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Biden says he would not back Israeli strike on Iran’s nuclear sites

Any Israeli response to Iran’s missile barrage should be ‘proportional’, says the US president.

By Al Jazeera Staff, 2 Oct 2024  https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2024/10/2/biden-says-he-would-not-back-israeli-strike-on-irans-nuclear-sites

United States President Joe Biden has voiced opposition to any strikes on Iran’s nuclear sites in response to Tehran’s missile attack on Israel.

When asked by reporters on Wednesday whether he would back such retaliation, Biden stated “the answer is no”.

Biden’s comments come a day after Iran fired some 180 ballistic missiles at Israel, its second attack on the country since April. Iran’s most recent attacks on Israeli military sites have come in response to the assassination of key Iran-allied figures, including Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh and Hezbollah leader Hassan Nasrallah.

Israel’s Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu vowed Iran would “pay” for the strike, which reportedly did not cause any serious casualties in Israel but killed one Palestinian in the occupied West Bank.

Analysts warned Israel may seize the chance to launch attacks on Iran’s nuclear facilities, a target its leaders have long eyed.

“The risk of an [Israeli] attack on the nuclear programme is particularly high because Iran’s defensive shield Hezbollah is on its knees,” Ali Vaez, the Iran Project director at the International Crisis Group think tank, told Al Jazeera.

“US forces are already in the region shielding Israel, and for Israel, this is potentially a once-in-a-generation opportunity to take care of a major threat that it has perceived from Iran over the past few decades,” he said.

Former Israeli Prime Minister Naftali Bennett explicitly called for such an attack in a post on X, saying Israel must “act now to destroy Iran’s nuclear program”.

“We have the justification. We have the tools”, Bennett said.

Biden calls for ‘proportional’ response

In the wake of Iran’s attack, Biden emphasised that the US is “fully supportive of Israel”.

Other US officials warned Iran would face “severe consequences”, with State Department spokesman Matthew Miller telling reporters he was not “ruling anything out”.

On Wednesday, after Biden spoke with allied leaders, he said he would not support an attack on Iran’s nuclear facility. Any Israeli response to Iran, he told reporters, should be “proportional”, a position shared by all nations part of the G7 grouping, including Canada, France, Germany, Italy, Japan and the United Kingdom.

The White House also said Biden and G7 leaders spoke about coordinating a new round of sanctions against Iran.

Whole Middle East at risk

Iranian President Masoud Pezeshkian said that the attack was warranted, but that Tehran did not seek war with Israel.

Iran’s armed forces warned that Israel would face “vast destruction” if it retaliated.

The escalation between two of the Middle East’s strongest militaries – while war continues to rage in Gaza and Lebanon – has stoked fears of an even broader conflict in the region.

“The idea of Iran and Israel going after each other under the auspices of the United States will burn everyone in the Middle East and beyond,” said Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst Marwan Bishara.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Donald Trump encourages Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear sites

 https://www.skynews.com.au/world-news/united-states/donald-trump-encourages-israel-to-strike-irans-nuclear-sites/video/1b46af245863dc258fdbfce60160c1a8 5 Oct 24

During a rally in North Carolina, Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump took the opposite approach to Joe Biden, encouraging Israel to strike Iran’s nuclear sites.

“They ask him (Joe Biden) what do you think about Iran? Would you hit Iran? And he goes as long as they don’t hit the nuclear stuff – that’s the thing you want to hit,” Mr Trump said.

“I think he’s got that one wrong – isn’t that what you’re supposed to hit?”

October 5, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Hey Australia, Ontario is no model for energy and climate policy

Energy and climate strategy should prioritize options with lowest economic, environmental, technological and safety risks. Ontario’s does the opposite.

by Mark Winfield October 4, 2024,  https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/october-2024/ontario-energy/

Over the past few weeks, word has begun to reach Ontario of a series of stories in the Australian media in which the province is being held up as a model for climate and energy policy Down Under.

It seems that Peter Dutton, the leader of the federal opposition Liberal (the conservative party in Australian politics), has been promoting Ontario’s nuclear heavy energy plans as a pathway for Australia.

For those in the province familiar with the ongoing saga of its energy and electricity policies, the reactions to the notion of Ontario being an example of energy and electricity policymaking have ranged from “bizarre” to “you couldn’t make this up.”

Poor maintenance and operating practices led to the near-overnight shutdown of the province’s seven oldest reactors in 1997, leading to a dramatic rise in the role of coal-fired generation and its associated emissions of greenhouse gases (GHGs) and smog precursors. The refurbishment of the “laid-up” reactors themselves went badly. Two ended in write-offs, and the others ran billions over budget and years behind schedule, accounting for a large portion of the near doubling of electricity rates in the province between the mid-2000s and 2020.

Towards a $100-billion nuclear binge?

Only two other provinces followed Ontario’s lead on nuclear. Quebec built two reactors and New Brunswick one, each of them completed in the 1970s or the early 1980s. The Gentilly-1 facility in Quebec was barely ever operational and closed in 1977. The Gentilly-2 facility was shut down in 2012, and assessed as uneconomic, particularly in light of Ontario’s experiences in attempting to refurbish its own. The construction and then refurbishment of the Point Lepreau facility has repeatedly pushed New Brunswick Power to the brink of bankruptcy.

The current government of Ontario, led by Conservative Premier Doug Ford, has seemed determined to ignore the nuclear experiences of these provinces, and its own history of failed nuclear megaprojects. The government’s July 2023 energy plan includes the refurbishment of six reactors at the Bruce nuclear power facility (owned by OPG), and four reactors at the OPG’s Darlington facility. It subsequently added the refurbishment of four more reactors at OPG’s Pickering B facility, an option that had previously been assessed as unnecessary and uneconomic. The plant had originally been scheduled to close in 2018. There are also proposals for four new reactors totaling 4,800 MW in capacity at Bruce and four new 300MW reactors at Darlington. (The current capacity is 6,550 MW at Bruce, and 3,512 MW at Darlington.)

The total costs of these plans are unknown at this point, but an overall estimate in excess of $100 billion would not be unrealistic:

  • $13 billion for the refurbishment at Darlington;
  • approximately $20 billion for the refurbishment at Bruce;
  • $15 billion for Pickering B (based on Darlington costs and plant age for both this case and Bruce);
  • about $50 billion for the new build at Bruce, based on previous new build proposals;
  • and the Darlington new build (unknown, but likely $10 billion or more).

Even this 100$-billion figure would assume that things go according to plan, which rarely happens with nuclear construction and refurbishment projects.

The government’s ambitious nuclear plans have not been subject to any form of external review or regulatory oversight in terms of costs, economic and environmental rationality, or the availability of lower-cost and lower-risk pathways for meeting the province’s electricity needs. Rather, the system now runs entirely on the basis of ministerial directives that agencies in the sector, including the putative regulator, the Ontario Energy Board, are mandated to implement.

The province’s politically driven policy environment is very advantageous to nuclear proponents. When previous nuclear expansion proposals had been subject to meaningful public review, the plans collapsed in the face of soaring cost estimates and unrealistic demand projections. This was the case in the early 1980s with the Royal Commission on Electric Power Planning – aka the Porter commission, at the turn of the 1990s with the Ontario Hydro demand and supply plan environmental assessment, and in the late 2000s, with the Ontario Power Authority’s integrated power system plan review.

A halt to renewable energy

There is a second dimension to Ontario’s electricity plans that also should not be overlooked. Upon arriving in office the Ford government promptly terminated all efforts at renewable energy development,  including having completed wind turbine projects quite literally ripped out of the ground at a cost of hundreds of millions of dollars. It then scrapped the province’s energy efficiency strategy for being too effective at reducing demand. Repeated offers of low-cost electricity from the hydropower-rich neighbouring province of Quebec were ignored. The results of studies by the province’s own electricity system operator on energy efficiency potential and the possible contributions of distributed generation, like building and facility-level solar photovoltaics (PV) and storage, have been largely disregarded.

These choices have left the province with no apparent option but to rely on natural gas-fired generation to replace nuclear facilities that are being refurbished or retired. With existing facilities dramatically ramping up their output, and new facilities being added, GHG and other emissions from gas-fired generation have more than tripled since 2017, and are projected to continue to increase dramatically over the next years. On its current trajectory, gas-fired generation will constitute a quarter of the province’s electricity supply, the same portion provided by coal-fired plants before their phase-out, completed in 2013. The province has recently announced a re-engagement around renewable energy, but the seriousness of this interest has been subject to considerable doubt.

Given all of this, it would be difficult to see Ontario as a model for Australia or any other jurisdiction to follow in designing its energy and climate strategy. The province has no meaningful energy planning and review process. Its current nuclear and gas-focussed pathway seems destined to embed high energy costs and high emissions for decades to come. And it will leave a growing legacy of radioactive wastes that will require management of timescales hundreds of millennia.

A rational and transparent process would prioritize the options with the lowest economic, environmental, technological and safety risks. Higher-risk options, like new nuclear, should only be considered where it can be demonstrated that the lower-risk options have been fully optimized and developed in the planning process. Ontario’s current path goes in the opposite direction. To follow its example would be a serious mistake.

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

Trial in New Hampshire of protesters against Elbit Systems – supplier of weapons for Israel.

(the above video  is actually from a few months ago when Bruce (alone) was arraigned. 

Here’s a link to the video about this week’s trial of all the Elbit 8: https://www.wmur.com/article/protesters-guilty-elbit-systems-merrimack-100124/62474455)

Space for Peace – Organizing Notes, Thursday, 3 Oct 24 Bruce Gagnon – Bruce Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space.

On Monday eight of us stood trial before a judge in a New Hampshire District Court. The nature of our charges (Trespass and Resisting Arrest) under N.H. law do not allow a jury trial.

The first several hours of the trial were dominated by local, county and state police officers testifying about the nature of the March 22 action by our protest group that blocked the entrance of Elbit Systems. The early morning blockage, prior to workers arriving, lasted about five hours before cops (from various N.H. police departments) cleared the protest.

(Elbit makes weapons for Israel’s genocidal attacks on Palestine, Lebanon and others. Elbit has weapons facilities in dozens of nations around the world. This is likely done to create jobs in the host country in hopes of ‘buying international support’ for Israel’s colonial apartheid system.)

After lunch the defense team began our case. The judge would not allow the full testimony of one expert witness who tried to make the case about the rights and impacts of protest movements

Then came the testimony of an Iraqi immigrant young doctor who attended medical school in New Hampshire and now works in Portland, Maine. Yusuf was arrested with us at Elbit and spoke beautifully about the human toll of Israeli’s genocidal attacks on the Palestinian people – thus his reason for joining the action. Surprisingly the judge let him talk so Yusuf was able to make many strong moral statements.

I testified next and talked about my role that day as police liaison. I described how I had previously taken this role at large protests in Portland and at the BIW naval shipyard (the destroyers built there are attacking Yemen in support of Israel).  I noted that the Portland Chief of Police thanked me for playing that role in a protest where arrests were made. Sadly the Merrimack police had no interest in communication with me once I introduced myself.  I was quickly arrested, hours before the others were.

………………………………………………………………………………………………………. I closed by saying that I know that the Nuremberg Law Principles have been adopted as international law. This legal framework resulted from Hitler’s WW2 army having committed genocide against the Jewish people across Europe. Nuremberg proclaims that all citizens have the legal right and duty to intervene to prevent such crimes when they are happening before our eyes. Still on the witness stand, I turned to the judge and said ‘Even this court is required to honor Nuremberg Law’. The judge didn’t buy this offer to join the resistance against US-UK-Israel-NATO war crimes.

Another of our expert witnesses (Lisa Savage was to talk about what Elbit does at the Merrimack facility) was pulled when the judge made it clear that he didn’t wish to listen to another expert witness.

Once the closing statements were done, by the state prosecutor and our defense lawyer, the judge took a 15 minute break. When he returned to the courtroom the verdicts were announced. He held all of us guilty of trespass and declared that three of us were not guilty of Resisting Arrest (RA) but the other five were. I was one of the three that beat the RA rap.

We will have a sentencing meeting with the judge via zoom-type tech on October 7. We are facing considerable fines to cover costs of Merrimack police on the day of the protest event.

Since I was the first arrested (early in the protest) I sat in a cop car hands cuffed behind my back for two hours listening to the police radio and heard calls for the ‘bomb squad’, paddy-wagons to take protesters away and reports of more police arriving from other nearby cities. During my testimony I described how I counted at least 50 cops and our attorney asked what they did. I answered that they stood around enjoying the ‘show’ and often laughing. One local reporter in Merrimack once told me that he’d worked for his media outlet for 20 years, ‘but had never seen anything like this [protest] before’. ……………………………………
https://space4peace.blogspot.com/2024/10/elbit-systems-protest-trial-in-new.html

October 5, 2024 Posted by | Legal, USA | Leave a comment

Hurricane Helene sends a warning

 https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/10/01/hurricane-helene-sends-a-warning/

A nuclear plant, fortunately closed, was inundated, but we may not get so lucky next time, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

As no one can have failed to notice, our country has been ravaged once again by violent weather extremes, most recently by Hurricane Helene, which left areas in the south submerged and destroyed, and led to a significant number of deaths.

The press has routinely been describing the extreme flooding, especially in places such as North Carolina, as “Biblical. But, as my partner and colleague at Beyond Nuclear Paul Gunter points out, it is nothing of the sort. As should be obvious by now, our ever more frequent climatic disasters are entirely human-caused. 

Acts of God, whether you are a believer or not, have absolutely nothing to do with it.

Try telling that to our political leaders. No matter who wins in November, we are looking at drilling (Trump) or fracking (Harris) or possibly both. And, of course, more nuclear power!

The fact that all of these will obviously make the climate crisis far worse far faster does not pass these people by. They know it. But they push both fossil and fissile energy anyway, submitting willingly to the bidding of their corporate paymasters who would rather celebrate near-term greed and gain than leave a livable world to their children and grandchildren.

This means we are led by climate criminals who go not only unpunished, but who are routinely re-elected.

The push for license extensions for our aging reactor fleet is particularly heinous.  The lapdog nuclear regulator, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, has been exposed by the Government Accountability Office in a damning report as entirely uninterested in how the ravages of the climate crisis might jeopardize the safety of nuclear power plants.  

“NRC doesn’t fully consider potential increases in risk from climate change,” wrote the GAO. “For example, NRC mostly uses historical data to identify and assess safety risks, rather than data from future climate projections.”

Instead, the NRC is intent on colluding with the nuclear industry to sell us nuclear power as some sort of answer to the climate crisis.

Apart from the fact that nuclear power is too expensive and too slow, as we have argued here countless times, it is actually a hazard under climate chaos conditions. And we got the perfect demonstration of this from Hurricane Helene.

First of all, because of the extreme radiological risks, some nuclear power plants in the path of the hurricane were shut down as a preemptive precaution including Hatch in Georgia. This makes them completely useless in the wake of the storm’s onslaught when people are desperate for electricity. 

Then take the case of the Crystal River nuclear power plant on Florida’s Gulf Coast. Floodwaters swamped the site. Fortunately the plant has been shuttered since 2013 but all of the high-level irradiated radioactive fuel waste is still stored there.

“The whole site was flooded, including buildings, sumps, and lift stations. Industrial Wastewater Pond #5 was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge,” read a report filed by plant owner, Duke Energy.

Given the present enthusiasm for extending the licenses of the still operating US nuclear reactor fleet — and they are talking about out to 80 or even 100 years for reactors that were never designed or intended to run that long — Crystal River might easily still have been operating. 

Under today’s rush to relicense — and even reopen the country’s most dangerously degraded reactors including Palisades in Michigan — it probably would be.

Did nuclear waste escape as a result of the Crystal River nuclear site flood? 

“We are still in the process of obtaining access and assessing the damage, but due to the nature of this event we anticipate difficulty with estimating the total discharge amount of wastewater, and impacts are unknown at this time,” wrote Duke in its report.

In other words, we may never know.

The implication of a nuclear plant inundated by a massive storm surge does not have to be imagined. We saw it at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant in Japan on March 11, 2011, when a 50-foot tsunami swept over the inadequate sea wall and knocked out the backup onsite power after the earlier earthquake had already severed the offsite power connection.

Meanwhile, Crystal River owner Duke is the very same company that is trying to secure a license extension for its three Oconee reactors in South Carolina that sit downstream from not one but two dams!

The three reactors are sited 300 feet below the water level in Lake Jocassee behind Jocassee Dam and five feet below the water level in the immediately adjacent Lake Keowee.

  

What could possibly go wrong? Nothing, argues Duke, for whom the idea of a dam overtopping or breaking, sending a wall of water directly at the plant — effectively an inland tsunami — just isn’t a credible possibility. 

Out of our scope, declares the NRC, which contends it cannot include an assessment of likely climate change impacts on Oconee operations within its environmental review for license renewal. 

Beyond Nuclear and the South Carolina chapter of the Sierra Club have been fighting this through legal channels and will continue to do so. 

After last week, you might expect such a blinkered view of current — never mind future — climatic conditions to change. But it won’t. 

Retrofitting an old nuclear plant to adequately protect it against the impacts of a climate crisis never prepared for, costs money.

October 4, 2024 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

The Anishinaabe community fighting nuclear waste dumping, one step at a time‘

‘There’s more fresh water in this part of the country than there is in the Great Lakes, and they want to destroy that’

Ricochet, Crystal Greene, September 23 2024

Every September long weekend for the past five years, Indigenous and non-Indigenous allies have walked together along the TransCanada Highway 17 to peacefully protest the proposed dumping of nuclear waste on Treaty 3 lands in northwestern Ontario.

Among the walkers at the annual Walk Against Nuclear Waste was an Anishinaabe grandmother, who started the walk in hopes that more people will “wake up” to what’s at stake with the possibility of a deep geological repository (DGR) that would contain all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste within their watershed.

“This is my last year and I feel like I’m gonna miss it, but it was a good awareness. I’m okay with that,” Darlene Necan, told Ricochet Media as vehicles zoomed by on TransCanada Highway 17, many beeping their horns in support throughout the roadside interview. 

On September 1, two groups left from Ignace and Wabigoon at the same time. Over two days the group of about 30 participants walked about 40 kilometres from each direction. 

They all met up at a rest stop near Revell Lake, the site where the Nuclear Waste Management Organization has done exploration drilling for the potential $26-billion DGR, which would sit at headwaters of the Wabigoon River and Turtle River watersheds. The underground facility would be used to bury and abandon millions of bundles of spent fuel from Canadian nuclear power plants.

“We cannot foresee the future, but what if it does happen? What if there’s a leak?” Necan said.  “The creator gifted us this beautiful land for all of us to live, but who are these people to come here and economically destroy it? Money is never going to last.”

Necan, 65, is also known for asserting Anishinaabe title by building a cabin on her traditional territory at Savant Lake, Ontario, without permits, after she grew tired of waiting for housing from her band, Ojibway Nation of Saugeen #258. She was charged under the Public Lands Act with​​ construction on so-called Crown land.

It’s no surprise that she took on the responsibility to alert others about the NWMO’s plan to transport, bury and abandon the waste.

There is a strong sense of urgency as the NWMO is set to finalize its chosen waste site, narrowed down from a list of 22 locations in Canada, a process that began in 2010.

By the end of the year, NWMO will choose either the Revell Lake site, near where the walk ended, or a Bruce County site in southwestern Ontario. 

Rather than having the radioactive waste shipped by truck or train for the next 50 plus years —which they foresee is an accident waiting to happen — walkers say they want to see the waste all kept where it originated from, and for Canada to stop producing nuclear energy altogether.

The NWMO is an industry-funded organization made up of representatives from Canada’s nuclear power industry who’ve been looking for a way to deal with the approximately 100,000 tonnes of waste they’ve produced that will be radioactive for tens of thousands of years.

In a report to the Standing Committee on Environmental and Sustainable Development, a northwestern Ontario coalition “We the Nuclear Free North” describes the flaws and weaknesses of the DGR project along with the serious risks expressed by experts.

“Numerous experts in the fields of geology, chemistry and physics warn of the insufficiency of current scientific knowledge to guide a project of the nature and magnitude of the NWMO’s proposed plan,” the coalition wrote .

Their report broke down NWMO’s “conceptual” plan.

The waste would be transported by truck and received at a fuel packaging plant where it would be placed into containers. 

The water used during the process to decontaminate the devices used for the waste in-transit would become contaminated with radionuclides and moved into a tailings pond, and be contained as a low-to-medium level radioactive liquid waste.

The waste in containers would be lowered to the DGR underground storage facility, made up of rooms blasted out of precambrian rock, 500 to 1000 metres below the Earth’s surface. 

Since there is no way for the high-level radioactive nuclear fuel to deactivate, except for time,  it would continue to generate heat, years after being stored. It could lead to pressure build-up, causing fractures in the DGR walls, where the groundwater would seep in and mix with water-soluble radionuclides. 

Eventually, the free-moving contaminated water would reach the two watersheds, through cracks in the DGR, and a sump pump would need to be used to bring liquid to a surface tailings pond. 

Another risk to hosting a DGR in the Revell Lake area are low magnitude earthquakes that have been documented by Environment Canada. A quake could fracture the DGR and increase flow of water into the facility and send contaminated water into the watersheds…………………………………………………………. more https://ricochet.media/indigenous/the-anishinaabe-community-fighting-nuclear-waste-dumping-one-step-at-a-time/

October 4, 2024 Posted by | Canada, indigenous issues, opposition to nuclear, wastes | Leave a comment

DOE Plutonium Pit Plan Found To Violate Environmental Law

By Daniel Wilson (September 30, 2024,) — A South Carolina federal judge on Monday backed antinuclear groups’ challenge to a U. S. Department of Energy plan to boost production of plutonium cores used in nuclear weapons, saying the DOE hadn’t properly considered the potential environmental impact of the plan. . . …….. (Subscribers only) more https://www.law360.com/articles/1884130/doe-plutonium-pit-plan-found-to-violate-environmental-law

October 2, 2024 Posted by | Legal, USA | Leave a comment

US government provides $1.52 billion loan to resurrect Michigan nuclear plant

US closes $1.52 billion loan to resurrect Michigan nuclear plant, By Timothy Gardner October 1, 2024

WASHINGTON, Sept 30 (Reuters) – The U.S. on Monday said it closed a $1.52 billion loan to resurrect Holtec’s Palisades nuclear plant in Michigan, and a senior Biden administration official said it could take two years to reopen the plant, which is longer than the company predicted.

President Joe Biden’s administration has called for a tripling of U.S. nuclear power capacity as U.S. power demand surges and worries about climate change mount.

The push could include the potential reopening of some commercial reactors that have been shut for decommissioning, including one at Three Mile Island, site of the worst nuclear accident in U.S. history. Restarting shut nuclear plants is a complicated and expensive process never before accomplished in the country.

“Palisades is a climate comeback story,” Ali Zaidi, the White House climate adviser, told reporters in a call, adding that nuclear power supports high-paying union jobs

The $1.52 billion in financing from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office, was accompanied by funding for nonprofit electric cooperatives to purchase power from Palisades. Deputy U.S. Energy Secretary Xochitl Torres Small announced more than $1.3 billion in public funding to power cooperatives Wolverine and Hoosier Energy.

Nuclear reactors generate virtually emissions-free power, which is valued as electricity demand soars for the first time in decades on growth in artificial intelligence, electric vehicles and cryptocurrencies. Nuclear critics, however, point out that the U.S. has not agreed on a permanent place to bury radioactive nuclear waste.

Palisades still needs licensing from regulators and the senior U.S. official said that means it could take “a couple of years to turn back on”. Holtec has estimated a comeback in the fourth quarter next year…………….

O’Brien has said Holtec does not expect delays or additional costs.  https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/us-closes-152-billion-loan-resurrect-michigan-nuclear-plant-2024-09-30/

October 2, 2024 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA | Leave a comment

Question for the candidates: Will the United States sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?

By Alicia Sanders-Zakre | September 20, 2024 Alicia Sanders-Zakre is the Policy and Research Coordinator at the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons.  https://thebulletin.org/2024/09/will-the-united-states-sign-and-ratify-the-treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons/?fbclid=IwY2xjawFoiE5leHRuA2FlbQIxMQABHXWHz4dPKx6qA6gXNV_3JCT1LqSA4SpW4InKnv6GP0M0A5RzBvtaJMfokw_aem_nT8dnPTOYgkrNFm4kOHKTA

Before the 2016 US presidential election, Princeton physicist Zia Mian wrote an essay asking then-candidates Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump in the Bulletin whether they would be ready to start talks to ban nuclear weapons. Eight years and two presidents later, both the Trump and Biden administrations have rebuffed the 2017 UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) and chosen instead to persist with current US policies to maintain and upgrade nuclear weapons—despite a legal obligation to disarm, public support for the TPNW, and the existential threat to humanity of adherence to the debated theory of nuclear deterrence.

The TPNW is the first international treaty banning all nuclear weapons activities, including nuclear use and threat of use, testing, stationing, and development. The treaty’s Article 4 provides a verifiable pathway for nuclear-armed states to join and disarm. And Articles 6 and 7 create the first international regime to provide assistance and remediation to people and environments harmed by nuclear weapons use and testing; an effort led by countries that have been bombarded by Soviet and British nuclear detonations. This treaty currently has 93 signatory states and 70 states parties from every region of the world.

The United States—like other nuclear-armed countries—has chosen to undermine and dismiss this good faith effort by nearly half the world’s governments, including US allies, to rid the world of nuclear weapons. In 2020, the Trump administration even urged states to withdraw their instruments of ratification. Meanwhile, the United States has failed to implement the obligation it undertook more than half a century ago under Article VI of the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) to pursue nuclear disarmament and instead spent $51.5 billion in 2023 alone to upgrade its nuclear arsenal. The continued investment of nuclear powers in maintaining and rebuilding their nuclear arsenals, while paying mere lip service to disarmament, is a source of contention within the NPT and undermines the nuclear non-proliferation regime.

Foreign policy goals aside, US presidential candidates should adhere to democratic principles and align their policies with public opinion and support for the treaty among local governments to join the TPNW: According to a 2022 study, 65 percent of the US population supports joining the TPNW. Cities and towns across the country—from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles to Yellow Springs, Ohio—have adopted local resolutions calling on their government to join, alongside five US states. Members of the US Congress, as well as local and state politicians, have also called on the United States to join the ban treaty.

Support for the TPNW is based on a clear-eyed assessment of the risks that nuclear weapons pose as long as they exist—and an understanding of the naiveté of relying on the rationality of statemen like Russian President Vladimir Putin, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, or former US president Donald Trump to decide the fate of humanity.

Scholars have shown that the reason humanity has escaped nuclear annihilation since the dawn of the nuclear age may have more to do with sheer luck than with any successful strategy.

No one will want to be around when luck runs out.

We know all too well what that would look like and the incapacity of humanitarian organizations to respond. A new report by the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons documents in gut-wrenching detail the harm that nuclear weapons have done to children and the threat they continue to pose to them, including those bombed by the United States in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Some of those children survived and now give testimony to—and remind leaders of—the urgent need to abolish these weapons. This report adds to the robust body of literature on the devastating humanitarian and environmental consequences of nuclear weapons.

Under both Republican and Democratic administrations, the United States and the world have continued to face the threat of accidental or intentional nuclear annihilation, a threat that has continued to grow in recent years. It is time to chart a new course and to eliminate nuclear weapons, which is the only fail-safe way to eliminate the threat of their use.

Presidential candidates Kamala Harris and Donald Trump should be asked: If elected President, will you sign and submit to the Senate for ratification the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons?

October 2, 2024 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Lawmakers to Investigate Faulty Sub, Carrier Welding at Newport News Shipbuilding

USNI News, Sam LaGrone, September 27, 2024

THE PENTAGON – The House Armed Services Committee is investigating substandard welding on submarines and aircraft carriers at Newport News Shipbuilding, the committee announced on Friday.

Following a Thursday report in USNI News, lawmakers are now looking into how shipbuilders at the Virginia yard had violated proper welding procedures on work that made it into current in-service submarines. The flawed work was found by quality assurance teams at Newport News Shipbuilding, which has led to a wider investigation into welding quality that’s prompted a notification to the Department of Justice, USNI News reported.

“It is deeply concerning to learn that faulty welds may have been knowingly made to U.S. Navy submarines and aircraft carriers. The House Armed Services Committee is investigating how this occurred. The safety of our sailors is our top concern, and we need to immediately understand any risks associated with the faulty work,” reads the statement from HASC chair Rep Mike Rogers (R-Ala.), ranking member Rep Adam Smith (D-Wash.) and House Armed Services seapower and projection forces subcommittee leaders Rep. Trent Kelly (R-Miss.) and Rep. Joe Courtney (D-Conn.).
“The Department of Defense needs to immediately provide our committee with answers and a plan for how they will protect U.S. Navy vessels against tampering. Absolute transparency with Congress is essential.”

The Congressional query comes as the Navy and shipbuilder HII are gauging the scope of the ships that were affected overall. The number of in-service Virginia-class submarines that have been affected are in the “low single digits” and an ongoing analysis of under-construction Virginia, Columbia-class submarines and Ford-class aircraft carriers could stretch into October, a defense official told USNI News on Friday.

Earlier this year, quality assurance teams at Newport News discovered the sub-standard welds and reported the violations in procedure to both the Navy and the Department of Justice, according to a Friday statement on LinkedIn by Newport News president Jennifer Boykin.

“We recently discovered that the quality of certain welds on submarines and aircraft carriers under construction here at NNS do not meet our high-quality standards. Most concerning is that some of the welds in question were made by welders who knowingly violated weld procedures.” she wrote.
“We immediately put together a team made up of both internal and independent engineering and quality subject matter experts to determine the root causes, bound the issue and put in place immediate short-term corrective actions as we work through longer-term solutions.”

Boykin went on to say HII notified both the Navy and the Department of Justice on the sub-standard work………………………………………………………………………………………….

Neither HII nor the Navy have said when the initial faulty work was discovered.

While the assessment of the overall welds on the ships under construction could extend into next month, the Navy and HII now have the tedious task of reinspecting the welds and determining solutions.

Twice in the 2000s, the Navy mounted separate investigations into suspicious welds into then Northrop Grumman-managed Newport News Shipbuilding. In 2007, the Navy found welders used the wrong filler material in non-nuclear pipping on Virginia submarines. In 2009, the Navy had to reinspect the welds on nine submarines and four aircraft carriers after a shipyard inspector admitted to falsifying inspection reports, according to The Virginian Pilot.

The inspections can involve analyzing welds that are difficult to reach throughout a submarine or aircraft carrier. The subsequent weld checks after the 2009 investigation took years, USNI News understands.  https://news.usni.org/2024/09/27/lawmakers-announce-investigation-into-faulty-submarine-carrier-welding-at-newport-news-shipbuilding-ships-affected-in-low-single-digits-officials-say

October 2, 2024 Posted by | safety, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Pentagon “goes to school” -William Hartung, The Battle for the Soul of American Science

“……………………………………………. Hartung, a Pentagon expert, has focused on this strange reality of ours: no matter how many wars the United States loses, it only pours yet more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget and into the coffers of those giant weapons-making companies of the military-industrial-congressional complex. 

September 29, 2024, Tomgram

………………………………………………… Yet, after all these years, what couldn’t be more striking today is that, in the same spirit as those older pieces, Hartung focuses (as he so often has) on a different aspect entirely of the Pentagon’s distinctly over-funded world, one that, amid all the news coverage in this country, gets little or no attention: how the Pentagon, as he puts it, “goes to school” to enlist American science in the battle to create yet more horrific weaponry. 

Pentagon expert William Hartung first wandered into TomDispatch in March 2008, less than seven years after this country’s Global War(s) on Terror were launched, full-scale disasters that were already costing the American taxpayer a fortune and a half — or perhaps, given the subject, all too literally an arm and a leg. As he wrote then, “How much, for instance, does one week of George Bush’s wars cost? Glad you asked. If we consider the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan together — which we might as well do, since we and our children and grandchildren will be paying for them together into the distant future — a conservative, single-week estimate comes to $3.5 billion. Remember, that’s per week! By contrast, the whole international community spends less than $400 million per year on the International Atomic Energy Agency, the primary institution for monitoring and preventing the spread of nuclear weapons; that’s less than one day’s worth of war costs.”

Only $650 million or so of that weekly sum, he estimated, was “spent on people.” So, he wondered, “where does the other nearly $3 billion go?” The answer he offered then: “It goes for goods and services, from tanks and fighter planes to fuel and food. Most of this money ends up in the hands of private companies like Boeing, Lockheed Martin, and the former Halliburton subsidiary, Kellogg, Brown and Root.” And knowing about that expense of $3.5 billion a week “and counting” on America’s wars, he added sarcastically, “Doesn’t that make you feel safer?”

Ever since then, Hartung, a Pentagon expert, has focused on this strange reality of ours: no matter how many wars the United States loses, it only pours yet more taxpayer dollars into the Pentagon budget and into the coffers of those giant weapons-making companies of the military-industrial-congressional complex. Even the titles of a few of his pieces over the years catch the grim spirit of his all-too-striking analysis: “There’s No Business Like the Arms Business, Weapons ‘R’ Us (But You’d Never Know It)” (July 2016); “The Urge to Splurge, Why Is It So Hard to Reduce the Pentagon Budget?” (October 2016); “The American Way of War Is a Budget-Breaker, Never Has a Society Spent More for Less” (May 2017); “Merger Mania, The Military-Industrial Complex on Steroids” (July 2019); “America Dominant Again (in Arms Sales), And Again… and Again… And Again” (May 2021); “Fueling the Warfare State, America’s $1.4 Trillion ‘National Security’ Budget Makes Us Ever Less Safe” (July 2022); “Spending Unlimited, The Pentagon’s Budget Follies Come at a High Price” (March 2024).

And of course, that’s just a small dip into the pieces he’s written for TomDispatch. Yet, after all these years, what couldn’t be more striking today is that, in the same spirit as those older pieces, Hartung focuses (as he so often has) on a different aspect entirely of the Pentagon’s distinctly over-funded world, one that, amid all the news coverage in this country, gets little or no attention: how the Pentagon, as he puts it, “goes to school” to enlist American science in the battle to create yet more horrific weaponry. And so it goes, again and again and again. Tom

The Pentagon Goes to School. The Battle for the Soul of American Science. Bringing the Militarization of University Research Back to Earth

By William D. Hartung

The divestment campaigns launched last spring by students protesting Israel’s mass slaughter in Gaza brought the issue of the militarization of American higher education back into the spotlight.

Of course, financial ties between the Pentagon and American universities are nothing new. As Stuart Leslie has pointed out in his seminal book on the topic, The Cold War and American Science, “In the decade following World War II, the Department of Defense (DOD) became the biggest patron of American science.” Admittedly, as civilian institutions like the National Institutes of Health grew larger, the Pentagon’s share of federal research and development did decline, but it still remained a source of billions of dollars in funding for university research.

And now, Pentagon-funded research is once again on the rise, driven by the DOD’s recent focus on developing new technologies like weapons driven by artificial intelligence (AI). Combine that with an intensifying drive to recruit engineering graduates and the forging of partnerships between professors and weapons firms and you have a situation in which many talented technical types could spend their entire careers serving the needs of the warfare state. The only way to head off such a Brave New World would be greater public pushback against the military conquest (so to speak) of America’s research and security agendas, in part through resistance by scientists and engineers whose skills are so essential to building the next generation of high-tech weaponry.

The Pentagon Goes to School

Yes, the Pentagon’s funding of universities is indeed rising once again and it goes well beyond the usual suspects like MIT or Johns Hopkins University. In 2022, the most recent year for which full data is available, 14 universities received at least — and brace yourself for this — $100 million in Pentagon funding, from Johns Hopkins’s astonishing $1.4 billion (no, that is not a typo!) to Colorado State’s impressive $100 million. And here’s a surprise: two of the universities with the most extensive connections to our weaponry of the future are in Texas: the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin) and Texas A&M.

In 2020, Texas Governor Greg Abbott and former Army Secretary Ryan McCarthy appeared onstage at a UT-Austin ceremony to commemorate the creation of a robotics lab there, part of a new partnership between the Army Futures Command and the school. “This is ground zero for us in our research for the weapons systems we’re going to develop for decades to come,” said McCarthy.

Not to be outdone, Texas A&M is quietly becoming the Pentagon’s base for research on hypersonics — weapons expected to travel five times the speed of sound. Equipped with a kilometer-long tunnel for testing hypersonic missiles, that school’s University Consortium for Applied Hypersonics is explicitly dedicated to outpacing America’s global rivals in the development of that next generation military technology. Texas A&M is also part of the team that runs the Los Alamos National Laboratory, the (in)famous New Mexico facility where the first nuclear weapons were developed and tested as part of the Manhattan Project under the direction of Robert Oppenheimer.

Other major players include Carnegie Mellon University, a center for Army research on the applications of AI, and Stanford University, which serves as a feeder to California’s Silicon Valley firms of all types. That school also runs the Technology Transfer for Defense (TT4D) Program aimed at transitioning academic technologies from the lab to the marketplace and exploring the potential military applications of emerging technology products.

In addition, the Pentagon is working aggressively to bring new universities into the fold. In January 2023, Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin announced the creation of a defense-funded research center at Howard University, the first of its kind at a historically black college.

Given the campus Gaza demonstrations of last spring, perhaps you also won’t be surprised to learn that the recent surge in Pentagon spending faces increasing criticism from students and faculty alike. Targets of protest include the Lavender program, which has used AI to multiply the number of targets the Israeli armed forces can hit in a given time frame. But beyond focusing on companies enabling Israel’s war effort, current activists are also looking at the broader role of their universities in the all-American war system.

For example, at Indiana University research on ties to companies fueling the killings in Gaza grew into a study of the larger role of universities in supporting the military system as a whole. Student activists found that the most important connection involved that university’s ties to the Naval Surface Warfare Center, Crane Division, whose mission is “to provide acquisition, engineering… and technical support for sensors, electronics, electronic warfare, and special warfare weapons.” In response, student activists have launched a “Keep Crane Off Campus” campaign.

A Science of Death or for Life?

Graduating science and engineering students increasingly face a moral dilemma about whether they want to put their skills to work developing instruments of death. Journalist Indigo Olivier captured that conflict in a series of interviews with graduating engineering students. She quotes one at the University of West Florida who strongly opposes doing weapons work this way: “When it comes to engineering, we do have a responsibility… ​Every tool can be a weapon… I don’t really feel like I need to be putting my gifts to make more bombs.”

By contrast, Cameron Davis, a 2021 computer engineering graduate from Georgia Tech, told Olivier about the dilemma faced by so many graduating engineers: ​“A lot of people that I talk to aren’t 100% comfortable working on defense contracts, working on things that are basically going to kill people.” But he went on to say that the high pay at weapons firms ​“drives a lot of your moral disagreements with defense away.”

The choice faced by today’s science and engineering graduates is nothing new. The use of science for military ends has a long history in the United States. But there have also been numerous examples of scientists who resisted dangerous or seemingly unworkable military schemes……………………………………………………………………………………………

Scientists have also played a leading role in pressing for nuclear arms control and disarmament, founding organizations like the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists (1945), the Federation of American Scientists (1945), the global Pugwash movement (1957), the Council for a Livable World (1962), and the Union of Concerned Scientists (1969). To this day, all of them continue to work to curb the threat of a nuclear war that could destroy this planet as a livable place for humanity.

A central figure in this movement was Joseph Rotblat, the only scientist to resign from the Manhattan Project over moral qualms about the potential impact of the atomic bomb. In 1957, he helped organize the founding meeting of the Pugwash Conference, an international organization devoted to the control and ultimate elimination of nuclear weapons. In some respects Pugwash was a forerunner of the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), which successfully pressed for the U.N. Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which entered into force in January 2021.

Enabling Endless War and Widespread Torture

The social sciences also have a long, conflicted history of ties to the Pentagon and the military services. Two prominent examples from earlier in this century were the Pentagon’s Human Terrain Program (HTS) and the role of psychologists in crafting torture programs associated with the Global War on Terror, launched after the 9/11 attacks with the invasion of Afghanistan.

………………………………………………An even more controversial use of social scientists in the service of the war machine was the role of psychologists as advisors to the CIA’s torture programs at Abu Ghraib in Iraq, the Guantánamo Bay detention center in Cuba, and other of that agency’s “black sites.” ……………………………………………………………

 today, resistance to the militarization of science has extended to the growing use of artificial intelligence and other emerging military technologies. For example, in 2018, there was a huge protest movement at Google when employees learned that the company was working on Project Maven, a communications network designed to enable more accurate drone strikes. More than 4,000 Google scientists and engineers signed a letter to company leadership calling for them to steer clear of military work, dozens resigned over the issue, and the protests had a distinct effect on the company. That year, Google announced that it would not renew its Project Maven contract, and pledged that it “will not design or deploy AI” for weapons.

Unfortunately, the lure of military funding was simply too strong. Just a few years after those Project Maven protests, Google again began doing work for the Pentagon,…………………………………….

The Future of American Science

……………………………………………………………………The stakes are particularly high now, given the ongoing rush to develop AI-driven weaponry and other emerging technologies that pose the risk of everything from unintended slaughter due to system malfunctions to making war more likely, given the (at least theoretical) ability to limit casualties for the attacking side. In short, turning back the flood of funding for military research and weaponry from the Pentagon and key venture capital firms will be a difficult undertaking. After all, AI is already performing a wide range of military and civilian tasks. Banning it altogether may no longer be a realistic goal, but putting guardrails around its military use might still be.

Such efforts are, in fact, already underway. The International Committee for Robot Arms Control (ICRAC) has called for an international dialogue on “the pressing dangers that these systems pose to peace and international security and to civilians.”………………………………….

The Future of Life Institute has underscored the severity of the risk, noting that “more than half of AI experts believe there is a one in ten chance this technology will cause our extinction.”

Instead of listening almost exclusively to happy talk about the military value of AI by individuals and organizations that stand to profit from its adoption, isn’t it time to begin paying attention to the skeptics, while holding back on the deployment of emerging military technologies until there is a national conversation about what they can and can’t accomplish, with scientists playing a central role in bringing the debate back to earth?

https://tomdispatch.com/the-pentagon-goes-to-school/

October 1, 2024 Posted by | Education, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear power for AI: what it will take to reopen Three Mile Island safely

As Microsoft strikes a deal to restart a reactor at the notorious power station, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about the unprecedented process.

Michael Greshko,  https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03162-2 30 Sept 24

Microsoft announced on 20 September that it had struck a 20-year deal to purchase energy from a dormant nuclear power plant that will be brought back online. And not just any plant: Three Mile Island, the facility in Londonderry Township, Pennsylvania, that was the site of the worst-ever nuclear accident on US soil when a partial meltdown of one of its reactors occurred in 1979.

The move, which symbolizes technology giants’ need to power their growing artificial-intelligence (AI) efforts, raises questions over how shuttered nuclear plants can be restarted safely — not least because Three Mile Island isn’t the only plant being brought out of retirement.

Palisades Nuclear Plant, an 805-megawatt facility in Covert, Michigan, was shut down in May 2022. But the energy company that owns it, Holtec International, based in Jupiter, Florida, plans to reopen it. This reversal in the facility’s fortunes has been bolstered by a US$1.5-billion conditional loan commitment from the US Department of Energy (DoE), which sees nuclear plants — a source of low-carbon electricity — as a way of helping the country to meet its ambitious climate goals. The Palisades plant is on track to reopen in late 2025.


“It’s the first time something like this has been attempted, that we’re aware of, worldwide,” says Jason Kozal, director of the reactor safety division at a regional office of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in Naperville, Illinois, and the co-chair of a regulatory panel overseeing the restart of Palisades.

Here, Nature talks to nuclear specialists about what it will take to restart these plants and whether more are on the way as the world’s demand for AI grows.

A change in fortunes

Since 2012, more than a dozen nuclear plants have been shut down in the United States, in some cases as a result of unfavourable economics. Less cost-effective plants — such as those with only a single working reactor — struggled to remain profitable in states with deregulated electricity markets and widely varying prices. Three Mile Island, owned by the utility company Constellation Energy in Baltimore, Maryland, is a prime example. Today, 54 US plants remain in operation, running a total of 94 reactors.


Nuclear energy, which accounts for about 9% of the world’s electricity, has seen some resurgence internationally, but is also competing with other energy sources, including renewables. After the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi disaster, Japan suspended operations at all of its 48 remaining nuclear plants, but these are gradually being brought back online, in part to cut dependence on gas imports. By contrast, Germany announced a phase-out of its nuclear plants in 2011, and shut down its last three in 2023.

In the United States, nuclear energy’s fortunes might be turning as technology companies race to build enormous, energy-gobbling data centres to support their AI systems and other applications while somehow fulfilling their climate pledges. Microsoft, for instance, has committed to being carbon negative by 2030.

It’s further confirmation of the value of nuclear, and, if the deal is right — if the price is right — then it makes business sense, as well,” says Jacopo Buongiorno, the director of the Center for Advanced Nuclear Energy Systems at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge.

A new start

This isn’t the first time that the United States has brought a powered-down reactor back online. In 1985, for example, the Tennessee Valley Authority, a federally owned electric utility company, took the reactors at its Browns Ferry Nuclear Power Plant in Athens, Alabama, offline. After years of refurbishment, they were brought back online, with the final reactor restarted in 2007.

The cases of Palisades and Three Mile Island are different, however. When those plants closed, their then-owners made legal statements that the facilities would be shut down, even though their operating licenses were still active. Three Mile Island, which will be renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center under the proposed restart, shut down its single remaining functional reactor in 2019.

Because the plants were slated for shutdown and safety checks were therefore stopped, regulators and companies must now navigate a complex licensing, oversight and environmental-assessment process to reverse the plants’ decommissioning.

Safety checks will be needed to ensure, among other things, that the plants can operate securely once uranium fuel rods have been replaced in their reactors. When these plants were decommissioned, their radioactive fuel was removed and stored, so the facilities no longer needed to adhere to many exacting technical specifications, says Jamie Pelton, also a co-chair of the Palisades restart panel, and a deputy director at the NRC’s Office of Nuclear Reactor Regulation in Rockville, Maryland.

It will be no small feat to reinstate those safety regulations: to meet the standards, infrastructure will need to be inspected carefully. According to Buongiorno, any metallic components in the plants that have corroded since the shutdowns, including wires and cables used in instrumentation and controls, will need to be replaced.

The plants’ turbine generators, which make electricity from the steam produced as the plants’ fuel rods heat up water, will also get a close look. After sitting dormant for years, a turbine could develop defects within its shaft or corrosion along its blades that would require refurbishment. In the case of Palisades, the NRC announced on 18 September that the plant’s steam generators would need further testing and repair, following inspections conducted by Holtec.

Nuclear’s prospects

As the plants near their restart dates, their operators will also have to contend with a challenge faced by even fully operational plants: the need to source fresh nuclear fuel. US nuclear utility companies have long counted on the international market to buy much of the necessary raw yellowcake uranium and the services that separate and enrich uranium-235, the isotope used in nuclear reactors’ fuel rods. Russia has been a major international supplier of these services, even after the country’s 2022 invasion of Ukraine, because US and European sanctions have not targeted nuclear fuel. But to minimize its reliance on Russia, the United States is building up its own supply chain, with the DoE offering $3.4 billion to buy domestically enriched uranium.

There probably won’t be too many other restarts of mothballed nuclear plants in the United States, however, even as demand for low-carbon electricity grows. Not every US plant that has been shut down is necessarily in good enough condition to be easily refurbished — and the idea of reopening some of those would meet with too much resistance. As an example, Buongiorno points to New York’s Indian Point Energy Center, which was closed in 2021. The plant’s proximity to New York City had long provoked criticism from nuclear-safety advocates.

But that doesn’t mean that all of these sites will remain unused. One option is to build advanced reactors — including large reactors with upgraded safety features and small modular reactors with innovative designs — on sites where old nuclear plants once stood, to take advantage of existing transmission lines and infrastructure. “We might see interest in the US in building more of these large reactors, whether that’s fuelled by data centres or some other applications,” Buongiorno adds. “Utilities and customers are exploring this at the moment.”

October 1, 2024 Posted by | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Biden would rather defend Israeli impunity than stop a regional war

As Israel intensified its deadly attacks on Lebanon, the U.S. moved more troops to the Middle East. The move shows Joe Biden’s priority is not to avoid escalation but to ensure that Israel has full impunity.

Mondoweiss. By Mitchell Plitnick  September 27, 2024 

As Israel was intensifying its deadly attacks on Lebanon, the United States decided to move more troops to the Middle East. The number of soldiers was not announced, but the force was said to be small. 

The stated purpose was to protect Americans stationed in the region, but the more likely reason was to send a message to Iran, Ansarallah, and other allies of Hezbollah that the United States would protect Israel in the event of escalation, regardless of who was responsible for that escalation. 

U.S. President Joe Biden might hope that such a message would deter escalation, but his decision to communicate it by increasing the U.S. military presence rather than acting to restrain Israel demonstrates that, just as with Gaza, Biden’s priority is not to avoid escalation, but to ensure that Israel has full impunity to act as it wants.

Confronting Iran is Israel’s endgame

In fact, this response plays right into the tactics Israel is pursuing in its attack on Lebanon. The Israeli right doesn’t have a real strategy, but it has long clung to an ideological belief that Israel should throw off the “restraints” placed on it by the United States and Europe and fully exercise its military might to utterly destroy its enemies. 

This is what has played out in Gaza since last October. The genocidal campaign is meant not to destroy Hamas, but rather to destroy the Palestinian national movement. That’s why it was inevitable that the genocide would expand to the West Bank, despite the fact that there were virtually no Palestinian actions there in response to the horror in Gaza. 

The Israeli right believes it must decisively defeat Iran, not merely deter it. Israel’s provocative actions such as its bombing of the Iranian embassy in Syria and assassinating Hamas leader Ismail Haniyeh in Tehran were meant to force a response from Iran that would escalate regional tensions. Iran didn’t take the bait, despite the fact that its lack of response to Israel’s activities invites more and greater provocative Israeli actions. 

The latest Israeli escalation indicates that Israel is making good on its promise to shift its attention from Gaza to Lebanon. That won’t mean the slaughter in Gaza will stop, but it will mean that Israel will focus its forces more in the north once it feels it is ready to engage Hezbollah on the ground, an eventuality its current activities are an attempt at paving the path toward.  

Both Israeli and American military leaders are less enthusiastic about escalation with Lebanon……………………………………………………………………

A potential Iranian diplomatic response

Iran has been an obsession for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu from his earliest days in the public eye. Few in Israel disagree with that obsession, but past governments had significant internal dissent from the idea of provoking a conflict with the Islamic Republic. 

This government is much more willing to take bold steps to provoke that confrontation. Worse, successive American administrations have raised Israeli hopes that they can get the support from Washington that they would need to effectively fight Iran. ……………………………………………………………………………………… more https://mondoweiss.net/2024/09/biden-would-rather-defend-israeli-impunity-than-stop-a-regional-war/

October 1, 2024 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Questions still remain on the suspicious death of nuclear worker Karen Silkwood

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Silkwood,K

Karen Gay Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American chemical technician and labor union activist known for raising concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety of workers in a nuclear facility. Following her mysterious death, which received extensive coverage, her estate filed a lawsuit against chemical company Kerr-McGee, which was eventually settled for $1.38 million. Silkwood was portrayed by Meryl Streep in Mike Nichols‘ 1983 Academy Award-nominated film Silkwood.

She worked at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, United States. Silkwood’s job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. This plant experienced theft of plutonium by workers during this era. She joined the union and became an activist on behalf of issues of health and safety at the plant as a member of the union’s negotiating team, the first woman to have that position at Kerr-McGee. In the summer of 1974, she testified to the Atomic Energy Commission about her concerns.

For three days in November, she was found to have plutonium contamination on her person and in her home. That month, while driving to meet with David Burnham, a New York Times journalist, and Steve Wodka, an official of her union’s national office, she died in a car crash under unclear circumstances.

Her family sued Kerr-McGee on behalf of her estate. In what was the longest trial up until then in Oklahoma history, the jury found Kerr-McGee liable for the plutonium contamination of Silkwood, and awarded substantial damages. These were reduced on appeal, but the case reached the United States Supreme Court in 1979, which upheld the damages verdict. Before another trial took place, Kerr-McGee settled with the estate out of court for US $1.38 million, while not admitting liability. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood

Questions Still Remain In Suspicious Death Of Karen Silkwood

September 30, 2024 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA | Leave a comment

Hurricane Helene Floods Closed Duke Nuclear Plant in Florida

By Ari Natter, September 28, 2024 , https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/investing/2024/09/28/hurricane-helene-floods-retired-duke-nuclear-plant-in-florida/

(Bloomberg) — Floodwaters from Hurricane Helene have swamped a retired Duke Energy Corp. nuclear power plant, according to a filing with the Florida Department of Environmental Protection, though an escape of contaminated fuel appears unlikely. 

The Crystal River plant, which has been shuttered since 2013, experienced a storm surge of as much as 12 feet, according to the filing, which was posted online. 

“The whole site was flooded, including buildings, sumps, and lift stations. Industrial Wastewater Pond #5 was observed overflowing to the ground due to the surge,” according to the report, which was filed Friday, the day after Helene roared ashore. 

“We are still in the process of obtaining access and assessing the damage, but due to the nature of this event we anticipate difficulty with estimating the total discharge amount of wastewater, and impacts are unknown at this time,” the report said. 

The used nuclear fuel at the site remains secure, Duke Energy said in a statement Sunday. “All radioactive material has been segmented and permanently packaged in shielded containers impervious to the effects of extreme weather,” the company said.

The facility, just south of Cedar Key, is still in the process of being dismantled. It’s likely that the spent fuel, which is kept onsite in dry storage, is safe, Edwin Lyman, a nuclear specialist with the Union of Concerned Scientists, said in an email before Duke Energy commented. 

“There is probably still quite a bit of low-level radioactive waste awaiting shipment, and it’s likely the site wastewater has low levels of radioactive contamination,” Lyman said in an email. “Although anything is possible, based on the Fukushima experience, if the storage area were immersed in water for a short period of time, there is unlikely to be significant damage or leakage from the canisters.”

The site also flooded in 2023 after Hurricane Idalia made landfall, according to a report in Newsweek, that said spent fuel was scheduled to remain on site until 2037.

–With assistance from Tony Czuczka.

September 30, 2024 Posted by | climate change, USA | Leave a comment

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