A Washington Post story headlined the “White House Blew Past Legal Concerns in Deadly Strikes on Drug Boats,” reported that “There is no actual threat justifying self defense — there are not organized armed groups seeking to kill Americans.” The Post quoted a former senior official saying, “The question is, is it legal just to kill the guy if he’s not threatening to kill you … There are people who are simply uncomfortable with the president just declaring we’re at war with drug traffickers.”
For a more critical perspective on Venezuela, we turn to Venezuelanalysis.com and their conversation with Atilio Borón (Borón is an Argentine sociologist, political scientist, professor, and essayist, he holds a doctorate in Political Science from Harvard University), Their conversation examines the administration’s military expansion in the country. Some key takeaways include:
“Venezuela remains a strategic target … global oil markets are more strategic than ever, and geological surveys confirm that Venezuela holds the largest proven oil reserves in the world … greater even than those of Saudi Arabia!”
“Latin America has long been described as a continent in dispute, and today that dispute is sharper than ever. … What we are witnessing now, however, is an open display of brute military force.”
“This is the largest imperialist air–naval military buildup in our region since the October 1962 Missile Crisis.”
“New actors have emerged with decisive weight, fundamentally reshaping geopolitics … China is here to stay.”
I also recommend checking out this graphic also from Venezuelanalysis.com — it details the scale of weaponry in the region:
Here’s the reporting from CNN on the situation, including Trump’s discussion about attacking Mexico, with a chilling interview at the end between Jake Tapper and GOP House member Carlos Gimenez.
From yesterday, former ambassador James Story discussed the situation. I’ll add that it still doesn’t pass the smell test. It feels like we’re being pushed toward a conflict — framed through what the former ambassador called Venezuela’s relationship with our “strategic competitors.” At this point in world history, can’t we find a way to get along? Naive or not, I don’t want the world to melt down.
Of course I’m posting this video from a mainstream source, but where are the questions for our leaders and former leaders that push back — even slightly — against the status quo narrative? Honestly, it brings me back to an old classroom discussion about nuclear war: If a nation is treated as an enemy, or labeled a “strategic competitor,” and you make it clear you want them weakened or destroyed, why wouldn’t they stockpile weapons? Or, more simply put: if your neighbor hates you and has an axe, maybe you go get an axe too.
I guess I’m still wishful enough to hope that the United States could be the bigger person and put the axe down — especially when, in our case, we have the Fifth Fleet. Here is former Ambassador Story:
President Donald Trump shamefully welcomed Saudi Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman to the White House today. He brushed aside questions about Prince Mohammed’s role in the gruesome murder of Washington Post journalist Jamal Khashoggi, commenting that “things happen” and “You don’t have to embarrass our guest by asking a question like that.”
Freedom of the Press Foundation Director of Advocacy Seth Stern said:
“Somehow calling a female reporter ‘piggy’ was only the second-most offensive anti-press utterance to come out of the president’s mouth in recent days. And somehow Biden’s infamous fist bump is now only the second-most disgusting public display of flattery by a U.S. president to journalist-murderer Mohammed bin Salman.
“Scolding a U.S. reporter for asking questions about MBS ordering a fellow journalist to be bonesawed signals to dictators everywhere that they can murder journalists with impunity — as if Trump hadn’t already sent that message clearly enough by bankrolling and arming Israel while it does just that in Gaza.
“Today’s fiasco felt like the nail in the coffin for whatever was left of the U.S.’s global standing as a leader on press freedom. The next president is going to have their work cut out for them in rebuilding that credibility. In the meantime, judges, lawmakers, and everyone else in a position to slow the backslide need to step up and rise to the moment before more journalists get killed.”
Santa Fe, NM – An internal Department of Energy (DOE) memorandum eliminates worker and public radiation protection rules known “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA). This fundamental departure from decades of accepted health physics practices is being promoted by senior DOE political appointees with little background in health or radiation control. It is marked as “URGENCY: High” under the auspices of the DOE Deputy Secretary, the Under Secretary for Science, and the Administrator of the National Nuclear Security Administration. The memorandum awaits the final signature of DOE Secretary Chris Wright.
The memo’s stated goal is to:
“…remove the ALARA principle from all DOE directives and regulations, including DOE Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public and the Environment, NE [Office of Nuclear Energy] Order 458.1, Radiation Protection of the Public, and, upon completion of the rulemaking process, 10 CFR [Code of Federal Regulations] 835, Occupational Radiation Protection.” [1]
It follows the playbook of the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025, which called for:
“Set[ting] clear radiation exposure and protection standards by eliminating ALARA (“as low as reasonably achievable”) as a regulatory principle and setting clear standards according to radiological risk and dose rather than arbitrary objectives.”[2]
Contrary to Project 2025’s assertion that ALARA is just “arbitrary objectives,” the U.S. Occupational Safety and Health Administration declares it to be:
“…the cornerstone principle of radiation safety, emphasizing that radiation exposure should be minimized to the lowest possible levels while still allowing essential tasks to be performed. This principle applies everywhere radiation is present, including medical, industrial, nuclear, and research settings… ALARA is not just a recommendation—it is a legal and ethical requirement in radiation-related industries.”[3]
The elimination of ALARA protections is likely to increase radiation exposures to workers and weaken cleanup standards at contaminated sites where DOE has binding legal requirements with the impacted states (e.g., Los Alamos Lab, NM; Hanford Nuclear Reservation, WA and West Valley Demonstration Project, NY), as well as DOE Legacy Management sites where residual contamination remains after completion of claimed “cleanup” (e.g., Rocky Flats, CO and Weldon Spring, MO).
DOE’s memo purports to remove red tape constraining construction of new nuclear power plants, which inevitably experience huge cost overruns at ratepayers’ expense because of the inherent economic problems with nuclear power. However, because DOE’s primary mission is expanding nuclear weapons production, the elimination of ALARA protections will hit workers and nearby communities by allowing higher worker and public doses.
Two pertinent examples are the expanding production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores at the Los Alamos Lab and future pit production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. At the same time, the independent Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board’s role of nuclear safety oversight is being crippled by the Trump Administration’s refusal to nominate candidates to the Board. Moreover, DOE’s termination of ALARA rules can even downgrade international radiation protection standards because the Department provides staff and training for the United Nations’ International Atomic Energy Agency.
DOE’s high-level memorandum relies heavily upon a recent study by its Idaho National Laboratory.[4] According to the memo, the INL Report concluded:
“The balance of available scientific evidence indicates that annual dose rates of 5,000 mrem or less have not been shown to result in detectable increases in adverse health outcomes across diverse human populations and exposure scenarios. Furthermore, substantial evidence suggests that even 10,000 mrem/year may maintain a reasonable safety margin based on available epidemiological and radiobiological data.”
This is highly debatable (see comments by an independent epidemiologist below). By way of comparison, a standard chest X-ray is around 10 millirem (mrem) and an average annual radiation dose from all sources (including natural) to any one individual in the United States is around 600 mrem.[5] The INL report begins to rationalize public radioactive doses that are up to 16 times higher.
The Idaho National Laboratory is where DOE extracted weapons grade uranium from spent reactor fuel for warhead production, resulting in significant ground water contamination and “temporary” storage of liquid high-level waste now estimated to cost billions of dollars to stabilize. Nevertheless, according to INL Director John Wagner, the Idaho National Laboratory Report specifically recommends:
Eliminating all ALARA requirements and limits below the 5,000 mrem occupational dose limit in order to reduce “unnecessary economic burdens.”
Multiplying five-fold the allowed public radioactive dose limit from 100 mrem per year to 500 mrem per year.
Supporting ongoing research on low-dose radiation effects to “further refine scientific understanding and regulatory approaches.”
Ongoing research on low-dose radiation effects” is aimed at the Linear No-Threshold principle, which maintains that no dose of radiation is safe. Related, ALARA is considered to be the global bedrock of radiation protection for nuclear workers and the public and is widely accepted as best practices by health physics professionals. Historically, more than 10,000 DOE workers have filed compensation claims for their occupational illnesses, which argues for strengthening, not weakening, occupational protection standards.
In parallel with DOE under Trump Executive Orders, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which oversees the nuclear energy industry) is questioning the Linear No-Threshold (LNT) principle. In recent written comment to the NRC, epidemiologist Joseph Mangano summarized decades of studies supporting LNT. His cited evidence includes:
Studies of low-dose pelvic X-rays to pregnant women in the mid-1950s that concluded that a single X-ray would nearly double the risk of the child dying of cancer or leukemia by age ten.
A 1990 study by the Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation (BEIR) that concluded that cancers and genetic damage increase with low-level radiation as a linear, non-threshold function of the dose. It included over 900 references that support LNT.
A second BEIR study in 2005 that reiterated the risks of low-dose radiation exposures.
A 2020 systematic review of 26 studies involving 91,000 individuals with solid cancers and 13,000 with leukemia that documented excess risks caused by low dose radiation.
A 2023 study of 309,932 workers at nuclear plants in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States that found 28,089 had died of solid cancers with occupational doses well below Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bomb survivors. This suggests that the Linear No-Threshold model may actually underestimate the harmful effects of prolonged low radiation doses.[6]
Jay Coghlan, Director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, concluded: “The Trump Administration is pumping taxpayers’ money into the much hyped “nuclear renaissance,” now in its third or fourth failed attempt, while cutting Medicaid for the poor and cutting taxes for the rich. But this time the corporate nuclear titans are being given a leg up by cutting nuclear safety protections for workers and the public, inevitably causing more illnesses. The good news is that fundamental market economics will eventually collapse the nuclear industry. However, one has to ask, at what safety costs to other sectors, such as the expanding production of nuclear weapons for the new arms race?”
Last month, the Trump administration announced a deal to spend at least $80 billion to build at least 10 new large-scale Westinghouse reactors, a move that seemed to anoint a “national champion” in nuclear power. On its face, the agreement appeared to offer these new U.S. AP1000s — the type of reactor built at Southern Company’s Plant Vogtle in Georgia — with a guarantee of financing akin to direct funding from the Department of Energy’s Loan Programs Office.
But exactly how the $80 billion will be spent and when remains an open question.
The details are unusual. Rather than coming from the Energy Department, the Department of Commerce brokered the deal in what one Republican source described as an example of the administration’s internal “chaos.” Rather than coming from the federal budget, the $80 billion appears to be contingent upon Japan fulfilling its $550 billion investment in the U.S. that President Donald Trump negotiated in Tokyo last month. Rather than funneling the money through an entity such as the LPO, the disbursement process remains unclear.
“Without a sense of how this $80 billion is going to be used for nuclear in the U.S., it’s not going to give actual developers or owner-operators a chance to structure their own finances in response,” Advait Arun, a former Treasury Department analyst who now researches capital markets and energy finance at the Center for Public Enterprise think tank, told Latitude Media. “Is $80 billion going to go through LPO? Will it go through the White House? Are there other costs? There [are] all these different ways to imagine how the $80 billion will flow.”
Adding to the uncertainty, a top Energy Department official said this week the federal government may take ownership of the new reactors outright.
“The role of having the government involved in private markets is sacrosanct; you just don’t do it,” Carl Coe, the Energy Department’s chief of staff, said at a conference hosted by the Tennessee Advanced Energy Business Council. “But this is a national emergency.”
In a statement, Cameco, the Canadian uranium giant that owns a 49% stake in Westinghouse, said the initial agreement with the Trump administration set the stage to “negotiate and enter into definitive” contracts. Brookfield Asset Management, the private equity firm that owns the 51% share of the nuclear giant, told Latitude Media it expected to broker a binding contract by early next year. ……………………………………………………………………….
The big investor-owned utilities — Exelon, Duke, or Southern Company, for example — are arguably the ones with the resources to pursue a new nuclear deal. But so far, they have resisted building the plants themselves.
“I wouldn’t build a nuclear plant,” Calvin Butler, CEO of utility giant Exelon, told CNBC last week. “What I could do is lean in on combined-cycle gas turbines. What I could do is build community solar. What I could do is own battery storage.”
In an earnings call earlier this month, Duke CEO Harry Sideris said North Carolina’s biggest utility would need to sort out some insurance policy to manage cost overruns before embarking on its loose plans to build more than a gigawatt of new nuclear power by 2037.
“We still need to figure out what we’re going to do with cost overrun protection and how we’re going to protect our investors and our customers from overruns,” Sideris told investors on the call. “Nothing going forward until we have those other items resolved.”
Westinghouse is pursuing alternative ways to bring down the cost of new reactors. Earlier this week, the company debuted new artificial intelligence software it’s developing with Google to streamline construction and reduce the enormous cost of interest payments on loans from slow buildouts.
‘A shiny toy’
That the landmark Westinghouse agreement came through the Commerce Department rather than the Energy Department is a sign of the lack of coordination between agencies under the Trump administration, a Republican source with direct knowledge of the White House’s nuclear plans told Latitude Media.
“Everyone is running around the globe trying to make deals to bring a shiny toy back to the president,” said the source, who spoke on condition of anonymity.
The source said it was a situation of “the left hand not knowing what the right is doing,” and expressed doubt that the Japanese would direct that much funding toward a non-Japanese company in the U.S.
But that might be about to change. In late October, hard-right stalwart Sanae Takaichi took office as prime minister, pushing her plans to rebuild her country’s nuclear sector. More than half of Japan’s operable reactors are still offline as part of a nationwide shutdown that occurred after the 2011 Fukushima-Daiichi accident, but the new Takaichi administration is aiming to restart those reactors and build new ones………………. https://www.latitudemedia.com/news/trumps-westinghouse-nuclear-deal-comes-with-unresolved-questions/
JERUSALEM — Israel will accelerate production of Iron Dome components with “billions of dollars” of U.S. aid money, the Israeli Defense Ministry said Nov. 20.
The announcement comes amid a tense ceasefire in Gaza and Lebanon, as Hezbollah continues to arm and strengthen itself in Lebanon and Hamas declares that it has no intention of giving up weapons. Israel used Iron Dome interceptors to intercept thousands of rockets fired from these two fronts during the two-year “Iron Swords” war.
Government officials here did not specify the exact amount of the purchase, but its Defense Ministry noted that the it will be made from the special U.S. aid package approved by Congress in April 2024 under the Biden administration, totaling at $8.7 billion.
This is the second purchase of interceptors from Rafael by the Israeli Defense Ministry in the past year that from that pot of money.
Israeli officials have said Iron Dome interceptors caught thousands of rockets fired from Gaza and Lebanon.
Iron Dome is an air defense system that intercepts short- and medium-range rockets and missiles, mortars, drones, helicopters and more. The Israeli Air Force claims that since the defense system began its operational service in 2011 it has shown a 95% interception success rate.
Rafael Advanced Defense Systems is the prime contractor for the Iron Dome defense system, collaborating with ELTA Systems – a division in Israel Aerospace Industries (IAI), and mPrest Systems.
When a President Demands the Death Penalty for His Opponents, Democracy Is Already on Life Support
There are moments in political life so shocking, so fundamentally corrosive, that they should stop a nation in its tracks. President Trump calling for the death penalty for six political opponents is one of those moments – not because it’s surprising, but because it isn’t anymore.
A president of the United States, the supposed leader of the free world, now speaks about hanging adversaries with the ease of ordering a cheeseburger. No evidence, no process, no pretence of legality – just the authoritarian impulse spoken out loud: eliminate them.
And the true horror is not just in the words themselves, but in the silence that follows.
The Republican Party, once fond of quoting the Constitution like scripture, now treats Trump’s threats as if they’re merely colourful commentary instead of the political equivalent of arson. Speaker Mike Johnson nods along. Karoline Leavitt repeats the talking points with the fervour of someone auditioning for a ministry of propaganda. The party’s enablers treat this behaviour as normal, even patriotic – as though the Founding Fathers intended freedom of speech to include calling for the state-sanctioned killing of critics.
This is not strength. It’s not law and order. It’s a chilling preview of what happens when democratic norms collapse under the weight of one man’s ego and a movement’s cowardice.
Because authoritarianism isn’t built overnight. It creeps. It numbs. It desensitises.
First, the president jokes about locking up opponents.
Then he insists it wasn’t a joke.
Then he escalates.
And the people around him – out of loyalty, fear, or ambition – normalise it.
By the time a president demands executions for political rivals, the real danger is already well underway: a nation where threats replace arguments, silence replaces dissent, and loyalty replaces truth.
America has weathered dangerous leaders before. What’s new is the echo chamber that institutionalises the danger – politicians who imitate Trump’s rhetoric, media outlets that launder it into legitimacy, and supporters who cheer it as strength.
A democracy dies long before the first political prisoner does.
It dies when its citizens shrug.
It dies when its leaders cower.
It dies when a president crosses a moral line and nothing – absolutely nothing – happens in response.
If Trump’s calls for death penalties don’t spark a bipartisan alarm, then the alarm system itself is broken. And once that happens, the fall isn’t sudden. It’s already begun.
The absence of a 123 Agreement — designed to prevent countries from manufacturing fuel which could be diverted to weapons — has implications across the region. Should Saudi Arabia win access to the full nuclear fuel cycle, other Middle Eastern countries including Iran and the United Arab Emirates may demand the same conditions.
US negotiations with Saudi Arabia on a nuclear technology-sharing deal have been completed, potentially allowing American companies to build reactors in the kingdom.
A formal 123 Atomic Energy Act agreement, which includes non-proliferation requirements, has yet to be signed, according to a US Energy Department spokesman.
The prospect of a deal has alarmed non-proliferation experts and some members of Congress who have raised concerns over weapons-grade material and the potential for Saudi Arabia to gain access to the full nuclear fuel cycle.
US negotiations with Saudi Arabia on a long-sought nuclear technology-sharing deal have been completed, potentially opening the door for American companies to build reactors in the kingdom.
Energy Secretary Chris Wright and his Saudi Arabian counterpart signed a joint declaration signifying the talks were finished, the Trump administration said Tuesday following a White House visit by the kingdom’s Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman. A formal 123 Atomic Energy Act agreement, which customarily includes non-proliferation requirements, has yet to be signed, a US Energy Department spokesman confirmed.
If finalized, such an agreement between the two nations could inject new life into America’s atomic energy sector and provide a boost to Westinghouse Electric Co. and other US companies that want to construct plants or sell reactor technology to Saudi Arabia. Still, the prospect has alarmed non-proliferation experts and some members of Congress who have raised concerns over weapons-grade material.
The absence of a 123 Agreement — designed to prevent countries from manufacturing fuel which could be diverted to weapons — has implications across the region. Should Saudi Arabia win access to the full nuclear fuel cycle, other Middle Eastern countries including Iran and the United Arab Emirates may demand the same conditions.
“It does include fuel cycle activities,” International Atomic Energy Agency Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi told journalists after speaking by phone with Saudi Arabia’s Energy Minister Prince Abdulaziz bin Salman early Wednesday. The IAEA hasn’t been notified about whether or not there will be a 123 Agreement attached to the deal, Grossi said.
Both the Energy Department and the White House didn’t immediately respond to questions seeking clarity over whether the deal would include the so-called “gold standard,” barring the enrichment and reprocessing of spent uranium that Saudi Arabia has been reluctant to agree to in the past
………………..The declaration signed Tuesday “builds the legal foundation for a decades-long, multi-billion-dollar nuclear energy partnership with the Kingdom; confirms that the United States and American companies will be the Kingdom’s civil nuclear cooperation partners of choice; and ensures that all cooperation will be conducted in a manner consistent with strong nonproliferation standards,” the White House said in a fact sheet.
On Nov. 17, ahead of the Saudi crown prince’s visit to the White House, Israeli Energy Minister Eli Cohen told Channel 14 TV that he’s skeptical of an agreement.
“I think Israel should be opposed, because it would bring about a situation where there will constantly have to be monitoring and oversight, to check whether the nuclear civilian project is sliding toward the military side,” Cohen said “This will constantly have to be checked.”
On November 19, 2025, Bloomberg news reported that the United States government will “buy and own” as many as ten new, large (1000 MWe and bigger) commercial nuclear reactors. The new nuclear power deal emerged out of President Trump’s October meeting with Japan’s first woman and ultra-conservative Prime Minister, Sanae Takaichi. According to the Trump White House, Japan pledged to invest a total of $550 billion in US infrastructure of which $332 billion will go into developing domestic energy projects. The Japan/US domestic energy infrastructure plan includes the licensing and construction of new large nuclear reactors (Westinghouse AP1000 pressurized water reactors as well as a new breed of small modular reactors [SMR]), new natural gas power plants, electric transmission projects and pipelines.
On November 13, 2025, Beyond Nuclear spotlighted “Make Atoms Great Again?” on the White House announcement of an agreement with Westinghouse Electric where the US Department of Energy (DOE) plans to buy an $80 billion government equity share for 20% of Westinghouse corporation’s future nuclear profits from its fleet expansion of the controversial AP1000 “advanced” pressurized water reactor. The AP1000 pressurized water reactor was to only new reactor design to launched construction projects in 2007 and only two of the new Westinghouse units are operable today in the US.
Vogtle Units 3 & 4 were stricken with extreme cost overruns and as a result have indefinitely stuck Georgia ratepayers and manufacturers with electric rate shock. Two additional AP1000 units (V.C. Summer 2 & 3) financially collapsed mid-construction in South Carolina and were abandoned with nearly $10 billion in sunk costs. The President and CEO of Santee Cooper at the time of project’s cancellation was quoted to observe in July 2017, “When you find yourself riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.” An effort to resuscitate the failed construction project is presently underway by the utility. The cost overruns, recurring delays and cancellations however resulted in the 2017 Westinghouse bankruptcy that shifted the corporation to new Canadian ownership.
The White House issued an October 28, 2025 “Fact Sheet: President Donald J. Trump Drives Forward Billions in Investments from Japan,” identifying,
“Critical Energy Infrastructure Investments: Up to $332 billion to support critical energy infrastructure in the United States, including the construction of AP1000 and small modular reactors (SMRs), in partnership with Westinghouse; construction of SMRs in collaboration with GE Vernova and Hitachi.”
Official advises DEP to uphold its earlier decision based on Ocean Sanctuaries Act
Christine Legere, the Provincetown Examiner, November 19 2025,
PLYMOUTH — Holtec International, the company that owns and is decommissioning the Pilgrim nuclear power station, has likely lost its appeal of a state environmental ruling that has prevented it from releasing nearly one million gallons of the power plant’s wastewater, which contains radionuclides and other contaminants, into Cape Cod Bay.
Salvatore Giorlandino, the Dept. of Environmental Protection’s chief presiding officer for the appeal, issued his 60-page recommendation on Nov. 6. It advises DEP Commissioner Bonnie Heiple to uphold her agency’s 2024 decision to deny Holtec’s request for an amendment to its discharge permit that would allow releasing the wastewater
The DEP’s 2024 decision was based on the state’s Ocean Sanctuaries Act, which prohibits the discharge of industrial waste into designated ocean sanctuaries. Cape Cod Bay carries that designation.
Giorlandino’s recommendation finds that Holtec does not qualify for any of the exemptions listed in the Ocean Sanctuaries Act, including an exemption for discharges related to the generation of electric power, since Pilgrim has not generated electricity since its shutdown in 2019.
The recommendation also discussed why preemption by federal law does not apply. Holtec had argued that the federal Atomic Energy Act would preempt the state law. But Giorlandino wrote that because the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has approved three methods of nuclear wastewater disposal investigated by Holtec in connection with the Pilgrim plant — discharge, shipment for disposal, and evaporation — Holtec has options beyond a discharge into the bay that would comply with both federal and state laws.
“If all three methods of disposal approved by the NRC were prohibited by state law, this case may have a different outcome,” Giorlandino noted.
The recommendation awaits Heiple’s final determination.
Making It a Federal Case
A dismissal of the appeal by Heiple likely won’t mark the end of the wastewater debate.
In an email on Nov. 14, spokesman Patrick O’Brien said Holtec is currently refraining from comment until the state decision is finalized. “But based on a recent federal court ruling, it is likely that we may go that route as well,” O’Brien said.
O’Brien was referring to a federal judge’s September ruling in favor of Holtec in a New York case related to Holtec’s plan to discharge 1.5 million gallons of wastewater into the Hudson River from the Indian Point nuclear power plant, which it also owns and is dismantling.
New York passed a state law, the “Save the Hudson Act,” in 2023, which prohibited the discharge of radioactive substances into the Hudson River in connection with the decommissioning of a nuclear power plant. But according to a report on the website of the clean water advocacy group Riverkeeper, the judge in the appeal ruled that federal laws relating to the regulation of nuclear waste discharges supersede state laws. The site noted that New York Attorney General Letitia James had notified the court that the state would appeal the ruling.
James Lampert, an attorney and member of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel for Pilgrim, said that Giorlandino had considered the New York case in this ruling on Pilgrim. “I am pleased that he correctly found that a New York court decision that a New York statute prohibiting the discharge of radioactive waste into the Hudson River was preempted did not affect his decision here because, among other things, the facts in New York and Massachusetts are very different,” said Lampert in an email.
The difference, he wrote, is that the Ocean Sanctuaries Act has been in place since the early 1970s and prohibits all industrial waste discharges, not just discharges containing radioactive waste. New York’s law, only a few years old, limits its application to radioactive waste discharges.
Mary Lampert, who is also an NDCAP member and leads the community advocacy group called Pilgrim Watch and who is James Lampert’s wife, said she was not surprised that Holtec plans to continue its legal battle.
“Why would Holtec not appeal?” Lampert said by email. “Its legal fees all come out of the decommissioning trust fund, paid by ratepayers; not one dime comes out of Holtec’s pocket.”
Local Opposition Continues
Holtec first announced plans to discharge 1.1 million gallons of wastewater from Pilgrim into Cape Cod Bay in late 2021, triggering vigorous pushback from state, federal, and local officials, the fishing and tourist industries, and the public. At the time, Holtec said it had investigated alternatives to discharging the wastewater into the bay, including evaporating it, shipping it off site at a cost of $20 million, or storing it on the site. Releasing the wastewater into the bay was and remains the company’s top choice.
………………………………………………………Members of the NDCAP panel and the public have become increasingly concerned over the evaporation of the wastewater, which has not yet been treated to reduce radioactive contamination levels.
The Lamperts have said at NDCAP meetings that the evaporated water and its contaminants ultimately end up in Cape Cod Bay in the form of precipitation.
They are not the only ones to make that point.
Diane Turco, president of the Cape Downwinders advocacy group, said in an email that DEP’s denial of Holtec’s request to discharge the wastewater should also apply to its evaporation of the wastewater because “it’s falling into our environment and Cape Cod Bay.”
Andrew Gottlieb, an NDCAP member and executive director of the Association to Preserve Cape Cod, posted on his agency’s website that Holtec now has a choice. The company could forgo appeals and dispose of the wastewater legally and responsibly, Gottlieb wrote, or it could continue with “serial appeals” to give it time to evaporate the wastewater “into the air breathed by residents of southeast Massachusetts and the Cape.” https://provincetownindependent.org/featured/2025/11/19/state-finds-no-exemption-for-holtec-on-nuclear-wastewater-release/
The Trump administration said on Tuesday it has loaned Constellation Energy Corp $1 billion to restart its nuclear reactor at a Pennsylvania plant formerly known as Three Mile Island. Constellation signed a deal in late 2024 with Microsoft to restart the 835-megawatt reactor, which shut in 2019, and which would offset Microsoft’s data center electricity use. The other unit at the plant, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, shut in 1979 after an accident that chilled the nuclear power industry. U.S. power demand is now rising for the first time in two decades on technologies including artificial intelligence. Nuclear energy, which is virtually carbon-free, has become an option for technology companies with uninterrupted power needs and climate pledges. Critics point out that the U.S. has failed to find permanent storage for radioactive waste.
The Trump administration has announced a $1bn federal loan to restart the nuclear power plant at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that is under contract to provide power to Microsoft’s datacenters. The US energy secretary, Chris Wright, said on Tuesday that the loan to Constellation Energy, the plant’s operator, would “ensure America has the energy it needs to grow its domestic manufacturing base and win the AI race”. Constellation signed a 20-year purchase agreement in 2024 with Microsoft, which needs power for its artificial intelligence operations, to restart the 835MW reactor that shut in 2019. The other unit at the plant, renamed the Crane Clean Energy Center, shut in 1979 after the most serious nuclear meltdown and radiation leak in US history. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/nov/19/three-mile-island-nuclear-loan-microsoft-datacenter
The US government plans to buy and own as many as 10 new, large nuclear reactors that could be paid for using Japan’s $550 billion funding pledge, part of a push to meet surging demand for electricity. The new details of the unusual arrangement were outlined Wednesday by Carl Coe, the Energy Department’s chief of staff, about the non-binding commitment made by Japan in October to fund $550 billion in US projects, including as much as $80 billion for the construction of new reactors made by Westinghouse Electric Co.
The U.S. Department of Energy said Tuesday that it will loan $1 billion to help finance the restart of the nuclear power plant on Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island that is under contract to supply power to data centers for tech giant Microsoft. The loan is in line with the priorities of President Donald Trump’s administration, including bolstering nuclear power and artificial intelligence.For Constellation Energy, which owns Three Mile Island’s lone functioning nuclear power reactor, the federal loan will lower its financing cost to get the mothballed plant up and running again. The 835-megawatt reactor can power the equivalent of approximately 800,000 homes, the Department of Energy said.
On Monday, Nov. 10, the Knesset voted 39 to 16 in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists”
The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations.
November 18, 2025 By Patrick Lawrence ScheerPost
Maybe you saw the video that went public on Nov. 1 wherein Itamar Ben–Givr stands above a row of Palestinian prisoners lying face down with their heads in bags and their hands bound behind their backs. “Look at how they are today, the minimum of conditions,” the ultra–Zionist minister of national security in Bibi Netanyahu’s fanatic-filled cabinet, says as he turns to his entourage. “But there is another thing we need to do. The death penalty to terrorists.”
Those lying on their bellies were reportedly members of al–Nukhba, the special forces unit of al–Qassam, Hamas’s military wing. Ben–Givr, a militant settler who proves, time and again, utterly indifferent to international law, the laws of war, or any sort of accepted norms, wants the Zionist state to kill prisoners of war. This is what it comes down to.
If you haven’t seen the video (and here is a version with good English subtitles), maybe you heard the outrage that subsequently echoed around the world (except in the United States). The footage of the vulgar Ben–Givr has been all over digital media — on YouTube, Facebook, Instagram. Al Jazeera put it out on “X.” I took the version linked here from CNN, one of the few mainstream American media to cover it.
That was then, this is now: On Monday, Nov. 10, the Knesset voted 39 to 16 in favor of a bill that will allow Israel to execute those it arrests as “terrorists” — so long, this is to say, they are Palestinians and not Israeli settlers, who have been on an escalated rampage of terror in the West Bank for many months. “Any person who intentionally or through recklessness causes the death of an Israeli citizen, when motivated by racism, hatred, or intent to harm Israel, shall face the death penalty,” the bill reads in part. It disallows any reconsideration of a death sentence once it is imposed.
This vote was on the legislation’s first reading, of which there are to be three per Israeli parliamentary procedure. But Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and his government support the bill, according to The Times of Israel and Haaretz. Gal Hirsch, a former IDF military commander and the man who oversaw all the negotiations that led to the recent release of captives on both sides, told Haaretz the bill is “a tool in the toolbox that allows us to fight terror.”
The media coverage was yet more extensive this time — although not, once again, in the United States — and I found it better than one might expect. The BBC had it, reporting that the bill covers “people Israel deems terrorists.” Reuters referred to “Palestinian militants” instead of “terrorists.” These are modest steps in the right direction — away from the Zionist state’s account of what it is doing, this is to say. Al Jazeera also covered the vote, as to be expected. Anadolu Ajansi, the Turkish wire service, reported that Ayman Odeh, an Arab member of the Knesset, got into an altercation with Ben–Givr that nearly came to fisticuffs. I wish it had, to be honest.
Anadolu then quoted Ben–Givr as bragging on social media: “Jewish Power is making history. We promised and delivered.” Jewish Power, Otzma Yehudit in Hebrew, is the party Ben–Givr heads, which counts the infamous Meir Kahane, madman of all Zionist madmen, among its inspirations.
On the NGO side, I was pleased to see Amnesty International step forward boldly. “There is no sugarcoating this,” Erika Guevara Rosas, Amnesty’s senior research director, stated. “A majority of 39 Israeli Knesset members approved in a first reading a bill that effectively mandates courts to impose the death penalty exclusively against Palestinians.” The headline on this report was just as good: “Israel must immediately halt legislation of discriminatory death penalty bill.”
Apartheid Israel will not halt anything, of course; the more indecent the proposition the more certainly this is so. And here we go. On Thursday and Friday, Nov. 13 and 14, the IDF made mass arrests in the West Bank, all arrestees detained as “terrorists.” The Times of Israel puts the number at 50, The Jerusalem Post 40. Just to complete the picture, on Thursday a pack of Israeli settlers descended on a mosque 18 km southwest of Nablus — this just before morning prayers were to begin — and, after scrawling racist graffiti on its walls and burning copies of the Quran, attempted to set the mosque ablaze.
Take a sec, as I did, to consider these events side-by-side, with the law now pending in the Knesset in mind. What are we in for here, 40 or more mass executions at some point not far down the road? And how many after that? And Israeli settlers will go on their terrorizing way?
I am right with Amnesty and all others condemning the racism implicit in legislation that makes the repulsive Ben–Givr so pleased. But I don’t quite get the reasoning. Would the Knesset bill be OK if it also extended to settler violence and, so, wasn’t discriminatory? Not sure I understand the point here.
No, I see a larger matter at issue in this bill. It is this: The Zionist-nationalists who now determine Israel’s direction are on the way to passing a law that makes legal what is illegal according to the U.N. Charter, international law, and whatever else we count as the international framework that determines the conduct of nations. The Knesset and the Netanyahu regime, in other words, implicitly argue that Israeli law supersedes what the jurists of international law may count as beyond the boundaries of legality.
We are going to make it legal to execute prisoners so long as we call them terrorists, and all we have to do to make this legal is say it is legal by ruling on our own conduct: This is the Israeli position, fairly stated.
This, the consecration of lawlessness in national law, tips us into another line of inquiry altogether. To put the case very simply, where does the Zionist state get off attempting this stunt? The bitter truth is that the United States, world leader in lawlessness for a long time now, has licensed the Israelis to go unabashedly down this road. We should be clear about this for the sake of our integrity: What the Israelis are about to do is nothing the Americans have not already done.
The most obvious case in point is the bundle of secret memoranda Justice Department attorneys wrote to construct the legality of the kidnappings, the detentions without charge, the torture, the offshore “black sites,” Guantánimo — the whole horrific schmear — after the 9/11 attacks. The commander-in-chief was acting legally in a time of war. The Geneva Conventions did not apply because all those people fighting on their own soil against American soldiers were “unlawful combatants,” and the United States had no obligation under the laws of war to afford them legal protections. The waterboarding, the beatings, the electrodes, the rectal feedings and all that wasn’t torture: It was “enhanced interrogation techniques,” which even got an acronym, EITs. The black sites were OK because they were beyond U.S. borders and the U.N. Convention Against Torture therefore did not apply.
The extent to which these lawyers twisted law and logic into pretzels was truly diabolic, as readers may recall. And the worst of these despicable punks, well-deserving to be named, was John Yoo, who drafted a number of the memos that “authorized” the CIA to torture human beings. Yoo is now 58 and holds an endowed chair as a professor of law at the University of California, Berkeley. I suppose it follows naturally, given what the late-phase imperium counts important.
Yoo and his colleagues at Justice had a job to do, making lawlessness lawful, and they got it done, at least at home and on paper. My argument is very simple: What goes around keeps going around. There is a straight line, I mean to say, between Washington’s post–9/11 abuses of international law and the vote in the Knesset last Monday.
Four years ago, a very fine correspondent named Vincent Bevins published a book called The Jakarta Method (Public Affairs, 2021), in which he made the case that the CIA–sponsored mass killings following the 1965 coup that brought Suharto to power in Indonesia reflected the modus operandi of the United States the whole of the Cold War. The book got all sorts of awards and across-the-board accolades, all deserved.
I’m looking for a similar name, a name for how the United States has conducted its business during the two dozen years since the 9/11 attacks. There must be one, surely, or there ought to be one in any case, because there is a method to all the madness, lawlessness its defining principle, and Israel is the nation most eagerly — or baldly, better put — adopting it.
After the events of September 2001 John Whitbeck, the international lawyer living in Paris, published an essay on the meaning and instrumentalized use of the word “terrorism” that has been republished many times since in many places. And after two dozen years it is still superbly pertinent. The Floutist, the Substack newsletter I co-edit, reprinted it last year under the headline, “‘Terrorism,’ this insidious word.” That version of Whitbeck’s piece is here. It begins:
The greatest threat to world peace and civil society today is clearly “terrorism” — not the behavior to which the word is applied but the word itself. Since the word “terrorism” (like the behavior to which the word is applied) can never be eradicated, it is imperative to expose it for what it is — a word.
No nation has made more profligate use of this term than the United States. Its list of Foreign Terrorist Organizations, FTOs, runs to several pages; President Trump has added 19 names to it so far this year and proposes to add more. Drug traffickers are terrorists; Nicolás Maduro, Venezuela’s president, is a terrorist with a $50 million bounty on his head; antifa protesters are terrorists; the immigrant population in the United States, legal and illegal, is infested with terrorists; so are those demonstrating against Israel’s brutalities in Gaza and the West Bank. Label some organization or someone a “terrorist” and all manner of extra-legal behavior is excused. I cannot say the Israelis learned the power of this word from the Americans, but it is from the Americans they have learned how effectively to use it — which is to say, incessantly.
So much of what “the Jewish state” is doing in its Zionist-nationalist phase derives from what the Americans have “legitimized” by doing it first. This is the point we ought not miss.
The Israeli military’s attacks on the Gaza aid flotillas this last summer — drones, fire bombs, eventually the boarding of these vessels and the arrests of their crew and passengers, all of this in international waters: It is sheer piracy on the open seas. Do you think the Israelis would have dared these breaches of law had the Americans not set the bar when it seized the cargo of four Iranian vessels en route to Venezuela four years ago? At the moment the Trump regime is in legal contortions worthy of John Yoo to justify its extrajudicial executions of fishermen sailing in the Caribbean and the eastern Pacific — claiming they are, but what else, “narco-terrorists.”
The U.S. imperium entered an era of desperation after 9/11, and in this condition it has led the world back to a state of lawlessness — flagrantly this time, with an assumption of collective impunity shared among the Western powers and their appendages — that humanity thought it had superseded after the 1945 victories. So has it licensed by its own example others to ignore international law and the institutions created by common effort to define and enforce it.
Israel is not alone in partaking aggressively of this march to chaos. There are terrorists, terrorists, terrorists everywhere, to listen to the Europeans tell of it. The European Union now debates how it will structure the theft of €140 billion, about $163 billion, from Russia’s frozen assets to keep the war going in Ukraine. No, there are others. But the Israelis are first in adopting — at last I have a name for it — let’s call it “the post–9/11 Method.” https://scheerpost.com/2025/11/18/patrick-lawrence-the-knesset-and-the-post-9-11-method/
Rand Paul had long called for oversight on aid to Kiev.
US Senator Rand Paul has accused President Donald Trump of staying silent on a major corruption scandal involving a close associate of Ukrainian leader Vladimir Zelensky.
Last week, Ukrainian anti-corruption agencies alleged that Timur Mindich, Zelensky’s former longtime business partner, led a scheme that siphoned $100 million in kickbacks from contracts with the country’s nuclear power operator Energoatom, which depends on foreign aid. Two government ministers have since resigned, while Mindich fled the country to evade arrest.
“Remember when the Ukraine first Uniparty opposed my call for an Investigator General for Ukraine? Trump silent on $100M Ukraine corruption scandal resignations,” Paul wrote on X on Saturday, commenting on a news story about the affair.
Paul, who frequently attacks what he calls “wasteful spending” of American taxpayers’ money on foreign projects, has repeatedly pushed for a watchdog to supervise funds directed to Ukraine “in order to detect and prevent waste, fraud, and abuse.”
Trump has criticized unconditional aid to Kiev in the past, calling Zelensky “the greatest salesman on earth.” In August, he said the administration of his predecessor, Joe Biden, had “fleeced” America by committing $350 billion to Ukraine. He has since argued that the US is profiting from the conflict by selling Ukraine-bound weapons to NATO.
Kiev’s European backers have also raised concerns about corruption. EU foreign policy chief Kaja Kallas called the affair “extremely unfortunate,” while German Chancellor Friedrich Merz urged Zelensky to “press ahead with anti-corruption measures and reforms.”
The scandal erupted just months after Zelensky had unsuccessfully tried to strip the country’s anti-corruption bodies, NABU and SAPO, of their independence – relenting only after protests in Kiev and outcry from Western supporters. He has since imposed sanctions on Mindich, who is reportedly hiding in Israel.
nuclear-news 