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Figures on Fox News’ key programs have called for escalation in the Iran war more than 250 times since the initial ceasefire

Jason Campbell, 08/28/26, https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-august-28

In the four months since the initial ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, Fox News figures have continuously warmongered. Throughout the cycle of ceasefire violations and stalled peace talks, individuals on Fox have urged President Donald Trump to “decapitate and destroy this regime” and send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” and encouraged him to “send the SEALs in and blow something up just for grins.” 

Media Matters studied 7 key shows on Fox News — which includes the network’s evening programming as well as some shows hosted by commentators whom Trump has praised or promoted during the Iran war — called for escalatory action in the war at least 252 times since the initial ceasefire agreement on April 7. The escalatory rhetoric on the network includes arguments for military strikes, ground invasions, regime change, arming Iranian citizens, or attacks on civilian infrastructure. 

I invite you to check out this study to see how the data breaks down. You can find it here.

Also: Many right-wing figures promised an early and easy victory against Iran when the U.S. and Israel launched the war in February. Six months later, it seems very clear the Trump administration has fallen quite short of its objectives. Nonetheless, a set of especially sycophantic pundits — including Sean Hannity, CNN contributor Scott Jennings, and Benny Johnson — are claiming that Trump has already won the war.

September 4, 2026 Posted by | media, USA | Leave a comment

You Could Be Next: Trump’s Gestapo Tactics Are Getting Worse

You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.

The US military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong US campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs.

Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state.

Wake up, America. You’re living in a nightmare.

Robert Reich, Common Dreams, Aug 29, 2026

Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous.

Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now.

As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state.

His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It’s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It’s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the US Constitution.

Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day.

According to a new analysis by The New York Times, the regime’s surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction).

Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to US citizens, others who entered the US legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke.

In other words, they were all here legally.

If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle — even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point.

You’re not even safe if you’re a US citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 US citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication.

Some estimates put the number of US citizens subjected to ICE as much higher, but there’s no way of knowing because there’s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there’s no legal process for protecting anyone else who’s here legally. Trump’s police state is extrajudicial, and it’s being done in secret.

You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer…………………………………..

You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.

The US military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong US campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs.

Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state………………………

These cases are the first to incorporate new guidance from the regime that classifies Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” That’s despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement rather than a single organization and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing US law.

I want to make three concluding points about all this.

First, Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day. Kristi Noem’s replacement as secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, along with his boss in the White House, Stephen Miller, and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, have more money, manpower, and firepower than ever. They are ramping up all of their extrajudicial arrests, detentions, deportations, and murders.

The only difference between last year and now is they’re no longer announcing what they’re doing with fanfare and braggadocio, because the American public has grown wary of it.

Second, none of us is safe from this because the arrests, installations of ankle bracelets, imprisonments, deportations, and murders are made without any judge, jury, or neutral party deciding that the assumptions on which they’re based are adequate and truthful.

Not even “domestic terrorism” arrests and lengthy prison sentences necessitate judicial inquiry into what exactly is meant by “domestic terrorism” and whether defendants have done anything to justify that appellation.

Finally, this growing menace is cruel, inhumane, and likely unconstitutional. It is causing hundreds of thousands of families in our country extreme mental distress; many people are not leaving their homes for fear of being arrested or worse. It is likely chilling First Amendment rights to speak up and protest against these atrocities.

Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed. How can one maniacal man in the Oval Office, his fanatical assistant, and two suck-up Cabinet secretaries have been so cruel and oblivious to basic human rights? How can their Republican enablers in Congress have been willing to go along? How can the American public have been so quiet? https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-s-gestapo-tactics

September 4, 2026 Posted by | politics, USA | 1 Comment

Walt Zlotow – Some inconvenient truths about Trump’s Iran war


Walt Zlotow  West Suburban Peace Coalition  Glen Ellyn IL , 31 Aug 2026, https://theaimn.net/some-inconvenient-truths-about-trumps-iran-war/

The US lost the war within the first 3 days when the US, Israeli attack and assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khomenei did not collapse the Iranian regime

Bombing Iran for 39 days was a catastrophic military failure. Iran’s retaliatory defense decimated all 20 US Gulf State bases inflicting over 750 US casualties including 18 dead.

Running out of both offensive and defensive missiles, Trump blinked first and called for a ceasefire on April 8, war day 40. 

The June 17th signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was essentially a US surrender document. 

Realizing the MOU signaled his defeat, Trump simply ignored it, implemented a blockade and resumed periodic bombing. Both utterly failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to resume the critical flow of oil to prevent worldwide economic calamity.

Having been sucker punched with bombs twice by Trump during negotiations, Iran has signaled it will never negotiate with Trump during his remaining 2 years, 5 months in office. 

Trump’s statements that Iran is negotiating surrender on Trump’s terms, the Strait is open, and will become US territory, the blockade is a resounding success, the oil is flowing, are so detached from reality one must ponder Trump’s sanity. 

Refusal to capitulate is spreading the war within the region to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, West Bank, Iraq, Syria, possibly even Turkey v. Israel.

If Trump’s last gasp is to utterly destroy Iranian infrastructure, Iran will retaliate and destroy the entire Gulf States oil infrastructure and possibly Israel’s infrastructure as well. 

Unlike for the US, Trump’s war is an existential threat to Iran’s existence. They have been preparing for the US, Israeli tag team war machine to destroy them for decades. They are and will prevail regardless of the cost. 

Israel will do whatever is necessary to keep Trump in the war to destroy Iran. Trump’s only way out is to sever ties with Israel and capitulate to Iran’s sensible terms. Given Trump’s history, the chances of that are nil. Removing Republican control of Congress in 9 weeks may be only chance for America to avoid economic collapse.

But only if a Democratic Congress has the wisdom, decency and good sense to end the most self destructive war in America’s 251 years. 

September 3, 2026 Posted by | Iran, Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump’s shipping race with Xi goes nuclear

COMMENT AA BB

Have they factored in the staggeringly huge cost of the multi decades long decomissioning process and disposal of the reactor and nuclear waste? NS Savanna was built 1961, out if service 1972 – the reactor and ship will ‘remain regulated until 2031″ (wikipedia)

Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.

Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.

US bets uranium-powered British vessels can challenge China’s maritime dominance

Christopher Jasper, Transport industry editor, 29 August 2026

Donald Trump has opened up a new battleground in his trade war with Beijing, and a British start-up building nuclear-powered ships has found itself on the front line.

A US effort to challenge China’s dominance in shipping by building a fleet of nuclear-fuelled vessels is being led by UK-based Core Power.

The start-up, which has 100 employees and moved to London from Singapore in 2020, says it is unique outside Russia and China in having the expertise to integrate reactors with commercial ships, and the White House seems to agree.

Mikal Bøe, the Norwegian founder and chief of Core Power, flew to Washington last week to sign a seven-year pact with the US Maritime Administration…………….

The deal aims to deliver a fleet of zero-emission vessels that travel at 30 knots, or twice the pace of today’s ships, which typically sail slowly to conserve fuel.

They would be assembled in a multibillion-dollar nuclear yard operated by Core Power in the US. Work is slated to commence by 2028, with the first deliveries in 2033.

Trump hopes the plan can revive American shipbuilding and provide a ready market for a nuclear industry.

While China is developing its own maritime nuclear propulsion, the sector is one of the few in which the US is confident it has a major lead.

Onboard reactors heat water to create steam, which generates electricity to drive the engines, providing a permanent source of power and “free speed”, Bøe said…………

The deal aims to deliver a fleet of zero-emission vessels that travel at 30 knots, or twice the pace of today’s ships, which typically sail slowly to conserve fuel.

While the nuclear vessels would cost around $700m (£515m), compared with up to $250m for a large merchant ship, their speed would let them complete far more journeys………………..

Establishing the business case for nuclear power over traditional engines will open up a market to replace 8,000 ships over the next 25 years, Bøe estimates……

Bøe said the Trump administration had been instrumental in accelerating its plans……………

Core Power plans to announce a supplier of nuclear reactors for its ships as early as next month, with BWX Technologies viewed as the frontrunner.

The company is already partnered with BWX – which helped develop the first nuclear submarine in the 1950s – on plans for floating nuclear power plants to supply coastal industrial complexes.

A decision on the location for its nuclear shipyard will follow in the next six months.

A facility capable of producing three vessels a year would have construction costs of about $3bn, increasing to $15bn to churn out ships for the global market………………….

Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.

Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.


‘The talk of the industry’

Britain’s dominance of the maritime insurance industry could see it play a key role in establishing an insurance regime.

The Technology Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Sir Keir Starmer last year included a commitment to explore civil nuclear applications at sea and the establishment of a UK-US corridor, which could form the basis of a maritime nuclear insurance zone…………..

Core Power has $200m in financing and will seek to raise a further $600m next year. While existing investors are mostly shipbuilders and owners, the next round will seek to bring in private equity, venture capital and energy companies.

It has also agreed an alliance with authorities in Corpus Christi, Texas, a major US port, to lay out plans for new infrastructure that will be needed for nuclear-propelled tankers.

Mr Bøe said the door was also “wide open” for Britain to become involved in the sector.

Establishing the business case for nuclear power over traditional engines will open up a market to replace 8,000 ships over the next 25 years, Bøe estimates.

He said the first ships could operate on transatlantic routes and that Washington was open to allies – including Britain – becoming involved in the project, although ships were unlikely to be built here.

Bøe said the Trump administration had been instrumental in accelerating its plans.

“The pace at which both nuclear reactors and maritime policy and an action plan to build back shipbuilding capacity have been developed is remarkable,” he said.

“You cannot compete with Beijing on its own terms, we cannot outbid them. But we can put these two things together and establish the world’s first programme for civil maritime nuclear propulsion which creates a whole new adventure and competes with China.”

Core Power plans to announce a supplier of nuclear reactors for its ships as early as next month, with BWX Technologies viewed as the frontrunner.

The company is already partnered with BWX – which helped develop the first nuclear submarine in the 1950s – on plans for floating nuclear power plants to supply coastal industrial complexes.

A decision on the location for its nuclear shipyard will follow in the next six months.

A facility capable of producing three vessels a year would have construction costs of about $3bn, increasing to $15bn to churn out ships for the global market.

The hulls for the ships will be built in Japan or South Korea and floated to the US to be fitted with reactors and engines. The same yard will undertake maintenance and midlife refuelling once supplies of uranium are spent.

Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.

Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.

September 3, 2026 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Walt Zlotow -Trump first president in America’s 251 years to preside over 2 lost wars


Walt Zlotow    West Suburban Peace Coalition   Glen Ellyn  IL .30 Aug 26

President Trump loves to brag he ended 8 wars. The truth is a tad darker. He’s presiding over the lost US proxy war in Ukraine to destroy Russia. At the same time he’s presiding over the lost war to destroy Iran in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.

Trump didn’t start the Ukraine war. He correctly blamed predecessor Joe Biden for provoking it on his watch in February 2022. Said it wouldn’t have occurred if Biden hadn’t stolen the 2020 election from him. That’s a wild claim as Trump spent the preceding term arming Ukraine to smash the Ukrainian separatists in Donbas and promoting NATO membership for Ukraine. Both actions were instrumental in Russia’s eventual invasion under Biden. 

When reelected in 2024, Trump boasted he’d end the war on day one of his second term. Five hundred, eighty days on, Ukraine is a mere rump state largely land locked and near collapse. Trump has done nothing to end Ukraine’s impending defeat. Just the opposite. He’s still supporting Ukraine with intelligence to fire missiles and drones into Russia having no strategic value promoting victory whatsoever. He’s still selling weapons to NATO to gift Ukraine in their futile effort to stay in the fight. 

Trump’s impending defeat in the Iran war is even more catastrophic. This war is all on Trump. He made the biggest foreign policy blunder in US history by believing Israeli war whisperer Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran would collapse within a couple of days if only Trump would assassinate Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei. 

That two day victory expectation has turned into a six month catastrophe, not only for the US military, but possibly also for the world economy unless Trump admits defeat and settles on Iran’s sensible terms. 

Two wars, one Trump helped facilitate in his first term, then prolonged in his second term into certain defeat. The second he started all by his demented self whose dire consequences have yet to be sorted out. 

Trump’s two lost wars in term two…a dubious presidential achievement, unprecedented and likely never to be repeated or topped in US history. 

September 3, 2026 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Thank Trump for This: He Has Exposed the Leaking Guts of the War Machine

Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement)

American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky.

Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength.

There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. 

As Trump’s approval ratings crater due to his war on Iran, there may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.

Phil Wilson, Aug 28, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-exposes-war-machine

Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.

The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:

They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon.

Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.

No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:

The story books say they were all cut low.
But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,
The spirits will live and their legends grow,
so long as we remember the Alamo.

The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”

Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):

It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized.

The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.

Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.

Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. . A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.

The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.

There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.

We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.

War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:

The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it.

Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.

War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.

But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.

Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.

We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?

September 2, 2026 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

US Army to spend $2 bln on nuclear microreactors for bases

The Army program uses the military’s “deep pockets to provide a hidden subsidy” to nuclear companies that can’t find private-sector customers for their hypothetical and uneconomical reactors

DW Sean Sinico with AP, Reuters, August 27, 2026

The US Army has announced a plan to install what it calls nuclear microreactors at five of its bases across the country. The move would ensure the facilities’ energy independence from the rest of the electric grid.

The United States Army said Wednesday that it will award $2.2 billion (€1.7 billion) in contracts to five companies to build and operate small nuclear reactors on military bases. The program set a goal of deploying the first such reactor by the end of September 2028.

Called microreactors, developers say each of the nuclear plants would be easy to transport and provide up to 20 megawatts of power.

The reactors will adhere to all environmental and safety regulations that apply to commercial reactors, but an Army spokesperson said the reactors will be regulated by the Army rather than the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates commercial reactors.

“The whole idea here is that at the back end of this we want a commercial product,” said Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment.

Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said the awards will speed up the military’s ability “to deliver safe, reliable baseload power directly to our installations.”

“We are building the energy resilience necessary to project combat power globally, without relying on potentially vulnerable external grids,” he added………………………………………………………………………

‘Hidden subsidy’ for expensive reactors, critics say

Critics of microreactors say they will be expensive compared to conventional reactors. Safety advocates point out that nuclear technology carries significant risks that other low-carbon energy sources don’t, such as the danger of accidents or targeted attacks.

The Army program uses the military’s “deep pockets to provide a hidden subsidy” to nuclear companies that can’t find private-sector customers for their hypothetical and uneconomical reactors, Alan J. Kuperman, associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, told the AP news agency.

The Army’s Waksman said nobody thinks that microreactors will be lower in cost than conventional plants.

“What we are trying to do here with Janus … is to flesh out how can we get those prices down,” he said.

What will happen with the radioactive waste?

Waksman said the microreactors would safely shut down in case of a failure and that the Army wouldn’t add them to installations without being certain they are safe.

He added that the Army is working on a deal with the Energy Department to remove radioactive waste, and there won’t be any long-term storage on these installations.

Last month, five states offered to accept nuclear waste in exchange for federal support in developing nuclear energy facilities.

Trump pushing nuclear power in US

Executive orders signed by US President Donald Trump in May 2025 aimed to accelerate the development of nuclear power. Trump has called for the US to quadruple its nuclear energy production — just two new large reactors have been built from scratch in the United States in nearly 50 years. Those two reactors were completed years late and at least $17 billion over budget, AP reported.

The nation’s 94 nuclear reactors supply about 19% of U.S. electricity, compared to about 60% for fossil fuels and 21% for renewables, according to the US Energy Information Administration. https://www.dw.com/en/us-army-to-spend-2-billion-on-nuclear-microreactors-for-bases/a-78518374

September 2, 2026 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear regulator prepares to abandon a decades-old radiation safety rule

August 27, 2026, Geoff Brumfiel, NPR

The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is preparing to change a foundational rule designed to minimize radiation exposure. The update is part of President Trump’s expansive changes to nuclear oversight, as his administration seeks to revive nuclear energy to power data centers for artificial intelligence.

Under a new proposed rule, the agency is eliminating a 50-year-old standard known as “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA), which requires the nuclear industry to drive radiation exposure for workers and the public below the stated limits where possible. The new rule also creates a carveout for some workers to get higher exposures to radiation in special circumstances.

For some, the elimination of ALARA is overdue. “Keeping doses as low as reasonably achievable was a fair idea,” said Emily Caffrey, a radiation health physicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But in practice, the standard forced companies to take increasingly stringent radiation protection measures. It also created ambiguity, Caffrey said, “because what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person isn’t reasonable to another person.”

But others warn that the change could lay the groundwork for higher radiation exposures.

For some, the elimination of ALARA is overdue. “Keeping doses as low as reasonably achievable was a fair idea,” said Emily Caffrey, a radiation health physicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But in practice, the standard forced companies to take increasingly stringent radiation protection measures. It also created ambiguity, Caffrey said, “because what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person isn’t reasonable to another person.”

But others warn that the change could lay the groundwork for higher radiation exposures.

Since shortly after the dawn of the nuclear age, scientists have been aware of the risks of radiation exposure, and decades of data makes it clear.

“At high radiation doses, nobody’s really arguing: radiation causes cancer,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. High doses of radiation damage DNA and can cause mutations that lead to cancer. But when the dose is low, it’s much harder to determine risk because about 40% of the U.S. population develops cancer at some point in their lifetime.

“As you go down in dose, what you’re looking for is a very small increase in cancer risk over a very large background,” Brenner said. “That’s what makes it really, really hard.”

For the past 50 years or so, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has dealt with this uncertainty by requiring that the nuclear industry adhere to ALARA and keep radiation exposure as low as possible.

Then last May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for a wholesale overhaul of nuclear regulations. The order specifically called out ALARA, claiming the principle was a “flawed” understanding of radiation risks.

The NRC decided not to change its scientific model of radiation risk, known as the Linear No Threshold model, but it has proposed eliminating ALARA.

Speaking this week on the Federal News Network, NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said that ALARA is no longer working…………………………………………………

“Loosey-goosey” rules

The NRC will instead use the existing current threshold of 5 rem for a worker and 0.1 rem for the public as the upper limit for radiation exposure. A whole body CT scan is about 1 rem, according to the EPA…………………………………

The proposed NRC rule doesn’t change its other regulatory limits, but it does create some carve-outs. In particular, the industry would now be able to ask for a “planned occupational dose limit extension,” which would allow workers to receive 10 rem instead of 5 in any given year, providing their overall exposure doesn’t pass 25 rem in a five-year period………………………………

But Lyman, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that ALARA should stay. He said while it may be imperfect, its net effect has been to reduce radiation exposure to very low levels. The harms of low-dose radiation exposure are difficult to see, but Lyman says NRC’s own models suggest those harms exist.

In his opinion, the revised rule ignores that risk and is designed to desensitize the public to the dangers of radiation. “It’s trying to devalue and deemphasize the harm of ionizing radiation exposure,” he warned. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-radiation-safety-rules-alara-update

September 2, 2026 Posted by | USA, radiation | Leave a comment

Provoked: How Decades of American Policy Set the Stage for Catastrophe in Ukraine

In conversation with Scott Horton

Ian Proud, Aug 29, 2026

In my conversation with Scott Horton about his landmark book Provoked: How Washington Started a New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, one theme emerged with striking clarity: the Ukraine war that began in 2022 did not erupt from nowhere. It was the culmination of more than three decades of deliberate American choices.

Horton’s eight-hundred-page account is not a polemical rant but a meticulously documented timeline. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, he traces the story president by president—from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.

The central argument is straightforward and devastating: successive U.S. administrations systematically dismantled the post-Cold War settlement, broke explicit assurances given to Moscow, and treated Russian security concerns with open contempt.

The most consequential early breach concerned NATO expansion.

During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Robert Gates and others repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.”

Those assurances were not casual asides. They formed the basis on which Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to remain inside the alliance while Soviet troops were still stationed in the east.

Later State Department reviews under Warren Christopher quietly confirmed that the Russians had every reason to believe those promises were binding. Yet the Clinton administration proceeded with expansion anyway, first into Central Europe and later, under George W. Bush, into the Baltic states—leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines.

Opposition to this course was widespread and bipartisan. With great prescience, George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that the policy would produce a “devastating reaction” from Russia and that the very people dismissing those concerns would later claim the reaction proved their point.

Two-thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations opposed expansion. Career diplomats, military officers and even hardline hawks such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Ukraine required a special neutral status—something resembling the Cold War Finland or Austria model—precisely to avoid a catastrophic collision.

Those voices were ignored.

The pattern continued.

The 2008 Bucharest Summit promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia without a membership action plan or credible security guarantees—the “worst of all worlds,” as several analysts later described it.

Color revolutions, the deliberate sidelining of the Partnership for Peace, and the refusal to implement the Minsk agreements further eroded any residual trust.

When the same cohort of officials who had driven the policy under earlier administrations returned under Biden – most notably Daniel Fried – the trajectory accelerated toward open conflict.

Horton is careful not to justify Russia’s invasion. He simply insists that calling the attack “unprovoked” is an exercise in willful blindness.

The word itself, repeated endlessly by Western governments and media, seeks to close off inquiry rather than invite it.

Horton’s book reopens that inquiry with forensic detail—names, dates, cables, memoirs—leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.

What makes Provoked essential is precisely this refusal to operate on the short time horizon of the daily news cycle.

Most public discussion still treats either 2014 or 2022 as year zero. Horton shows that the roots stretch back to the moment the Cold War ended, when a victorious America chose (to quote the title of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s also excellent book) hubris over restraint.

The result is a tragedy that was both foreseeable and avoidable.

I am taking the book with me on holiday.

It is heavy—literally and figuratively—but the weight is justified.

Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at the present catastrophe, rather than simply recycle the slogans of the moment, should read it.

You can see the full conversation here.

September 2, 2026 Posted by | media, resources - print, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

Three of four reactors at Ontario’s refurbished Darlington nuclear power plant face frequent outages.


MATTHEW MCCLEARN, The Globe and Mail, Aug 28, 2026, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-ontario-darlington-nuclear-power-plant-three-reactors-out-of/

Three of four reactors at Ontario’s Darlington Nuclear Generating Station are experiencing prolonged outages, data from the Independent Electricity System Operator show, even as the province faces a further large drop in nuclear power generation in just a few weeks’ time.

Ontario Power Generation completed a $12.8-billion, decade-long refurbishment of its station in Clarington, Ont., in March. Although provincial officials have portrayed that overhaul as an unqualified success, Darlington’s units have meandered in and out of service ever since.

The most recently refurbished unit, Unit 4, suddenly stopped generating power on Aug. 1 – its third outage since returning to service. Two days later, Unit 2 abruptly stopped supplying power to the grid. Unit 3 had already been out of service for several months because of long-planned work, leaving Unit 1 as the lone operational unit.

Officials have disclosed little about the causes and implications of the outages at Units 2 and 4, nor when they might return to service. In response to questions from The Globe seeking details of the outages, OPG spokesperson Neal Kelly wrote in a statement that the two units were taken offline “to complete required maintenance.” He added that Unit 2 is expected to restart in September, and Unit 4 will follow in October.

Braeson Holland, a spokesperson for the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, wrote in a statement that OPG reported the forced outages of Units 2 and 4 to its staff.

“CNSC inspectors maintain regulatory oversight of the outage work to verify that the appropriate actions are being taken. CNSC staff are satisfied that these events do not present a risk to the health and safety of persons or to the environment,” he wrote.

Representing nearly 900 megawatts of generating capacity each, Darlington’s units are the largest in Ontario. The station boasts a total generating capacity of roughly 3,500 megawatts, making it the province’s second largest, eclipsed only by the eight-reactor Bruce Nuclear Generating Station in Tiverton, Ont., operated by Bruce Power.

Ontario’s third nuclear power plant, OPG’s Pickering Nuclear Generating Station, is just weeks away from shutting down. Its four operational reactors, representing 2,100 megawatts of generating capacity, are scheduled to come offline next month for their own $26.8-billion refurbishment, expected to wrap up in the mid-2030s.

Will soaring electricity rates kill Ontario’s nuclear expansion?

Michael Dodsworth, a spokesperson for the Independent Electricity System Operator, said his organization had no concerns that the outages would affect Ontario’s ability to meet electricity demand in the coming months.

“Ontario’s electricity system has remained reliable this summer thanks to our diverse supply mix, bolstered by recent investments in new generation and energy storage,” he wrote.

In a July filing to the Ontario Energy Board, OPG forecast that there would be 286 outage days at Darlington in 2026 – the most taken in any year since at least 2008. Nonetheless, the forced outages of Units 2 and 4 seem likely to push the actual total higher still.

OPG forecast planned outages totaling 512 days in 2027, including a major outage for work on Unit 2’s steam generators. The entire Darlington station will be out of service next year for nearly 46 days to allow work on its vacuum building, which is designed to suck out and condense steam from a reactor during a major accident.

Since outages of a single reactor can cost a utility $1-million or more a day in lost revenue – and because large, unexpected fluctuations in power generation can stress power grids, utilities invest considerable manpower and resources to avoiding unplanned outages, according to David Novog, a professor of engineering at McMaster University who specializes in nuclear safety and maintenance.

“Of course there’ll be unplanned outages,” he said. “But because of the value that the reactor represents on the grid and the amount of revenue it provides, it is probably one of the most looked-after assets that the government has.”

Ontario’s proposed nuclear plants could cost nearly $300-billion, study finds

However, several of this year’s outages at Darlington have been entirely unexpected. Unit 4 was officially returned to service on March 13 following a refurbishment lasting nearly three years. Since then, it has been taken offline three times with little explanation; OPG has disclosed only that the first outage was taken “to assess an operational matter unrelated to the refurbishment” and that it had completed repairs.

“When you stop and start and stop and start, that’s atypical of how we would typically choose to run the reactors,” Prof. Novog observed.

The Bruce and Darlington plants suffered many unplanned outages in their early years of operation, he added. During the years leading up to refurbishment, however, Darlington’s units were “exceptionally well-run.”

Prof. Novog said OPG should pro-actively publish more information about outages.

“When you’re not upfront with the information, it can lead to speculation and a lack of confidence,” he said.

“Without knowing the details, it’s hard to even tell whether it’s teething pain [at Darlington] or whether it is something else.”

The provincial government has said that Ontario’s nuclear projects were completed ahead of schedule and under budget, which Energy Minister Stephen Lecce repeated Tuesday at a press conference in St. Clair Township.

As the output of Ontario’s nuclear fleet has fallen because of refurbishments and outages, the province has increasingly relied on natural gas-fired plants to supply electricity. On Thursday afternoon, the 11 operational reactors provided 38.5 per cent of the province’s electricity, as compared to 31.5 per cent from gas plants, according to the Gridwatch monitoring web site.

For 2024 and 2025, the nuclear plants provided roughly half of Ontario’s power; gas plants provided less than 20 per cent.

September 2, 2026 Posted by | Canada, technology | Leave a comment

The push to clear nuclear power’s waste-disposal hurdle

The technical issues have mostly been solved, but the long-term potential peril of radioactive material has made it difficult to find politically acceptable sites.

Nature, By Brian Owens, 26 August 2026

Inside a nondescript warehouse in an industrial park in Oakville, Canada, sits a squat forklift truck that requires no driver. When activated by its remote operator, the vehicle trundles to a stack of huge clay blocks, each weighing 8,000 kilograms, and carries them into a narrow rock tunnel. Another custom-built machine then fills the spaces around the blocks with crumbled clay.

Each block is made of bentonite clay and encases a copper-coated steel container built to hold spent fuel from a nuclear reactor. The blocks will be sealed behind yet more clay and concrete in tunnels deep underground, and the radioactive material inside will be left to slowly decay over thousands of years.

Or it would be, if there were any nuclear waste stored on-site. The warehouse is a test facility for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the group in Toronto, Canada, that is responsible for dealing with the long-term storage of the country’s nuclear waste. The life-sized mock-up, complete with simulated rock tiling, enables Peter Keech, manager of engineered barrier science at the NWMO, and his colleagues to test technologies that will be used to store the waste and to demonstrate the storage process to the public.

The metal fuel containers, for example, are designed to withstand the pressure of being buried under a 3-kilometre-thick glacier, should the next ice age arrive before the radiation has decayed fully. But Keech and his team take the testing much further, subjecting several canisters to crushing forces equivalent to being more than 6 km under the ocean. The containers looked like toothpaste tubes that had been squeezed in the middle — but they were still fully sealed.

“These are much higher forces than they will ever see in the repository, but we take it to failure to understand the materials,” says Keech. “And even in failure it still offers containment.”


Canada’s real waste repository will be built roughly 1,600 km to the northwest of the test facility, hosted by the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the town of Ignace. It is buried some 750 metres under the hard rock of the Canadian Shield, which was once the base of a vast mountain range. When the facility opens in around 2040, its 80–100 km of tunnels will be capable of storing the nearly 6 million bundles of spent fuel that will be produced by Canada’s four nuclear-power plants over their operational lives, isolating the waste from people and the environment until long after the material’s radiation levels return to that of natural uranium.

World tour

Almost every country with a nuclear-power industry is working on some variation of this plan. Finland’s is the most advanced: its Onkalo repository on the country’s west coast is expected to open later this year.

The storage facility is built 430 metres below ground in a hard crystalline bedrock, and will eventually consist of about 50 km of tunnels that can store around 6,500 tonnes of spent uranium fuel, says Linda Kumpula, a nuclear-safety engineer at Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment in Espoo.

A site in Sweden, also built into hard crystalline rock, is expecting to begin accepting radioactive waste in the 2030s. France and Switzerland have each selected a site in natural clay formations and are in the process of gaining regulatory approval. And in December 2025, China completed the first stage of construction for its underground laboratory in the Gobi Desert, a facility that will test the area’s suitability for long-term waste storage.

In the United States, plans for a spent-fuel repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been a political hot potato for decades, and the project is currently stalled. But the nation does already have one permanent facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a repository for radioactive waste from the country’s nuclear-weapons programme that is located in salt caverns beneath New Mexico’s desert. That facility has been a major source of learning for other countries, says Keech — particularly how to protect communities when transporting waste to the site and how to minimize the time the material spends on the surface when it arrives.

These issues and other technical ones, such as how best to build a deep geological repository, have now mostly been resolved. “We’ve been working on this for a long time and it is no longer a major technical or scientific challenge,” says Stefan Mayer, team leader of radioactive waste disposal at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.

The real challenge is political and social. “You have to find a site that’s technically suitable, but you also need a site that is hosted by a community that is willing,” says Allison Macfarlane, a geologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It turns out that the latter problem is harder than the former.”

Types of waste

Waste from nuclear plants generally falls into four categories: materials with very low, low, intermediate and high levels of radioactivity.

Very-low-level and low-level waste make up most radioactive waste — about 95%. Very-low-level waste consists of the soil, concrete and rubble generated when a nuclear plant is decommissioned. Low-level waste is made up of used protective equipment and other lightly contaminated materials from the plant. Both types can be disposed of in near-surface secure facilities and need to be isolated for several hundred years.

Intermediate-level waste consists mainly of metal parts of the reactor that are contaminated with radiation. These metallic isotopes are so concentrated and long-lived that the material remains radioactive for thousands of years and cannot be disposed of near the surface — it needs to be isolated underground.

The biggest issue is the high-level waste. This is the spent nuclear fuel and its containers, as well as the waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel that some countries do to extend their fuel supplies. By volume, it represents just 3% of the waste generated by a power plant, but it is responsible for 95% of the radioactivity. And it remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years — longer than any human civilization has yet lasted. Because of the waste’s longevity, it must be safely isolated deep underground where it cannot contaminate the ecosystem or harm future generations………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

Another important adjustment for the United States would be to change who is responsible for dealing with the waste. Instead of the Department of Energy, with its revolving door of politically appointed leaders, Macfarlane thinks that it should be an independent organization: either a government agency similar to New York’s port authority or an industry-led group such as Canada’s NWMO.

“You need more of a corporate structure with leadership that’s going to be there a long time, because this is a slow process,” Macfarlane says. “It takes decades to do properly.”

This was one of the main recommendations in 2012 of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which Macfarlane took part in. But so far there has been no movement on the issue.

The United States, Macfarlane says, should not be afraid to admit defeat on Yucca Mountain and start again with a more consent-based process. “I think the US has failed and they just have to acknowledge that — and decide they’re going to try again,” she says.

The long timelines involved in dealing with nuclear waste make it tempting to continually kick the can down the road and trust that future generations will eventually find a solution. But Macfarlane is adamant that it is the responsibility of people today to at least get the ball rolling.

“It’s imperative that we do something sooner rather than later,” she says. “I can tell you one thing with 100% certainty: if we do nothing, this material will get into the environment and will harm humans in the future.”

September 1, 2026 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Nuclear Hotseat  #774: Nuke Tax Costs You HOW MUCH ?! Nuclear Weapons Tax Calculator.

9 May 2026

WHO WE ARE: Nuclear Hotseat is the weekly international news magazine keeping you up to date on all things nuclear… from a different perspective. We’re a show for people who know nothing about nuclear who want to know something, and people who know something about nuclear who would like to know just a little bit more. Since June 14, 2011, only three months after the Fukushima nuclear disaster began, producer/host Libbe HaLevy — a survivor of the nuclear accident at Three Mile Island — has presented nuclear news, expert interviews, activist actions, and ways for citizens concerned about nuclear to take action.

WHAT IS COVERED IN THIS EPISODE:
How much are nukes really costing us? The answer is astounding – and every year, Physicians for Social Responsibility provides an updated answer, created by long-term veteran member and board member Dr. Robert Dodge. Bob’s latest numbers for 2026 were released on April 15 – tax day – as is appropriate for tracking the outrageous financial nuclear tax burden place on every woman, man, child, and even infant in this country. Where does that $137 BILLION dollars go? Sit back and fasten your seatbelt and you find out.

And Physicist Lynda Williams is great at breaking down complex nuclear issues and giving us the bare bones to be able to understand the truth behind all that nuclear industry gobbledygook. Here, she explains the need for comments on three new rule changes the NUclear Regulatory Commission – the NRC – is proposing and the tiny window of opportunity we have to comment on them… and why we must. We spoke on April 26, 2026.

August 31, 2026 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Tell NRC: Do Not Weaken Radiation Protection!

Tell the NRC – https://www.protectbetter.org/nrc-comments?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=7a7efaf6-d89b-4f2a-bc04-cb2330ac6bc4

Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Fri, Aug 28,

Radiation harms. There is no safe level of exposure—and now the federal government is moving to weaken the standards meant to protect us.

President Trump’s Executive Orders are pushing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) to weaken radiation protections as part of an effort to accelerate the construction of more nuclear reactors, nuclear-powered data centers, and the expansion of the nuclear weapons complex. These changes could expose people and communities to dramatically more radiation while disregarding decades of evidence about the health risks of even low-dose exposure.

WE MUST MAKE CLEAR:


  • No exemptions for radiation exposure.     Nuclear licensees must be required to track and count all radiation doses and radioactive emissions, with no minimum threshold. Any proposal allowing 25 millirem per year—or any millirem or microrem level—before exposures begin to “count” would effectively permit additional radiation exposure to go untracked. That could mean higher worker doses and increased radioactive releases into our air, water, and sewage, while making it harder to understand the true health impacts of cumulative, low-dose radiation exposure. If radiation is released and people are exposed, it should be tracked and reported and kept to a minimum.  
  • If new nuclear reactors are as safe and clean as the industry claims, why do our existing health and safety protections need to be weakened to build them? The rush to expand nuclear power should not come at the expense of safeguards designed to protect workers, communities, and the public. If nuclear expansion requires weaker radiation standards to move forward, that should raise serious questions—not justify lowering the bar. Don’t weaken the regulations. 
  • We MUST retain the goal of keeping exposures to radiation As Low As Reasonably Achievable.

This is not an abstract regulatory debate. It is about how much radiation the government considers acceptable for you, your family, and your community to be exposed to.

Weakening already inadequate radiation standards could  double or more allowable exposure—and the resulting cancer risk— And that risk is not distributed equally. Women, children, older adults, workers, and communities living near nuclear facilities face greater risks.

The science is clear that radiation’s harms extend far beyond cancer. Radiation causes  immune dysfunction and heart and cardiovascular disease. It could cause infertility, and disruption of pregnancy. In 2021, after a six-year review, the NRC itself rejected the industry proposal to do away with the Linear NoThreshold model.  NRC should rely on that decision, not weaken it. 

Yet instead of strengthening protections, the federal government is trying to move in the opposite direction.

We know what happens when regulators underestimate radiation risk. Billions of dollars in government compensation have already been paid to people harmed by radiation exposure—including people whose exposures occurred below legal levels  at the time. We  must not repeat those mistakes  to make nuclear expansion dirtier and cheaper.

If radiation standards are weakened while nuclear facilities proliferate, more radioactive materials will be produced, transported, processed, stored, and released into our environment. Once radioactive contamination is released, we cannot simply take it back.

This is a moment when we have to act. Regulators and lawmakers need to hear that public health protections are not an inconvenience to be eliminated in the rush to build more nuclear facilities.

NIRS is fighting to defend science-based radiation protections and ensure that the health of our communities comes before the nuclear industry’s expansion plans.

August 30, 2026 Posted by | opposition to nuclear, USA | Leave a comment

Army Selects Vendors, Sites for Nuclear Microreactors

Aug. 27, 2026 | By U.S. Army Communication and Outreach Office , https://www.war.gov/News/News-Stories/Article/Article/4584583/army-selects-vendors-sites-for-nuclear-microreactors/

The Army announced yesterday that the Janus Program selected five nuclear energy vendors and five initial locations to build and operate nuclear microreactors.

In partnership with the War Department’s Defense Innovation Unit, the Army is awarding up to $2.2 billion in total for these microreactors. The project will deliver safe, secure and reliable nuclear power, strengthening the Army’s ability to project power globally, while supporting the revitalization of American industrial capacity and technological leadership. 

“Since launching the Janus Program, our mandate from President [Donald J.] Trump and Secretary [Pete] Hegseth has been clear: secure the power our warfighters need to train, deploy and win,” said Dan Driscoll, Army secretary. “Awarding these contracts accelerates our ability to deliver safe, reliable baseload power directly to our installations. We are building the energy resilience necessary to project combat power globally, without relying on potentially vulnerable external grids.”

With private sector funding expected alongside government investment, the Army expects to build and operate more than 20 nuclear microreactors across War Department installations.

The five selected vendors and installations are:

  • Antares Nuclear Inc. at Fort Bragg, North Carolina.
  • BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC at Fort Campbell, Kentucky.
  • General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems at Fort Hood, Texas.
  • Radiant Industries Inc. at Fort Benning, Georgia.
  • Westinghouse Government Services at Fort Drum, New York.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………As the Janus Program moves forward, vendors will bring nuclear technologies to other military installations for continued energy resilience across the entire War Department. The Army will announce additional military sites at a later date and continues to drive toward the September 2028 target outlined in Executive Order 14299 for operation of a first reactor.

“The Army is leading the nation in its return to nuclear preeminence,” said Jason Craft, Janus Program manager. “Our selected industry awardees represent the most viable technologies to achieve this capability, setting conditions for both installation energy resilience and operational energy solutions.”

Using a milestone-based payment model, vendors will receive government funding only after successfully hitting specific technical goals. This investment model brings together approximately $2.2 billion across fiscal years 2027-2031, along with significant capital investment from each vendor. 

This technology development model will speed up the delivery of next-generation energy solutions to the warfighter and promote innovation while ensuring accountability, Craft said. The prototype reactors will be contractor-owned and operated. Collaboration with utility providers is needed for the success of the Army’s nuclear power strategy and the Janus Program. The Army will work closely with providers on the program to ensure the best possible outcomes, while continuing to collaborate with them now and in the future.

“The Army’s Janus Program has my full support,” said Emil Michael, undersecretary of war for research and engineering and War Department chief technology officer. “The War Department is acting swiftly to implement President Trump’s executive order. … We are unleashing America’s domestic nuclear industrial base to ensure a more resilient and secure energy supply for the joint force.”

August 30, 2026 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

We’re Half a Year Into Trump’s War on Iran. Congress Has Tools to End It.

 SCHEERPOST, August 26, 2026, By Hanieh Jodat

The clash over whether the US has a functioning constitutional process for starting and ending wars is coming to a head.

The U.S.-Israeli war on Iran is entering its seventh month after a series of attempts at diplomatic negotiations moderated by Pakistan and other countries in the region.  The U.S has embroiled itself in a conflict without a clear exit strategy, and Iran has shown no interest in bending under President Donald Trump’s pressure. As Washington and Tehran continue this agonizing yo-yo of threats, the growing reported number of casualties feel heavy. More than 3,400 Iranians have reportedly been killed, while over 26,000 have been wounded, including at least 4,000 women and more than 1,600 children. On the American side, the Pentagon currently reports that 14 U.S. service members have been killed and more than 700 wounded. However, one Department of Defense (DOD) official accused the Pentagon of “an accounting trick” in order to misrepresent the true casualty figures.

By now it has become obvious that Benjamin Netanyahu played a key role in convincing Trump to start this war of choice, after decades of pushing the United States to attack Iran. In recent years, Israel’s lobby, in collaboration with opposition leaders from the Iranian diaspora — including the son of Iran’s late Shah Reza Pahlavi and his monarchist advisors — and a group of hawkish American officials pushed the U.S. to the brink of this war.

Until recently, those attempts were unsuccessful — that is, until they finally found a U.S. president who would risk a strategic disaster and economic collapse for one of the most quickly unpopular wars in U.S. history. But after half a year of war, the question is no longer how we arrived at this war, but more so how Congress might limit the executive branch and force an end to the military hostilities.

Poll after poll reveals that people in the U.S. are increasingly questioning the motivation and cost of the war. After decades of U.S. military interventions across the Middle East and West Asia that have cost trillions of dollars without any sign of success, Americans have expressed their exhaustion with the financial and human toll of another conflict. A Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in late July found that only 33 percent of people in the U.S. supported the war with Iran, the lowest level of support measured since the conflict began. Sixty-nine percent said President Trump had failed to explain the objectives of the military operation in Iran clearly.

Diplomacy and negotiations between the U.S. and Iran have repeatedly faltered since Trump entered office for the first time and pulled out of a landmark nuclear deal engineered by the Obama administration. The possibility of a lasting political settlement remains buried beneath the weight of the bombs dropped on civilians, sanctions, military threats, and political calculation. And the consequences of the war of choice with Iran are not confined to the Middle East. Rising food and energy prices, inflation, regular attacks on U.S. bases with an unknown number of U.S. casualties, and the uncertainty over the war’s future have shifted the way both Americans and the rest of the world view U.S. recklessness. And the frustration has only gotten worse; by August, roughly two-thirds of people in the U.S. opposed the war outright, according to Reuters polling.

In the face of clear American opposition to the war, the question now is whether the United States has a functioning and democratic constitutional process for deciding when a war begins, how long it continues, and when it ends.

While Trump and his war cabinet have swung back and forth between the promise of diplomacy and peace or the threats of further military escalation, Congress has unsuccessfully attempted several times to reassert its constitutional authority. Only Congress has the power to declare war, and the 1973 War Powers Resolution gives the president a 60-day clock to terminate hostilities without congressional approval. The president has now blown through that deadline — bringing about several constitutional questions for lawmakers.

An Ever-Expanding War……………………………………………………………….

A Path Forward Beyond More War Powers Resolutions

Congress can strengthen congressional oversight over the war by requiring mandatory reporting, conducting investigations, and using the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to audit the executive branch. How can Congress exercise its war powers if it doesn’t know what the Trump administration seeks to do?…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/26/were-half-a-year-into-trumps-war-on-iran-congress-has-tools-to-end-it/

August 30, 2026 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

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