NATO Nuclear Sharing, Centre for Security Studies, The CSS Blog Network, By Tim Street , 3 Aug 18
“……….What modernisation is planned?
Despite former President Obama’s much-publicised rhetoric on the need for concrete action towards a nuclear weapons free world, work on the modernisation of US B61 bombs began under his administration and is receiving continued support from President Trump. In addition, NATO has embarked on improvements to its security and infrastructure, which alliance members will pay for. These are taking place at the USAF base at Incirlik, in Turkey and at the USAF base at Aviano, Italy.
The B61 bomb modernisation programme is being driven by the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which aims to upgrade and expand the lives of about 400 of the 520 B61 bombs in its inventory for approximately twenty years, through a Life Extension Program (LEP). More precisely, the NNSA plans to consolidate the four existing types or ‘MODs’ of the B61 bombs into one MOD—the B61-12. Key results of the planned modernisation will be to: make the existing ‘dumb’ bombs three times more accurate by adding a new tail kit and internal guidance system; allow the use of the weapons for both tactical and strategic missions; and for delivery by both fighter jets and long-range bombers. Completion of the first new B61-12 bomb is set for 2020, with work on the remaining bombs planned for 2024.
Such improvements, which, NATO argues, have been made to decrease the risk of radioactive fallout and result in fewer civilian casualties, have led to critics arguing that these weapons could be seen as more usable. Analysts such as Hans Kristensen have therefore concluded that the increased military capabilities provided by the new B61 bombs will signal to Russia that “it is acceptable for it to enhance its non-strategic nuclear posture in Europe as well”. Russia could do this by deploying its own TNW closer to NATO’s eastern border as well as keeping nuclear capabilities, which are, the US argues, in violation of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty.
Critics have also pointed to the major costs involved in the LEP, estimates for which range up to $25 million per bomb. Some also argue that the programme is unnecessary given the capabilities of the existing arsenal, simpler options for life extension and the possibility that the weapons could soon be withdrawn from service.
Controversy has also dogged the replacement of nuclear host countries’ nuclear-capable aircraft, which are all set to retire in the 2020s. The Lockheed Martin F-35A is seen as particularly suitable for nuclear missions and can be modified to carry B61-bombs. However, whilst several NATO members, including Italy, the Netherlands and Turkey, have committed to purchasing the F-35A, nuclear host nations Belgium and Germany have proved more reluctant, both for cost reasons and because of their interest in procuring alternative, European-made aircraft. Like the Greeks in 2001, failure to procure suitable new aircraft could lead to them ceasing to participate and host TNWs.
What are the political dynamics of NATO nuclear sharing?
As NATO’s Strategic Concept of 1999 explains, “the fundamental purpose of the nuclear forces of the Allies is political” since these weapons “provide an essential political and military link between the European and the North American members of the Alliance”. The two key aspects of this ‘link’ are that it is: i) hierarchical, with Washington leading; ii) legitimating, so that political elites in NATO member states visibly assent to the dominant US presence and role in Europe.
A common objection raised by those who argue that NATO nuclear weapons should be removed from the continent is that the alliance’s conventional superiority in relation to Russia means that there is no military need for these weapons. If these weapons no longer have a meaningful military role, it is argued, then they are no longer justifiable from a political perspective.
In response, the value of NATO TNW as a bargaining chip in arms control and disarmament negotiations with Russia is sometimes raised. Arguably, Moscow does not maintain its TNW in order to balance against NATO TNW, but because of the disparity it suffers in terms of conventional military forces in Europe. NATO’s unwillingness to scrap its TNW also tends to warrant Moscow’s inaction and opacity regarding its own TNW.
Various studies and opinion polls show that several alliance member governments as well as many experts, civil society groups and significant numbers of citizens want TNW removed from their countries. The Belgian, German and Dutch governments have all officially acknowledged that they favour the withdrawal of TNW from their territories. Yet they have qualified this position by stating that withdrawal can only take place if there is consensus on the move by all 28 NATO members. However, there is a range of different positions within NATO on nuclear matters, for example, on the value of deterrence and disarmament. Such dynamics help explain the alliance’s inherent caution and conservatism regarding nuclear decision-making.
Other areas of political controversy involve safety and security issues. For example, the 2016 attempted coup in Turkey led critics to question how secure nuclear weapons were at the Incirlik airbase, which is also close to the Syrian border. Another possibility is that the command and control protocols for the weapons preventing unauthorised use could be overridden. Such concerns have led opponents of the weapons, such as German President Frank-Walter Steinmeier, to describe them as ‘absolutely senseless’ and potential targets for terrorists.
Another notable dimension to nuclear sharing is that US allies in other regions—such as North East Asia—closely observe how Washington handles its extended deterrence relations with NATO. Some analysts have thus proposed that US nuclear sharing be extended to South Korea and/or Japan given current instability in the region. Again, the rationale of disincentivising these allies from independently developing nuclear weapons in response to nuclear-armed rivals (i.e. North Korea) has been advanced.
How does nuclear-sharing fit with arms control, non-proliferation and disarmament regimes?
A common view in Europe and beyond is that the continued deployment in Europe of US TNW is a contravention of the nuclear non-proliferation treaty (NPT), which commits its members to “further diminish the role and significance of nuclear weapons in all military and security concepts, doctrines and policies”. Despite pressure within several nuclear sharing states for change, both the conventional and nuclear arms control and disarmament agenda are frozen. This is mainly due to the poor relations between the US and Russia, as well as the lack of political will in NATO governments to push these issues forward. Civil society groups have long called for the US to realise its NPT non-proliferation and disarmament obligations by repatriating its TNW to US soil prior to their dismantlement.
Russia has a far larger number of TNWs than the US (approximately 1,830) and Moscow insists upon the removal of US TNWs from Europe before it engages with Washington and NATO on accounting for and reducing these weapons. For its part, the US sees Russian TNW as threatening to its NATO allies, particularly in Eastern Europe and the Baltics. Russian and US experts have proposed a series of measures that could overcome existing reluctance and allow TNW to be included in wider nuclear arms reduction talks. For example:
Former US Ambassador Steven Pifer has previously recommended that the two nations take: i) confidence-building and transparency measures; ii) parallel unilateral steps to freeze or reduce TNW stockpiles; and iii) begin negotiations aimed at a legally-binding TNW treaty with verification measures.
Nuclear experts Pavel Podvig and Javier Serrat have recently argued that TNW should continue not being deployed during peacetime and that this should be codified into a “legally-binding, verifiable arrangement” to reduce crisis escalation and the risks of nuclear war.
Other analysts such as Dr Andrew Futter have also highlighted the existence of other options, such as moving US TNW to bases in new countries or concentrating them in Italy and Turkey, but note that these ideas raise several problems.
Russian analysts, meanwhile, argue that conventional arms control—such as an updated Conventional Forces in Europe treaty—would need to be implemented if Moscow is to further reduce its TNW.
In March 2011, NATO created a new Committee on WMD Control and Disarmament to provide oversight and policy discussion in this area, but it is unclear what this body has hitherto accomplished.
About the Author
Tim Street is an Associate Fellow of the Oxford Research Group’s Sustainable Security Programme, specializing in nuclear security and disarmament issues.
Unlike traditional nuclear methods of generating isotopes for medical imaging, the new particle accelerator at South Campus can generate a wider range of isotopes without producing nuclear waste.
The particle accelerator, known as a cyclotron, can produce enough isotopes for 1,000 diagnostic procedures a day – enough for both Calgary and Edmonton. John Wilson, the facility’s manager said the technology may soon replace nuclear reactors in providing medical isotopes for major cities across Canada.
“We’re the first to show that it can be produced to this quantity,” Wilson said.
More than 70 percent of the world’s diagnostic imaging is done using technetium-99m, a radioactive tracer. When fused with a drug or other molecule, its passage through the body can then be monitored using gamma cameras.
Wilson said the method can be used to track tumour growth and drug metabolism in cancer patients.
Technetium-99m has been traditionally supplied through splitting atoms in a nuclear reactor to produce molybdenum-99, which then decays into technetium-99m. However, only six percent of the material produced in a nuclear reactor can be used, the rest is nuclear waste.
Using a particle accelerator, Wilson said technetium-99m can now be produced directly by firing a stream of protons at a target material. The method bypasses the safety and environmental concerns surrounding traditional nuclear reactors.
“When the electricity stops, the (isotope) production stops,” Wilson said. “It’s a much safer technology.”
But Wilson said what makes the cyclotron useful is its ability to generate difficult to produce medical isotopes.
While most hospitals and clinics continue to rely on technetium for gamma imaging, Wilson said the technology is slowly being replaced with positron emission tomography (PET) scans.
“Technetium is more or less like black and white TV,” Wilson said. “It’s low definition.”
By varying the target material used in the cyclotron, the technology can produce other medical isotopes like radioactive fluorides for PET, something traditional nuclear reactors cannot produce.
Since 2010 the Canadian government has been investing in the creation of alternative medical isotope sources.
In 2009, countries across the globe faced a medical isotope shortage when the two major nuclear reactors producing technetium-99m were briefly out of service. The National Research Universal Reactor in Chalk River, Ontario was closed due to a heavy water leak the same period the High Flux Reactor in Petten, Netherlands was shut down for a month-long maintenance.
After 61 years of operation, the Chalk River reactor has since been decommissioned in 2016, and Wilson believes the 57-year-old High Flux Reactor in Petten likely won’t last much longer.
“There’s only about six or seven reactors in the world that are producing [medical isotopes] and they’re ageing,” Wilson said. “It’s not that it wasn’t good technology, it’s just that nobody wants to build reactors anymore … Nobody wants a reactor built in their backyard.”
While the cyclotron is ready for use, Canada’s federal and provincial governments have yet to determine how the technology may be implemented across the country and how it may be integrated into existing healthcare practices.
However, Wilson is optimistic that the new cyclotron will set the province up for success down the line as the demand for technetium shifts.
“The cyclotron gives you a more or less stable continuous source (of isotopes),” Wilson said. “You don’t have to worry about what’s happening on the outside.”
Group: Nuclear waste could be trucked from Illinois to Port Huron, Bob Gross, Port Huron Times Herald, 3 Aug 18
A coalition of environmental groups claims a letter from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission indicates that nuclear waste from power plants in Illinois will be trucked to Port Huron and shipped from there to an unknown destination.
“A spill, release or fire here or near waterways that flow into the St. Clair River could potentially ruin one of the largest fresh water deltas in the world – the St. Clair Flats – and potentially poison forever drinking water and freshwater ecosystems for up to 40-plus million people of the Great Lakes, including residents of Canada, the U.S., U.S. Tribes, First Nations and other indigenous peoples,” said Kay Cumbow of the Great Lakes Environmental Alliance in Port Huron, in a news release.
According to the news release from Don’t Waste Michigan, Coalition for a Nuclear-Free Great Lakes, a letter dated July 13, from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission to “Secured Transportation Services,” cites an application under 45-day review by the NRC for a highway transport route for high level radioactive waste from the LaSalle nuclear reactors in Illinois to the “Port Huron, Michigan Port of Exit.”
The letter was found July 23 among 467 documents on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s online ADAMS library, according to the news release. The number of transports is not given.
Secured Transportation Services, which is based in Buford, Georgia, is identified on the company’s website as the “leading transportation coordinator for spent nuclear fuel in North America.”
The letter only refers to shipping from central Illinois to Port Huron by a land route, according to the news release. It does not show where or how the waste would move from the city.
In a follow-up interview, Cumbow said the groups have more questions than answers about possible spent fuel shipments coming to Port Huron from Illinois………..
Cumbow said the letter only references highway route approval.
“Once it gets to Port Huron, we don’t know where it goes,” she said.
She said the waste is highly radioactive.
“It’s lethal when you are exposed to it,” Cumbow said. “Shielded, you’re fine. Any accident with this stuff, if there was a serious incident with this stuff, there is a likelihood people will be killed.
“The other thing is we don’t know what’s approved in Canada,” she said. “We don’t know where it is going. It might be going to Canada or it might be going through Canada to somewhere else.”
She said safety issues posed by the state’s crumbling road and bridge infrastructure are other concerns.
“There might be a little bit of this going across the border, or there might be a whole lot of it going across the border,” Cumbow said. “We just don’t know. I think as a society we should be looking at ways to stop poisoning our land and water.”
According to the news release, NRC spokesman Alex Sapountzis is quoted in an email to an NRC librarian as stating that “details of all spent nuclear fuel routes are designated as Safeguards Information/sensitive information and therefore will not be placed in ADAMS. All a member of the public will see in ADAMS is that in a letter we state we accepted for review a route (it has all the information we need to conduct our review) and then an approval letter (based on the information the applicant submitted, we accept the route and for transport by road it’s good for 5 years or by rail for 7 years).”
The US Navy has yet to choose a way forward for dismantling the USS Enterprise aircraft carrier. The delay has been motivated in part by the fact that disposing of the nuclear-powered craft could cost more than $1 billion ‒ a pill the Navy is loathe to swallow.
The Government Accountability Office published a report Thursday indicating that in 2013 “the Navy’s cost estimate for the shipyard” in Puget Sound, Washington, “to perform all [USS Enterprise] dismantlement and disposal activities increased — from a range of $500 million to $750 million — to well over $1 billion.”
As a result of this rather significant expense — about 25 percent of what it cost to build the ship in 1958 in inflation-adjusted terms — the Navy decided to ditch the plans. As the ship, built between 1958 and 1961, was the world’s first nuclear-powered aircraft carrier, the government wants to take special care in dismantling it and must comply with stringent guidelines set in place by nuclear regulation bodies separate from the Navy.
There is also a policy precedent to be set by how the carrier is deconstructed, in terms of “the processes, costs and oversight that may be used to dismantle and dispose of nuclear-powered aircraft carriers in the future.” Specifically, the manner in which the Enterprise is disposed of will set an example for how to do the same thing with the US Navy’s aging fleet of Nimitz-class carriers.
One of the thornier issues when it comes to disposal of the carrier is what to do with the nuclear waste produced by its propulsion generators. In 2016, the Navy thought it would have commercial contractors bid for contracts to break down the non-nuclear parts of the ship — everything except what’s referred to as the propulsion space section.
As GAO conducted its study, the Navy decided to ditch this plan. Instead, the Navy is now considering two options for the USS Enterprise, the watchdog noted. One route would be to do most of the deconstruction in Puget Sound, and then dump the nuclear waste at the US Department of Energy’s Hanford Site in southeastern Washington state. The other route is for commercial contractors to do all the dismantling. There is no estimate provided in GAO’s report for how much each of these routes would cost the US Navy, and by extension US taxpayers.
Under the 100 percent commercial dismantling route, the US Navy needs to coordinate with the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which has regulatory jurisdiction over the private nuclear industry, the GAO said. The Pentagon agreed with this recommendation, Stars and Stripes reported Friday.
University’s cyclotron facility could fully supply province’s demand for medical isotopes HINA ALAM, Edmonton Journal : May 15, 2018
For an Albertan who needs it, the journey of a radioactive isotope that has the ability to detect a potential heart or a bone cancer could begin at the University of Alberta’s Medical Isotope Cyclotron Facility…….
Although tests conducted over the past few months have shown that the U of A facility is capable of meeting the province’s need for 1,000 diagnostic procedures a day, there are still hurdles to overcome and its future use for producing technetium is still unclear…..
But research lead and university oncology department chairman Sandy McEwan sees a silver lining….
There are three isotopes that are commonly used — technetium-99m, a radioactive molecule of fluorine used in PET (positron emission tomography) scanning, and isotopes of iodine, used to detect and treat thyroid cancers.
Technetium-99m is the most common of these, and has a half-life of six hours, meaning that only half of it remains after that time. This is advantageous because the imaging scan is quick and the technetium doesn’t linger around in the body. This also means that the isotope must be produced quickly.
In the cyclotron, McEwan said it takes about six hours to make enough technetium-99m for the province each day.
……… ……The U of A technology shows that the isotope can be made locally and the science replicated across the country.
As it stands now, a dose of technetium-99m produced by the cyclotron at U of A is about 10 per cent more expensive compared to a dose of technetium-99m produced by traditional reactors.
“But that includes costing everything,” McEwan said. “It includes costing the cyclotron, the building, the research, the operations — everything.”
McEwan said the technetium-99m produced by the cyclotron is of a slightly higher purity profile than what you get from a reactor.
Also, most of the reactors are extremely old, said John Wilson, manager of the facility……
“Nuclear reactors are the highest capacity source for technetium-99m but are very, very expensive and create nuclear waste,” he said. “No one wants a reactor built close to where they live.” Jan Andersson, a researcher at the facility said as the supply stands now, reactors produce molybdenum-99, which has a half-life of 66 days and decays into technetium-99m, which is used in patients. This allows isotope to be supplied from far away but only if the reactors are running.
McEwan believes that technetium PET imaging will soon fade to give way to newer technologies, and the cyclotron is well-positioned to handle that.
“The cyclotron is Canadian,” he said. “We have a made-in-Canada solution.”
A top SCANA accountant says the company’s most powerful executives pressured her to lie and she was given altered information to share with state regulators about how much it would cost to finish the utility’s faltering nuclear project, according to a transcript of her sworn testimony.
If the estimates were lower, that could have made the project appear healthier than it was. Leaders at SCANA, which owns South Carolina Electric & Gas, have been accused of painting a rosy picture to regulators, customers and investors about the health of the $9 billion project before it failed a year ago.
Carlette Walker, who managed the nuclear project’s finances, testified under oath that she left her $565,000-a-year job in 2016, “Because I wasn’t going to lie.”
“And who do you feel was pressuring you to lie?” an attorney representing SCE&G customers asked.
Walker answered with the names of the power company’s top officials: Kevin Marsh, its CEO throughout the nuclear project’s final years; Steve Byrne, who had been its operations chief; and Jimmy Addison, the finance chief who was her boss and is now SCANA’s chief executive.
SCANA and attorneys representing Addison, Byrne and Marsh did not respond to requests for comment Monday. Marsh and Byrne resigned from the company last year after the project went bust and state lawmakers called for them to step down.
Walker was in SCANA’s inner circle and was repeatedly called to testify about its budget to South Carolina’s utility regulators and her work won her raises year after year as one of the project’s leaders.
During the recent heat wave, only about 11 percent of articles mentioned global warming, a new report finds EVLONDO COOPER
Almost 90 percent of articles about the recent heat wave in the biggest 50 U.S. newspapers failed to mention hot weather’s connection to climate change, according to a new report published by the nonprofit Public Citizen.
This unfortunate trend extends beyond newspapers. Media Matters has documented how rarely broadcast TV networks cover climate change. Our most recent study looked at how the major broadcast networks covered the links between climate change and extreme heat and found that over a two-week period from late June to early July, only one segment out of 127 about the heat wave mentioned climate change.
Public Citizen looked at coverage of extreme heat in the top 50 U.S. newspapers by circulation over the first half of 2018 and found that less than 18 percent of the articles mentioned climate change:
In the top 50 newspapers, a total of 760 articles mentioned extreme heat, heat waves, record heat, or record temperatures from January 1 to July 8, 2018. One hundred thirty-four of these pieces (17.6 percent) also mentioned climate change or global warming.
During the period June 27 to July 8, only 23 of 204 heat-related articles (11.3 percent) mentioned climate.
During the heat wave, there were 673 articles, with 26 (3.9 percent) mentioning climate.
In late June and early July, when a heat wave was afflicting much of the U.S., the percentage of articles mentioning climate change was even lower:
Public Citizen also looked beyond the top 50 papers to see how extreme heat was covered in papers in 13 states where 10 or more local areas broke heat records from June 27 to July 8. This more localized newspaper coverage was even worse:
While writers and editors may want to exercise caution in attributing any individual event to climate change, the science is clear that our warming climate is making extreme events like heat waves, floods, and fires more intense and more frequent. That’s why environmentaljournalistsandcommunicators have been calling on major news outlets to do a better job of covering climate change and the environmental rollbacks that could make things worse.
Public Citizen’s report did highlight notable exceptions when newspapers did strong reporting to connect extreme heat to climate change — such as a story by Austin American-Statesman reporter Roberto Villalpando that explained how climate change is bringing 100-degree days to Austin earlier in the year. Despite this, the report concluded, “U.S. news outlets continue to tell only half the story. These exceptions need to become the norm if the public is going to wake from its slumber on climate change in time to take the bold action we urgently need to avoid catastrophic harm, and possibly even an existential threat to the U.S., later this century.”
But the recent hot weather is dangerous in more subtle ways, and is an ominous signal of what increasing average temperatures and climate change portend for some of the most vulnerable who must endure the heat to earn a living. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 15 million people in the United States have jobs that require them to be outdoors at some point, and rising temperatures are proving dangerous for them.
In Georgia, Miguel Angel Guzman Chavez, a 24-year-old farmworker, died of heatstroke while working the fieldlast month when the heat index reached 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Earlier this month, 52-year-old Cruz Urias-Beltran was found dead in a cornfield in Nebraska after temperatures topped 100°F. Postal worker Peggy Frank died in her mail truck near Los Angeles on July 6, when the temperature reached 117°F. She was 63.
For farmworkers, delivery personnel, and construction crews, high temperatures can also mean heat exhaustion and related maladies. Between 1992 and 2016, excessive heat killed 783 US workers and seriously injured 69,374, according to the BLS.
As the climate changes, heat waves are poised to get longer and more intense. That means more workers will face triple-digit temperatures, often for single-digit wages, threatening lives and livelihoods.
While much of the rest of the workforce is in air-conditioned offices and stores, they’re not immune to the economic blows from climate change. By 2028, climate change will cost the US $360 billion per year, about half the expected growth of the economy, according to the Universal Ecological Fund. Much of this is due to health costs.
Researchers are starting to realize just how costly high temperatures are, and workers are now fighting back for cooler conditions.
Extreme heat is costly for workers and the economy as a whole
Rising temperatures have an impact on productivity well before they become dangerous. Economist R. Jisung Park reported that worker productivity declines by 2 percent for every degree Celsius above room temperature. It’s a worldwide phenomenon, with the hottest regions getting hit the hardest. The heat can dehydrate laborers, and higher temperatures demand more frequent breaks.
A 2014 study from the Rhodium Group found that the largest economic losses from climate change in the United States will come in the form of lost labor productivity.
According to the Environmental Protection Agency, the United States will lose 1.8 billion labor hours across the workforce in the year 2100 due to extreme temperatures under a business-as-usual climate change scenario. That adds up to $170 billion in lost wages.
But laborers aren’t the only ones vulnerable to heat. Researchers at the London School of Economics found that urban areas also pay a price for high temperatures, even among indoor office workers. They found that in London, a warm year could cost the city’s economy upward of 2.3 billion euros in productivity. Workers make more mistakes and act more slowly as temperatures rise above their optimal range. You can also see this effect in factories.
Worker protections from high temperatures are sorely lacking
However, when we’re talking about climate change, the financial impacts should be secondary to the consequences for human life. And millions of workers remain alarmingly vulnerable to high temperatures. The advocacy group Public Citizen reported that worker fatalities from heat stress show a close link to average annual temperatures in the United States:
States like Minnesota, California, and Washington do have some heat regulations in place. But according to Public Citizen, that still leaves 130 million workers across the country without these legal protections.
They’re asking for provisions including heat stress thresholds, mandatory rest breaks, protective equipment, and heat risk education programs.
For urban environments, the LSE research team had an interesting (and amazing) suggestion to help workers cope with the heat:
Our analysis suggests a change in working hours is a potentially important adaptation measure for the case of London. In particular, working schedules that avoid early afternoon work, such as working from 07:00-11:00 and 17:00-20:00 instead of 09:00-13:00 and 14:00-17:00 – the equivalent to the Spanish “siesta” – could save the London economy over 700 million euros by the end of the century.
So if you’re getting hot at work, stay hydrated, take breaks (or a nap), and avoid the sun. Your paycheck, and your life, may depend on it.
REPORT PROJECTS DOE COAL, NUCLEAR BAILOUT COSTS COULD TOP $34 BILLION, Popular Resistance, By Emma Foehringer Merchant, Greentechmedia.com
A previous estimate, from a pro-coal group, put the cost at $4 billion.
Analysis out this week from The Brattle Group estimates the Trump administration’s coal and nuclear support plan could cost between $9.7 billion and $17.2 billion annually.
Working off of the scant details presented in a draft memorandum released by Bloomberg in May, The Brattle Group analyzed several scenarios the administration might employ to support nuclear and coal-fired power plants.
One assumes the government would pay an average $50-per-kilowatt flat rate to all plants, costing $16.7 billion a year. In another scenario, facilities experiencing shortfalls would be compensated directly at a customized level between $43 to $58 per kilowatt, costing between $9.7 billion and $17.2 billion each year. The draft memo suggested facilities would receive payments for two years, putting high-end cost estimates north of $34 billion for the duration of the program.
If the administration moves forward with a plan that pays facilities back for capital already invested in power plants, in addition to operating shortfalls, it bumps the price to $20 billion to $35 billion per year.
Brattle’s cost estimates dwarf the $4 billion calculated by the American Coalition for Clean Coal Electricity, presented in a report earlier this month. Groups that have opposed the potential policy, including Advanced Energy Economy, the American Wind Energy Association and the Natural Gas Supply Association, funded the Brattle report.
The widely varying price tags echo diverging opinions on the bailout policy.
In a statement on the Brattle analysis, Amy Farrell, senior vice president for government and public affairs at the American Wind Energy Association, called the costs “a steep price to pay in an era of U.S. energy abundance, when independent regulators and grid operators agree that orderly power plant retirements do not constitute an emergency.”……https://popularresistance.org/report-projects-doe-coal-nuclear-bailout-costs-could-top-34-billion/
As one of a few islanders in his company within the U.S. Army, Robert Celestial jumped at the chance to help with post-World War II cleanup in the Republic of the Marshall Islands in the late 1970s. He looked forward to six months of island living and was promised a monthly trip to Hawaii for some R&R.
Not long after, Celestial found himself draining water from a crater on Lojwa Island in the Enewetak Atoll, wearing shorts, boots and a dust mask. The crater was left over from a nuclear test explosion. While he knew they were dealing with nuclear waste during the deployment, he said he did not know that was what the crater was from.
“We were never told the extent of the 66 nuclear detonations,” he said. “The only thing that was serious was the Air Force was in charge of the Geiger counters … if you see an Air Force guy running, then you better run.”
Like any good soldier, he followed orders and didn’t ask questions. When a magazine came to report on the cleanup, some soldiers donned a full-body protective suit. Celestial said it was the only time he saw the suit used.
Celestial said he and fellow soldiers often caught fish, lobster and octopus to eat. They were not told that the seafood could be contaminated until months after arriving.
More than 70 years after the United States dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Celestial’s past willingness to be exposed to that level of nuclear radiation is unthinkable.
But that was decades ago, at the dawn of the nuclear age. Few could be expected to predict the ramifications of their six-month cleanup tour.
An undetectable enemy
“We were all young. … We got to the Marshall Islands and it was beautiful,” he said. “You can’t see the danger, you can’t smell it, taste it. … We just did what they told us.”
Today, Celestial, who serves as president of the Guam-based Pacific Association for Radiation Survivors, says he is blessed: He hasn’t been diagnosed with cancer, unlike many of his fellow veterans, and was discharged from the Army with full disability.
Celestial said he deals with rheumatoid arthritis and osteoporosis. In fact, he said, almost all atomic veterans suffer from brittle bones. Two decades ago, while living in San Diego, California, Celestial was told he had the liver of a 90-year-old and was given four years to live, but he ultimately recovered.
Others have not been as fortunate. One Enewetak veteran, who lives in Maine, has been diagnosed with six distinct cancers, Celestial said. Because he was diagnosed after his separation from the military, he does not receive any compensation for medical costs.
Without any major medical issues, some wonder why Celestial has spent the better part of the past two decades fighting for Guam and veterans who participated in the Enewetak Atoll cleanup to receive federal reimbursement for illnesses linked to radiation exposure.
Proposed amendment
Legislation has been introduced that would expand the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act. The current law has distributed more than $2 billion to residents within Nevada, Utah and Arizona who suffer from radiation-related illnesses, but will end payments by 2022. The last year for people to apply for coverage is 2020.
The proposed amendment would extend RECA by 19 years and offer up to $150,000 in medical coverage to residents of Guam, Idaho, New Mexico and the Navajo Nation.
In late June, Celestial gave testimony before the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Toward the end of the hearing, he was asked if he had cancer.
“I told them no,” Celestial said with a laugh. “It made other people realize … what the hell is he doing it for? I’m not doing it for myself. I’m doing it for other people. I’m fighting for the people of Guam and the other states, and I’m also fighting for the Enewetak veterans who haven’t been rightly identified.”
He said his Senate testimony – given alongside downwinder allies from Idaho, New Mexico and Navajo Nation – was a new high in his decades-long fight.
But he refuses to make any promises about the future.
“What we’ve done in the Senate is the closest we’ve come,” he said. “Now we have to go to the House.”
……… Years ago, Celestial’s fight was bolstered by a report from the Board on Radiation Effects Research, which determined that Guam “did receive measurable fallout.”
Without this proof, Celestial said, he would not have continued his work on RECA.
‘Very, very wrong’
Lt. Charles Bert Schreiber, a chemical, biological and radiological officer with the U.S. Navy who served on Guam in 1952, gave testimony to the BRER, saying that just two days after a nuclear explosion in the Marshall Islands, radiation level readings were off the charts on Guam.
According to Schreiber’s testimony in 2001, he went straight to the admiral’s top aide to see what needed to be done. Minutes later, he was told to leave.
“I then knew something was very, very wrong,” Schreiber said in his testimony.
After giving this testimony, containing information that Celestial said was previously classified above the top-secret level, Schreiber revealed to Celestial that a burden had been lifted from him, as he was finally able to share what happened.
“The Guamanians, for the large part, had only rainwater for drinking … and they were drinking highly contaminated radioactive water and I could not tell them to stop. The Navy … did not provide any information to the military personnel, civilians or the natives about how to protect themselves.”
The Hill 28th July 2018 , Intelligence officials and security analysts say Russian hackers are
devoting much more effort toward implanting malicious software in the U.S.
power grid than attempting to breach electoral systems, according to a new
report.
Several intelligence officials told The New York Times that Russian
efforts had been more focused on attacking and infiltrating U.S.
infrastructure systems, while interference in electoral systems remained
lower than the level witnessed in 2016.
LAS CRUCES, N.M. (AP) — Las Cruces has become the latest community in New Mexico to voice opposition to building a nuclear waste storage facility in the southeast corner of the state.
The Las Cruces Sun-News reports the Las Cruces City Council on Monday approved a resolution opposing the transport and storage of high-level nuclear waste in the state.
Holtec International, a New Jersey-based company specializing in nuclear storage, has applied to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission for a license to construct a nuclear waste storage facility about 35 miles east of Carlsbad.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is accepting public comment on the proposal through July 30. The council voted in support of the resolution after discussing the issue for nearly two-and-a-half hours.
COLUMBIA, S.C. — Jul 28, 2018 In the 12 muddled months since the abandonment of two South Carolina nuclear reactors that never produced a watt of power, only one thing seems certain: it will take a lot of litigation to untangle the mess.
Courtrooms are where much of the saga some call South Carolina’s nuclear boondoggle will unfold.
South Carolina Electric & Gas Co. and state-owned utility Santee Cooper spent more than $9 billion before abandoning construction on the reactors at the V.C. Summer Nuclear Station near Columbia last year. State and federal authorities are probing the failure, and irate customers and shareholders have filed lawsuits.
“We’re just at the end of the beginning,” said Lynn Teague, vice president of the League of Women Voters in South Carolina who has made protecting ratepayers her goal since noticing things weren’t going right for the projects three years ago.
Customers of SCE&G, a SCANA subsidiary, got a temporary 15 percent rate cut. But even the rate cut isn’t on bills yet. Four months of cuts are supposed to show up in August. SCE&G is asking a federal court to stop it, but a judge hasn’t taken up the request.
There is also a likely showdown ahead between Gov. Henry McMaster and the state Senate about whether the governor’s pick to run the board of state-owned Santee Cooper can start immediately without Senate approval. And there are ongoing criminal investigations of potential wrongdoing.
The complexity in unraveling the mess is in part because the two different utilities involved. SCE&G is privately owned with shareholders able to shoulder the loss . Dominion Energy in Virginia appears to be working toward a merger with SCE&G that is awaiting approval.
Santee Cooper is owned by the state and its holdings include land and lakes as well as the power grid. The utility the chief provider for power for the tinier co-ops that serve some of the most remote areas of South Carolina. The utility’s debt — which includes more than just the billions poured into the failed nuclear reactors — is around $8 billion or roughly equal to the annual state budget.
“We got out the paddles and kept the patient from dying. We did CPR,” Climer said of the past year in the Legislature. “Now we need to nurse him back to health.”
But experts predict whether Santee Cooper is sold or not, rates are going up for its customers. The average Santee Cooper customer pays $130 a month, while SCE&G customers pay some of the highest rates in the nation at $163 a month, based on power usage statstics.
“They had three to four billion of state assets and they go up there and they put money in the hole and now, of course, they’re not going to go under because they have a captive audience,” Condon told lawmakers considering his appointment in April. “But is that fair to all concerned? I think not.”
They have thus obscured the reality that the fate of the negotiations depends not only North Korean policy but on the willingness of the United States to make changes in its policy toward the DPRK and the Korean Peninsula that past administrations have all been reluctant to make.
These stories also underscore a broader problem with media coverage of the US-North Korean negotiations: a strong underlying bias toward the view that it is futile to negotiate with North Korea. The latest stories have constructed a dark narrative of North Korean deception that is not based on verified facts. If this narrative is not rebutted or corrected, it could shift public opinion—which has been overwhelmingly favorable to negotiations with North Korea—against such a policy.
How the Media Wove a Narrative of North Korean Nuclear Deception38 North, BY: GARETH PORTER, JULY 26, 2018
Since the June 12 Singapore Summit between US President Trump and North Korean leader Kim Jong Un, the US media has woven a misleading narrative that both past and post-summit North Korean actions indicate an intent to deceive the US about its willingness to denuclearize. The so-called intelligence that formed the basis of these stories was fed to reporters by individuals within the administration pushing their own agenda.
The Case of theSecret Uranium Enrichment Sites
In late June and early July, a series of press stories portrayed a North Korean policy of deceiving the United States by keeping what were said to be undeclared uranium enrichment sites secret from the United States. The stories were published just as Secretary of State Mike Pompeo was preparing for the first meetings with North Korean officials to begin implementing the Singapore Summit Declaration.
Addressing a room full of federal and circuit judges at the Ninth Circuit’s annual judicial conference, David McCraw, the deputy general counsel for The New York Times, explained that regardless of how one feels about Assange and traditional news outlets receiving the same kind of deference over publishing leaked materials, his prosecution would be a gut punch to free speech.
“I think the prosecution of him would be a very, very bad precedent for publishers,” McCraw said. “From that incident, from everything I know, he’s sort of in a classic publisher’s position and I think the law would have a very hard time drawing a distinction between The New York Times and WikiLeaks.”
McCraw went on to clarify that while Assange employs certain methods that he finds discomfiting and irresponsible, such as dumping unredacted documents revealing the personal information of ordinary people, Assange should be afforded the same protections as a traditional journalist.
“Do I wish journalism was practiced in a certain way, like it is with The New York Times, The Washington Post, or The Wall Street Journal? Of course. But I also think new ways of publishing have their value. Our colleagues who are not only challenging us financially but journalistically have raised an awareness that there are different ways to report,” McCraw said.
“But if someone is in the business of publishing information, I think that whatever privilege happens to apply – whatever extension of the law that would apply – should be there. Because the question isn’t whether he’s a journalist. It’s in that instance was he committing an act of journalism.”
Assange has long considered himself a journalist operating no differently than other news outlets. This has complicated matters, because if Assange can be prosecuted for publishing leaked information, why not prosecute news organizations like The New York Times?
Earlier this month, a grand jury returned an indictment against twelve Russian military spies for hacking into the servers and emails of the Democratic National Committee and state election officials, stealing documents and staging the release of those documents to interfere with the 2016 presidential election. While the indictment did not name Assange and WikiLeaks specifically, it has been widely suggested that WikiLeaks received the materials and could very well be the group referred to in the indictment as “Organization Number 1.”
Barry Pollack, who represents Assange in an ongoing criminal investigation in the Eastern District of Virginia, weighed in on the indictment Tuesday.
“If you read the indictment that just came out on Russians and you look at what Organization Number 1, which is clearly WikiLeaks, is alleged to have done in that indictment, it is doing exactly what The New York Times and The Washington Post do every day of the week,” Pollack said. “He [Assange] is communicating with a source, the source provides him with information, he publishes that information.
“There are no questions about the truthfulness or accuracy or authenticity of that information. And then he encourages the source to give him more information. He says ‘don’t give it to my competitors, give it to me. This story will have more impact if I publish it.’”
Pollack and McCraw spoke as part of a panel titled “The Law of Leaks,” a session on how the United States has ramped up efforts to prosecute people who have leaked state secrets. Thirteen people have been prosecuted under the first law against leaking state secrets, the Espionage Act of 1917, most under the Obama administration.
President Donald Trump has waged an unprecedented war against the media, taking to Twitter last year to call the media “the enemy of the American people.” Yet no publisher has ever been indicted over leaks, and both McCraw and Pollack expressed doubts about whether it will happen any time soon.
“Unlike firing off a tweet, bringing a prosecution requires a career professional prosecutor to sign off on the prosecution, so there also is a tremendous check there that doesn’t exist in some of the rhetoric we hear,” Pollack said.
“Prosecutions of journalists would be difficult,” McCraw said. “I think they’d be unpopular, I think they’d be wrong, and I think they’d be unsuccessful. I see this PR campaign against the press as almost an alternative to legal measures.”
Tell Congress: Prevent Nuclear Catastrophe in Iran
Read the Public Inquiry Report, the Commissioners’ report, Surrendering Australia: The AUKUS Deception is available to download for free at aukuspublicinquiry.com. Or just watch the replay of the National Press Club Luncheon.
19 November – Webinar – The Reality of Reprocessing
Time: 11:00 AM Pacific Time (US & Canada) / 2:00 PM Eastern / 7:00 PM UK / 8:00 PM CET
