What You Should REALLY Know About Ukraine
“the United States is standing with missiles on our doorstep.” Putin asked, “How would the Americans react if missiles were placed at the border with Canada or Mexico?”
The US Wants to Expand NATO In addition to integrating Ukraine into the US-dominated economic sphere, Western planners also want to integrate Ukraine militarily. For years, the US has sought the expansion of NATO, an explicitly anti-Russian military alliance. NATO was originally billed as a counterforce to the Warsaw Pact during the Cold War, but after the demise of the Soviet Union, the US promised the new Russia that it would not expand NATO east of Germany. Despite this agreement, the US continued building out its military alliance,growing closer and closer to Russia’s borders and ignoring Russia’s objections.
The West Wants Investor-Friendly Policies in Ukraine The backdrop to the 2014 coup and annexation cannot be understood without looking at the US strategy to open Ukrainian markets to foreign investors and give control of its economy to giant multinational corporations
The US Helped Overthrow Ukraine’s Elected President……. US Officials Were Caught Picking the New Government …
Washington Used Nazis to Help Overthrow the Government The Washington-backed opposition that toppled the government was fueled by far-right and openly Nazi elements like the Right Sector. One far-right group that grew out of the protests was the Azov Battalion, a paramilitary militia of neo-Nazi extremists.
What You Should Really Know About Ukraine https://fair.org/home/what-you-should-really-know-about-ukraine/, BRYCE GREENE 28 Jan 22, As tensions began to rise over Ukraine, US media produced a stream of articles attempting to explain the situation with headlines like “Ukraine Explained” (New York Times, 12/8/21) and “What You Need to Know About Tensions Between Ukraine and Russia” (Washington Post, 11/26/21). Sidebars would have notes that tried to provide context for the current headlines. But to truly understand this crisis, you would need to know much more than what these articles offered.These “explainer” pieces are emblematic of Ukraine coverage in the rest of corporate media, which almost universally gave a pro-Western view of US/Russia relations and the history behind them. Media echoed the point of view of those who believe the US should have an active role in Ukrainian politics and enforce its perspective through military threats.
The official line goes something like this: Russia is challenging NATO and the “international rules-based order” by threatening to invade Ukraine, and the Biden administration needed to deter Russia by providing more security guarantees to the Zelensky government. The official account seizes on Russia’s 2014 annexation of Ukraine’s Crimean peninsula as a starting point for US/Russian relations, and as evidence of Putin’s goals of rebuilding Russia’s long-lost empire.
Russia’s demand that NATO cease its expansion to Russia’s borders is viewed as such an obviously impossible demand that it can only be understood as a pretext to invade Ukraine. Therefore, the US should send weapons and troops to Ukraine, and guarantee its security with military threats to Russia (FAIR.org, 1/15/22).
Continue readingComfortably numb — Beyond Nuclear International
When we will wake up to the real threat we face?
Comfortably numb — Beyond Nuclear International “Hello? (Hello? Hello? Hello?)
“Is there anybody in there?
Just nod if you can hear me
Is there anyone home?”
Those echoing opening lines of the Pink Floyd song, “Comfortably Numb” keep wafting through my psyche as I watch the US, Russia, and China, amass ever more sophisticated, deadly and downright evil nuclear weapons capabilities. What are they thinking?
Meanwhile, tensions continue to mount at the Ukraine-Russia border, as Putin moves more armaments and fleets around and the US flies its elite 82nd Airborne Division into standby mode in Poland, part of 3,000 US troops now deployed to the region.
All of this has sent US nuclear hawks, sounding more and more like General ‘Buck’ Turgidson from Dr. Strangelove, chafing at the bit to justify the further escalation and acceleration of the so-called modernization of the entire US nuclear weapons complex.
Meanwhile, there is even speculation that maybe Ukraine should not have given up its nuclear weapons at the end of the Cold War as the Soviet Union collapsed. The Russian seizure of Crimea and the seemingly endless conflict on Ukraine’s eastern border has led some to urge a Ukraine nuclear rearmament.
A nuclear-armed Ukraine, goes the logic, would allow it to “deter” a Russian invasion or, at least, any possible use of nuclear weapons by Russia in a grab for Ukraine.
But this thinking further exposes the hollow argument for deterrence. Nuclear weapons in Ukraine would have only one outcome — they would make the prospect of nuclear weapons being used in any current conflict more likely. (Then, of course, there is the ever-present danger of Ukraine’s 15 operating nuclear reactors — addressed in a January 30, 2022 article on these pages.)
The prospect that even a conventional conflict could break out in Ukraine is already horrific enough. But even the remotest possibility that this could progress to the use of nuclear weapons by any party, is positively nightmarish.
If you don’t value sleep, then Ira Helfand’s article in The Nation lays all of this out in chilling detail. It’s like reading the script to an apocalyptical dystopian horror movie (the kind that sadly seems to be all too popular these days).
Helfand’s article, however, is the exception to most of the coverage, which discusses the prospect of accidental or deliberate nuclear war over the Ukraine situation in a mind-bogglingly impassive way, “comfortably numb” to the very real, horrific, humanitarian consequences were this actually to happen.
It’s as if, as IPPNW’s Chuck Johnson said to me during a recent phone call, “it’s all perfectly normal”.
But to most of us regular folk, calmly anticipating the possibility of a nuclear war isn’t normal. It’s the definition of insanity. And it’s exasperating. Hello? Can you hear us? We have a climate crisis bearing down on us. A global emergency of, yes, apocalyptic proportions.
It goes without saying that, as a species, we need to stop directing all our energies towards our collective extinction, both through our failure to act adequately and on time on climate, and by unnecessarily rattling nuclear sabres.
It goes without saying, but it needs saying. Again and again and really loudly. By all of us. Just nod if you can hear me.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.
In Ukraine, USA to finance American companies to sell nuclear technology there, and to other States
Where the Russians are coming, so is Westinghouse with its nuclear ambitions, ANYA LITVAK, Post Gazette, 7 Feb 22, Over the past few months, Joel Eaker, Westinghouse Electric Co.’s vice president for new nuclear power plant projects, has been shaking hands and posing for pictures all over Eastern Europe.
He was in Poland last month, where he plans to move in the spring. A week before that, he was in the Czech Republic to announce agreements signed with local companies in Cranberry-based Westinghouse’s bid to sell its AP1000 reactors in the region.
The nuclear renaissance never happened in the United States. But Mr. Eaker thinks Europe is headed in that direction.
The long game
The nuclear business is a long game with fits and starts.
For more than two decades, Westinghouse has been seemingly on the cusp of selling new nuclear reactors to various Eastern European countries ………….
All along, Westinghouse was pursuing a parallel strategy: making fuel that could be used in existing Russian-made reactors that are scattered across Europe.
…… Westinghouse could provide an alternate supply of fuel, which effectively delinks those countries from Russia.”
After some attempts loading the fuel in Russian-made reactors at Temelin in the Czech Republic, it was Ukraine that allowed Westinghouse to test and refine its fuel assemblies in Russian reactors.
Today, the U.S. company’s fuel is loaded into nearly half of Ukraine’s nuclear plants, and Westinghouse is trying to use those bona fides to sell fuel to existing Russian-style reactors in Finland, Czech Republic, Slovakia and Hungary, Tarik Choho, president of Westinghouse’s Europe, the Middle East and Africa division, told Ukraine’s news service in August.
Mr. Eaker said Westinghouse’s pursuit of that market was both earnest and strategic.
The company’s bread-and-butter business is supplying fuel to and servicing existing reactors. It’s what made Westinghouse, then in bankruptcy, attractive to the Canadian asset management firm Brookfield Business Partners, which has owned it since 2018.
It’s difficult to predict if this recent burst of nuclear promise in Eastern Europe will yield actual new reactor projects, Ms. Harrington said.
………… In 2014, when the continued existence of the U.S.’s Export-Import Bank became a topic of debate in Congress, Westinghouse’s then-CEO Danny Roderick said the first thing he was asked when pitching a new plant to clients in places like Central Europe is how much the U.S. government is willing to help financially.
………. Pierre Paul Oneid, the chief nuclear officer at Holtec International, a New Jersey-based company that specializes in decommissioning and nuclear fuel storage. Holtec, Mr. Oneid said, had been working for a decade to close a deal for a centralized storage facility for spent nuclear fuel in Ukraine, which would not be possible without financing from the U.S. government.
…….. While Mr. Oneid said the deal was in the “eleventh hour,” in fact it took three more years to finalize. U.S. Overseas Private Investment Corp. announced in 2017 that it was providing $250 million in political risk insurance to the Ukrainian utility. Bank of America/Merrill Lynch would then sell that $250 million commitment in the form of fixed-rate bond securities.
It was the first such deal of its type, but probably not the last.
Show me the money
If there’s another major piece, other than climate change, that’s opening doors for Westinghouse in Eastern Europe, it’s the prospect of the U.S. government’s expanded role in financing nuclear projects, Mr. Eaker said.
In 2019, then-President Donald Trump created the U.S. Nuclear Fuel Working Group………. Among its recommendations was for the U.S. Development Finance Corp., a newly-created vehicle to fund projects in low-income countries, to lift its ban on providing funds to nuclear projects.
The development agency listened and, in the summer of 2020, it unshackled itself from the ban, which was a holdover from its predecessor and modeled on the language of the World Bank. The DFC can even provide financing to projects in higher-income countries in Eastern Europe as part of its charge under the The European Energy Security and Diversification Act of 2019.
This means the U.S. government can now offer equity financing for nuclear projects abroad, a first. It can also give larger loans and loan guarantees than what is typically handled by the Export-Import Bank, and it can offer political risk insurance.
This is the next step in Westinghouse’s advances in Eastern Europe. Once it finishes doing a $10 million front end engineering and design study for AP1000 reactors in Poland — the U.S. government funded 70% of that work as part of an intergovernmental agreement — then it hopes to submit a formal bid along with a U.S. government financing proposal this fall.
In Ukraine, Westinghouse has already signed contracts with the electric utility to start ordering long-lead equipment and doing other preparations, but the contracts won’t be fully implemented until the U.S. comes with the financing package.
Anya Litvak: alitvak@post-gazette.com. https://www.post-gazette.com/business/powersource/2022/02/07/Russia-Ukraine-Westinghouse-Electric-nuclear-AP1000-reactors-climate-change-energy-eastern-europe/stories/202201300126
Hinkley nuclear mud
500 000 tonnes of Hinkley mud are now to be dumped at Portishead. Thisdumping was licensed by @The_MMO – the English Marine Management Organisation – on the basis of EDF’s skimped EIA that brushed over the key issues of *what* contaminants, and where they *go*.
@cianciaran 6th Feb 2022
European dispute over the Taxonomy plan to class nuclear power as ”green”, qualifying it for billions of euros in subsidies.
EU Observer, 7. FEB, 07:22, Barely a month since France took over the rotating presidency of the Council of the European Union, and France and Germany are already in dispute over the highly-controversial EU proposal to grant nuclear energy and natural gas a green investment label under the EU taxonomy on sustainable finance rules.
The EU proposal was published on Wednesday (2 February) with only minor edits – despite the internal row it had sparked amongst several member states.
The initial proposal itself had been quietly distributed to EU members on New Year’s Eve – the day Germany closed half of its six nuclear power plants.
If the proposal now passes the EU’s legislative procedures without getting blocked by the commission or the parliament (both unlikely scenarios), it will likely channel billions of euros into the construction of new nuclear power plants across the bloc…………………….
During the past weeks France has taken a strong stance in support of nuclear energy with president Emmanuel Macron labelling it as the “sovereign solution”, while Germany has expressly rejected the integration of nuclear power into the green taxonomy…………….
After their success in September’s federal elections, German Greens secured their position as the second-largest party in the current coalition government – making them crucial for the future of the German coalition.
No compromise
And nuclear energy is one of the topics the Greens are not willing to compromise on.
The Greens, born out of the 1980s anti-nuclear protests, were quick to call out the EU over the new energy proposal with the German vice-chancellor and climate minister, Robert Habeck, accusing the EU of “greenwashing”.
UK court should slap down the US Justice Department in the Assange case
UK court should slap down the US Justice Department in the Assange case https://thehill.com/opinion/judiciary/591776-uk-court-should-slap-down-the-us-justice-department-in-the-assange-case?fbclid=IwAR1FwC11pSY_hGdiCvIdBqIj6mttfTheEDtcNR3EUpQG38xWS3-ZRC6TLhw
BY JAMES C. GOODALE, 6 Feb 22, As the lead attorney for the New York Times in the “Pentagon Papers” case in 1971, I’ve been doing a slow burn ever since over the government’s behavior in that instance: lies, disregard of court rules, arrogance, destruction of documents. All of this was brought to mind earlier this week when a British court hinted in the Julian Assange case that the U.S. government has acted in the same way once again.
It asked Britain’s supreme court to determine the appropriateness of a late filing by the government that completely undercut a ruling that Assange could NOT be extradited to the U.S. This followed British trial court Judge Vanessa Baraitser, who was hearing Assange’s extradition case, ruling that Assange might commit suicide if held in a U.S. prison in solitary confinement under what is called Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) and, so, he could not be extradited.
As soon as she announced her decision, the U.S. government filed assurances that Assange would not be held in that kind of detention, although it reserved the right to revoke the assurance if circumstances changed.
The judge was unmoved by this assurance, but she was reversed on appeal. The U.K.’s supreme court has now asked to consider the timeliness of this filing.
I do not believe the U.S. government’s assurances are worth the paper on which they have been written. Its behavior in this case has been rampant. Most outrageously, the CIA discussed a plot to kidnap Assange from the Ecuadorian Embassy in London, where he was holed up, and to kill him. The CIA also tapped into conversations in the Ecuadorian Embassy, including those with Assange’s lawyers.
There is not much question whether all of this is true. There was testimony about it in open court, and Mike Pompeo, the CIA director at the time and later secretary of State during the Trump administration, has conceded that there is “some truth” in the foregoing.
I do not pretend to be particularly familiar with the extradition laws of the U.K. But common sense tells me that you deliver highly important documents about a case — such as government assurances — before the case begins, not after it has been decided. U.K. counsel representing the U.S. disagrees, saying he can deliver documents when he wants and if he loses the appeal, he will start the extradition proceedings all over again.
This is the very same arrogance that was on display in the Pentagon Papers case, in which then-U.S. Solicitor General Erwin Griswold said the usual rules of evidence did not apply. His view of the law manifested itself in his introduction of new evidence in the case anytime the government was so moved. The claims were always extravagant: Publication of the new evidence would be a disaster for the country’s national security, etc., etc. They never were. Indeed, most of them turned out to be previously published.
The other principal fallacious claim made by the government back then was that the Times had revealed that the United States had broken the Vietnamese code. This also proved to be so much hogwash.
The government also destroyed — or, in its words, “lost” — New York Times briefs in the case. It prevailed upon me to give them these briefs to protect national security and to be returned if the government indicted the Times. A later research request evoked the response “they were lost.”
We do not know if the U.K.’s supreme court will take the Assange case to determine the issue of the timing of the U.S. government’s filing. Let’s hope that it does and then decides the U.S. government should not get away with the latest example of its less than appropriate behavior in a national security case.
James C. Goodale is the former general counsel and vice chairman of the New York Times and the author of “Fighting for the Press: The Inside Story of the Pentagon Papers and Other Battles.”
The nuclear power dilemma: where to put the lethal waste?
The nuclear power dilemma: where to put the lethal waste
France is exploring new ways to dispose of radioactive materials but public opposition is as fierce as ever, Ft.com Anna Gross in Chooz and Sarah White in Bure 6 Feb 22,
Every morning, Benoit Gannaz places a small black device in his breast pocket to make sure his work is not killing him. Like every worker at the Chooz A nuclear power facility in northern France, he carries a detector that measures ionising radiation levels at all times. The reactor was turned off more than three decades ago and the most hazardous materials removed soon after, but nobody here is taking any chances — least of all the project manager overseeing the challenging and lengthy process of decommissioning Chooz A. Gannaz’s job is to ensure the remaining hazardous materials on site are removed and stored away safely now that the lifecycle of the reactor is at an end. ………….
…………….. as momentum grows for a new generation of nuclear power plants in Europe and elsewhere, there is little discussion of the huge costs and complexity of dismantling the plants at the end of their approximately 50-year lifespan. And nobody has yet given a satisfactory answer to the question of what to do with thousands of metric tonnes of high-level nuclear waste, some of which can remain radioactive, and thereby lethal, for up to 300,000 years.
A quarter-million metric tonnes of spent fuel rods are believed to be spread across 14 countries worldwide, mostly collected in cooling pools at closed-down nuclear plants, as engineers and waste specialists puzzle over how to dispose of them permanently. Many believe these are sitting ducks for terrorist organisations and that they could potentially cause catastrophic spills or fires. The cost of maintaining these sites can be extraordinary, and last for decades. Sellafield in the UK, for example, contains the largest stock of untreated nuclear waste on earth, including 140 tonnes of plutonium. Though the plant was shut down in 2003, it remains the biggest private employer in Cumbria. More than 10,000 people continue to undertake a colossally expensive clean-up that is expected to take more than 100 years and cost above £90bn.
“Nowhere in the world has anyone managed to create a place where we can bury extremely nasty nuclear waste forever,” says Denis Florin, partner at Lavoisier Conseil, an energy-focused management consultancy in Paris. “We cannot go on using nuclear without being adult about the waste, without accepting we need to find a permanent solution.” With the Chooz A reactor, France is attempting to do just that — and in the process create a prototype for how decommissioning could be done more efficiently. If it succeeds, it could help convince environmentalists that nuclear power has a part to play in creating a greener planet. But there is still a heavy dose of popular opposition to the best option there is on the table for the waste: burying it.
The legacy of a spent reactor The challenge with cleaning up Chooz A is not so much the site itself as the materials once contained within. The facility was shut in 1991, and within three years 99.9 per cent of the most highly radioactive materials had been evacuated to a specialist plant 620km away in La Hague, in the north-west of France. According to French law, the most highly radioactive elements of a plant, the fuel and the rods, should be removed as quickly as possible once the plant has been shut down — in stark contrast to policy in most other parts of the world, where the most hazardous products are handled last.
Decommissioning a reactor
Click on the numbers to see the process in sequence (Interactive graphic on original)
Some of these products have since been recycled. In a process pioneered by France, many of the uranium, plutonium and fission chemicals have been reprocessed into new fuel at the La Hague site, while waste chemicals that cannot be reused have been vitrified, or turned into glass, for short-term storage in shallow sites underground. Though EDF says the 23,000 tonnes of spent fuel it has reprocessed at La Hague are enough to power France’s nuclear fleet for 14 years, critics point to the fact that the fuel can only be reused once and the process itself creates yet more radioactive waste, without providing a long-term solution.
The dismantling of the rest of Chooz A began in 2007, after it received legal permission from the state, and is due to be completed by 2024, at a total cost of €500mn. But the most hazardous waste removed from the site will remain radioactive for centuries to come, and perhaps millennia. “Only a state or a religion will live as long as the waste, and maybe not even them,” says Florin. Countries have toyed with ejecting such waste into space or burying it deep under the seabed, but these ideas were eventually deemed either impossible or too dangerous. Only one long-term solution is broadly considered safe and feasible: deep geological repositories, where radioactive material can be stored several hundred metres below ground in formations of clay, rock salt and granite that have not moved for millions of years.
But no one has yet managed to do it. The US has come close; it pumped $15bn into a project to bury waste beneath Yucca Mountain in Nevada, but the initiative was eventually abandoned in the face of intense and sustained public backlash. Similar opposition from local communities has dogged attempts to find burial sites in Germany, the UK and Japan. Some countries have earmarked provisional sites to try again. After a decades-long planning and negotiation process with a remote island community, Finland will bury its radioactive waste in copper tubes in a tomb 1,400 feet below the granite bedrock in Olkiluoto island. The burial site is expected to begin operation in 2023.
France has identified its own site, just outside Bure, 300km east of Paris, in which radioactive waste might be entombed. Consisting of a research centre sitting above a web of tunnels and vaults almost 500 metres below ground, the Cigeo project has so far cost €2.5bn and involved 25 years of research.
The French government is due to decide this year whether to declare the site officially viable as a storage option, setting in motion another sequence of construction and authorisation stages that would lead to the first toxic samples being deposited between 2035 and 2040. The ambition is to seal all the tunnels irreversibly from 2150, with residues encased in blocks of cement or steel within the ultimate barrier — a subterranean layer of clay with the ideal properties to entrap any material that eventually seeps out. This seeping material should lose its radioactive qualities within the 100,000 years it would take them to permeate other strata,,,………………https://www.ft.com/content/246dad82-c107-4886-9be2-e3b3c4c4f315?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6
A big pile of Plutonium – UK reprocessing ceases, leaving deadly waste and no plan
in the end, reprocessing became a commercial venture rather than producing anything useful. Nine countries sent spent fuel to Sellafield to have plutonium and uranium extracted for reuse and paid a great deal of money to do so. In reality, very little of either metal has ever been used because mixed oxide fuels were too expensive, and fast breeder reactors could never be scaled up sufficiently to be economic.
UK reprocessing ceases, leaving deadly waste and no plan
A big pile of PU — Beyond Nuclear International https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/02/06/a-big-pile-of-pu/120 tons of plutonium is legacy of Britain’s dirty decades of reprocessing, By Paul Brown, The Energy Mix
Seventy years after the United Kingdom first began extracting plutonium from spent uranium fuel to make nuclear weapons, the industry is finally calling a halt to reprocessing, leaving the country with 120 tons of the metal, the biggest stockpile in the world. However, the government has no idea what to do with it.
Having spent hundreds of billions of pounds producing plutonium in a series of plants at Sellafield in the Lake District, the UK policy is to store it indefinitely—or until it can come up with a better idea. There is also 90,000 tons of less dangerous depleted uranium in warehouses in the UK, also without an end use.
Plans to use plutonium in fast breeder reactors and then mixed with uranium as a fuel for existing fission reactors have long ago been abandoned as too expensive, unworkable, or sometimes both. Even burning plutonium as a fuel, while technically possible, is very costly.
The closing of the last reprocessing plant, as with all nuclear endeavours, does not mean the end of the industry, in fact it will take at least another century to dismantle the many buildings and clean up the waste. In the meantime, it is costing £3 billion a year to keep the site safe.
Perhaps one of the strangest aspects of this story to outside observers is that, apart from a minority of anti-nuclear campaigners, this plutonium factory in one of prettiest parts of England hardly ever gets discussed or mentioned by the UK’s two main political parties. Neither has ever objected to what seems on paper to be a colossal waste of money.
Continue readingTHE ILLEGALITY OF NATO
THE ILLEGALITY OF NATO, By John Scales Avery, Popular Resistance.6 Feb 22, Recent threats of war over Ukraine.
Russia understandably fears the eastward expansion of NATO. Recently NATO countries, led by the United States, have supplied arms to Ukraine. There is a threat that the tensions building up in the region will lead to war. Such a development would be catastrophic for the entire world. Against this backdrop, let us examine the question of NATO’s illegality.
Violation of the UN Charter and the Nuremberg Principles
In recent years, participation in NATO has made European countries accomplices in US efforts to achieve global hegemony by means of military force, in violation of international law, and especially in violation of the UN Charter, the Nuremberg Principles.
Former UN Assistant Secretary General Hans Christof von Sponeck used the following words to express his opinion that NATO now violates the UN Charter and international law: “In the 1949 North Atlantic Treaty, the Charter of the United Nations was declared to be NATO’s legally binding framework. However, the United-Nations monopoly of the use of force, especially as specified in Article 51 of the Charter, was no longer accepted according to the 1999 NATO doctrine. NATO’s territorial scope, until then limited to the Euro-Atlantic region, was expanded by its members to include the whole world”
Article 2 of the UN Charter requires that “All members shall refrain in their international relations from the threat or use of force against the territorial integrity or political independence of any state.” This requirement is somewhat qualified by Article 51, which says that “Nothing in the present Charter shall impair the inherent right of individual or collective self-defense if an armed attack occurs against a Member of the United Nations, until the Security Council has taken measures necessary to maintain international peace and security.”
Thus, in general, war is illegal under the UN Charter. Self-defense against an armed attack is permitted, but only for a limited time, until the Security Council has had time to act. The United Nations Charter does not permit the threat or use of force in preemptive wars, or to produce regime changes, or for so-called “democratization”, or for the domination of regions that are rich in oil. NATO must not be a party to the threat or use of force for such illegal purposes.
In 1946, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously affirmed “the principles of international law recognized by the Charter of the Nuremberg Tribunal and the judgment of the Tribunal”. The General Assembly also established an International Law Commission to formalize the Nuremberg Principles. The result was a list that included Principles VI and VII, which are particularly important in the context of the illegality of NATO:
Principle VI: The crimes hereinafter set out are punishable as crimes under international law:
a) Crimes against peace: (I) Planning, preparation, initiation or waging of a war of aggression or a war in violation of international treaties, agreements or assurances; (ii) Participation in a common plan or conspiracy for accomplishment of any of the acts mentioned under (I).
b) War crimes:……………….
Violation of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty
At present, NATO’s nuclear weapons policies violate both the spirit and the text of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty in several respects:………………………………….. https://popularresistance.org/the-illegality-of-nato/
France is exploring new ways to dispose of radioactive materials but public opposition is as fierce as ever
“There may be a price [communities] are willing to accept in order to stomach the waste and its risks, but we don’t know what that price is yet,” … “If it’s high enough, it will ultimately add to the cost of disposal.” Local authorities have poured millions of euros of subsidies and compensation into the area to support the project
The nuclear power dilemma: where to put the lethal waste
France is exploring new ways to dispose of radioactive materials but public opposition is as fierce as ever, Ft.com Anna Gross in Chooz and Sarah White in Bure 6 FEB 22,
”………………….Resistance is fissile Cigeo has attracted the same kind of vocal opposition found at other potential burial sites. And, as a result Bure, a village of fewer than 100 inhabitants, has become a battleground where protesters have regularly clashed with police over the future of the site. Demonstrators have set up a “house of resistance” in Bure that has become a magnet for anti-nuclear protesters around the country. The former barn is equipped with a projection room, mattresses to welcome guests and a cosy communal kitchen.
Campaigners say the Bure site has become representative of a broader cause. “Beyond the waste, it’s nuclear production above all else that worries us,” says a 29-year-old jurist who gave his name as Antoine, one of a handful of campaigners manning the fort on a snowy February morning. “It’s a supposedly low carbon source of energy, but you’ve got to build the reactors . . . it is such a dangerous and destructive solution.” Yet the state holds that the undeniable risks of nuclear energy are outweighed by its potential benefits as a cost-effective way of cutting CO2 emissions. According to a report last year from French grid operator RTE, France’s cheapest way to reach carbon neutrality by 2050 would involve building 14 new reactors. Under the scenarios RTE presented, if France built no new nuclear reactors and relied exclusively on expanding renewables and extending the lifespan of existing nuclear, this would cost €10bn more per year than other options including new reactors, with the cost of decommissioning factored into the final bill.
But that may not factor in the costs of convincing French citizens to host such facilities in their backyards. Bure resident Anne-Marie Henn, a retiree, says the project has forced her and her artist husband Jacques to give up on their dream of creating a painting atelier in an annex to their home. “We’d like to leave, but our house isn’t worth anything any more,” she says. Ed Lyman, senior global security scientist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, who has spent decades researching nuclear power safety, says the science behind burying waste is robust, and the dangers of corrosion or leakage minimal. But there remain real risks for the public, he says, such as accidents happening when materials are transported to the site.
“There may be a price [communities] are willing to accept in order to stomach the waste and its risks, but we don’t know what that price is yet,” he adds. “If it’s high enough, it will ultimately add to the cost of disposal.” Local authorities have poured millions of euros of subsidies and compensation into the area to support the project and residents. In Bure, that has translated into snazzy lampposts lining every street alongside the barns and stone houses; households have also got fibre optic internet connections and sanitation networks have been improved. “We’ve got to deal with this crap,” Henn says. “At the very least we can benefit a bit from [subsidies].”
But the concerns of many communities go way beyond immediate dangers to more existential questions: how can we ensure that not just our children and grandchildren, but people living thousands of years in the future have the knowledge and understanding to handle it responsibly? And how can we be sure that the storage containers we have developed now will stand the test of time? “What we’ll be getting here is the really dangerous core of the waste,” Henn says, adding that it was “the generations to come” that worried her.
Andra, the French state agency responsible for nuclear waste management, is considering ways to warn future generations of what lies below Bure — perhaps by inscribing microscopic information on a hard disk of sapphire, designed to withstand erosion, should the site be forgotten. “Even if we lose our collective memory, the storage site will be safe,” says spokesperson Audrey Guillemenet. If these kinds of innovations fail to impress French lawmakers and the site does not win approval, that leaves the government with a problem that goes far beyond the billions spent on construction. “Some 50 per cent of the [nuclear] waste destined to come here eventually already exists,” says Guillemenet. Forget the next generation of power plants; the decades-old materials Gannaz and his predecessors have removed from Chooz A are a problem that needs a solution. If it is not Bure, then what is it? https://www.ft.com/content/246dad82-c107-4886-9be2-e3b3c4c4f315?segmentid=acee4131-99c2-09d3-a635-873e61754ec6
Lake animals near Chernobyl have mutations
Lake animals near Chernobyl have mutations https://beyondnuclear.org/lake-animals-near-chernobyl-have-mutations/ February 4, 2022
Animals in lakes close to the Chernobyl nuclear reactor have more genetic mutations than those from further away – giving new insight into the effect of radiation on wild species, researchers at the University of Stirling have found, writes Brendan Montague in The Ecologist.
DNA analysis of freshwater crustaceans, called Daphnia (pictured on original), revealed greater genetic diversity in lake populations that experienced the highest radiation dose rates following the accident in 1986.
Radiation is the primary cause of these genetic mutations, according to Dr Stuart Auld, who led the research.
Dr Auld, of Stirling’s faculty of natural sciences, said: “Chernobyl is a natural experiment in evolution, because the rate of genetic mutation is higher, and all evolutionary change is fuelled by mutations.
“Normally you have to wait for generations to see the effect of the environment on mutations, and most mutant animals are pretty damaged so don’t live long.
“By sequencing non-coding DNA – bits of genetic code that don’t actually affect the form or function of the organism – we were able to uncover these mutations.”
Dr Jessica Goodman collected the crustaceans using a kayak and net from lakes at varying distances from Chernobyl as part of her PhD. She flew the samples back to the lab at Stirling, where Dr Auld’s team isolated and analysed the DNA.
The research was assisted by June Brand at the University of Stirling and Gennady Laptev from the Ukrainian Hydrometeorological Institute in Kiev. It was funded by the Natural Environment Research Council.
The paper Radiation-mediated supply of genetic variation outweighs the effects of selection and drift in Chernobyl Daphnia populations is published in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology.
UK close to opening coal mine under Marine Conservation Zone just 5 miles from Sellafield nuclear facility!
The Coal Mine planning inspector Stephen Normington will, any day now, be
making his recommendation to government (the same government who have
appointed the coal boss as nuclear dump advisor). Then the final decision
will be with Secretary of State Michael Gove on whether or not to open a
new coal mine under the Marine Conservation Zone off St Bees and just five
miles from Sellafield. Concerns, aside from climate, raised by Keep
Cumbrian Coal in the Hole since 2017, regarding seismic, nuclear and marine
impacts have been well and truly ‘talked over’ despite our vehement
campaigning.
Keep Cumbrian Coal in the Hole 5th Feb 2022
In New Mexico, two Bills to block the storage of high level nuclear waste
Efforts by New Mexico lawmakers to block the storage of high-level nuclear
waste in the state built momentum this week as two bills in the House and
Senate advanced in legislative committees.
Senate Bill 54 and House Bill
127 contain identical language that would prohibit State agencies from
issuing permits for high-level nuclear waste storage facilities, introduced
in direct opposition to the project proposed by Holtec International in
southeast New Mexico near Carlsbad and Hobbs. The Holtec project would see
about 100,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel rods from generator sites
across the U.S. shipped via rail to the location on about 1,000 acres in a
remote area by the Eddy-Lea county line.
Carlsbad Current-Argus 5th Feb 2022
BBC Inside Science Nuclear Waste Podcast Kicks Off With a Big Fat Lie – Fact Check!?
BBC Inside Science Nuclear Waste Podcast Kicks Off With a Big Fat Lie – Fact Check!? https://www.lakesagainstnucleardump.com/post/bbc-inside-science-nuclear-waste-podcast-kicks-off-with-a-big-fat-lie-fact-check
Listen to BBC Inside Science Here Reporting from the BBC which holds the newly “green” nuclear industry to account has been in short supply and this was no exception despite the promising headline.
Listen to BBC Inside Science Here Reporting from the BBC which holds the newly “green” nuclear industry to account has been in short supply and this was no exception despite the promising headline. The podcast kicked off with some big fat lies about nuclear being low carbon (radioactive carbon it produces in spades) and stating that “Sizewell C will produce 7% of the UKs energy needs.” “Inside Science” is the arbiter of truth for many people including Cumbrian politicians who have repeated these lies. Sizewell C would only produce 2% of the UKs energy needs – an amount that could easily be saved by insulating houses. What the podcast presenter should have said was that Sizewell C may produce up to 7% of the UK’s ELECTRICITY – rather different from ENERGY and a big fat lie that the nuclear industry likes to promote.
Professor Claire Corkhill did reveal some home- truths about nuclear such as reprocessing produces a net result of more hazardous waste and that low level waste does not equate to low hazard “it is still hazardous.” When the interviewer asked Professor Corkhill if digging a big hole for nuclear waste was expensive the reply was that ‘its the right thing to do and it means that future generations won’t have the expense.’ This is the mantra that the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management like to promote as a truism. It is the wrong thing to do and denies future generations the ability to protect themselves from nuclear waste. Professor Corkhill was appointed to the Committee on Radioactive Waste Management ( CoRWM) in January 2020. Mark Kirkbride the CEO of West Cumbria Mining was appointed to CoRWM in November 2019 and has been putting together costings for the digging of a big hole or two. The total cost of decommissioning is around £132 Billion and counting. The eyewatering amounts of money are the very least of the bottomless Bill that this and future generations will be picking up from the nuclear experiment in any event.
Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) demands deadly plutonium stockpile be placed ‘out of use’
The Nuclear Free Local Authorities (NFLA) of the UK and Ireland has called for Britain’s deadly Plutonium stockpile to be placed ‘out of use’, for an early end to reprocessing, and for greater accountability and more transparency about the long-term management of radioactive materials arising from decommissioning operations at the UK’s former nuclear power plants.
The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) is the agency charged with making safe and cleaning closed civil nuclear plants. It has just published a draft Business Plan for 2022-5 and invited comments.
In its response, the NFLA also expressed its disappointment that reprocessing at Sellafield did not end in 2020 as was originally promised and that there isstill no clear end date.
The NFLA also wants to see a comprehensive inventory of all radioactive materials created for each site, including those arising from decommissioning operations, and for local authorities to be consulted over arrangements for their transport and management.
NFLA 3rd Feb 2022
1 This Month
of the week– Nuclear Reactor Information Task Force
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
-
Archives
- May 2026 (156)
- April 2026 (356)
- March 2026 (251)
- February 2026 (268)
- January 2026 (308)
- December 2025 (358)
- November 2025 (359)
- October 2025 (376)
- September 2025 (257)
- August 2025 (319)
- July 2025 (230)
- June 2025 (348)
-
Categories
- 1
- 1 NUCLEAR ISSUES
- business and costs
- climate change
- culture and arts
- ENERGY
- environment
- health
- history
- indigenous issues
- Legal
- marketing of nuclear
- media
- opposition to nuclear
- PERSONAL STORIES
- politics
- politics international
- Religion and ethics
- safety
- secrets,lies and civil liberties
- spinbuster
- technology
- Uranium
- wastes
- weapons and war
- Women
- 2 WORLD
- ACTION
- AFRICA
- Atrocities
- AUSTRALIA
- Christina's notes
- Christina's themes
- culture and arts
- Events
- Fuk 2022
- Fuk 2023
- Fukushima 2017
- Fukushima 2018
- fukushima 2019
- Fukushima 2020
- Fukushima 2021
- general
- global warming
- Humour (God we need it)
- Nuclear
- RARE EARTHS
- Reference
- resources – print
- Resources -audiovicual
- Weekly Newsletter
- World
- World Nuclear
- YouTube
-
RSS
Entries RSS
Comments RSS
nuclear-news 