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California Nuclear Plant Integrates AI for Efficiency

Oil Price By Haley Zaremba – Apr 13, 2025,

  • The Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in California is utilizing AI technology to improve the efficiency of its document retrieval processes, aiming to reduce the time and resources spent on managing technical documentation.
  • While the initial use of AI is limited to document retrieval, there are concerns among lawmakers and watchdogs regarding the potential for broader automation and the safety implications within a nuclear setting.
  • The convergence of nuclear energy and AI is being driven by the increasing energy demands of data centers, with tech leaders and the federal government exploring the symbiotic relationship between these technologies for future energy solutions.

……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………lawmakers are very concerned about what the introduction of artificial intelligence into nuclear power production could mean for the future, and are pushing for more concrete guardrails. However, under the Trump administration, such parameters may not be forthcoming. Trump has already walked back a Biden-era ??executive order outlining goals for AI regulation, which the current administration sees as anti-innovation. 

While there is little risk in the use of AI for document retrieval, there is concern about what comes next.

“The idea that you could just use generative AI for one specific kind of task at the nuclear power plant and then call it a day, I don’t really trust that it would stop there,” Tamara Kneese, the director of tech policy nonprofit Data & Society’s Climate, Technology, and Justice program, was recently quoted by Cal Matters. “And trusting PG&E to safely use generative AI in a nuclear setting is something that is deserving of more scrutiny.”

Nuclear energy and AI have become increasingly entangled as the runaway energy demand growth of data centers has threatened domestic energy security as well as Silicon Valley’s decarbonization goals. Tech bigwigs like Bill Gates and Sam Altman have increasingly touted nuclear energy as a carbon-free solution to meeting AI’s fast-growing energy demand, and have even envisioned a symbiotic relationship between nuclear and AI, wherein machine learning can help plan and design more efficient and cost-effective next-gen power plants. 

The federal government has also pushed this angle. The U.S. Department of Energy recently identified 16 federal sites that ??are “uniquely positioned for rapid data center construction, including in-place energy infrastructure with the ability to fast-track permitting for new energy generation such as nuclear.” https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/California-Nuclear-Plant-Integrates-AI-for-Efficiency.html

April 15, 2025 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Moltex Canada pushes on with nuclear project as U.K. parent struggles

Matthew McClearn, Globe and Mail, Toronto, 14 Apr 25

The British owner of New Brunswick small modular nuclear reactor developer Moltex Energy Canada Inc. is up for sale as part of a U.K. insolvency proceeding.

Moltex Energy Ltd., a private company based in Stratford-upon-Avon, announced last month the appointment of two insolvency practitioners from accounting firm Azets Holdings Ltd. to manageitsaffairs. Azets hired appraisers Hilco Valuation Services to solicit offers for its assets, which are due May 7.

It’s the latest complication fortaxpayer-sponsored efforts to construct small modular reactors, or SMRs, in New Brunswick.

Moltex’s wholly owned Canadian subsidiary is one of two vendors partnered with New Brunswick Power to build reactors at Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station. Moltex Canada’s is known as the Stable Salt Reactor-Wasteburner (SSR-W), and it’s also developing a plant to reprocess spent nuclear fuel. The second company, ARC Clean Technology, is working on another reactor called the ARC-100.

Both were originally promised by 2030. But developing a novel nuclear reactor is a painstaking, resource-intensive process that can require hundreds of employees, billions of dollars and decades of effort. New Brunswick and the federal government backed startups with only one or two dozen employees, and they’ve struggled to raise funds privately.

Moltex’s British holding company was founded in 2014 by Ian Scott, who previously worked in the biological-sciences field including as a senior scientist at Unilever PLC. (A co-founder, John Durham, stepped down as a director in October.) According to its latest financial report, published in January, it employed two people during the year ended March 31, 2024, and lost £630,000 (about $1.1-million). For several years its reports raised uncertainty about its ability to continue as a going concern.

Britain’s administration process is similar to proceedings under Canada’s Companies’ Creditors Arrangement Act; according to the British government, it’s intended to provide “breathing space” while a rescue package or sale of assets is executed.

According to Moltex Energy Ltd.’s financial statements, its shareholders had provided its equity throughout its history; it carried no long-term debt. The company reported in 2023 that its future depended on raising external capital; it had enough cash flow to survive through December, 2025, albeit “there would need to be cuts.”

Rory O’Sullivan, chief executive officer of Moltex Energy Canada, was also a director of the parent company for much of the past several years. He said the British company’s shareholders would not approve the Canadian subsidiary’s fundraising efforts, effectively stalling them.

“The key here is we needed to get someone else in control of Moltex Energy Ltd. so that we could have a competitive sale process,” Mr. O’Sullivan said…………………………..

New Brunswick’s government attracted Moltex and ARC to establish offices in the province in 2018. The two companies have each estimated that it would cost around $500-million to develop their respective technologies…………………………

As for ARC, its CEO and other employees suddenly departed last summer; ARC has published no announcements on its website since then. The ARC-100 is undergoing a prelicensing review by the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission. Spokesperson Sandra Donnelly said the company will complete its design by 2027 to support an application for a construction licence.

NB Power’s CEO, Lori Clark, presented SMRs as playing a crucial role in her utility’s plans to achieve “net zero” emissions. More recently, however, she acknowledged that neither project is likely to follow its original schedule, and the utility is now considering other reactors for construction at Point Lepreau.

Spokesperson Dominique Couture wrote in a statement that NB Power has been working on an environmental impact assessment for the ARC-100 during the past year. And it assisted Moltex’s development efforts for reprocessing spent fuel.

All this is far less than what the federal government envisioned in the SMR Roadmap, a 2018 document developed with extensive input from the nuclear industry. It promised demonstration projects across the country; successive federal budgets allocated hundreds of millions of dollars to support them.

Canadian Nuclear Laboratories was to have an SMR called the Micro Modular Reactor up and running at its Chalk River facility by 2026. But its partner in that project, Ultra Safe Nuclear Corp., initiated a court-supervised sale process under Chapter 11 of the U.S. Bankruptcy Code in October. Another partner, Ontario Power Generation, pulled out last year.

Of the demonstration projects contemplated in the SMR Roadmap, only one appears to be on track: OPG’s proposal to build a “grid-scale” SMR at its Darlington Station. This month it received a construction licence from the CNSC to build its first reactor, a BWRX-300 designed by U.S. vendor GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy. If completed on schedule by 2028, it would be the first SMR in any G7 country. https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-moltex-canada-pushes-on-with-nuclear-project-as-uk-parent-struggles/#comments

April 15, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, Canada | Leave a comment

Iran says ‘indirect talks’ have taken place with US over nuclear programme – with more to follow

The talks come after US President Donald Trump warned Iran it would be in “great danger” if a deal wasn’t reached between the two countries.


 Sky News 1 13 April 2025

The discussions on Saturday took place in Muscat, Oman, with the host nation’s officials mediating between representatives of Iran and the US, who were seated in separate rooms, according to Esmail Baghaei, a spokesperson for Iran’s foreign ministry.

After the meeting, Oman’s foreign minister Sayyid Badr Albusaidi thanked Iran’s foreign minister Abbas Araghchi and US Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff for joining the negotiations aimed at “global peace, security and stability”, in an X post.

“We will continue to work together and put further efforts to assist in arriving at this goal,” he added.

‘Very positive’ and ‘constructive’

Iranian state media claimed the US and Iranian officials “briefly spoke in the presence of the Omani foreign minister” at the end of the talks – a claim Mr Araghchi echoed in a statement on Telegram.

He said the talks took place in a “constructive atmosphere based on mutual respect” and that they would continue next week.

Speaking on board Air Force One on Saturday US President Donald Trump said the “talks are going okay”……………………………………………………..

Reuters news agency said an Omani source told it the talks were focused on de-escalating regional tensions, prisoner exchanges and limited agreements to ease sanctions in exchange for controlling Iran’s nuclear programme.

‘Great danger’ if talks fail

Donald Trump has insisted Tehran cannot get nuclear weapons.

He said on Monday the talks would be direct, but Tehran officials insisted it would be conducted through an intermediary.

Mr Trump also warned Iran would be in “great danger” if negotiations fail…………….

He added Iran “cannot have a nuclear weapon, and if the talks aren’t successful, I actually think it will be a very bad day for Iran”.

The comments came after Mr Trump’s previous warnings of possible military action against Iran if there is no deal over its nuclear programme. https://news.sky.com/story/iran-says-indirect-talks-taking-place-with-us-over-nuclear-programme-13347051

April 15, 2025 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Inside the New Mexico lab where the U.S. is moving into the most terrifying chapter of the nuclear arms race

By JAMES REINL, 13 Apr 25, https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14597065/activity-new-mexico-lab-nuclear-arms-race.html

It weighs just 824lbs, but packs enough plutonium to vaporize a city center and kill and maim three million people in the blink of an eye.

Scarier still, production of America’s new B61-13 gravity bomb is seven months ahead of schedule, as scientists speed up work at their laboratory in the New Mexico desert.

The timeline was moved up due to the ‘critical challenge and urgent need’ for a new nuclear deterrent. It is 24 times more powerful than the atom bomb that levelled Hiroshima, Japan, in 1945.

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They speak of an ‘urgent need’ for the new super-nuke, as everywhere from Russia to China, North Korea and even Britain boost their stockpiles of warheads.

Nuclear arms watchers say that, while overall global inventories have fallen since the Cold War, the number of warheads deployed for combat readiness is on the rise once again.

For some, this new nuclear arms race is scarier than when America and the Soviet Union built enough nukes to wipe out mankind many times over in the years after World War II.

That’s down to the wide array of states that possess the weapons now — which includes India, Pakistan, and, reputedly, Israel — and as a multipolar balance of power emerges.

As the US Trump administration slights its allies in Europe and Asia, the club of nine nuclear powers looks set to expand, perhaps quickly, and grow even more unwieldy.

In recent months, officials from Germany to Poland, South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia have broken the nuclear taboo and spoken about acquiring nukes, or related technology.

Meanwhile, Iran’s religious hardliners have been spinning their uranium centrifuges in secret for years.

Joseph Cirincione, a national security analyst who advised the State Department in the Obama administration, warns of a ‘nuclear nightmare’ of more European nations going fissile.

‘Should they proceed, the spread of nuclear weapons would not be limited to Europe or our allies,’ says Cirincione.

‘The nuclear reaction chain could quickly spread to Asia, where Japan, South Korea and Taiwan face similar worries about the reliability of their defense agreements with America.’

This is all happening as US President Donald Trump slaps tariffs on nuclear-armed China, and many other big economies, in a trade war that’s raised tensions and roiled stock markets.

Scientists at Sandia National Laboratories in New Mexico recently said they were kickstarting development of the B61-13, a nuclear ‘gravity bomb’ that was originally slated to go into production for the US Air Force in 2026.

Gravity bombs are literally what they sound like, a bomb dropped from a warplane that lets gravity do all the work.

It would be dropped by the stealth B-21 Raider, and have a yield of as much as 360 kilotons, or 360,000 tons of TNT.

It would create a blast radius of roughly 190,000 feet, the length of two Manhattans.

If dropped over a city like Beijing, the B61-13 would likely leave some 788,000 people dead and 2.2 million injured.

Anything within a half-mile radius of the detonation site would be vaporized by the ensuing fireball, and the blast would demolish buildings and kill nearly everyone else within a mile.


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 Inside Trump’s bold plan to save America from a nuclear apocalypse… and what happens if it fails 

Those within a two-mile radius of the blast site would also suffer from high levels of radiation that would likely kill them within a month.

Another 15 percent of the survivors would likely perish from cancer years down the line.

Currently, the US has some 5,044 nuclear warheads in its arsenal, with Russia being the only country that has more.

Together, they possess about 88 percent of all the world’s nuclear weapons.

The Federation of American Scientists says the US and Russia are bringing down the total number of nuclear weapons globally by dismantling their old, retired warheads.

But the number of warheads in global military stockpiles is actually increasing, says the group of atomic researchers.

Five nuclear-armed states — China, Pakistan, India, Israel, and North Korea — have all raised their nuclear stockpiles by more than 700 warheads these past 40 years.

Meanwhile, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine in 2023, and subsequent Western military aid to Kiev, stoked fears of a nuclear escalation.

Russian President Vladimir Putin in November lowered the threshold for Moscow’s use of its nuclear weapons.

Alarmed by this, the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists in January moved their ‘Doomsday Clock’ closer to midnight than ever before.

The metaphorical timepiece is now at just 89 seconds before midnight — the theoretical point of annihilation.

Fears of a nuclear war come as such groups as the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) say work on a treaty to permanently ban nuclear testing has stalled, and Russia and China are adding buildings at their nuclear sites.

In February, the US government announced plans to restart its nuclear testing programs in secret underground facilities.

Fears of a nuclear war come as such groups as the US National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) say work on a treaty to permanently ban nuclear testing has stalled, and Russia and China are adding buildings at their nuclear sites.

In February, the US government announced plans to restart its nuclear testing programs in secret underground facilities.

In any case, the rise of China, which has some 600 nuclear warheads and is building more, complicates any negotiation process, as the nuclear arms race has more than two main players.

Former Russian president Dmitry Medvedev warned that more countries would get nuclear weapons in the coming years.

He blamed the West for pushing the world towards the brink of World War Three by waging a proxy war against Russia in Ukraine.

Trump has said the ‘power of nuclear weapons is crazy’ and supports a global effort to ‘denuclearize’ and has revived talks with Iran aimed at ending its bootleg nuclear program.

Iranian Foreign Minister Abbas Araqchi and US special envoy Steve Witkoff will meet in Oman on Saturday, after Trump threatened to bomb the Islamic Republic if discussions failed.

Yet Cirincione and others say the Trump administration is inadvertently making a global nuclear arms race more likely.

That’s because it is frosty toward long-standing US allies in Europe and Asia, including through the so-called ‘nuclear umbrella’ — a promise of nuclear protection in return for allies not seeking atomic weapons themselves.

From Berlin to Tokyo, alarm bells are ringing that Washington, the anchor of the Western security apparatus across Europe and Asia, is no longer a reliable guarantor of the ultimate deterrence offered by nuclear arms.

The clearest statement of nuclear intent has come from Donald Tusk, Poland‘s prime minister, who last month said the ‘profound change in American geopolitics’ has nudged Warsaw to seek ‘opportunities related to nuclear weapons.’

‘This is a serious race: a race for security, not for war,’ Tusk told Polish lawmakers.

Likewise, Friedrich Merz, the man who is set to be Germany’s next chancellor, said in February that it was time for Berlin to explore a ‘nuclear sharing’ deal with Britain and France.

Senior figures in South Korea, Japan, and Saudi Arabia, have also made statements about acquiring nuclear arms or technology.

Likewise, Taiwan, Turkey and Egypt, have declared no interest in acquiring a deterrent, but could well change tack if they lived in a neighborhood of nuclear states.

For many defense analysts, there is perhaps the greatest threat of proliferation beyond the nine nuclear states since the end of the Cold War.

‘Whether he meant it or not, Trump has sent a message that the US nuclear umbrella might one day be folded,’ a Western security source said last month.

‘Once a South Korea or a Germany signals that they’re going for the bomb, it will be hard indeed to stop others following suit.’

April 14, 2025 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Texas Budget Throws a Lot of Tax Dollars at Unproven Nuclear Technology

The initial $750 million tax dollars invested could swell to $2 billion

 Public Citizen 11th April 2025

AUSTIN, Texas – The Texas House of Representatives gave initial approval early Friday to a state supplemental budget that includes $750 million in taxpayer giveaways to developers of advanced nuclear reactors, putting what could ultimately become a $2 billion bet on unproven technology.

The appropriation is part of House Bill 500 – a supplemental budget bill for the 2026-27 biennium – and directed toward the Texas Nuclear Power Fund. This new program would be created by another bill pending before the Legislature.

The initial $750 million in funds could become a $2 billion cost to taxpayers because of the program’s completion bonuses.

“Lawmakers have various strategies to choose from to fix the grid stability problems exposed by 2021’s Winter Storm Uri,” said Adrian Shelley, Texas director of Public Citizen. “With this budget’s subsidies for unproven nuclear technology, lawmakers are again going with the pricier, much harder-to-implement option that its proponents admit will take years to pay off. It’s a promise that comes with a giant “if” and wastes valuable time in the race to fix the grid’s predicted demand and supply issues.”

Gov. Greg Abbott prioritized nuclear energy at the start of the legislative session. In response, legislators proposed the Texas Nuclear Power Fund to incentivize the development of so-called small modular reactors (SMR). However, the technology is not cost-competitive with other forms of power generation, including wind, solar and fossil fuels. The only publicly traded company in the United States trying to build SMRs has canceled six proposals in Idaho after cost overruns of 250%………..
https://www.citizen.org/news/texas-budget-throws-a-lot-of-tax-dollars-at-unproven-nuclear-technology/

April 14, 2025 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Trump declares he would ‘absolutely’ bomb Iran if it refuses to give up its bid for nuclear weapons

The Iran nuclear deal, which Trump scuttled after it was put in place under Barack Obama, was negotiated through multi-party talks.

On Tuesday Trump ridiculed fears of climate change, then pivoted to the Iran threat, which he called much more grave

Says Israel would be ‘very much involved’ 

By GEOFF EARLE, DEPUTY U.S. POLITICAL EDITOR, 10 April 25 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-14589765/donald-trump-bomb-iran-nuclear-weapons.html

President Donald Trump openly discussed military action against Iran just days before talks are set to begin on its nuclear program.

He upped his threats a day after he used colorful language to warn against ‘nuclear heat’ while saying Iran must relinquish nuclear ambitions. 

A reporter asked Trump to specify his comment Tuesday that it would be ‘very dangerous’ for Iran if nuclear talks are unsuccessful.

Well they can’t have a nuclear weapon,’ Trump said. Pressed on if he meant military action, Trump responded: ‘Oh if necessary? Absolutely, yeah.’

Asked if he had a deadline with Iran, Trump responded, ‘Yeah, I do,’ but declined to say what it was.

But he said this weekend – with talks set to commence in Oman Saturday – was not the deadline. ‘We have a little time, but we don’t have much time,’ the president said.

‘Because we’re not going to let them have a nuclear weapon, can’t let them have a nuclear – and we’re gonna let them thrive. I want them to thrive. I want Iran to be great. The only thing they can’t have is a nuclear weapon.

‘I’m not asking for much. I just … they can’t have a nuclear weapon,’ Trump said.

‘But with Iran, yeah, if we, if it requires military, we’re gonna have military. Israel will obviously be very much involved in that. He’ll be the leader of that. But nobody leads us. We do what we want to do.

In his final cryptic comment, he added: ‘When you start talks, you know they’re going along well or not. And I would say the conclusion would be when I think they’re not going along well. So that’s just a feeling.’

Trump has pledged it is ‘not after a nuclear bomb’ and even expressed interest to direct U.S. investment.

Trump’s comments came on a day he did a sudden U-turn and imposed a 90-day pause on his ‘reciprocal’ tariffs, while maintaining a 10 percent across the board tariff and hiking the tariff on China to 125 percent.

The episode revealed both Trump’s willingness to throw the global system into turmoil to achieve his goals, and his willingness to backtrack amid fears of a recession and trillions worth of market losses. He also signed orders directing the Justice Department to investigate Miles Taylor, who wrote a critical book under the pen name ‘Anonymous’ during his first term, and former cyber security official Chris Krebs, who vouched for the security of the 2020 elections during the COVID pandemic.

Satellite images have revealed the deployment of six nuclear-capable B-2 bombers on Diego Garcia, a British-owned naval base that has been critical during U.S. military campaigns. 

Trump on Monday said the U.S. would hold top level ‘direct’ talks with Iran – while brandishing new threats and repeating demands that Iran could not be allowed to have a nuclear weapon.

‘We’re having direct talks with Iran. And they’ve started,’ Trump told reporters while seated in the Oval Office next to Israeli PM Benjamin Netanyahu, himself a top Iran hawk.

The talks are set to take place in Oman, but Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araqchi, said the talks would be ‘indirect,’ amid longstanding tensions between the two nations.

The U.S. has avoided such direct talks for years. The Iran nuclear deal, which Trump scuttled after it was put in place under Barack Obama, was negotiated through multi-party talks.

‘I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable to doing the obvious. And the obvious is not something that I want to be involved with, or frankly, that Israel wants to be involved with, if they can avoid it,’ he added. ‘So we are going to see if we can avoid it, but it’s getting to be very dangerous territory, and hopefully those talks will be successful.’

‘And I think it would be in Iran’s best interests if they are successful.’

 On Tuesday Trump ridiculed fears of climate change, then pivoted to the Iran threat, which he called much more grave

‘We were going to be gone, we’re all going to be gone – the environment. No, what they have to worry about is the nuclear – nuclear heat. They don’t have to worry about environmental heat. They have to worry about nuclear heat,’ Trump said on an event where he called for deregulating the coal industry.

‘And if we’re smart, we’re working on that right now with others, having to do with Iran and some other countries,’ Trump said.

‘But that’s the that’s the heat you’re gonna have to worry about. You don’t have to worry about the air is getting warmer. The ocean will rise … within the next 500 to 600 years, giving you a little bit more waterfront property. They say this is going to these guys can handle that. The nuclear we have a bigger problem with, right?’ Trump said. 

Iran claims its nuclear program is peaceful, but U.S. intelligence has long warned it was close to being capable of producing nuclear weapons. 

April 13, 2025 Posted by | Iran, Israel, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

To Secure U.S. Energy Dominance, the Department of Defense Selects Eligible Companies for the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations Program


Defense Innovation Unit 10th April 2025 Mountain View, CA

– To ensure U.S. energy dominance, the Defense Innovation Unit (DIU), with the Department of the Army and the Department of the Air Force, launched the Advanced Nuclear Power for Installations (ANPI) program. First announced in summer 2024, the program will allow for the design and build of fixed on-site microreactor nuclear power systems on select military installations to support global operations across land, air, sea, space, and cyberspace. The Department of Defense team selected eight companies to be eligible to demonstrate the ability to deliver compliant, safe, secure, and reliable nuclear power.

The companies are now eligible to receive Other Transaction (OT) awards to provide commercially available dual use microreactor technology at various DOD installations. Selected companies for the ANPI program include:

  • Antares Nuclear, Inc
  • BWXT Advanced Technologies LLC
  • General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems
  • Kairos Power, LLC
  • Oklo Inc.
  • Radiant Industries Incorporated
  • Westinghouse Government Services
  • X-Energy, LLC

“Projecting power abroad demands ensuring power at home and this program aims to deliver that, ensuring that our defense leaders can remain focused on lethality,” said Dr. Andrew Higier, Energy Portfolio Director at DIU. “Microreactors on installations are a critical first step in delivering energy dominance to the Force. Tapping into the commercial sector’s rapid advancements in this area is critical due to the significant private investment in this space over the last few years. The U.S. and the DoD must maintain the advantage and leverage the best of breed nuclear technology for our national security.”

The ANPI project directly supports Executive Order (E.O.) 14156 – Declaring a National Energy Emergency and E.O. 14154 – Unleashing American Energy

……………………………………… In addition to DIU, Army, Air Force, ANPI receives support from the Department of Energy; the NRC; Idaho National Laboratory with Oak Ridge National Laboratory; Los Alamos National Laboratory; Argonne National Laboratory; Pacific Northwest National Laboratory; Sandia National Laboratory; and the Office of Nuclear Energy. https://www.diu.mil/latest/DOD-selects-eligible-companies-for-the-Advanced-Nuclear-Power-for-Installations-Program

April 13, 2025 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Walt Zlotow: Trump, Hegseth off by nearly 1 trillion on national security budget

Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 11 Apr 25 https://theaimn.net/trump-hegseth-off-by-nearly-1-trillion-on-national-security-budget/

Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth is applauding Trump’s boast to push through America’s first trillion dollar defense budget.

“Thank you Mr. President! COMING SOON: the first TRILLION dollar [Defense Department] budget.” Hegseth was echoing boss Trump who chortled “Nobody’s seen anything like it. We have to build out military, and we’re very cost-conscious, but the military is something we have to build, and we have to be strong,”

Trump’s defense policy and these quotes epitomize America’s decline as a peaceful, caring nation. Spending that trillion on militarism and warfare worldwide while Trump’s oligarchs are slashing a trillion from the social safety net is putting America into a death spiral from which it may never recover.

But they should really be high-fiving a national security budget that will be approaching $2 trillion based on Trump’s defense agenda.

That’s because the current defense budget under the National Defense Authorization Act of $900 billion just funds the Pentagon. When factoring in the Department of Veterans Affairs, special operations, Homeland Security and the national security share of US debt interest, the total for Fiscal ‘25 national security approaches $1.8 trillion. Regarding special ops, Trump’s failed month long Yemen bombing to stop their resistance to US enabled Israeli genocide in Gaza has already passed a billion bucks.

Current wars US supports in Ukraine, Gaza, Yemen, Somalia, Syria, Iraq and possible upcoming wars in Iran and China, don’t come cheap. Add in cost of over 750 bases in 80 countries hosting over 150,000 military personnel puts the approaching $2 trillion dollar cost in perspective.

Spending all that treasure on national offense (nope, not defense), becomes problematical when Trump is pushing thru trillion dollar tax cuts for his oligarch buddies.

What to do? Of Course, send in oligarch clown Musk to cut a trillion or more from everything that makes life livable for Joe Sixpack.

It is no surprise Trump plans to ravage the social safety net to spend $2 trillion on worldwide military adventurism while giving $4.5 trillion in tax cuts over 10 years mainly to those who don’t need them.

But do Trump and Hegseth have to brag about it?

April 12, 2025 Posted by | business and costs, politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Trump has threatened Iran over an ultimatum that likely cannot be met

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran appears to be moving the U.S. down a path to where war is the only outcome, as occurred in 1914 – an outcome which ultimately triggered WW1.

Strategic Culture Foundation, Alastair Crooke, April 7, 2025

What is understood now is that ‘we’re no longer playing chess’. There are no rules anymore.

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran? Colonel Doug Macgregor compares the Trump ultimatum to Iran to that which Austria-Hungary delivered to Serbia in 1914: An offer, in short, that ‘could not be refused’. Serbia accepted nine out of the ten demands. But it refused one – and Austria-Hungary immediately declared war.

On 4 February, shortly after his Inauguration, President Trump signed a National Security Presidential Memorandum (NSPM); that is to say, a legally binding directive requiring government agencies to carry out the specified actions precisely.

The demands are that Iran should be denied a nuclear weapon; denied inter-continental missiles, and denied too other asymmetric and conventional weapons capabilities. All these demands go beyond the NPT and the existing JCPOA. To this end, the NSPM directs maximum economic pressure be imposed; that the U.S. Treasury act to drive Iran’s oil exports to zero; that the U.S. work to trigger JCPOA Snapback of sanctions; and that Iran’s “malign influence abroad” – its “proxies” – be neutralised.

The UN sanctions snapback expires in October, so time is short to fulfil the procedural requirements to Snapback. All this suggests why Trump and Israeli officials give Spring as the deadline to a negotiated agreement.

Trump’s ultimatum to Iran appears to be moving the U.S. down a path to where war is the only outcome, as occurred in 1914 – an outcome which ultimately triggered WW1.

Might this just be Trump bluster? Possibly, but it does sound as if Trump is issuing legally binding demands such that he must expect cannot be met. Acceptance of Trump’s demands would leave Iran neutered and stripped of its sovereignty, at the very least. There is an implicit ‘tone’ to these demands too, that is one of threatening and expecting regime change in Iran as its outcome.

It may be Trump bluster, but the President has ‘form’ (past convictions) on this issue. He has unabashedly hewed to the Netanyahu line on Iran that the JCPOA (or any deal with Iran) was ‘bad’. In May 2014, Trump withdrew the U.S. from the JCPOA at Netanyahu’s behest and instead issued a new set of 12 demands to Iran – including permanently and verifiably abandoning its nuclear programme in perpetuity and ceasing all uranium enrichment.

What is the difference between those earlier Trump demands and those of this February? Essentially they are the same, except today he says: If Iran “doesn’t make a deal, there will be bombing. It will be bombing the likes of which they have never seen before”.

Thus, there is both history, and the fact that Trump is surrounded – on this issue at least – by a hostile cabal of Israeli Firsters and Super Hawks. Witkoff is there, but is poorly grounded on the issues. Trump too, has shown himself virtually totalitarian in terms of any and all criticism of Israel in American Academia. And in Gaza, Lebanon and Syria, he is fully supportive of Netanyahu’s far-right provocative and expansionist agenda.

These present demands regarding Iran also run counter to the 25 March 2025 latest annual U.S. Intelligence Threat Assessment that Iran is NOT building a nuclear weapon. This Intelligence Assessment is effectively disregarded. A few days before its release, Trump’s National Security Adviser, Mike Waltz clearly stated that the Trump Administration is seeking the “full dismantlement” of Iran's nuclear energy program: “Iran has to give up its program in a way that the entire world can see”, Waltz said. “It is time for Iran to walk away completely from its desire to have a nuclear weapon”.

On the one hand, it seems that behind these ultimata stands a President made “pissed off and angry” at his inability to end the Ukraine war almost immediately – as he first mooted – together with pressures from a bitterly fractured Israel and a volatile Netanyahu to compress the timeline for the speedy ‘finishing off’ of the Iranian ‘regime’ (which, it is claimed, has never been weaker). All so that Israel can normalise with Lebanon –and even Syria. And with Iran supposedly ‘disabled’, pursue implementation of the Greater Israel project to be normalised across the Middle East.

Which, on the other hand, will enable Trump to pursue the ‘long-overdue’ grand pivot to China. (And China is energy-vulnerable – regime change in Tehran would be a calamity, from the Chinese perspective).

To be plain, Trump’s China strategy needs to be in place too, in order to advance Trump’s financial system re-balancing plans. …………………………………………………………………………………….. https://strategic-culture.su/news/2025/04/07/break-leg-that-old-mafia-warning-trump-has-threatened-iran-over-ultimatum-that-likely-cannot-be-met/

April 11, 2025 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

A Iran and US to enter high-stakes nuclear negotiations – hampered by a lack of trust

April 10, 2025. The Conversation, Ali Bilgic, Professor of International Relations and Middle East Politics, Loughborough University

The announcement of planned talks between the US and Iran in Oman signifies a crucial development – especially given the history of distrust and animosity that has characterised their interactions.

There remains a degree of confusion as to whether the negotiations over Iran’s development of a nuclear capacity will be direct or indirect. The US has said that its Middle East envoy, Steve Witkoff, will meet Iran’s foreign minister, Abbas Araghchi. Donald Trump has publicly stated that Iran will be in “great danger” if the negotiations fail.

Iran meanwhile has said that talks will be conducted through an intermediary. Araghchi commented that: “It is as much an opportunity as it is a test. The ball is in America’s court.”

This seeming clash in messaging before the talks have even begun is not the greatest omen for their success, even with the threat of US or Israeli military action hovering over Iran. Representatives from Iran, China and Russia are reported to have met in Moscow on April 8.

China’s foreign ministry released a statement reminding the world that it was the US “which unilaterally withdrew from the JCPOA [the 2015 nuclear deal or joint comprehensive plan of action] and caused the current situation”. It stressed the need for Washington to “show political sincerity, act in the spirit of mutual respect, engage in dialogue and consultation, and stop the threat of force and maximum pressure”.

This followed messaging from Washington which very much focused on the possibility of force and maximum pressure. Speaking to the press after meeting the Israeli prime minister Benjamin Netanyahu, Trump struck a very aggressive note, saying: “Iran cannot have a nuclear weapon and if the talks aren’t successful, I actually think it will be a very bad day for Iran if that’s the case…………………………………………………

Rocky road ahead

A major issue affecting the talks is the low level of trust between the two parties. The US’s involvement in the Gaza conflict – including Trump’s controversial proposal to clear Gaza of Palestinians to make way for possible redevelopment – has further strained relations. So has the recent US campaign against the Tehran-backed Houthi rebels in Yemen.

Further threats of this kind are likely to be seen by Iran as aggressive and coercive – and Trump’s latest rhetoric won’t have helped. This will inevitably undermine the prospects for trust between the parties.

Iran’s scepticism is rooted in past experiences where promises of economic relief were not fulfilled. Trump’s withdrawal of the US from the 2015 nuclear deal in 2018 is a case in point. This perceived breach of trust has made Iran cautious about entering into new agreements without concrete assurances.

The regional context adds another layer of complexity to the talks. American support for Israel’s actions in Gaza is likely to complicate matters. The populations of most Gulf states are fully supportive of Palestinian self-determination and are scandalised at the way the US president has seemingly given the green light to Israel’s breach of the ceasefire and resumption of hostilities.

Iran’s internal politics are also likely to play an important role in shaping its approach to the negotiations. The country is experiencing significant political polarisation between the “hardliners”, spearheaded by the supreme leader Ali Khamenei, and the “reformists”, who are relatively more conciliatory towards the US and Europe. ………………………..https://theconversation.com/iran-and-us-to-enter-high-stakes-nuclear-negotiations-hampered-by-a-lack-of-trust-254106

April 10, 2025 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

‘We thought it was the end of the world’: How the US dropped four nuclear bombs on Spain in 1966

Myles Burke https://www.bbc.com/culture/article/20250404-how-the-us-dropped-nuclear-bombs-on-spain-in-1966 7 Apr 25

In 1966, the remote Spanish village of Palomares found that the “nuclear age had fallen on them from a clear blue sky”. Two years after the terrifying accident, BBC reporter Chris Brasher went to find what happened when the US lost a hydrogen bomb.

On 7 April 1966, almost 60 years ago this week, a missing nuclear weapon for which the US military had been desperately searching for 80 days was finally found. The warhead, with an explosive power 100 times that of the bomb dropped on Hiroshima, was carefully winched from a depth of 2,850ft (869m) out of the Mediterranean Sea and delicately lowered onto the USS Petrel. Once it was on board, officers painstakingly cut into the thermonuclear device’s casing to disarm it. It was only then that everyone could breathe a sigh of relief – the last of the four hydrogen bombs that the US had accidentally dropped on Spain had been recovered.

“This was not the first accident involving nuclear weapons,” said BBC reporter Chris Brasher when he reported from the scene in 1968. “The Pentagon lists at least nine previous accidents to aircraft carrying hydrogen bombs. But this was the first accident on foreign soil, the first to involve civilians and the first to excite the attention of the world.”

This terrifying situation had come about because of a US operation code-named Chrome Dome. At the beginning of the 1960s, the US had developed a project to deter its Cold War rival, the Soviet Union, from launching a pre-emptive strike. A patrol of nuclear-armed B-52 bombers would continuously criss-cross the skies, primed to attack Moscow at a moment’s notice. But to stay airborne on these long looping routes, the planes needed to refuel while in flight.

On 17 January 1966, one such bomber was flying at a height of 31,000ft (9.5km) over the Almería region of southern Spain, and attempted a routine air-to-air refuelling with a KC-135 tanker plane. “I believe what happened was the bomber was closing at a too-high rate of closure speed and he didn’t stabilise his position,” US Maj Gen Delmar Wilson, the man in charge of dealing with the catastrophic accident, told Brasher, “with the result that they got too close and collided.”

The B-52 bomber’s impact with the refuelling plane tore it open, igniting the jet fuel the KC-135 was carrying and killing all four of the crew onboard. The ensuing explosion also killed two men in the B-52’s tail section. A third managed to eject, but died when his parachute did not open. The other four members of the bomber’s crew successfully bailed out of their burning plane before it broke apart and fell to earth, raining down both flaming aircraft fragments and its lethal thermonuclear cargo onto the remote Spanish village of Palomares.

Everyone kept talking about a ‘broken arrow’. I learnt then that ‘broken arrow’ was the code word for a nuclear accident – Capt Joe Ramirez

The huge fireball was seen a mile away. Thankfully, it did not trigger a nuclear explosion. The bomber’s warheads were not armed and had built-in safeguards to prevent an unintended atomic chain reaction. But the thermonuclear devices did have explosives surrounding their plutonium cores as part of the triggering mechanism. In the event of an accident, the bombs had parachutes attached to them designed to cushion the impact on landing and prevent radioactive contamination. And indeed, one undetonated bomb did land safely in a riverbed and was recovered intact the following day. Unfortunately, two of the plummeting nuclear bombs’ parachutes failed to open.

That morning, Spanish farmer Pedro Alarcón was walking to his house with his grandchildren when one of the nuclear bombs landed in his tomato field and blew apart on impact. “We were blown flat. The children started to cry. I was paralysed with fear. A stone hit me in the stomach, I thought I’d been killed. I lay there feeling like death with the children crying,” he told the BBC in 1968.

Devastation and chaos

The other hydrogen bomb also exploded when it hit the ground near a cemetery. These dual blasts created vast craters and scattered highly toxic, radioactive plutonium dust across several hundred acres. Burning aircraft debris also showered the Spanish village. “I was crying and running about,” a villager called Señora Flores told the BBC in 1968. “My little girl was crying, ‘Mama, Mama, look at our house, it is burning.’ Because of all the smoke I thought what she said must be true. There were a lot of stones and debris falling around us. I thought it would hit us. It was this terrific explosion. We thought it was the end of the world.”

Once the news that the bomber had come down with nuclear weapons aboard reached US military command, a huge operation was launched. At the time of the disaster, Capt Joe Ramirez was an US Air Force lawyer stationed in Madrid. “There were a lot of people talking, there was a lot of excitement in the conference room. Everyone kept talking about a ‘broken arrow’. I learnt then that ‘broken arrow’ was the code word for a nuclear accident,” he told BBC’s Witness History in 2011.

US military personnel were scrambled to the area by helicopter. When Capt Ramirez arrived in Palomares, he immediately saw the devastation and chaos wrought by the accident. Huge pieces of smoking wreckage were strewn all over the area – a large part of the burning B-52 bomber had landed in the school’s yard. “It’s a small village but there were people scrambling in different directions. I could see smouldering debris, I could see some fires.”

Despite the carnage, miraculously no one in the village was killed. “Nearly 100 tonnes of flaming debris had fallen on the village but not even a chicken had died,” said Brasher. A local school teacher and doctor climbed up to the fire-scarred hillside to retrieve the remains of the US airmen who had been killed. “Later still, they sorted the pieces and the limbs into five coffins, an act that was to cause a certain amount of bureaucratic difficulty when the Americans came to claim only four bodies from that hillside,” said Brasher.

Three of the B-52 crew who managed to eject landed in the Mediterranean several miles off the coast and were rescued by local fishing boats within an hour of the accident. The fourth, the B-52 radar-navigator, ejected through the plane’s explosion, which left him badly burned, and was unable to separate himself from his ejection seat. Despite this, he managed to open his parachute and was found alive near the village and taken to hospital.

However, this still left the problem of locating the plane’s deadly nuclear payload. “My main concern was to recover those bombs, that was number-one priority,” Gen Wilson told the BBC in 1968.

One of our nuclear bombs is missing

“The first night, the Guardia Civil [the Spanish national police force] had come to the little bar in Palomares, and that was about the only place that had electricity. And they had reported what they considered to be a bomb, so we immediately despatched some of our people to this riverbed which is not far from the centre of town, and, in fact, it was a bomb, so we placed a guard on that. And then the next morning, at first daylight, we started conducting our search, and I believe it was something in the order of 10am or 11am the following morning, we located two other bombs.”

This accounted for three of the nuclear bombs, but there was still one missing. By the next day, trucks filled with US troops had been sent from nearby bases, with the beach in Palomares becoming a base for some 700 US airmen and scientists urgently trying to contain any radioactive contamination and locate the fourth warhead.

“The first thing that you could see as the search really got underway in earnest was Air Force personnel linking up hand-by-hand and 40 or 50 people in a line. They would have designated search areas. There were some people with Geiger counters who started arriving, and so they started marking off the areas which were contaminated,” said Capt Ramirez in 2011. When US personnel registered an area contaminated with radiation, they would scrape up the first three inches of topsoil and seal it in barrels to be shipped back to the US. Some 1,400 tonnes of irradiated soil ended up being sent to a storage facility in South Carolina.

Both the US and Spain, which at the time was under the brutal rule of Francisco Franco’s military dictatorship, were keen to downplay the devastating accident. Franco was especially worried that radiation fears would hurt Spain’s tourism industry, a major source of revenue for his regime. In an effort to reassure the local population and the wider world that there was no danger, the US Ambassador to Spain, Angier Biddle Duke, would end up taking a swim in the sea off Palomares coast in front of the international press just weeks after the accident.

But despite hundreds of US personnel conducting an intensive and meticulous search of the surrounding area for a week, they still couldn’t find the fourth bomb. Then Capt Ramirez spoke to a local fisherman who had helped rescue some of the surviving airmen who had splashed down in the sea. The fisherman kept apologising to Capt Ramirez for not being able to save one of the US flyers, whom he thought he had witnessed drifting down into the depths. 

Capt Ramirez realised that the fisherman could have actually seen the missing nuclear bomb. “All the bodies had been accounted for, I knew that,” he said. The search then quickly shifted to the Mediterranean Sea, with the US Navy mobilising a flotilla of more than 30 ships, including mine-sweepers and submersibles, to scour the seabed. The exploration of miles of ocean floor was both technically complicated and a very slow process, but after weeks of exhaustive searching, a newly developed deep-diving vessel, Alvin, finally located the missing bomb in an underwater trench.

Nearly four months after it was first lost, the warhead was finally made safe and back in US hands. The next day, despite the secrecy with which the US military had surrounding its nuclear arsenal, it took the unusual step of showing the bomb to the world’s press. Ambassador Duke reasoned that unless people saw the bomb for themselves, they would never feel certain that it had actually been recovered.


April 9, 2025 Posted by | history, incidents, Reference, Spain, USA | Leave a comment

Trump claims US held direct nuclear talks with Iran

Aljazeera, 7 April 25

The US president makes the claim in a media conference with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu, while also threatening Tehran.

President Donald Trump has announced that the United States has begun direct negotiations with Iran over its nuclear programme, after Tehran had earlier dismissed Washington’s calls for the talks.

“We’re having direct talks with Iran, and they’ve started. It’ll go on Saturday. We have a very big meeting, and we’ll see what can happen,” Trump told reporters at the White House on Monday, alongside Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.

“And I think everybody agrees that doing a deal would be preferable,” he added, without providing further details.

Trump also warned that Iran would be in “great danger” if diplomatic efforts to curb its nuclear ambitions failed, adding that Tehran “can’t have nuclear weapons”.

Earlier this month, Trump told NBC News: “If they [Iran] don’t make a deal, there will be bombing”. He added that the bombing would be “the likes of which they have never seen before.”

Trump’s announcement of direct talks with Tehran would not be to Netanyahu’s “liking”, as the Israeli leader has long wanted to simply bomb Iran, said Marwan Bishara, Al Jazeera’s senior political analyst.

“Trump has wanted a deal for a long time,” Bishara said. However, “Netanyahu certainly thinks Iran’s defences have been weakened by last year’s Israeli air strikes on Iran. And he sees this as a great opportunity, with US support, for Israel to finish off Iran.”

“In reality, Trump doesn’t want to enter a war with Iran while he is in the midst of trade wars with the rest of the world,” Bishara added.

‘Meaningless talks’

Over the weekend Iranian Minister of Foreign Affairs Abbas Araghchi described the prospect of direct negotiations with the US on Tehran’s nuclear programme as “meaningless”.

Araghchi’s remarks came after Trump said last month in a letter to Iran’s Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei that he hoped there would be a negotiation between the countries.

Tehran, which maintains that it is not seeking a nuclear weapon, has so far rejected Washington’s overtures, but has said it is open to indirect diplomacy – a stance repeated by Araghchi in Sunday’s statement.

In 2018, during his first presidency, Trump withdrew the US from the 2015 nuclear agreement between Iran and world powers, which had placed strict curbs on Tehran’s nuclear activities in exchange for sanctions relief.

Iran says its nuclear activities are solely for civilian purposes. Israel, the US’s top ally in the region, is widely believed to have an undeclared nuclear arsenal.

Netanyahu calls for Palestinians to leave Gaza

Speaking next to Netanyahu, who has been issued an arrest warrant by the International Criminal Court (ICC) for alleged war crimes in Gaza, Trump suggested that the war in Gaza could soon come to an end……………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.aljazeera.com/news/2025/4/7/trump-claims-direct-us-talks-with-iran-on-nuclear-deal-have-begun

April 9, 2025 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

With US bombers at the ready, can Trump cut a deal with Iran and avoid a war?

The United States and Iran are once again on a collision course over the
Iranian nuclear program. In a letter dated early March, US President Donald
Trump urged Iranian Supreme Leader Ayatollah Ali Khamenei to negotiate a
new deal.

The new deal would replace the defunct nuclear agreement
negotiated in 2015 between the United States, Iran and five other global
powers. Trump withdrew from that agreement, called the Joint Comprehensive
Plan of Action (JCPOA), during his first term.

Trump gave the Iranians a
two-month deadline to reach a new nuclear deal. If they don’t, the US will
bomb the country. In recent days, American B-2 bombers and warships have
been deployed to the region in a show of force. In response, Tehran has
agreed only to indirect negotiations. It has ruled out any direct talks
while under a US policy of “maximum pressure”.

Khamenei and his
generals have promised a “harsh response” to any military venture. Iran
has vowed to target all American bases in the region. France, one of key
negotiators in the 2015 deal, said this week a failure to secure a new deal
would make a military confrontation “almost inevitable”. In a positive
sign, however, Washington is reportedly “seriously considering” Iran’s
offer for indirect negotiations. And Trump is now suggesting Iran may
actually be open to direct talks.

The Conversation 5th April 2025 https://theconversation.com/with-us-bombers-at-the-ready-can-trump-cut-a-deal-with-iran-and-avoid-a-war-253828

April 7, 2025 Posted by | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Canada supplied uranium for atomic bombs in WWII — 80 years later, the cleanup continues

Gordon Edwards, 6 Apr 25

Atomic Reaction is a documentary feature film dealing with the radioactive history and contamination of the town of Port Hope Ontario, located on the North shore of Lake Ontario just east of Toronto.

Here is a YouTube of the film: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8jC1DPOYoQ0

Canada played a key role in chemically refining uranium from Canada and the Congo for use in the first two atomic bombs dropped on the cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. Canada then became the largest supplier and exporter of uranium in the world,  in the post-war period, most of it sold for tens of thousands of nuclear warheads during the Cold War, until the sale of Canadian uranium for nuclear weapons was ended by Prime Miniister Pearson in 1965.

​In the process, the town of Port Hope (where all this refining took place until 1980) became thoroughly contaminated with radioactive wastes that were carelessly discarded and dispersed all about town – dumped into the harbour and into open ravines about town, used in roadways and mingled with the sandy beach, and used in huge quantities as construction material and as fill for up to a thousand buildings – homes, schools, offices, throughout town – requiring a massive radioactive cleanup costing over two billion dollars, resulting in two surface mounds of about a million tons each which will remain highly radiotoxic for many thousands of years to come. The cleanup is stlll ongoing today.

A similarly sized mound of radioactive waste is currently planned for the cleanup of the Chalk River Laboratories, created near the end of World War 2 as a secret site for producing plutonium for the US bomb program among other things. Canada sold plutonium to the US military for weapons purposes.


For 20 years after the end of World War 2. The Chalk River megadump has been approved by Canada’s Nuclear regulator, but two of three court challenges have been successful in delaying the implementation pending legally required consultations with the Algonquin peoples on whose traditional land the megadump would be located, and pending the careful evaluation of alternative sites or waste management options that will not destroy the habitat of several endangered species.

April 7, 2025 Posted by | Canada, media, Resources -audiovicual | 2 Comments

Federal regulator approves Canada’s first small modular reactor

the commissioners heard concerns from intervenors that GE-Hitachi hadn’t yet finished designing the reactor, raising questions about how its safety could be analyzed properly.

CNSC decisions are particularly vulnerable to challenges from First Nations.

Matthew McClearn,  April 5, 2025, https://www.theglobeandmail.com/business/article-federal-regulator-approves-canadas-first-small-modular-reactor/

The federal nuclear safety regulator has authorized construction of an American small modular reactor (SMR) at the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station in Clarington, Ont., a crucial milestone for a project that has garnered worldwide attention.

The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission granted the license to Ontario Power Generation on Friday for its Darlington New Nuclear Project. OPG has said it will finish building the first 327-megawatt reactor by the end of 2028, and begin supplying electricity to the province’s grid the following year. The reactor’s cost has not been disclosed publicly, but estimates suggest it could be several billion dollars.

“We now await the go-ahead from the Ontario government to proceed,” said OPG spokesperson Neal Kelly.

The Darlington SMR would represent a host of firsts, accompanied by larger risks and anticipated benefits. It would be the only nuclear reactor under construction in the Western hemisphere, and Canada’s first reactor start since the mid-1980s.

It would also represent the first SMR in any G7 country. And it would be the first BWRX-300; utilities in other jurisdictions (including Saskatchewan, the U.S., Poland and Estonia) have announced plans to build reactor fleets based on the same design.

The BWRX-300 is being designed by Wilmington, N.C.-based GE-Hitachi Nuclear Energy, a leading American reactor vendor. Its construction would make Canada more reliant on U.S. suppliers for enriched uranium fuel and other critical inputs at a moment when relations between the two countries are rapidly deteriorating.

Yet this has not diminished support from Canadian officials. In a statement Friday, Ontario Energy Minister Stephen Lecce called the license “a historic milestone” for his province and the country.

“Ontario is realizing its potential as a stable democratic energy superpower, and I look forward to sharing next steps for this exciting project in the coming weeks.”

OPG applied for the license in late 2022. During hearings held this fall and winter, the commissioners heard concerns from intervenors that GE-Hitachi hadn’t yet finished designing the reactor, raising questions about how its safety could be analyzed properly.

But the commissioners dismissed this concern, finding OPG had supplied adequate information. They noted that an OPG representative told them the design was 95 per cent done; CNSC staff said in other countries, licenses are typically issued when designs are less than one-third complete.

Intervenors also said that the BWRX-300 lacked two fully independent emergency shutdown systems, because it features two systems that insert the same set of control rods into the reactor. The CNSC’s own staffers confirmed this, but told the Commission the probability both insertion systems would fail was “very low.” The Commission said OPG would have to provide additional information about this at a later date.

In response to concerns from certain First Nations concerning OPG’s and the CNSC’s obligation to engage with them, the CNSC imposed what it calls “regulatory hold points.” The first occurs before construction begins on the reactor building’s foundation, another before OPG can install the reactor’s pressure vessel, and a third before testing and commissioning of the facility can begin. The Commission delegated responsibility for supervising these license conditions to CNSC chief regulatory operations officer Ramzi Jammal.

“The Commission is satisfied that the honour of the Crown has been upheld and that the legal obligation to consult and, where appropriate, accommodate Indigenous interests has been satisfied,” the commissioners wrote in their decision.

CNSC decisions are particularly vulnerable to challenges from First Nations. In February the Federal Court granted an application from Kebaowek First Nation for a judicial review of the CNSC’s decision to approve construction of a nuclear waste disposal facility at Chalk River Laboratories. Justice Julie Blackhawk found that the commissioners erred when they declined to apply the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples, and ordered a resumption of consultations.

The CNSC’s authorization applies only to OPG’s first SMR. Since the 1960s, Ontario’s long-standing practice has been to build “four-packs,” power plants with four identical reactors sharing workers and common infrastructure. In 2023, the Ontario government instructed OPG to begin planning for another three BWRX-300s at Darlington.

Over the past several years the utility has cleared and re-graded the site for the first reactor; ongoing excavation has reached 8 metres below ground level. OPG has been installing utilities all four reactors would share, such as water and sewer lines and network cabling.

OPG’s pivot to SMRs means the plant will generate far less power than originally envisioned. Under an earlier plan the site was licensed for up to 4,800 megawatts, whereas the BWRX-300s would possess a quarter of that capacity. (According to rough industry estimates, a single BWRX-300 could meet electricity demand from a city the size of Markham or Vaughan, Ont.)

Also working on the project are AtkinsRealis Group Inc., serving as architect-engineer, and construction giant Aecon Group Inc. Major reactor components are to be built by subcontractors in Ontario: BWX Technologies, for example, is preparing to build its massive pressure vessel at its plant in Cambridge. A 2023 study by the Conference Board of Canada said the four-reactor plant would increase Canada’s GDP by $15.3 billion over 65 years, and support 2,000 jobs.

Promoters, including OPG, have argued that building the first SMR will grant Ontario “first-mover” advantage and allow its nuclear industry to participate in subsequent BWRX-300 constructions worldwide. With numerous U.S. federal officials proclaiming an era of American energy “dominance” and imposing punishing tariffs on allies and trading partners, some observers now doubt this will happen. Mr. Lecce, though, appeared to dismiss that concern in his statement Friday.

“Our government has insisted and successfully negotiated that local Ontario and Canadian businesses must be overwhelmingly used to build SMRs for the world.”

April 7, 2025 Posted by | Canada, politics | Leave a comment

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