERGER
Environmental Progress is a pro-nuclear energy lobby group. While the group itself was only established in 2016, its backers and affiliates have a long and well-documented history of denying human-caused climate change and/or attempting to delay action on the climate crisis. A quick look at groups currently promoting Zion Lights through their social media channels include climate deniers and industry lobbyists such as The Global Warming Policy Foundation and the Genetic Literacy Project (formerly funded by Monsanto).*
The founder of Environmental Progress, Michael Shellenberger, has a record of spreading misinformation around climate change and using marketing techniques to distort the narrative around climate science. He has a reputation for downplaying the severity of the climate crisis and promoting aggressive economic growth and green technocapitalist solutions.
Shellenberger appeared on the Tucker Carlson Show on Fox News just last week to say that the forest fires currently raging in California are due to “more people and more electrical wires that they’ve failed to maintain because we’ve focused on other things like building renewables” and we’ve been “so focused on renewables, so focused on climate change.”
In his recent book Apocalypse Never: Why Environmental Alarmism Hurts us All, Shellenberger argues that there are no limits to growth and that environmental problems can be solved by everyone getting richer. The book has been widely criticised by many respected scientists both for its central premise and its misunderstanding, misinterpretation and misuse of the facts. (See here and here.)
His stance on fundamental and vitally important points of scientific consensus around the climate crisis is flat out wrong. In his essay promoting his book published in June of this year on the Environmental Progress website and The Australian – ‘On behalf of environmentalists, I apologise for the climate scare’ –he claims that “climate change is not making natural disasters worse” and that “Humans are not causing a ‘sixth mass extinction”. He also argues that “fires have declined 25% around the world since 2003,” and, “The build-up of wood fuel and more houses near forests, not climate change, explain why there are more, and more dangerous, fires in Australia and California.” These claims contradict reports from the IPCC and misrepresent the discussion taking place in the scientific community.
One science advisor with Environmental Progress, respected MIT climate expert Professor Kerry Emanuel, spoke publicly about being “very concerned” about the essay, and felt unsure whether he would remain involved with the organisation.
The article was published in Forbes, before being pulled offline the same day for violating its code of ethics around self-promotion.
A key tactic from the climate delayer playbook used in the essay is that of the repentant environmentalist, according to investigative journalist, Paul Thacker. After gaining credibility by aligning themselves with a section of the environmental movement, the repentant environmentalist then performs a volte face and attacks their former position.
This tactic has also been used by Zion Lights, who first overstated her role within Extinction Rebellion (she was a member of the media team, not ‘co-lead’ as stated on the Environmental Progress website) and then denounced the movement following an apparent change of heart.
BREAKTHROUGH INSTITUTE
Shellenberger is co-founder of the Breakthrough Institute, a lobbying group masquerading as a “think tank”. The Breakthrough Institute has “a clear history as a contrarian outlet for information on climate change [which] regularly criticises environmental groups”, according to Paul Thacker. Breakthrough has also been described as a “program for hippie-punching your way to fame and fortune.”
Shellenberger co-founded the Breakthrough Institute with Ted Nordhaus, nephew of economist, William Nordhuas. William Nordhaus features in Merchants of Doubt – Naomi Oreskes and Erik Conway’s examination of the PR strategies used both by the tobacco and fossil fuel industries. His interventions in the 1990s helped set back essential action on climate change by decades.
Other figures associated with Shellenberger and the Breakthrough Institute include:
Owen Paterson, one of the UK’s most prominent climate deniers who helped with the UK launch of the group’s Ecomodernist manifesto in 2015.
Matt Ridley, coal mine owner, once hereditary Conservative Peer and famous climate delayer / ‘lukewarmist’ who spoke at the UK launch event. (more…)
The future of nuclear energy in Estonia will be decided next year. Universities in Estonia are ready to train specialists in this field, but this requires new curricula, recruiting expensive lecturers from abroad and years of preparation. Due to Estonia’s small population, the pool of nuclear specialists for Estonia must be trained internationally to ensure impartiality in decision making processes.
If Estonia decides to build its own nuclear power plant, it will probably also have to set up a radiation safety and nuclear security authority, similar to as in other nuclear countries.
While the agency could hire a few dozen professionals before the facility is operational, it should eventually employ 60-80 experts. We can compare ourselves to our northern neighbors.
“We have over 100 workers in the nuclear reactor regulation department and roughly 25 in the nuclear waste department in charge of nuclear safety, so about 130-140 people in total,” Tomi Routamo, deputy director of the Finnish radiation protection center, said.
The first reactor is the most expensive for the country, both financially and in terms of the demand for experts. The question of how many experts the plant needs is much more complicated.
“The number of persons in the preliminary phase is about 50-60, while during construction it reaches a few hundred, 200-300. It is expected to be 400 or more throughout the operational period,” Siim Espenberg, the head of the center for applied social science research at the University of Tartu, said.
Since Estonia is the only nuclear country with a small population, predicting the need for experts is impossible. There are few reactors in the world that are a reasonable size for Estonia. However, building a nuclear power facility in Estonia would require 10 or more classes of nuclear experts in additional to the current ones.
There is also a concern characteristic of small population countries that officials from a regulatory body and nuclear plant managers could be past classmates. The agency must be objective and rigorous. This implies that the expert community cannot be too small. It is also critical that nuclear workers have actual expertise in order to deal with unanticipated scenarios……………………………………………………………………………
“Certainly, people should be brought in from overseas, and in my opinion, some people from Estonia should be trained abroad. This type of curriculum, which can span years, can be used to teach professionals at a specific level, but it is also possible for a small number of specialists, perhaps five or ten, to be trained abroad,” Aune Valk, vice-rector of the University of Tartu, said.
These top researchers are quite expensive, particularly if they are recruited from the western Europe or the Nordic countries.
“We are talking about a wage bill of around €150,000 per year. Also, such a top specialist would be expecting investment funding for the establishment of laboratories, a research group, and the recruitment of PhD students. These are very significant investments,” Hendrik Voll, vice rector of Tallinn University of Technology, said.
The new curricula could take seven to 10 years to produce Estonia’s own nuclear engineers, possibly up to 15 years if they are required to obtain practical experience with an employer. Universities are hesitant to start on such costly and time-consuming projects until Estonia has made a solid decision to build a nuclear power plant.
“We might end up educating highly expensive professionals for western Europe, the Nordic countries, or certain eastern European countries if we don’t develop nuclear energy here,” Voll said.
Universities agree that the future of the nuclear power plant in Estonia will require the creation of a school of nuclear engineers…………………
“The use of liquid sodium has many problems. It’s a very volatile material that can catch fire if it’s exposed to air or water,” Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety with the Union of Concerned Scientists science advocacy nonprofit, told Fortune previously
“at centre stage”? “clean” ?”
Bill Gates’ nuclear reactor company signs a clean energy deal with the UAE, as nuclear power takes center stage at COP28
A nuclear reactor company cofounded by Bill Gates signed a deal with the United Arab Emirates to explore building advanced reactors in the Gulf country.
On Monday, TerraPower and the UAE’s state-owned nuclear company Emirates Nuclear Energy Corporation (ENEC) signed a nonbinding memorandum of understanding to collaborate on developing new nuclear power plants that would ? combat climate change. The preliminary deal comes as nuclear power increasingly takes ? center stage at the United Nations’ COP28 conference in Dubai, which started last week. ……………………………………………………
The UAE’s partnership with TerraPower would allow the country to “collaborate across a range of areas including technical design and commercial viability” related to nuclear power, according to a press release. The UAE will have access to TerraPower’s Natrium technology, which uses sodium instead of water to cool nuclear reactors,…
………………………The new partnership could also mean that Emirati engineers will be dispatched to TerraPower’s U.S. headquarters to learn about its work. “Our new agreement with TerraPower will facilitate cooperation in taking nuclear energy technology to the next level, by accelerating its deployment and its use for innovating new solutions including the production of clean molecules and hydrogen,” ENEC CEO Mohamed Ibrahim Al Hammadi said in a statement.
…The United States led the coalition of countries that pledged to triple the world’s nuclear power capabilities by 2050. Other major countries to sign on include France, which has long been at the vanguard of nuclear power; Japan, which suffered a devastating nuclear meltdown in 2011 after an earthquake struck a plant in Fukushima; and South Korea, whose second-largest company SK Group, is an investor in TerraPower.
…………………………..“Now, we need to take what looks very promising and scale it up, build the pilot plants, and prove those out,” Gates said on Friday.
nuclear-news 
