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Test rocket carrying component for future nuclear armed ICBM explodes after takeoff

By Barbara Starr, CNN Pentagon Correspondent, July 8, 2022, (CNN)A test rocket carrying a component for a future US nuclear armed intercontinental ballistic missile blew up 11 seconds after takeoff Wednesday night from Vandenberg Space Force Base in California, according to a statement from the base…………

This was the first test of the Mk21A Reentry Vehicle (RV) the part of the weapon that would hold a nuclear warhead if the system was operational. There was no nuclear element or armed component to this test

The Mk21A is planned to be the reentry vehicle for the future LGM-35A Sentinel intercontinental ballistic missiles, a new ground-based nuclear intercontinental ballistic missile planned to replace the current Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile as a key element of the US nuclear deterrent capability.

The explosion comes a week after the latest test of a US hypersonic weapon failed after an “anomaly” occurred during the first test of the full system.

The test, carried out June 30 at the Pacific Missile Range Facility in Hawaii, was supposed to launch the Common Hypersonic Glide Body atop a two-stage missile booster. The booster is designed to launch the system and accelerate it to hypersonic speeds in excess of Mach 5, at which point the glide body detaches and uses its speed to reach the target. It was the first time the entire system was tested, called an All Up Round test…….  https://edition.cnn.com/2022/07/08/politics/test-rocket-explodes/index.html

July 7, 2022 Posted by | incidents, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear energy consumption hit new low in ‘21, EIA says

By ExchangeMonitor

United States consumption of electricity produced by nuclear power plants last year hit its lowest point in nearly a decade, the government’s independent energy auditor said last week. According to a report published Friday by the U.S. Energy Information Administration…… [subscribers only]  https://news.wisc.edu/nuclear-war-would-turn-oceans-upside-down-crash-food-web/

July 7, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, USA | Leave a comment

National Endowment for Democracy (NED) – a CIA front group laid the foundations for the Ukraine war

HOW CIA FRONT LAID FOUNDATIONS FOR UKRAINE WAR By Kit Klarenberg, Substack., July 5, 2022

”…………………………………………. many of the CIA’s traditional responsibilities and activities being farmed out to “overt” organizations, most significantly the National Endowment for Democracy (NED).    Founded in November 1983, then-CIA director William Casey was at the heart of NED’s creation.

………………… September 2013, and Carl Gershman, National Endowment for Democracy (NED) chief from its launch until summer 2021, authored an op-ed for The Washington Post, outlining how his organization was hard at work wresting countries in Russia’s near abroad – the constellation of former Soviet republics and Warsaw Pact states – away from Moscow’s orbit.

Along the way, he described Ukraine as “the biggest prize” in the region, suggesting Kiev joining Europe would “accelerate the demise” of Russian President Vladimir Putin. Six months later, Ukraine’s elected president Viktor Yanukovych was ousted in a violent coup.

Writing in Consortium News earlier that month, investigative legend Robert Parry recorded how, over the previous year, NED had funded 65 projects in Ukraine totaling over $20 million. This amounted to what the late journalist dubbed “a shadow political structure of media and activist groups that could be deployed to stir up unrest when the Ukrainian government didn’t act as desired.”

NED’s pivotal role in unseating Yanukovych can be considered beyond dispute,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,,   NED has removed many entries from its website in the years since the coup, which amply underline its role in Yanukovych’s overthrow.

…………………………    the country remained captured by Western financial, political and ideological interests post-Maidan. It was a roadmap NED subsequently followed to the letter.

[Ed. This article gives the complex story of the role of NED and other U.S. and British agencies, in the overthrow of the popular leader  Yanukovych and the rise of the corrupt Petro Poroshenko.]

………………………   Trump’s term in office was typified by ever-escalating hostility between Washington and Moscow, the Oval Office resident going to dangerous lengths his predecessor had consistently refrained from to arm and galvanize the most reactionary and violent elements of the Ukrainian armed forces, including the notorious Neo-Nazi Azov Battalion, and tear up Cold War arms control treaties, much to Moscow’s chagrin…………….

 ………..Leshchenko,  [prominent corrupt politician in Kiev],  was voted out of parliamentc, Zelensky’s Servant of the People party candidate taking his seat in a landslide……

Despite no longer being part of the legislature, Leshchenko has continued to wield significant sway over the Ukrainian government, directly advising Zelensky on “Russian disinformation” to this day.

What direct influence NED still exerts over him – and Ukraine’s President by extension – isn’t certain. Although, mere days before the Russian invasion began, in an interview with The Guardian, Leshchenko referred to the Minsk Accords – which Zelensky stood on a specific platform of implementing – as “toxic”, suggesting the leader would “betray” his country by adhering to their obligations, which included granting autonomy to Donetsk and Luhansk.

This reflects NED’s position – on February 14th this year, its Journal of Democracy published an article declaring the Accords to be “a bad idea for the West and a serious threat to Ukrainian democracy and stability,” ……….

….. an objective analysis of what actually happened and why, in which NED is completely central. Still, the organization didn’t need to rely purely on Leshchenko to keep the Minsk Accords moribund. Its extensive network of assets in the country, and Washington’s dark alliance with Ukraine’s far-right, was more than sufficient to ensure that Zelensky’s overwhelmingly popular mission of restoring relations with Russia would and could never be fulfilled.

An archive of NED funding in Ukraine over 2021 – which has now been replaced with a statement “in solidarity” with Kiev – offers extensive detail on the precise projects backed by the CIA front over that pivotal 12-month period.

It points to a preponderant focus on purported Russian misdeeds in eastern Ukraine. One grant, of $58,000, was provided to the NGO Truth Hounds to “monitor, document, and spotlight human rights violations” and “war crimes” in the Donetsk and Luhansk regions.

Another, of $48,000, was provided to Ukraine’s War Childhood Museum to “educate the Ukrainian public about the consequences of the war through a series of public events.” Yet another received by charity East-SOS aimed to “raise public awareness” of “Russia’s policies of persecution and colonization in the region, and document illustrative cases,” its findings circulated to the UN Human Rights Council, European Courts of Human Rights, and International Court of Justice.

There was no suggestion this wellspring would be used to document any abuses by Ukrainian government forces. UN research indicates 2018 – 2021, over 80 percent of civilian casualties were recorded on the Donbas side. Meanwhile, Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe reports show that shelling of civilian areas in the breakaway regions intensified dramatically in the weeks leading up to February 24th, potentially the precursor of a full-blown military offensive.

As such, NED’s expurgation of records exposing its role in fomenting and precipitating the horror now unfolding in southeast Ukraine not only protects de facto CIA agents on the ground. It also reinforces and legitimizes the Biden administration’s sprawling, fraudulent narrative, endlessly and uncritically reiterated in Western media, that Russia’s invasion was entirely unprovoked and groundless.

Ukrainians now live with the mephitic legacy of that reckless, unadmitted meddling in the most brutal manner imaginable. They may well do so for many years to come. Meanwhile, the men and women who orchestrated it rest comfortably in Washington DC, insulated from any scrutiny or consequence whatsoever, every day cooking up fresh schemes to undermine and topple troublesome foreign leaders, hailed as champions of liberty by the mainstream press every step of the way.  https://popularresistance.org/how-cia-front-laid-foundations-for-ukraine-war/

July 7, 2022 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA causing tensions and uncertainty with its expanding militarism in the Pacific, targeting China

Wshington should stop playing dangerous games https://www.chinadaily.com.cn/a/202207/04/WS62c225a5a310fd2b29e6a123.html By Martin Sieff | CHINA DAILY , 6 Jul 22

US President Joe Biden has taken a vague approach on an understanding with Beijing over the Taiwan question negotiated in 1972 by then president Richard Nixon that has ensured peace and mutual prosperity in the Pacific for half a century.

The US-led West continues to push NATO’s eastward expansion and build NATO-like military alliances in the Asia-Pacific region such as AUKUS, the much-touted Australia-United Kingdom－United States strategic alliance. Now the Western powers with some other countries are holding RIMPAC 2022, or Rim of the Pacific, military exercises, the largest in the program’s history, which will further increase uncertainties in the Asia-Pacific.

The alleged reason the West cites for trying to brainwash the prosperous and, left to themselves, peaceful and well-meaning populations of those and other countries is that China, Russia and some other countries present some hideous threat to the rest of the world like Hitler’s Nazi Germany and therefore must be resisted.

Yet the Joe Biden administration, oblivious to the ageless teachings, remains consistent in holding on to the extraordinary irony and blasphemy that its own political values and ideology－which it so manifestly fails to live up to in its own domestic policies and society－must nevertheless be imposed as the inevitable and unavoidable destiny on the rest of the world. Such ridiculous hubris, or arrogance according to the classical Greek view of life, must inevitably generate an annihilating nemesis: total destruction.

How else can one explain the determination of the US administration, pulling its Pacific allies in tow, to provoke a full-scale confrontation, threatening no holds barred confrontation with China over the Taiwan question?

US President Joe Biden has taken a vague approach on an understanding with Beijing over the Taiwan question negotiated in 1972 by then president Richard Nixon that has ensured peace and mutual prosperity in the Pacific for half a century. Biden is also continuing to arm Ukraine to the teeth so Kyiv can keep fighting a bloody conflict it cannot possibly win against Moscow.

What possible sanity can lie behind provoking a war and openly threatening the world’s two other leading strategic and nuclear-armed powers with destabilization and destruction at the same time?

Now, the next step on this march of folly to an extended war has also been taken. Following the recently concluded G7 summit which was apparently targeted at both Russia and China, the Biden administration has dragooned its Pacific allies of New Zealand, Australia and (maybe a reluctant) Japan into the latest RIMPAC exercises specifically aimed at targeting Beijing and bullying it into accepting Washington’s diktat over Taiwan.

Neither Biden nor any of his national security team of Secretary of State Antony Blinken, National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin and Under Secretary of State for Policy Victoria Nuland shows the slightest realization that all their policies are certain to bring about the very Armageddon they claim to be determined to deter.

In fact, in his first face-to-face meeting with Austin on the sidelines of the Shangri-La Dialogue in Singapore on June 10, Chinese State Councilor and Defense Minister Wei Fenghe made clear that any move, encouraged or manipulated by the US, to get Taiwan to declare independence would be immediately taken by Beijing as a casus belli.

This would be an insane risk for the US administration to take even if it was to secure peace with the rest of the world, and at no risk of a full-scale war with Russia, another catastrophe which Biden has been assiduously courting.


Far from deterring China, the announcement of the latest RIMPAC exercises, as well as the provocative, hostile and contemptuous language in which that statement was made, can only lock the US even further into its suicidal leap of the Gadarene swine off the edge of a gigantic cliff from which there can be no return or recovery.

Only about 25 people are reported to have survived trying to commit suicide by jumping off the Golden Gate Bridge in San Francisco since it was completed in 1937 out of the 1,700 who have tried. Every one of those survivors has testified that they realized they had made a terrible mistake as soon as they jumped the 67 meters into San Francisco Bay.


Will Biden, Blinken, Sullivan and Nuland experience a similar far-too-late moment of clarity when the catastrophe they have worked so ceaselessly to provoke finally explodes on their country and its allies? By that point, it will not matter: the damned cannot escape their inevitable destruction. One can only weep for the hundreds of millions they will take with them.

The author is a senior fellow at the American University in Moscow.

July 7, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Congress poised to shoot down Biden’s nuclear rollback

The White House wants to cancel a nuclear cruise missile, but Democrats have joined Republicans to try to save it.

Politico, By LAWRENCE UKENYE and CONNOR O’BRIEN, 07/06/2022 ,

Progressives were already disappointed with President Joe Biden’s plans for the nation’s nuclear arsenal. Now they’re poised to lose one of the few things about the White House’s blueprint that they liked.

In recent weeks, Democrats have joined Republicans in adding money back into the Pentagon budget to continue developing a sea-launched nuclear cruise missile that former President Donald Trump initiated in 2018. Biden proposed canceling the missile, which arms control advocates say is redundant, costly and potentially destabilizing……………………..

The Pentagon’s still-classified Nuclear Posture Review, which lays out a long-term roadmap for the nuclear arsenal, spurred the decision to zero out funding for the missile in Biden’s most recent budget. The public split between top civilians and military commanders amounted to a “green light” for Democrats to hedge on the program, according to Tom Collina, policy director at Ploughshares Fund.

…………………… The situation marks a retreat from the campaign pledges of then-candidate Biden, who long advocated for reducing reliance on nuclear weapons, only to turn around and dedicate tens of billions of dollars to the modernization of all three legs of the triad for two years in a row. Arms control advocates also called on him to establish a “no first use” policy and cancel two weapons added on by the Trump administration: the cruise missile and a low-yield submarine-launched missile, which has already entered the fleet.

Biden’s nuclear plans, outlined in a brief summary released in March, omit a “no first use” policy. The low-yield warhead introduced during the Trump years remains a part of the arsenal.

As for the cruise missile, now that both the House and Senate Armed Services committees have authorized funding, albeit with differing conditions, Congress will likely send Biden a compromise defense policy bill this year that foils his plan to cancel the program.

A spokesperson for the White House National Security Council said in a statement that the administration “stands by the President’s budget submission, which canceled the SLCM-N,” which refers to the sea-launched cruise missile-nuclear. The spokesperson noted the decision to kill the missile “was based on the findings and recommendations” of the Nuclear Posture Review.

Biden’s fiscal 2023 defense budget proposes spending $50.9 billion on nuclear weapons programs across the Defense and Energy Departments, while also attempting to cancel the SLCM and retire the aging inventory of B83 gravity bombs. The latter system is also in play in defense talks.

Senate Armed Services voted to place limits on the retirement of the B83 by requiring a study on striking hardened and deeply buried targets before any of the bombs could be scrapped.

Both versions of the National Defense Authorization Act greenlight $25 million for the Navy’s research and development efforts on the cruise missile and another $20 million for the National Nuclear Security Administration to continue research on the W80-4 warhead to be used on the missile. But the House version restricts a portion of the $45 million from being spent until the Navy and NNSA deliver several reports, including analyses outlining the cost of the warhead and delivery system as well as the possible limitations of the vessels that carry the missile………………………………….

The debate won’t end with the Armed Services Committees, as Congress must still appropriate money to continue the program.

Democrats on the House Appropriations Committee sided with Biden and allocated no money for the missile or its warhead in their versions of annual defense and energy spending bills. But Armed Services’ action is likely to put pressure on appropriators in their talks over a spending compromise………………….  https://www.politico.com/news/2022/07/06/congress-biden-nuclear-rollback-00044344
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July 7, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Would you trust nuclear environmental research funded by the USA Department of Energy? (I wouldn’t)

UW researchers to study potential environmental injustices surrounding nuclear development at Kemmerer, Wyoming Public Radio | By Caitlin Tan, July 6, 2022 

As Wyoming sets its sights on nuclear development, a team of University of Wyoming researchers will study how one project impacts environmental justice.

The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) awarded the team an $800,000 grant to span the course of three years. This is the first time the DOE is funding a study that looks at how nuclear energy affects environmental justice. The grant will focus on these effects on the TerraPower nuclear project in Kemmerer. The goal is to take a proactive approach and identify potential environmental injustices before they happen.

Lead researcher Rachael Budowle said environmental justice means that specific populations should not experience inequalities because of development – this can include things like, water and air quality, and even access to economic opportunities.

“So, nuclear energy in particular, has historically presented a range of social, environmental and ethical challenges that also warrant exploration, around public perception, safety, trust, and industry and government responsibility for waste and accidents,” Budowle said.

Lead researcher Rachael Budowle said environmental justice means that specific populations should not experience inequalities because of development – this can include things like, water and air quality, and even access to economic opportunities.

“So, nuclear energy in particular, has historically presented a range of social, environmental and ethical challenges that also warrant exploration, around public perception, safety, trust, and industry and government responsibility for waste and accidents,” Budowle said………..

In the second year, researchers will interview a wide range of stakeholders and then provide recommendations to the state and TerraPower.  https://www.wyomingpublicmedia.org/natural-resources-energy/2022-07-06/uw-researchers-to-study-potential-environmental-injustices-surrounding-nuclear-development-at-kemmerer

July 7, 2022 Posted by | spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear War Could Mean Annihilation, But Biden and Congress Are Messing Around

 https://truthout.org/articles/nuclear-war-could-mean-annihilation-but-biden-and-congress-are-messing-around/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=eccf0454-e0d8-49d3-8e0c-8125c5a4fd5f The Biden administration hasn’t just remained mum about current nuclear war dangers — it’s actively exacerbating them. ANTON PETRUS 

Only diplomacy can halt the carnage in Ukraine and save the lives of millions now at risk of starvation. And the dangers of nuclear war can be reduced by rejecting the fantasy of a military solution to the Ukraine conflict.

BY Norman Solomon, Truthout 3 July 22, President Joe Biden and top subordinates have refused to publicly acknowledge the danger of nuclear war — even though it is now higher than at any other time in at least 60 years. Their silence is insidious and powerful, and their policy of denial makes grassroots activism all the more vital for human survival.

In the aftermath of the 1962 Cuban missile crisis, President John F. Kennedy was more candid. Speaking at American University, he said: “A single nuclear weapon contains almost 10 times the explosive force delivered by all the allied air forces in the Second World War.” Kennedy also noted, “The deadly poisons produced by a nuclear exchange would be carried by wind and water and soil and seed to the far corners of the globe and to generations yet unborn.” Finally, he added, “All we have built, all we have worked for, would be destroyed in the first 24 hours.”

Kennedy was no dove. He affirmed willingness to use nuclear weapons. But his speech offered some essential honesty about nuclear war — and the need to seriously negotiate with the Kremlin in the interests of averting planetary incineration — an approach sorely lacking from the United States government today.

At the time of Kennedy’s presidency, nuclear war would have been indescribably catastrophic. Now — with large arsenals of hydrogen bombs and what scientists know about “nuclear winter” — experts have concluded that a nuclear war would virtually end agriculture and amount to omnicide (the destruction of human life on earth).

In an interview after publication of his book The Doomsday Machine, Pentagon Papers whistleblower Daniel Ellsberg summed up what he learned as an insider during the Kennedy administration:

What I discovered — to my horror, I have to say — is that the Joint Chiefs of Staff contemplated causing with our own first strike 600 million deaths, including 100 million in our own allies. Now, that was an underestimate even then because they weren’t including fire, which they found was too incalculable in its effects. And of course, fire is the greatest casualty-producing effect of thermonuclear weapons. So the real effect would’ve been over a billion — not 600 million — about a third of the Earth’s population then at that time.

Ellsberg added:

What turned out to be the case 20 years later in 1983 and confirmed in the last 10 years very thoroughly by climate scientists and environmental scientists is that that high ceiling of a billion or so was wrong. Firing weapons over the cities, even if you call them military targets, would cause firestorms in those cities like the one in Tokyo in March of 1945, which would loft into the stratosphere many millions of tons of soot and black smoke from the burning cities. It wouldn’t be rained out in the stratosphere. It would go around the globe very quickly and reduce sunlight by as much as 70 percent, causing temperatures like that of the Little Ice Age, killing harvests worldwide and starving to death nearly everyone on Earth. It probably wouldn’t cause extinction. We’re so adaptable. Maybe 1 percent of our current population of 7.4 billion could survive, but 98 or 99 percent would not.

Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine four months ago, the risks of global nuclear annihilation were at a peak. In January, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists set its Doomsday Clock at a mere 100 seconds from apocalyptic Midnight, compared to six minutes a decade ago. As Russia’s horrific war on Ukraine has persisted and the U.S. government has bypassed diplomacy in favor of massive arms shipments, the hazards of a nuclear war between the world’s two nuclear superpowers have increased.

But the Biden administration has not only remained mum about current nuclear war dangers; it’s actively exacerbating them. Those at the helm of U.S. foreign policy now are ignoring the profound lessons that President Kennedy drew from the October 1962 confrontation with Russia over its nuclear missiles in Cuba.

“Above all, while defending our own vital interests, nuclear powers must avert those confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war,” Kennedy said. “To adopt that kind of course in the nuclear age would be evidence only of the bankruptcy of our policy — or of a collective death-wish for the world.”

In sync with the overwhelmingly hawkish U.S. media, members of Congress and “national security” establishment, Biden has moved into new Cold War overdrive. The priority aim is to make shrewd moves on the geopolitical chessboard — not to engage in diplomacy that could end the slaughter in Ukraine and prevent the war from causing widespread starvation in many countries.

As scholar Alfred McCoy just wrote, “With the specter of mass starvation looming for some 270 million people and, as the [United Nations] recently warned, political instability growing in those volatile regions, the West will, sooner or later, have to reach some understanding with Russia.” Only diplomacy can halt the carnage in Ukraine and save the lives of millions now at risk of starvation. And the dangers of nuclear war can be reduced by rejecting the fantasy of a military solution to the Ukraine conflict.

In recent months, the Russian government has made thinly veiled threats to use nuclear weapons. Meanwhile, the U.S. has been shipping huge quantities of weapons to Ukraine, while Washington has participated in escalating the dangerous rhetoric. President Biden doubled down on conveying that he seeks regime change in Moscow, and Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin has declared that the U.S. wants the Russian military “weakened” — an approach that is opposite from Kennedy’s warning against “confrontations which bring an adversary to a choice of either a humiliating retreat or a nuclear war.”

We’d be gravely mistaken to wait for Washington’s officialdom to level with us about nuclear war dangers, much less take steps to mitigate them. The power corridors along Pennsylvania Avenue won’t initiate the needed changes. The initiatives and the necessary political pressure must come from grassroots organizing.

A new “Defuse Nuclear War” coalition of about 90 national and regional organizations (which I’m helping to coordinate) launched in mid-June with a livestream video featuring an array of activists and other eloquent speakers, drawn together by the imperative of preventing nuclear war. (They included antiwar activists, organizers, scholars and writers Daniel Ellsberg, Mandy Carter, David Swanson, Medea Benjamin, Leslie Cagan, Pastor Michael McBride, Katrina vanden Heuvel, Hanieh Jodat Barnes, Judith Ehrlich, Khury Petersen-Smith, India Walton, Emma Claire Foley, retired Army Col. Ann Wright and former California Gov. Jerry Brown.)

The U.S. government’s willingness to boost the odds of nuclear war is essentially a political problem. It pits the interests of the people of the world — in desperate need of devoting adequate resources to human needs and protection of the environment — against the rapacious greed of military contractors intertwined with the unhinged priorities of top elected officials.

The Biden administration and the bipartisan leadership in Congress have made clear that their basic approach to the surging danger of nuclear war is to pretend that it doesn’t exist — and to encourage us to do the same. Such avoidance might seem like a good coping strategy for individuals. But for a government facing off against the world’s other nuclear superpower, the denial heightens the risk of exterminating almost all human life. There’s got to be a better way.

July 4, 2022 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 1 Comment

The Accidental Trumpification of NATO

 https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2022/07/nato-europe-america-trump-strategy/661459/

In a narrow but important sense, the world has become more amenable to the former president. And yet.

By Tom McTague, 3 July 22,  If Donald Trump returns to power in 2025, he will find a world starkly different from the one he tried to construct while president. All hopes of normalizing relations with Russia have been obliterated in the slaughter of Ukraine. China is more powerful than ever. Iran is closer to acquiring nuclear weapons. And Kim Jong Un is still behaving like Kim Jong Un.

But, in a narrow yet important sense, the world has become more Trumpian since he left office. The NATO that met in Madrid this past week to agree on a new strategy to defend the West has started to resemble the kind of organization Trump and his wing of the Republican Party said they always wanted.

NATO’s European members are paying more for their own defense, the alliance is more Eastern European in its outlook and positioning, and, for the first time, it is explicitly focused on America’s great-power rivalry with China. Trump is not primarily responsible for these changes—for that he can thank Vladimir Putin—but they nevertheless signal an important moment for the West, as Europe moves to more closely align itself with American domestic political concerns. Europe’s shift is part of a bid to protect the status quo that has existed since NATO’s founding, but which is now threatened both by Russia’s aggression and by the U.S.’s growing focus on its great-power rival in the 21st century: China.

As well as NATO becoming more American in outlook, the grand strategies of countries that Trump so obviously distrusted—Germany and France in particular—have never been more irrelevant. Germany has been forced to abandon its long-held reticence to increase defense spending as well as its planned Nord Stream 2 gas pipeline with Russia. France, which has long sought a greater role for the European Union rather than NATO, today faces a continent that wants more NATO, not less, which, as France well understands, means support for U.S. primacy.

A similar reprioritization is taking place in the G7, another international organization Trump seemed to loathe, and that also met this past week, transformed by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine into a body that more obviously serves the American interest.

Notably, President Joe Biden has consciously rejected President Barack Obama’s prioritization of the wider G20 group of advanced economies, which included developing democracies such as India and Indonesia, but also Russia and China. In one of Obama’s first forays onto the world stage, he said that the G20 would from then on be the more important international format, better representing the 21st century than the kind of world where “there’s just Roosevelt and Churchill sitting in a room with a brandy.” His vice president has decided to reverse course and return the G7 to its former role, an organization that looks much more like a group of wealthy Western powers deciding how to get their way.

If Trump regains power, then, he should have far less to complain about than he did during his time in office, when Europe was clearly failing to share the burden of its own defense with the U.S., while striking independent trade and energy deals with both China and Russia. Then, it was legitimate for Trump to ask whether Europe was taking the U.S. for a ride. That grievance looks a lot less real today, even as Europe doubles down in its dependence on the U.S.

Together with bipartisan support in Congress for America’s military backing of Ukraine and its economic sanctions on Russia, many have taken solace in the notion that NATO—and support for it—is growing stronger than ever. And yet with Trump, there is always an “and yet.”

The first is that there remains an obvious, growing, and valid American grievance with Europe that Trump will almost certainly pick up should he return to the White House. Led by France, Europe is erecting barriers to protect its defense industry: New rules mean that the moment a European defense firm accepts a single euro from the EU, partnering with non-EU companies becomes almost impossible because of strict restrictions on intellectual property, a kind of poison pill.

This kind of protectionism was already being noticed by Trump toward the end of his first term, according to one senior NATO official I spoke with, but it has moved on several steps since. The idea behind these regulations is to build up Europe’s own military industrial capacity so that it can defend itself better—a form of burden sharing. And in some senses this would be good for the West collectively. However, such a move only emphasizes the bigger problem: Why should the U.S. pay for Europe’s defense if Europe is building obstacles to American defense firms? If the West is worth defending collectively, then how can it continue raising walls between its members? As one European government official told me: “Putting barriers around the West is fine. Putting them within the West is not.”

July 4, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

NASA to spend $15 billion of tax-payers’ money on designs for nuclear reactors on the moon.

 In a newly announced initiative, NASA has commissioned three individual
companies to produce plans for the possible use of nuclear power bases on
the Moon. With the potential of such bases becoming more than just a
concept by the late 2020s, the three companies involved – Lockheed Martin,
Westinghouse, and a joint effort between Intuitive Machines and X-Energy
named XI – will command the contract value of an estimated $5 billion each
for their individual designs of lunar-based nuclear fission system.

 The National (Wales) 27th June 2022

https://www.thenational.wales/news/20237122.nasa-chooses-three-companies-design-nuclear-power-station-moon/

July 4, 2022 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

So, what should be done about nuclear waste?

Where will the nuclear waste go?” https://www.nationofchange.org/2022/06/30/where-will-the-nuclear-waste-go/

By Karl Grossman. June 30, 2022“Where will the state’s nuclear waste go?” was the headline of a story bannered last month across the front page of Connecticut’s largest newspaper, the Hartford Courant. 

What, indeed, is to be done about the nuclear waste that has been produced at the two Millstone nuclear power plants which have been operating in Connecticut? (They are now the only nuclear power plants running in New England.) 

And what is to be done about the nuclear waste at other nuclear power plants?

Decades ago, one scheme was to put it on rockets to be sent to the sun. But the very big problem, it was realized, is that one-in-100 rockets undergo major malfunctions on launch, mostly by blowing up. 

As Forbes magazine has pointed out, because of the “possibility of launch failure” if “your payload is radioactive or hazardous and you have an explosion on launch…all of that waste will be uncontrollably distributed across Earth.”

So, scratch that idea.

Then there has been the plan to construct a “repository” for nuclear waste at Yucca Mountain, Nevada, 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas. It was designated the nation’s “permanent nuclear repository” in 1987 and $15 billion was spent preparing it. 

The very big problem concerning Yucca Mountain as a nuclear waste dump: it’sin “an active earthquake zone, with 33 faults on site.”

So, that idea was scratched.

Now, Finland has built a nuclear waste site for its four nuclear power plants. “Finland wants to bury nuclear waste for 100,000 years,” was the title of an CNBC’s piece about it and how it uses “a labyrinth of underground tunnels.”  

The very big problem: nuclear waste needs to be isolated from life for way more than 100,000 years. The U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit in 2004 ordered the EPA to rewrite its Yucca Mountain regulations to acknowledge a million years of hazard, notes Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist for the organization Beyond Nuclear. 

Some nuclear waste stays radioactive for millions of years, Kamps points out: “Iodine-129 that is produced in reactors has a 15.7 million-year half-life.” 

After a half-life, a radioactive material is half as radioactive as when it was produced. For determining a “hazardous lifetime,” a half-life is multiplied by 20. 

Thus Iodine-129 remains radioactive for 314 million years.

“The design of the storage facility” for nuclear waste in Finland “has taken into account the potential impact of earthquakes and even future ice ages,” related CNBC. But not for anything close to millions of years.

So, what should be done about nuclear waste? 

First, says Kamps, “we should stop making it.” He calls for the closure of every one of the 92 nuclear power plants now in the United States, the building of no more and a push for safe, clean, green energy sources led by solar and wind energy. Nuclear power plants in the U.S. have since 1957 generated nearly 100,000 tons of deadly nuclear waste, he says. Second, the “best option is hardened onsite storage.”

Currently, most nuclear waste, he says, is at reactor sites in pools of water which must be kept circulating. If there is a “loss of water” accident, the nuclear waste in the pools can go “up in flames.”

Kamps and Beyond Nuclear, with other environmental and safe-energy groups, is now challenging—along with the state governments of Texas and New Mexico—the present U.S. government plan involving “so-called interim” nuclear waste sites in Texas and New Mexico. 

They would be amid largely Latino communities, and on top of the Ogallala Aquifer, the largest aquifer in the U.S. It extends north to South Dakota, encompassing eight states, and is a main source of water for drinking and irrigation. 

Also, the U.S. Department of Energy has, he says, “restarted its federal consolidated interim storage facility scheme, last attempted in the late 1980s and early 1990s. A whole new crop of nuclear waste dump fights can be expected, especially ones targeting Native American reservations to agree to host the most deadly poison our society has ever generated.”

Meanwhile, in New Jersey, Oyster Creek, among the oldest nuclear power plants in the U.S.—it began operation in 1969—is in the midst of being demolished after its closure in 2018. There’s been a “a series of worrisome accidents” in the tearing down process reported The Washington Post last month. And then there is the decommissioned Oyster Creek plant’s nuclear waste.

Oyster Creek was manufactured by General Electric and was a Mark I nuclear power plant—the same model of those that blew up at the Fukushima nuclear plant site in Japan. 

July 2, 2022 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

California may rescue its last nuclear power plant — and give PG&E $millions to do it

CalMatters, BY NADIA LOPEZ  JUNE 30, 2022,

The California Legislature has just taken the first step toward possibly extending the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, the state’s last nuclear facility, past its scheduled closure.  

The energy trailer bill negotiated by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and approved by lawmakers late Wednesday allocates a reserve fund of up to $75 million to the state Department of Water Resources to prolong the operation of aging power plants scheduled to close. Diablo Canyon, on the coast near San Luis Obispo, has been preparing to shut down for more than five years.The California Legislature has just taken the first step toward possibly extending the life of the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant, the state’s last nuclear facility, past its scheduled closure.  

The energy trailer bill negotiated by Gov. Gavin Newsom’s administration and approved by lawmakers late Wednesday allocates a reserve fund of up to $75 million to the state Department of Water Resources to prolong the operation of aging power plants scheduled to close. Diablo Canyon, on the coast near San Luis Obispo, has been preparing to shut down for more than five years.

The funding is part of a contentious bill that aims to address a couple of Newsom’s most pressing concerns — maintaining the reliability of the state’s increasingly strained power grid, and avoiding the politically damaging prospect of brown-outs or blackouts. 

Should the Newsom administration choose to extend the life of the nuclear plant, the funding would allow that — although the actual cost to keep the 37-year-old facility owned by Pacific Gas and Electric is not known. Newsom’s office and the Department of Water Resources did not immediately respond to multiple requests for comment. Asked for an estimate, PG&E spokesperson Lynsey Paulo did not provide one.

Even if only a contingency fund, the optics of sending millions of state and federal dollars to the state’s largest utility —  which has a recent record of responsibility for deadly wildfires and state “bailouts” — are politically problematic

…………………….. While it’s true that the energy bill doesn’t itself authorize the extension of the plant’s life, it does provide the money should state leaders decide to do so. Such a move would require “subsequent legislation and review and approval by state, local and federal regulatory entities,” said Lindsay Buckley, a spokesperson for the California Energy Commission.

……….   “The governor requested this language, not as a decision to move ahead with continuing operation of Diablo Canyon, but to protect the option to do that if a future decision is made,” said state Sen. John Laird, a Democrat from San Luis Obispo.

He also said the public should have a chance to weigh in before a final decision is made on the plant’s fate.

“The shuttering of Diablo Canyon has been years in the making, with hundreds of millions of dollars already committed for decommissioning,” Laird said. “Along with the residents of the Central Coast, I’m eager to see what the governor and federal officials have in mind.”…………….

Regardless of the future decision about the lifespan of the nuclear plant, nothing can happen without federal and state funding.

The Biden Administration created a $6 billion Civil Nuclear Credit Program to rescue financially struggling nuclear power plants, and Newsom has said he would consider applying for federal funding to keep Diablo Canyon open past its scheduled 2025 closure……………………………..

changing the federal rules to accommodate PG&E is a bad idea to longtime critics of nuclear power in California. To keep the plant operating, PG&E would have to seismically retrofit the plant and make heavy investments in cooling system and maintenance upgrades — costs that would outweigh the benefits, the anti-nuclear nonprofit San Luis Obispo Mothers for Peace wrote in a  letter sent to the Energy Department on Monday.

Linda Seeley, a San Luis Obispo resident and longtime member of the group, said extending Diablo Canyon will cause a “myriad of problems.”

…………………  , opponents cite safety threats and problems storing radioactive waste. And the prospect of keeping it open involves numerous technical, financial and logistical challenges. PG&E would need to reapply for licensing with the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which issues the licenses to keep the plant operating, and would need to receive state and federal approval to do so. It would also have to address aging infrastructure problems at the site. ………………… https://calmatters.org/environment/2022/06/california-nuclear-power-pge-diablo-canyon/ 

July 2, 2022 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

While Biden Gives Ukrainian Army “The Most Lethal Weapon,” War Profiteer BAE Systems Stock Soars

During the 2020 U.S. election campaign, BAE Systems donated $569,202 to Democratic Party candidates, and $452,594 to Republicans, according to opensecrets.org.

Joe Biden received $102,591 compared to $94,966 for Donald Trump.

This amounts to chump change for the company: Shares in BAE Systems have reached an all-time high since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising by 28 percent over ten weeks to give BAE a stock market value of £24 billion and putting it among the largest 25 companies in the Financial Times Stock Exchange.

CovertAction Magazine. By Jeremy Kuzmarov, June 27, 2022 

Sending Ukraine a $300 million shipment of powerful M-777 howitzers is a lobbying triumph for BAE Systems, one of the many war industry corporations fattening on the death and destruction of the Ukraine war

n June 15, the Biden administration announced that it was providing an additional $1 billion in military aid to Ukraine in a package that includes shipments of M-777 howitzers, ammunition and coastal defense systems.

While that announcement was being made, the Ukrainian army was shelling Donetsk, the capital of the Donetsk People’s Republic, with the U.S.-supplied howitzers along with French guns, according to The Donbass Insider, killing five civilians and wounding seven firefighters.

The attacks were being carried out from Ukrainian positions in Peski, a village not far from Donetsk airport.

According to a video produced by journalist Patrick Lancaster, a U.S. naval veteran who has reported on the war in eastern Ukraine over the last eight years, there were no military targets in the areas shelled by the Ukrainian army, only civilians.

Bringing Ukraine Closer to Victory?

Consistent with a society that used military technologies to subdue the native populations, most Americans subscribe to the belief that new superweapons can deliver salvation in wars.[1]

They ignore the dictum of German theorist Karl von Clausewitz that war is “politics by other means,” meaning that victory can only be achieved by aligning with the right side—which does not appear to be the case for Ukraine.

The New York Times characterized the M-777 howitzer—which made its debut in Afghanistan in 2005—as “the most lethal weapon the West has provided [to Ukraine] so far.”

Highly portable by land, air and sea, it can fire as far as 40 kilometers away or 25 miles—further than Russia’s primary artillery system—and is capable of striking within 10 meters of a target when coupled with the M982 Excalibur precision guided munition, which Canada has sent to Ukraine.[2]…………..

The American Legion reported that the United States had already sent 108 M-777 howitzers to Ukraine before the most recent aid package was signed by President Biden.

The Pentagon claimed that the howitzers had an immediate impact upon their arrival on May 8, enabling the Ukrainians to “go on the counter-offensive in the Donbas” and “take back some towns the Russians had taken in the past.”

Colonel Roman Kachur, commander of Ukraine’s 55th Artillery Brigade, told The New York Times that “this weapon [the howitzer] brings us closer to victory. With every modern weapon, every precise weapon, we get closer to victory.”

However, The New York Times reported on June 20 that Russian forces “appeared poised to tighten the noose around thousands of Ukrainian troops near two strategically important cities in the Donbas,” mounting an “assault on Ukrainian front lines.”[3]

So a Ukrainian victory appears far off.

The Russian Interior Ministry reported that it had destroyed U.S.-made howitzers through use of attack drones.

Former UN weapons inspector Scott Ritter wrote that Ukrainian dependence on Western artillery they were unfamiliar with resulted in a ten-fold disparity in firepower with Russia which was destroying Ukrainian defensive positions with minimal risk to its troops.

NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg warned that the Ukraine War could “last for years,” meaning we are looking at another Vietnam.

Merchants of Death

The M-777 howitzer is made by the U.S. division of BAE Systems, the largest arms manufacturer in Europe, which has supplied Ukraine with 400,000 rounds of munitions, anti-tank guided missiles and armored vehicles equipped with anti-aircraft missiles.

Former CIA Director Gina Haspel, who observed waterboarding at a CIA black site, sits on the company’s Board of Directors.

In March, BAE Systems ironically bankrolled an arms fair in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, where sanctioned Russian weapons makers showed off some of the weapons they were using in Ukraine, including tanks, helicopters and drones.

During the 2020 U.S. election campaign, BAE Systems donated $569,202 to Democratic Party candidates, and $452,594 to Republicans, according to opensecrets.org.

Joe Biden received $102,591 compared to $94,966 for Donald Trump.

Additional recipients of BAE’s largesse included such anti-Russia hawks as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA—$7,373); Steny Hoyer (D-MD—$10,000), Chuck Schumer (D-NY—$5,605); Liz Cheney (R-WY—$3,259 and another $5,500 in 2022); Jamie Raskin (D-MD—$4,089); Adam Schiff (D-CA—$8,036); Mitch McConnell (R-KY—$9, 289), James Inhofe (R-OK-$13,300) and Lindsey Graham (R-SC-$11,383).[4]

So far this year, BAE Systems has spent $940,000 on lobbying Congress; in 2021, it spent $3.63 million.[5]

This amounts to chump change for the company: Shares in BAE Systems have reached an all-time high since the Russian invasion of Ukraine, rising by 28 percent over ten weeks to give BAE a stock market value of £24 billion and putting it among the largest 25 companies in the Financial Times Stock Exchange.

In a blatant conflict of interest, a number of Tories in England’s Upper House of Parliament—notably Lord Glendonbrook, Viscount Eccles and Lord Sassoon, and unaffiliated peers Lord Lupton and Lord Gadhia—each own shares of at least £50,000 in BAE Systems.[6]

Samuel Perlo-Freeman, research coordinator for the campaign against the arms trade, said that BAE Systems “like other major world arms companies, are seeing their share prices soar in response to the war on Ukraine, as European countries prepare to massively rearm, doubling down on the very militarism that has created so much death and suffering in Ukraine, Yemen and elsewhere.”[7]

In May, BAE Systems’ CEO, Dr. Charles Woodburn, told investors: “We see opportunities to further enhance the medium-term outlook as our customers address the elevated threat environment.”

Which really means that, by antagonizing the Russians, great profits can be made in the Ukraine War and any compromise or diplomatic solution that might end the war should be rejected.

References: …………………………………………..  https://covertactionmagazine.com/2022/06/27/while-biden-gives-ukrainian-army-the-most-lethal-weapon-war-profiteer-bae-systems-stock-soars/1

June 30, 2022 Posted by | business and costs, politics international, UK, USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

USA now desperately trying to flog off NuScam’s small nuclear reactors to Europe, starting with Romania

U.S. funds study for NuScale SMR deployment in Romania,  https://www.power-eng.com/nuclear/u-s-funds-study-for-nuscale-smr-deployment-in-romania/

By Kevin Clark 6.27.2022 The United States will commit $14 million toward a front-end engineering and design (FEED) study for the basis of deploying NuScale’s small modular reactor (SMR) in Romania.

President Biden made the announcement June 26 at the G7 Leaders’ Summit in Germany. The funding is part of the administration’s Partnership for Global Infrastructure and Investment (PGII), aimed at narrowing infrastructure gaps around the world, including through clean energy deployments.

NuScale and Romania’s state nuclear power corporation S.N. Nuclearelectrica S.A. (Nuclearelectrica) plan to conduct engineering studies, technical reviews, and licensing and permitting activities at a site in Doicesti, Romania, the preferred location for the deployment of the first NuScale VOYGR power plant. The partners signed an MOU in May 2022.

The 8-month effort, expected to cost $28 million in total and including contributions from Nuclearelectrica and NuScale, will provide Romania with key site-specific data – cost, construction, schedule, and licensing details – necessary for the deployment of a NuScale’s 462 MWe VOYGR-6 SMR nuclear power plant.

The aim of the project is to show the ability of advanced nuclear reactors to replace coal generation, while creating thousands of jobs. NuScale President John Hopkins recently spoke with Power Engineering about how the company’s SMR plants are ideal for coal replacement.

NuScale believes Romania has the potential to accommodate the first SMR deployment in Europe and become a catalyst for SMRs in the overall region.

“Nuclear energy, including small modular reactors, represent a critical tool in the fight against climate change, and can also enhance energy security and boost economic prosperity,” said U.S. Special Presidential Envoy for Climate John Kerry.

The PGII initiative is funding projects in four major categories: clean energy, health systems, gender equality and information and communications technology.

June 28, 2022 Posted by | marketing, USA | Leave a comment

What happened at Santa Susana? — Beyond Nuclear International

A meltdown contaminated a community. A fire made it worse

What happened at Santa Susana? — Beyond Nuclear International A 1959 meltdown and a 2018 fire compounded a tragedy
By Carmi Orenstein
When the United Nations Human Rights Council officially recognized access to “a safe, clean, healthy and sustainable environment” as a basic human right earlier last October, it was an acknowledgement fifty years in the making. It was backed by an international grassroots effort, with the journey to the final vote including the voices of more than 100,000 children around the world and multiple generations of allies pushing against powerful corporate opposition. 
Just about the time that this half-century-long campaign to enshrine the right to a safe environment kicked off, a story about the horrific violation of this same human right and its cover-up emerged in a community near my own childhood home in Southern California.

 In 1979, a UCLA student named Michael Rose uncovered evidence of a partial nuclear meltdown at the Santa Susana Field Lab (SSFL) in the Simi Hills outside of Los Angeles. The SSFL, formerly known as Rocketdyne, played key government roles throughout the Cold War, developing and testing rocket engines and conducting experiments with nuclear reactors. Today, as the result of a recently published peer-reviewed study that represents the dogged efforts of both professional researchers and a team of specially trained citizens, we have solid evidence of the spread of dangerous contamination from that site.

Santa Susan Field Laboratory 1958

Working with nuclear safety expert and then-UCLA professor Daniel Hirsch, Rose discovered documentation that the partial nuclear meltdown had occurred at SSFL twenty years earlier in 1959, releasing up to 459 times more radiation into the environment than the infamous meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear reactor in Pennsylvania. Unlike the Three Mile Island facility, the SSFL reactors lacked containment structures—those tell-tale concrete domes that surround commercial nuclear power plants to prevent radiation spread in case of a nuclear accident. 

In addition to the 1959 meltdown, at least three of the site’s other nuclear reactors experienced accidents (in 1957, 1964 and 1969), and radioactive and chemical wastes burned in open-air pits as a matter of practice. A “hot lab,” which may have been the nation’s largest, was also located at SSFL, and, in 1957, it burned and was known to have spread radioactivity throughout the site. A progress report from the period states, “Because such massive contamination was not anticipated, the planned logistics of cleanup were not adequate for the situation.”

The rest of this story is an object lesson in what happens when the right to a safe environment is not universally acknowledged and when secretive, long-forgotten toxic legacies of the Cold War meet the unpredictable chaos of the current climate crisis. Real people are harmed in ways that are not easily remediable—including, perhaps, members of my family.

The radioactive contamination of the surrounding environment caused by the partial nuclear meltdown at the 2,849-acre SSFL site was not cleaned up by the time of Rose’s revelation. Nor was the extensive toxic chemical contamination on site. It is still not cleaned up. Thus, when the climate chaos-fueled Woolsey Fire erupted at, and burned through, the SSFL in 2018, the flames served to spread the contamination even further. The fire quickly burned 80 percent of the SSFL property, and onward, all the way to the ocean. Pushed by high winds and uncontained for nearly two weeks, the Woolsey Fire killed three people outright and destroyed over 1,600 structures.

Today, public knowledge of the original disaster and its continued radioactive and toxic legacy is still patchy. The silence that surrounded the catastrophe in 1959 gave way to intermittent waves of focused media attention, celebrity involvement, and inquiry and outcry on the part of elected officials in the years since the 1979 expose. These have been followed by whistleblower accounts from former workers, and various forms of citizen activism. While occasional news of confidential legal settlements addressing illness and contamination breaks through, the Santa Susana disaster is hardly a household name—including among those of us who grew up in its shadow. 

The suburbs on either side of the SSFL, in Ventura County and a western edge of Los Angeles County, are still expanding. More than 500,000 people currently live within about ten miles of the site. Parents vs. SSFL is the dynamic, parent-led group currently at the helm of public monitoring of, and demand for, a comprehensive cleanup. On their social media sites, one often sees public comments from nearby residents along the lines of why were we not told?

To be sure, the history of site ownership and responsibility is complex and makes redress of grievance vexing. Although Rocketdyne owned the facility at the time of the meltdown, most of the site is now owned by Boeing. However, some of the property is owned by NASA, who in turn leases parts of its property as SSFL to the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). California’s Department of Toxic Substances Control (DTSC), the lead regulatory agency for remediation, entered into a Consent Order with these “responsible parties,” in 2007. In 2010, stricter agreements were signed with DOE and NASA to clean up the properties for which they are responsible to “background levels.” 

In 2017 a legally binding agreement deadline for completion of cleanup was blown by, with no meaningful cleanup begun. In 2018 the Woolsey Fire came roaring through. That fire is now documented to have redistributed radioactive materials and toxic chemicals in surrounding areas. Non-binding, confidential negotiations with Boeing were just announced early this year. It is a confounding and maddening journey to anyone attempting to follow.

As Melissa Bumstead, co-founder of Parents vs SSFL, said in a Physicians for Social Responsibility-Los Angeles press release about the new study: “The bottom line is, if SSFL had been cleaned up by 2017 as required by the cleanup agreements, the community wouldn’t have had to worry about contamination released by the Woolsey Fire.” …………………………………….

UCLA professor of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences Suzanne E. Paulson also weighed in. Speaking to a reporter the next year, Paulson explained, 

Assuming that radioactive material was in the soil [and] vegetation burned, it is reasonable that it traveled 30 miles downwind, and some of it got deposited in downwind areas… When soil and vegetation burn, the material in them, including metals [and] soil minerals, end up in the aerosol particles that make smoke look dark and hazy. They are small enough that they can remain in the atmosphere for up to a week and as a result can be widely dispersed.

At the end of 2018, just weeks after the Woolsey Fire was finally extinguished, work commenced on the independent study that was ultimately published online in early October and would appear in the December 2021 issue of the Journal of Environmental Radioactivity. This paper represents the work of community-volunteer citizen scientists who were trained to collect dust and ash samples in a 9-mile radius throughout the rural, urban, suburban, and undeveloped mountainous area around the SSFL. Their data collection was followed by the slow and careful work of scientific analysis. In a society whose governmental structures and policies decidedly are not guided by the Precautionary Principle today, and where there are no efficient mechanisms by which to correct past regulatory errors—no matter how grave—these volunteers and their three research leaders have provided powerful, incriminating evidence with which the community and its allies will push forward for the cleanup. 

…………………………. “Woolsey Fire ash did, in fact, spread SSFL-related radioactive microparticles.” The authors also wrote, “Excessive alpha radiation in small particles is of particular interest because of the relatively high risk of inhalation-related long-term biological damage from internal alpha emitters compared to external radiation.”……………………………………………..

How did the entities with knowledge and power continue to delay and obstruct while the population boomed and crept up the hillsides near the SSFL, knowing full well that powerful human health hazards were there to meet the communities, new and old? The statement by DTSC proclaiming that no contaminants were carried, while the Woolsey Fire was still burning, smacks of the most brazen regulatory capture. …………………………….. Carmi Orenstein is Program Director at Concerned Heath Professionals of New York.    https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/72759838/posts/4098311628

June 27, 2022 Posted by | climate change, incidents, Reference, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

The world’s nuclear powers need to come to the table to try and change the course of history

JOHN POLANYI, GLOBE AND MAIL, JUNE 18, 2022   John Polanyi is a Nobel laureate at the University of Toronto who has written widely on the dangers of nuclear war.

The UN Treaty to Prohibit Nuclear Weapons is law for 61 states, and it awaits ratification in 28 more, totalling almost half the countries in the world. The first meeting of these states is scheduled to take place in Vienna later this week.

Missing, however, will be every country with a nuclear weapon. Canada, a member of NATO, will also be among those not present.

This is inconsistent with our history. Was it merely by chance that Canada opposed stationing any nuclear weapons on its soil? Was it also by chance that, after a countrywide debate in 2005, we rejected the protection of U.S. national missile defence?

It seems far likelier that Canadians take a longer view of our security, believing that the better path lies in international restraint, given the devastating power of nuclear weapons. Our first priority should be to support the United Nations when it calls for the prohibition of the most destructive weapons the world has ever known.

So why, then, have we failed to support the TPNW? Is it because of conventional thinking in a transformed world?

In a single century, the nuclear age has already passed through three phases: It began with a U.S. nuclear monopoly, which was then transformed into bilateral U.S.-Soviet deterrence, and now stands at the brink of an era of multiple superpowers.

 . But it all began with science……………………………..

Today, the bipolar standoff is an even more fraught multipolar one. Satellite observation shows China approaching nuclear parity with the U.S. and Russia, and so we must prepare for a world in which one superpower tries to deter two. Can three gunmen – two of them dictators, all with a strong incentive to shoot first – survive this Wild West shootout? The stakes have never been so high, since soot from nuclear war can bring nuclear winter.

The nuclear powers have responded by speaking of “modernization,” introducing a lexicon of AI, hypersonics and cyber. But the fact is, our future depends instead on the visionaries of the new treaty, blocking the path to war with clearly criminal weapons. The Vienna meeting gives us the opportunity to change course. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/article-the-worlds-nuclear-powers-need-to-come-to-the-table-to-try-and-change/

June 20, 2022 Posted by | Canada, politics international, weapons and war | Leave a comment

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