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A small modular reactor’s demise calls for big change in Energy Department policy

By Henry Sokolski | November 14, 2023, https://thebulletin.org/2023/11/a-small-modular-reactors-demise-calls-for-big-change-in-energy-department-policy/

NuScale Power Corp., which is developing America’s flagship small modular reactor (SMR), has lost its only firm utility customer, the Utah Associated Municipal Power System. That utility pulled the plug last week on the project just days after Iceberg Research, a financial advisory firm, urged investors to short sell NuScale (that is, to bet the value of its shares will decrease). Shares, worth $14.87 in August, plummeted more than 85 percent, closing Monday at $2.23.

Regrettably, the US Energy Department has already given NuScale hundreds of millions in grants, and the US Export Import Bank and the US Development Finance Corporation have promised NuScale another $4 billion in financing toward a plant in Romania. NuScale’s latest loss could cast a financial pall over its parent company, the Fluor Corporation, and other Energy Department-backed SMR projects, X-Energy and Oklo.

How could this happen? Simple: The Energy Department overrode market signals, went all in with SMRs and NuScale, and stuck US taxpayers with the tab. Sadly, this is nothing new. Think Solyndra, ethanol mandates, Fisker automobiles, fast breeder reactors, and synthetic fuels.

The NuScale case, however, is worse. In the Energy Department’s zeal to sell SMRs so the country can get to net zero carbon dioxide emissions, the department failed to focus on its primary missions. These include setting energy cleanliness and efficiency standards, assuring nuclear security, spotlighting energy market trends, and conducting basic energy research to validate unproven energy concepts—e.g., fusion power—rather than commercializing systems we know already work — e.g., fission reactors. That failure of focus raises obvious questions.

Did the Energy Department do due diligence in assessing NuScale’s financial health and integrity? Did it properly weigh independent analyses that questioned the economic and environmental viability of small modular reactors more generally?Also, what of the nuclear security issues that building these plants in war zones raise?

The State and Energy departments have been pushing federal financing to export SMRs to Ukraine, its immediate neighbors, and East Asia. All of the proposed projects are within shooting distance of Russian, Chinese, and North Korean missiles. Worse, officials in Moscow, Beijing, and Pyongyang have all threatened to attack such plants.

Japan’s prime minister and Ukrainian officials have called for increased hardening and military protections for their reactors (including installing missile defenses as Belarus has at its reactor). The Energy Department, however, has yet to offer any narrative on how it might keep US-exported reactors safe against such assaults.

Then there are the nuclear weapons proliferation headaches that the exporting of small fast reactors present. One of the Energy Department’s favorite SMR projects, Bill Gates’ Natrium fast reactor, is largely a knock off of the Prism fast breeder reactor. It was designed to produce plutonium, much of which would be super weapons-grade plutonium (i.e., even easier to make into weapons than what our military uses). TerraPower, which is developing Natrium, says it plans on exporting Natrium plants. One would think the Energy Department could have explained how such reactor technology can be shared without spreading fissionable material to make nuclear bombs. So far, it has not.

Some argue that providing nuclear alternatives to Russian natural gas and preventing global warming should overshadow such proliferation concerns. Yet, most of Russia’s top gas customers are now buying elsewhere. As for fighting global warming, victory is only possible by reducing carbon dioxide emissions in the cheapest, quickest fashion. SMRs are neither quick nor cheap.

Both the nuclear industry and its critics have long favored using marginal abatement cost models to determine which energy fixes to make first to curb carbon emissions at the lowest cost. Using these models, it’s clear that making natural gas substitutions for coal-fired plants, increasing efficiencies, reducing energy demand, improving electrical transmission and storage systems, and tapping renewables all should come well before building new nuclear plants. Unfortunately, the Energy Department has yet to reference any of these models in its public statements about SMRs.

So how is the misplaced confidence in SMRs best remedied?

First, Congress should wind down the funding of Energy Department schemes to commercialize energy “winners,” nuclear or nonnuclear. Instead, the department and Congress should focus on setting energy and cleanliness goals and deadlines. To incentivize industry to meet them, the Energy Department should consider offering industry prizes.

Second, the Energy Department should make the most favored greenhouse gas cost abatement models, such as the popular McKinsey Company package, publicly available for all to use and improve. To feed better data into these models, Congress should require the Energy Department to report annually on the real costs (including subsidies) of different types of electrical generation, distribution, transmission, and storage systems.

Finally, before the United States exports any small modular reactors, the Energy Department and the Pentagon should clarify what can (and can’t) be done to protect them against military assaults and what the nuclear proliferation dangers are in the various nations that would operate them. It’s bad enough that Energy Department-backed reactors are burning holes in taxpayers’ pockets. At the very least, the Energy Department and the Pentagon should make sure that they don’t blow up in everyone’s face.

November 17, 2023 Posted by | politics, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Behind the Scenes at a U.S. Factory Building New Nuclear Bombs

The workers who make pits face these risks every day

The U.S. is ramping up construction of new “plutonium pits” for nuclear weapons

Scientific American, BY SARAH SCOLES 1 Dec 23 [excellent illustrations]

This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

Within every American nuclear weapon sits a bowling-ball-size sphere of the strangest element on the planet. This sphere, called a plutonium pit, is the bomb’s central core. It’s surrounded by conventional explosives. When those explosives blow, the plutonium is compressed, and its atoms begin to split, releasing radiation and heating the material around it. The reaction ignites the sequence of events that makes nuclear weapons nuclear.

In early nuclear bombs, like the ones the U.S. dropped on Japan in World War II, the fission of plutonium or uranium and the fatal energy released were the end of the story. In modern weapons, plutonium fission ignites a second, more powerful stage in which hydrogen atoms undergo nuclear fusion, releasing even more energy. The U.S. hasn’t made these pits in a significant way since the late 1980s.

But that is changing. The country is modernizing its nuclear arsenal, making upgrades to old weapons and building new ones. The effort includes updated missiles, a new weapon design, alterations to existing designs and new pits. To accomplish the last item, the National Nuclear Security Administration has enacted a controversial plan to produce 50 new pits a year at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina and 30 pits a year at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, the birthplace of the bomb. The first pits will be designed for a weapon called W87-1, which will tip the new intercontinental ballistic missile, called Sentinel. After that the complex will produce pits for other bomb designs.

Not everyone believes this work is necessary. Pit production foments controversy because it’s costly and potentially risky and because the existing pits might still work for a while. The physics of plutonium is complex, and no one knows when the original pits will expire. The details of how the pits are made and how they work are among America’s most closely guarded secrets. Yet in June 2023 Los Alamos officials invited a group of journalists to tour the facility for the first time in years.

We were there as the lab and the broader National Nuclear Security Administration Complex were embarking on a charm offensive to support the new plutonium work. They have to win over the tax-paying public and recruit some 2,500 new employees for the job. Some of those workers must do high-hazard work that requires expertise the country has largely let slip since the last days of the cold war. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

…………………..The plutonium used for weapons exists only because people made it.

……………………………………………….. …….Plutonium’s genesis was repeated in reactors for decades. In fact, scientists made so much that no new plutonium is required for the new pits at Savannah River and Los Alamos—the current supply can be repurposed, reshaped, reborn.

None of those actions, though, will be simple because plutonium is not simple……………………………………………………………………………………….. Its most famous trick, of course, is its propensity for radioactive decay, through which it transforms itself out of existence.

This tendency is also what makes it so dangerous. Inhaled plutonium decays in the body, releasing alpha particles (helium nuclei) that can wreak havoc. The isotope plutonium 238, used as a heat and power source but not in weapons, exhibits other strange behaviors. “If you spill it in the laboratory, it will move around on its own,” Martz says. The oomph from a plutonium atom’s decay sends it shooting across a surface. “It can get everywhere,” he adds.

Plutonium’s strangeness comes from its arrangement of electrons……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..

In the excitement of these early scientific discoveries, the point of the work would sometimes get lost: it was all in the service of creating a deadly superweapon. In 1945 the U.S. dropped a uranium fission bomb on Hiroshima and then sent a plutonium bomb—essentially a pit encased in explosives—to devastate Nagasaki. The bombs killed tens of thousands of people immediately and more after the fact. As Manhattan Project physicist I. I. Rabi had feared, according to a quotation in the 2005 book American Prometheus, “the culmination of three centuries of physics” was a weapon of mass destruction.

Soon after the war, production of plutonium pits migrated to a facility outside Boulder, Colo. Called Rocky Flats, it could churn out thousands of pits a year—a level of productivity perhaps enabled by its violation of environmental regulations, which in 1989 resulted in a federal raid and then a permanent shutdown. “The public wasn’t considered at the time,” says Bob Webster, deputy director of weapons at Los Alamos. ………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

How aging affects a pit is the subject of contention, but some things are certain: As the plutonium atoms in a pit decay, their products damage the crystal structure of the plutonium that remains, creating voids and defects. These decays also contaminate the pit with helium, americium, uranium and neptunium, among other things. In 50 years a kilogram of plutonium will amass around 0.2 liter of helium. As pits change, their performance and safety in any conditions—including just sitting on a shelf—become questionable.

Scientists still don’t know the lifetime of a plutonium pit. …………………………………………………….. The National Nuclear Security Administration’s own studies have suggested the pits will last at least 150 years but also that their degradation could result in surprise defects. And scientists may never know exactly what those defects do or how they would affect an explosion because the ostensible point of nuclear weapons is to never use them.

So far restarting American pit production is proving challenging. Los Alamos’s efforts are at least a year behind schedule, and Savannah River’s are more like five years delayed.

The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board and other critics have claimed that PF-4 isn’t resilient enough against the kind of earthquake geologists now know could occur in Los Alamos. Such significant shaking and the fires it could cause, the board alleged at a hearing last year, could result in plutonium contamination that reaches the public.

……………………… Other safety concerns have come up recently, though. In May the National Nuclear Security Administration released an investigation about four 2021 incidents: one criticality safety violation, one breach that resulted in skin contamination for three workers, and two flooding events that sent water toward fissionable materials. The agency determined that the contractor that manages Los Alamos had violated safety, procedural, management and quality-assurance rules.

………………………………………………………………………………………….. On the tour, we are forbidden from setting our notebooks down lest potential contamination stick to them. Should we drop them, a radiological control technician—who has been following us the whole time and scans our hands and feet for radioactivity anytime we leave a room—would measure each page before returning them.

……………………  In some rooms, radioactive waste is packaged and waiting to go to a storage facility, with the dosage one might receive from standing near it written on the ground. We are never allowed to forget that this is a dangerous place.

The workers who make pits face these risks every day………………………………………………………………………………

All of this effort and investment is being made in the hopes that the pits never serve their active purpose. The U.S., like all nuclear nations, stockpiles weapons in a delicate game of deterrence, the idea being that the existence of our equally or more capable weapons will stop others from using theirs. In this strategy, the pits’ true purpose is to sit idly as a threat. But for the strategy to work, the country must be willing to follow through on that threat.

…………………………………….  The fear people feel when confronted with plutonium has degraded over time. But the atomic age is renewing, and we will all have to grapple afresh with the coiled terror of these powerful weapons. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/behind-the-scenes-at-a-u-s-factory-building-new-nuclear-bombs/

November 17, 2023 Posted by | - plutonium, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

USA’s Energy Department’s nuclear commercialization ‘small nuclear’ adventures are burning holes in the taxpayers’ pockets.

“A small modular reactor’s demise calls for big change in Energy Department policy,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

November 14, 2023  Nuclear Power Economics and Security, Op-Eds & Blogs, RESOURCE Author: Henry Sokolski

Late last week, NuScale Power Corp., which is developing America’s flagship small modular reactor (SMR), lost its only firm utility customer, the Utah Associated Municipal Power System. Once selling at nearly $15 a share, NuScale stock yesterday sold for $2.31.

Experts are now speculating on whether or not NuScale will go bankrupt. Given the Department of Energy (DoE) overrode market signals and plowed hundreds of millions of dollars into this nuclear commercialization project, though, there is much more to ponder.

As I note in the  Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists piece, “A small modular reactor’s demise calls for big change in Energy Department policy,” it isn’t just NuScale that needs attention, but DoE and its policy of pushing nuclear commercialization projects at the expense of focusing on its key missions. These include setting energy cleanliness and efficiency standards, assuring nuclear security, spotlighting energy market trends, and conducting basic energy research to validate unproven energy concepts — e.g., fusion power — rather than commercializing systems we know already work — e.g., fission reactors.

The department’s inattention to these matters seems inversely proportionate with its zeal to spend on questionable nuclear commercial ventures.

Did the Energy Department do due diligence in assessing NuScale’s financial health and integrity? Did it properly weigh independent analyses that questioned the economic and environmental viability of small modular reactors more generally?

Is it properly assessing the nuclear security issues that building these plants in war zones in Eastern Europe, the Middle East, and East Asia will surely raise? What of the nuclear weapons proliferation risks that would arise from exporting advanced small fast reactors (which are capable of producing extremely high-grade weapons plutonium)? Has the Energy Department publicly worked the emissions cost abatement models that industry and environmental communities use to determine which energy fixes to make first to curb carbon emissions at the lowest cost?

So far, the answer to each of these questions is no.

This is worrisome. Before DoE commits billions more to commercialize more small modular reactors, it needs to refocus on setting energy economic and cleanliness goals and deadlines. Instead of betting taxpayers’ dollars in advance on hunches as to who might meet them, it should consider creating rewards for those who actually do.

It also should make the most favored greenhouse gas cost abatement models that industry currently exploits publicly available for all to use and to improve upon. To give these models proper data, it also should report annually on the real costs (including subsidies) of different types of electrical generation, distribution, transmission, and storage systems.

Finally, before the United States sends any small modular reactors overseas, the Energy Department and the Pentagon should clarify what can (and can’t) be done to protect them against military assaults and what the nuclear proliferation dangers might be.

It is bad enough that the Energy Department’s nuclear commercialization adventures are burning holes in the taxpayers’ pockets. At the very least, the Department of Energy and the Pentagon should make sure these projects don’t also blow up in our faces.

November 17, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The U.S.’s Plans to Modernize Nuclear Weapons Are Dangerous and Unnecessary

The U.S. should back away from updating its obsolescent nuclear weapons, in particular silo-launched missiles that needlessly risk catastrophe

BY THE EDITORS,  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/the-u-s-s-plans-to-modernize-nuclear-weapons-are-dangerous-and-unnecessary/ DECEMBER 1, 2023

This article is part of “The New Nuclear Age,” a special report on a $1.5-trillion effort to remake the American nuclear arsenal.

The U.S. is planning to modernize its unwanted, unneeded and unsafe nuclear triad of land-, sea- and air-based weapons. Perfectly poised to refight the cold war, these overhauled bombs will waste $1.5 trillion and threaten life on Earth for the century to come. We should rethink this miserable folly rather than once again squandering our wealth while driving a new arms race.

As detailed in this issue of Scientific American, this plan to burn money while imperiling the world has been widely criticized in nuclear policy circles. “Russia and the United States have already been through one nuclear arms race. We spent trillions of dollars and took incredible risks in a misguided quest for security,” former U.S. defense secretary William J. Perry wrote in 2016 as the plans first materialized. “There is only one way to win an arms race: refuse to run.”

Although the Biden administration canceled proposed Trump-era sea-launched missiles, the U.S. nuclear arsenal still bristles with some 3,700 weapons, around 1,700 of them deployed for military use and the rest in storage overseen by the Department of Energy. This quantity is more than enough to threaten the destruction of humanity and Earth’s biosphere—and it is only a fraction of the world’s total, leaving out Russia’s similarly large stockpile and smaller ones in China and other nations. Lowering the numbers and thus the risks of these weapons is a responsibility the U.S. and the Soviet Union first recognized at the end of the 1960s, and this goal should drive military and political decision-making now.

Instead the U.S. is sleepwalking into an ill-considered and little-discussed resurrection of its three-pronged cold war nuclear forces. Meanwhile China is expanding its own arsenal (to one-fourth the size of the U.S.’s). New submarines, missiles and planes, all designed to fit into a military strategy first conceived before the death of Joseph Stalin in 1953, will by 2050 leave the dead hand of the past steering us into another century of pointless risks. In this future, a mistake or misjudgment could exterminate humanity, as nearly happened repeatedly throughout the cold war. We are simply fortunate, nothing more, to have survived the hundreds of false alarms that rang over those decades.

At the center of the government’s proposal is a $100-billion bid to fill 450 nuclear silos in five inland states with hundreds of new nuclear missiles set to launch on hair triggers. Built before submarine-launched missiles became large, accurate and untraceable, these relics are now justified as a “nuclear sponge” to absorb a Russian attack on the U.S. Why plant a $100-billion nuclear “kick me” sign on the country’s breadbasket?

We cannot store the nuclear waste we have now, never mind the additional waste that will result from building these missiles. The so-called nuclear sponging mapped in this month’s issue [see “Sacrifice Zones”] would kill up to several million from radiation exposure, with hundreds of millions in North America being at risk of exposure to lethal fallout. Even a limited nuclear war between India and Pakistan would kill tens of millions worldwide and cause global famine—but how can the U.S. argue for other nations to disarm while burnishing its own nuclear sword in such a heedless fashion?

We aimed this Damoclean sword at ourselves during the cold war when we produced 70,000 of the plutonium “pits” that trigger thermonuclear warhead explosions. Weapons tests of these blasts have left every part of Earth’s surface contaminated with plutonium, with hotspots such as the Rocky Flats in Colorado and the Hanford sites in Washington State still requiring tens of billions of dollars for cleanup. Faltering efforts to restart pit production for the nuclear-modernization effort have cost $18 billion to $24 billion, much of it wasted, and, by the admission of weapons officials at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, they don’t even seem to be immediately necessary.

Why are we risking so much when the lessons of the 20th century are so clear? In the words of the 1991 START Treaty that capped the cold war, “nuclear war would have devastating consequences for all humanity … it cannot be won and must never be fought.” Disregarding Russia’s inability to turn its nuclear arsenal to military advantage while being bombarded by Ukrainian drones, our political class has fumbled away hard-won wisdom about the deadly futility of the arms race. We are recapitulating the dangers the world turned away from decades ago.

Who today benefits from disinterring the arms race? Only defense-industry shareholders and military contractors near silos in North Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, Colorado and Nebraska. This, in a nation where we have just doubled child poverty out of a refusal to help lower-income families. Surely it would be cheaper, safer and smarter to build factories or universities or research labs in these places, construct low-cost housing next to new engineering or biomedical campuses there, and watch them boom, in a good way, for the next century at a fraction of the silo-overhaul price tag. The 900 nuclear missiles onboard U.S. submarines will meanwhile deter the feared nuclear first strike the obsolescent land missiles were meant to discourage at the dawn of the cold war.

“A worrisome new arms race is brewing,” United Nations secretary-general António Guterres said in September. “This is madness. We must reverse course.” We agree. The only real way to use nuclear weapons is never. They should exist only in numbers large enough to deter their use by others, which they already abundantly do, with not one warhead more.

November 16, 2023 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | 2 Comments

Over 400 of Biden’s Own Administration Officials Demand Ceasefire in Gaza

The letter adds to a wave of letters and memos calling for a ceasefire coming from current and former federal staffers.

SCHEERPOST, By Sharon Zhang / Truthout, November 15, 2023

More than 400 Biden administration employees across dozens of federal agencies have signed a letter calling for an immediate de-escalation of Israel’s siege on Gaza and demanding that President Joe Biden support growing calls for a ceasefire.

The letter, first reported on on Tuesday, includes signatures from employees across more than 30 federal agencies and departments, according to reporters from NBCand The New York Times who viewed the document. The group calls for an end to Israel’s violence and blockade that are causing a massive humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

“We represent a coalition of Biden-Harris Administration political appointees and civil servants, positioned across the domestic and foreign policy spheres, working in federal agencies, departments, independent agencies, and the White House,” reads the first line of the letter.

“We call on President Biden to urgently demand a ceasefire; and to call for de-escalation of the current conflict by securing the immediate release of the Israeli hostages and arbitrarily detained Palestinians; the restoration of water, fuel, electricity and other basic services; and the passage of adequate humanitarian aid to the Gaza strip,” the letter continues.

The letter was first circulated two weeks ago by two political appointees leading the effort. The signatories are anonymous, but the appointees told reporters that employees include both senior and low-level workers, with the majority being political appointees. The employees work in several countries and for a wide variety of agencies, including the Executive Office of the President, as well as the departments of Defense, Interior, and Justice.

The letter also notes that most Americans are against Israel’s genocide in Gaza and support ceasefire calls…………………………………………………………………..
more https://scheerpost.com/2023/11/15/over-400-of-bidens-own-administration-officials-demand-ceasefire-in-gaza/

November 16, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

America’s first SMR fizzles out as uranium continues to ride high

SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.

Its stock is down 81% over the past year.

Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong

Stockhead, Josh Chiat, 14 Nov 23

Small modular reactors — they’re the technology the nuclear power industry hopes will mainstream the controversial energy sector and prove it can expand without the massive scale of traditional nuclear energy.

But the emerging market has been dealt a blow just as enthusiasm for a nuclear renaissance hits a new level of intensity.

It came in the form of a decision from the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems and advanced SMR developer NuScale to dump a plan called the “Carbon Free Power Project”.

That would have been the first SMR rolled out in the States, six minireactors due to be constructed in Idaho Falls from 2026. But NuScale and UAMPS deemed it unviable after subscriptions fell well below the level required to underwrite the project’s construction.

It came despite strong political support, including from the Biden Administration, amid long delays and cost overruns for conventional plants.

Wood Mackenzie vice-chair of Americas Ed Crooks said it was a serious setback for the SMR industry.

“But while the end of the Carbon Free Power Project was not entirely unexpected, it is still a serious setback for nuclear power in the US, and for hopes of reducing greenhouse gas emissions globally,” he said in a note.

“It is increasingly likely that no new SMRs will be built in the US or Europe in the 2020s.”

According to Crooks the levelised cost of energy for the power to be delivered by the dumped project was over double that of utility-scale solar and materially higher than gas turbines.

“Estimates published in January set a target levelised cost of energy (LCOE) for the plant of US$89 per megawatt hour, up from an earlier estimate of US$58/MWh, including the benefit of tax credits and federal government support,” he wrote.

“But even that revised target relied on some favourable assumptions. Hitting that US$89/MWh target depended on cutting US$700 million from the Carbon Free Power Project’s estimated cost of US$5.1 billion.

“Without that, the LCOE would be US$105/MWh, and there were clear risks that it could rise higher.

“Wood Mackenzie calculated last year that the average LCOE from a combined-cycle gas turbine power plant in the US was US$58/MWh, while utility-scale solar was US$43/MWh.

“That makes the Carbon Free Power Project’s cost estimates seem expensive, even before any additional overruns.”

Enthusiasm for nuclear continues

Despite that news, SMR developer NuScale has, predictably, rebutted a short seller’s report from Iceberg Research on its operations last month.

Its stock is down 81% over the past year.

Yet enthusiasm for the nuclear renaissance is still strong, ………………………………………………………….  https://stockhead.com.au/resources/ground-breakers-americas-first-smr-fizzles-out-as-uranium-continues-to-ride-high/

November 15, 2023 Posted by | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

Who will clean up America’s nuclear wastes in Greenland?

Maine Voices: Long-buried U.S. nuclear waste would complicate any bid for Greenland https://www.pressherald.com/2019/08/24/maine-voices-long-buried-u-s-nuclear-waste-would-complicate-trumps-bid-for-greenland/

Would the U.S. or Denmark be responsible for cleaning up over 47,000 gallons of Cold War-era radioactive waste?

BY DAN POSSUMATO , 25 Aug 19, BRUNSWICK — President Trump’s flippant yet repeated comments about the possibility of the United States purchasing Greenland – Denmark’s semi-autonomous island, which is 25 percent larger than Alaska – are both amusing and worrisome. Amusing because the comments show an astounding lack of diplomatic decorum, and worrisome because the Russians are paying attention, as they are well aware of previous American attempts to utilize the island for military purposes. Since the early 1950s the U.S. has maintained Thule Air Base on the northwest of the island for the purpose of detecting missiles launched against North America, previously from the Soviet Union and now from Russia.

However, the Russians also are aware that in the 1960s, a top-secret U.S. Army operation code-named Project Iceworm attempted to place up to 600 nuclear missiles at another base underneath Greenland’s thick ice shelf. The location of the missiles, so close to our Cold War adversary, would have had enormous offensive capability. Flight time to their targets in the Soviet Union would have been mere minutes, and, therefore, virtually impossible to stop. The missiles were to be constantly moved over rail lines in a network of tunnels dug deep beneath the ice, a plan intended to foil Soviet intelligence from knowing which of the 2,100 siloswould house the missiles. A Cold War version of the old shell game.

Officially, the Army claimed to be operating a facility named Camp Century, whose purported purpose was to conduct experimentation in Arctic construction techniques and engage in other “research.” The installation that Camp Century concealed – Project Iceworm – was powered by an experimental nuclear reactor, which, according to the Atomic Heritage Foundation, produced over 47,000 gallons of radioactive waste that still lies buried, along with the entire camp, under more than 100 feet of ice. Other estimates put the figure at more than 63,000 gallons. The thinking at the time was that the ice would keep the waste entombed forever.

The whole operation proved impractical, as the Army engineers had miscalculated how fast the ice shelf was shifting. The 21 tunnels began to shift and collapse because of the pressure from the ice, the rail tracks buckled, and the reactor began to melt the ice below and it began to sink. Without fanfare, the whole project was abandoned in 1967.

However, the ice is now melting faster than anyone back then had thought possible. In a 2016 article, Science magazine reported that “melting could begin to release waste stored at the camp, including sewage, diesel fuel, persistent organic pollutants like PCBs, and radiological waste from the camp’s nuclear generator.” Fortunately, even with the effects of climate change, the base won’t be exposed for another 90 years or more. Still, who will take ownership of the problem and expend vast sums of money to remediate the environment: the USA or Denmark?

Project Iceworm was so secret that the Danish government was not formally asked for its permission to allow the establishment of the base; thus, it could disavow any knowledge if the operation were ever exposed. Denmark officially did and still does have ban nuclear weapons there, but the country’s prime minister and foreign minister had tacitly allowed U.S. nuclear weapons to be kept in Greenland, at Thule Air Base and at Project Iceworm. The Danish Parliament was unaware of this clandestine decision. (Ultimately, no U.S. missiles were ever deployed to Greenland.)

If President Trump should ever get Denmark to sell us Greenland, perhaps he could get the former base listed on the National Register of Historic Places, and thus preclude any nuclear-waste cleanup for the purpose of preserving a part of our history.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | ARCTIC, secrets,lies and civil liberties, USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Deadly alliance: Why has the CIA decided to allow US media to confirm its involvement in Ukraine’s brutal assassination campaign?

The scale of US intelligence support for Kiev’s murderous operations has been brought to light at a very interesting moment

 https://www.rt.com/russia/586692-cia-sbu-kiev-assassinations/
By Chay Bowes, journalist and geopolitical analyst, MA in Strategic Studies, RT correspondent

As Ukraine slips quietly from the top of the Western media’s news agenda, fascinating insights into the granular nature of the CIA’s involvement in Kiev’s assassination program are being revealed. By the very same outlets that had previously suggested Ukraine was on a solo run with its slew of extrajudicial killings and terror attacks.

Western media has routinely ignored the brutal exploits of Kiev’s successor to the KGB, the SBU. When they are reported upon, instead of calling out the illegal killing of journalists and activists, the press seeks to frame them as masterful operations of a band of freedom fighters administering tough justice to the “enemies of Ukraine.” A key element of that narrative was that while the US, British, and French intelligence services worked closely with the SBU, they didn’t have any direct control of its actions, particularly when those actions involved assassinating unarmed civilians. However, a recently published article in the Washington Post has now revealed that the CIA had, and continues to have, a central role in the group’s most disturbing activities.

A Washington Post article “Ukrainian spies with deep ties to CIA wage shadow war against Russia” outlines a labyrinthine relationship between the two intelligence agencies, and while the CIA still maintains it doesn’t sanction particular operations, the details revealed in the telling article suggest that this is nothing more than the usual stock disclaimer which accompanies most of Langley’s covert operations. The article is based on interviews with “more than two dozen current and former Ukrainian, US and Western intelligence and security officials” and its revelations are both shocking and fascinating.

One of the first claims it makes is that the relationship between the Ukrainian SBU and the CIA has been developing for decades with the latter working to “develop” Ukraine’s abilities to carry out sabotage and “operations” since at least 2014. The CIA has also been providing detailed intelligence, equipment and training to the SBU during that period and continues to spend “tens of millions” of dollars developing its capabilities. The sources quoted also confirm that the CIA even designed and built a new headquarters for the SBU in Kiev and currently share “levels of information and intelligence unthinkable” prior to Russia’s intervention in Ukraine.

According to the Washington Post, the CIA also now maintains a significant presence in Kiev, not only in terms of men and materiel but also information flow, all of which suggests that despite maintaining an overt distance, the CIA is in fact intimately involved in all aspects of SBU operations including the planning and execution of operations outside the state.

One such operation, and probably the most infamous carried out by the SBU since February 2022, was the assassination of Daria Dugina, daughter of prominent Russian philosopher Aleksandr Dugin. The Washington Post article goes into great detail to outline the complexity of the “operation” performed by the SBU that resulted in the death of the unarmed 23-year-old non-combatant in a car bombing outside Moscow in August 2022. It tells of the use of a pet carrier to transport explosives into Russia, and of the surveillance of the deceased woman’s home by the assassin, who then fled across the border soon after the horrendous killing, which was cynically referred to by the SBU as a “liquidation.” 

The granular details outlined in the article suggest sources either within the CIA or SBU have now confirmed that their relationship, once presented as purely advisory and business-like, is in fact a deep and long-standing partnership. The article goes on to confirm the SBU’s involvement in several other targeted murders on Russian territory, including the assassination of Vladlen Tatarsky with a bomb in a crowded St. Petersburg cafe and the murder of ex-submarine commander Stanislav Rzhitsky, who was shot in the back while jogging unarmed in a park in Krasnodar.

The revealing article also refers to “uneasiness” in Kiev and Washington regarding the SBU’s penchant for this kind of assassination, noting concern that they could tarnish Ukraine’s image abroad especially among donor countries who recently admitted that without their help Ukraine would collapse within weeks.

What is most interesting about this piece is probably not its confirmation that the CIA is intimately involved in the operations of the SBU, what’s most fascinating is why a newspaper widely recognized as itself having an intimate relationship with the CIA has suddenly decided to basically confirm what many analysts already knew when it comes to Langley and the SBU.

The Washington Post’s revelation comes not only in the aftermath of the bloody Hamas incursion into Israel and the subsequent Israeli assault on Gaza but also as international attention, and more importantly, appetite to support Kiev, wanes. This shift in attention, not only in the media but also potentially in the scale of aid, bodes poorly for President Vladimir Zelensky’s regime, as it faces increasing domestic pressures and war-weary neighbors.

Couple this with the oncoming winter and the view looks increasingly grim for Zelensky even before mentioning Ukraine’s failed counteroffensive and recent Russian battlefield gains. It now also looks inevitable that Ukraine will find itself playing second fiddle to an emerging political and potentially military crisis in the Middle East while competing for the vital US aid that keeps the Kiev regime afloat. Crucially, all of these woes offer a beleaguered NATO an opportunity to apply pressure on Zelensky to seek peace, potentially solving an increasingly difficult puzzle for Kiev’s backers as they head towards elections that will be decided by populations ever more vocal in their disdain for the conflict.

So as Kiev’s woes compound and the world’s gaze shifts towards Gaza, it seems the truth about the West’s intimate relationship with the SBU is now being pulled out of the closet, not by a whistleblower or dissenting investigative journalist, but by a stalwart of the US intelligence community, the Washington Post. The question we should all be asking is why? How does this benefit or promote a Western ‘victory’ in Ukraine? The answer may well be that it’s not a victory that these revelations are supposed to facilitate. It’s more likely that it’s part of a strategy of edging Kiev towards accepting the undeniable reality that the entire US project in Ukraine is set to fail, and for Zelensky to seek accommodation before there’s nothing left to negotiate with.

The task now is to end it as painlessly as possible for NATO and Kiev’s exhausted backers, and to move on to the next crusade, leaving a devastated and dysfunctional Ukraine to be consigned to the growing graveyard of bloody US foreign policy misadventures.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

Biden and Xi will sign a deal to keep AI out of control systems for nuclear weapons: report

Tom Porter , Nov 13, 2023,  https://www.businessinsider.com/biden-xi-deal-ai-out-nuclear-weapons-systems-apec-report-2023-11

  • China’s President Xi Jinping and US President Joe Biden will meet this week. 
  • They’re expected to agree to limit the use of AI in nuclear weapons, a report said. 
  • The meeting comes amid increasing tensions between the US and China.

US President Joe Biden and his Chinese counterpart Xi Jinping are set to sign a deal limiting the use of artificial intelligence in nuclear weapon control systems, according to The South China Morning Post.

The leaders are due to meet Wednesday at the Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation (APEC) summit in San Francisco against a backdrop of increasing tensions between the superpowers.

Among the top items on the agenda is the proliferation of AI in military technologies, two sources familiar with the planned discussions told The South China Morning Post.

Biden and Xi will pledge a deal limiting the use of AI in autonomous weaponry, such as drones, as well as the systems used for the control and deployment of nuclear warheads, the report said.

November 15, 2023 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

U.S. Space Force and the dangerous clutter of human-produced stuff in space

What Does the U.S. Space Force Actually Do? Inside the highly secretive military branch responsible for protecting American interests in a vulnerable new domain

NYT, By Jon Gertner,  Nov. 8, 2023

Chief Master Sgt. Ron Lerch of the U.S. Space Force sat down in his office in Los Angeles one morning in September to deliver a briefing known as a threat assessment. The current “threats” in space are less sci-fi than you might expect, but there are a surprising number of them: At least 44,500 space objects now circle Earth, including 9,000 active satellites and 19,000 significant pieces of debris.

What’s most concerning isn’t the swarm of satellites but the types. “We know that there are kinetic kill vehicles,” Lerch said — for example, a Russian “nesting doll” satellite, in which a big satellite releases a tiny one and the tiny one releases a mechanism that can strike and damage another satellite. There are machines with the ability to cast nets and extend grappling hooks, too. China, whose presence in space now far outpaces Russia’s, is launching unmanned “space planes” into orbit, testing potentially unbreakable quantum communication links and adding A.I. capabilities to satellites.

An intelligence report, Lerch said, predicted the advent, within the next decade, of satellites with radio-frequency jammers, chemical sprayers and lasers that blind and disable the competition. All this would be in addition to the cyberwarfare tools, electromagnetic instruments and “ASAT” antisatellite missiles that already exist on the ground. In Lerch’s assessment, space looked less like a grand “new ocean” for exploration — phrasing meant to induce wonder that has lingered from the Kennedy administration — and more like a robotic battlefield, where the conflicts raging on Earth would soon extend ever upward.

The Space Force, the sixth and newest branch of the U.S. military, was authorized by Congress and signed into law by President Donald Trump in December 2019. Its creation was not a partisan endeavor, though Trump has boasted that the idea for the organization was his alone. The initiative had in fact been shaped within the armed forces and Congress over the previous 25 years, based on the premise that as satellite and space technologies evolved, America’s military organizations had to change as well……………………………………………………………………………….

 nearly every aspect of modern warfare and defense — intelligence, surveillance, communications, operations, missile detection — has come to rely on links to orbiting satellites………………

the strategic exploitation of space now extends well beyond military concerns. Satellite phone systems have become widespread. Positioning and timing satellites, such as GPS (now overseen by the Space Force), allow for digital mapping, navigation, banking and agricultural management. A world without orbital weather surveys seems unthinkable. Modern life is reliant on space technologies to an extent that an interruption would create profound economic and social distress…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

Guardians tend to think of the realm they patrol as a kind of structured multilevel terrain — Earth as being surrounded by three highways, or three rings. The nearest level, low Earth orbit (LEO), is host to constellations like SpaceX’s Starlink network and the International Space Station, which moves about 250 miles above us at 17,500 miles per hour. A medium Earth orbit (MEO), between 1,200 and 22,000 miles above, is where GPS satellites circle. At the highest ring — at least for now — is a track known  as “geosynchronous” orbit (GEO), because an object in such an orbit keeps pace with Earth’s rotation. This band is home to DirectTV satellites, weather-tracking instruments from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration and crucial Defense Department communication links.

It’s a technological zoo up there. The satellite mix is foreign and domestic, young and old, sinister and peaceful. The technologies are all different sizes, flying at different speeds and altitudes. The challenge for the force is to monitor all movement but also to track the threatening presence of debris, some of which is naturally occurring (tiny rocks, for instance) and some of which has human origins (like shards of old rockets). Because space junk can move at extraordinary velocities, a floating screw might pack a destructive punch equivalent to a small bomb……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………

 Capt. Raymond Pereira, drawing on a white board, pointed me to another concern: the crowd of satellites in low Earth orbit. “I would say we’re probably already entering into an area where congestion is a problem,” he said, “and anything that would generate debris would be catastrophic for the domain.” One plausible theory is known as the Kessler Syndrome, named after the former NASA scientist Donald Kessler, which posits that a release of wreckage and fragments in this orbit could eventually lead to a domino effect of unstoppable destruction. Pereira pointed out that if someone (or something) were to touch off such an event, “they would not only be harming their adversary; they would be harming themselves.”  But even short of that, a single collision or attack might hamstring science missions to the moon, or to Mars, or lead to failures for GPS and communications systems, a problem that could have huge consequences for life on Earth.

………………………. A treaty from the late 1960s, signed by most of the major nations on Earth, prohibits the use of nuclear weapons in space and designates the moon for peaceful purposes. But recently, I was told, satellites from foreign adversaries have been coming close to machines from the United States and its allies. The treaty says nothing about such provocations — or about grappling hooks, nesting dolls and cyberwarfare.

Space Force leaders readily describe their guardians as working toward a state of combat readiness…………………………………………………………..

Debris has led military strategists to ponder a related issue: In space, it’s difficult to get out of the way of conflict……………………………………………………………………………………………………………….

………………….. “And then potentially every satellite becomes more debris,” Saltzman remarked. “Every peaceful satellite could become a weapon accidentally.”…………………………………………………………………………………. more https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/08/magazine/space-force.html

November 14, 2023 Posted by | space travel, USA | Leave a comment

Biden Moves To Reduce U.S. Reliance On Russian Nuclear Supply Chain

The U.S. depends on Russian state-operated firm Rosatom for nearly 50% of
global uranium enrichment, essential for the nation’s nuclear energy
production. America’s reliance on Russian nuclear supply chains continues
despite sanctions, inadvertently funding Russia’s defense sector and
creating a critical vulnerability in energy security. The Biden
administration is seeking $2.16 billion to boost domestic uranium
enrichment capabilities, emphasizing the urgency to diminish dependence on
Russian nuclear fuel for national security and energy independence.

Oil Price 11th Nov 2023

https://oilprice.com/Alternative-Energy/Nuclear-Power/Biden-Moves-To-Reduce-US-Reliance-On-Russian-Nuclear-Supply-Chain.html

November 14, 2023 Posted by | politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Deal to build pint-size nuclear reactors canceled, ‘avoiding a giant financial debacle.’

NuScale Power’s small modular reactors promised cheaper nuclear power, but costs soared and utilities balked

Science, NOV 2023 BY ADRIAN CHO

A plan to build a novel nuclear power plant comprising six small modular reactors (SMRs) fell apart this week when prospective customers for its electricity backed out. Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS), a coalition of community-owned power systems in seven western states, withdrew from a deal to build the plant, designed by NuScale Power, because too few members agreed to buy into it. The project, subsidized by the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE), sought to revive the moribund U.S. nuclear industry, but its cost had more than doubled to $9.3 billion.

“We still see a future for new nuclear,” says Mason Baker, CEO and general manager of UAMPS, which planned to build the plant in Idaho. “But in the near term, we’re going to focus on … expanding our wind capacity, doing more utility-scale solar, [and] batteries.” NuScale, which was spun out of Oregon State University in 2007, declined to make anyone available for an interview. But David Schlissel of the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis says, “The communities and their ratepayers have avoided a giant financial debacle.”

To some observers, the plan’s collapse also raises questions about the feasibility of other planned advanced reactors, meant to provide clean energy with fewer drawbacks than existing reactors. NuScale’s was the most conventional of the designs, and the closest to construction. “There’s plenty of reasons to think [the other projects] are going to be even more difficult and expensive,” says Edwin Lyman, a physicist and director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists.

The U.S. nuclear industry has brought just two new power reactors online in the past quarter-century. In a deregulated power market, developers have struggled with the enormous capital expense of building a power reactor. Two new reactors at Plant Vogtle in Georgia, one of which came online in May, cost more than $30 billion.

To whack down cost, engineers at NuScale decided to think small. Each NuScale SMR would produce just a fraction of the 1.1 gigawatts produced by one of the new Vogtle reactors. As originally conceived in 2014, the plant would contain 12 SMRs, each producing 60 megawatts of electricity, for $4.2 billion.

Small reactors are not an obvious winner. Basic physics dictates that a bigger nuclear reactor will be more fuel efficient than a smaller one. And a big nuclear plant can benefit from economies of scale. However, a small reactor can be simpler. For example, NuScale engineers rely on convection to drive cooling water through the core of each SMR, obviating the need for expensive pumps. SMRs also can be mass-produced in a factory and shipped whole to a site, reducing costs.

Size aside, NuScale’s SMR is relatively conventional. Whereas other advanced reactor designs rely on exotic coolants, NuScale’s sticks to water. It also uses the same low-enriched uranium fuel as existing power reactors. Those features helped the NuScale design win approval from the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in September 2020—the only advanced reactor to have done so.

DOE agreed to host the plant at its Idaho National Laboratory, bypassing the long site permitting process commercial reactors ordinarily face. Still, by the time NRC approved the design, the cost for the project has risen to $6.1 billion. That led DOE to chip in $1.4 billion and developers to reduce the design to six modules, each pumping out 77 megawatts. In January, an analysis revealed that the cost had increased by an additional $3 billion. It suggested power from the plant would cost $89 per megawatt-hour, roughly three times as much as power from wind or utility-scale solar.

Why the costs sky-rocketed remains unclear. Lyman notes that NuScale’s first plant was always going to be expensive, as the company’s production lines still need to be developed. Even so, he says, NuScale designers overestimated how much they could save with a simpler design. “They never demonstrated that you could compensate for that penalty in economies of scale with these other factors.”

Jacopo Buongiorno, a nuclear engineer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, says the NuScale design has an Achilles’ heel. Each reactor’s core resides within a double-walled steel cylinder, with a vacuum between the walls to keep heat from leaking out. The reactor modules sit in a big pool of water, which in an emergency can flood into the vacuum space around a reactor to prevent it overheating. Compared with a conventional reactor’s building, the pool requires more reinforced concrete, the price of which has soared, Buongiorno says. “In terms of tons of reinforced concrete per megawatt of power, NuScale’s design is off the chart.”

UAMPS’s members balked at the cost of that power. UAMPS had to line up agreements to buy 80% of the plant’s 462 megawatt output before early next year, Baker says, but it had commitments for only 26%. On 7 November the 26 of the 50 UAMPS members that had signed up for the project voted to terminate it, Baker says.

Other, more ambitious nuclear projects are in the works. DOE has agreed to help a company called Terrapower develop a reactor that will use molten sodium as a coolant. It will also help another company, X-power, develop an SMR cooled by xenon gas. Both plants would use novel fuel enriched to 20% uranium-235. That fuel is not yet commercially available, and it could make those designs even more expensive, Lyman says………………………….. https://www.science.org/content/article/deal-build-pint-size-nuclear-reactors-canceled

November 13, 2023 Posted by | business and costs, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

White House Aides “Simply Cannot Stomach” Biden’s Israel Policy, Dissent Memos Leak, Revolt At State Dept

BY TYLER DURDEN, FRIDAY, NOV 10, 2023, https://www.zerohedge.com/political/white-house-aides-simply-cannot-stomach-bidens-israel-policy-dissent-memos-leak-revolt

A revolt is brewing within the Biden administration over how the White House is handling the Israel-Gaza war, as the civilian death toll and mass Palestinian displacement soars, and as Biden’s top officials continue to say “no conditions” have been placed on how Israel uses US-supplied weapons. Pressure from the press pool is also piling on, with near daily spats and antagonistic back-and-forth exchanges on display in the State Department and White House briefing rooms.

This week there have emerged reports of scathing ‘dissent memos’ criticizing White House Israel policy being circulated, collecting many hundreds of signatures chiefly from among State Department and USAID staff. A primary theme of the pushback and pressure is that President Biden must change course on the Gaza crisis.

First, on Monday Politico obtained and published portions of a memo issued by State Department personnel giving a blistering critique which according to the publication argued that “among other things, the U.S. should be willing to publicly criticize the Israelis.”

It was issued after the Biden’s Secretary of State, Antony Blinken, repeatedly made clear that the US does not back a ceasefire, but is only sheepishly calling for brief humanitarian ‘pauses’. Politico points out the memo represents a “growing loss of confidence” among Biden’s corps of diplomats: 

The message suggests a growing loss of confidence among U.S. diplomats in President Joe Biden’s approach to the Middle East crisis. It reflects the sentiments of many U.S. diplomats, especially at mid-level and lower ranks, according to conversations with several department staffers as well as other reports. If such internal disagreements intensify, it could make it harder for the Biden administration to craft policy toward the region.

The memo has two key requests: that the U.S. support a ceasefire, and that it balance its private and public messaging toward Israel, including airing criticisms of Israeli military tactics and treatment of Palestinians that the U.S. generally prefers to keep private.

The memo, marked “sensitive but unclassified’ was sure to leak, and that was likely the point. It bluntly underscores that Biden’s policy is hurting America’s standing in the world as much of global opinion has been appalled at the Gaza death toll which this week surpassed 10,500. 

The memo sates that the gap between Biden officials’ private and public messaging “contributes to regional public perceptions that the United States is a biased and dishonest actor, which at best does not advance, and at worst harms, U.S. interests worldwide.”

“We must publicly criticize Israel’s violations of international norms such as failure to limit offensive operations to legitimate military targets,” the dissent memo continues. “When Israel supports settler violence and illegal land seizures or employs excessive use of force against Palestinians, we must communicate publicly that this goes against our American values so that Israel does not act with impunity.”

Next, hundreds of staffers at the United States Agency for International Development (USAID) have issued a letter calling for an “immediate ceasefire” while also criticizing the White House’s failure to hold Israel accountable in any way for “numerous violations of international law” and the huge numbers of Gaza civilian casualties, especially among women and children. 

The USAID staffers are also outraged that the US last month vetoed a UN Security Council resolution which sought a pause in fighting in order to allow humanitarian aid to get through to the Gaza Strip. The USAID dissent memo, which also went public by the middle of this week, includes the following: 

“We believe that further catastrophic loss of human life can only be avoided if the United States Government calls for an immediate ceasefire in Gaza, the release of Israeli hostages, and the restoration of water, food, fuel, and electricity to the people of Gaza by the State of Israel,” it reads.

“In the longer term, we call on the United States Government to join the international community and human rights organizations in holding all parties, including the State of Israel, to international law, which includes ending Israel’s illegal occupation of the Palestinian territories and settlements on occupied land.”

Publicly, President Biden is coming under most pressure from a tiny handful of outspoken Progressive Democrats in Congress (the Squad), but the more significant pushback appears to be coming from within his own administration.

Increasingly, bold public statements from Israeli leaders themselves have introduced huge, obvious contradictions between the White House’s rhetoric and that of Netanyahu’s government, which is much more open about its intent in Gaza…

On Thursday, CNN issued a new investigative report quoting senior White House staffers as saying they increasingly “cannot stomach” defending Biden’s policy anymore. The report also describes “great moral anxiety” – in the words of one unnamed senior admin official, who is quoted in the following: 

Angst, unease and outrage are spreading through corners of the Biden administration as Israeli forces show no signs of letting up their relentless attacks inside Gaza and the civilian death toll in the besieged enclave – already in the thousands – continues to climb.

One month into the Israel-Hamas war, some senior officials privately say there are aspects of Israel’s military operations they simply cannot stomach defending; calls for the US to back a ceasefire are growing among government employees; and others are distraught by the incessant images of Palestinian civilians being killed by Israeli airstrikes, multiple sources told CNN.

“It has created great moral anxiety,” said one senior administration official. “But no one can say it because we all work at the pleasure of the president and he’s all in.”

More high level resignations could come as a result, which will certainly only increase the pressure on Biden’s team while headed into an election year, already has his poll numbers are at record lows.

CNN notes that a full-on revolt is underway in the State Department: “Some of the fiercest backlash has come from inside the State Department, including an official who publicly resigned from the agency last month over the Biden’s administration’s approach to the conflict,” the report says. “Elsewhere in the administration, officials are quietly fuming as the civilian death toll mounts.”

The Democratic base too, could increasingly shift to become more sympathetic to the unrelenting denunciations issued by the Squad. Progressives and protesters are calling Biden “genocide Joe” – as CNN describes further:

The internal administration dissent is becoming so visible that White House National Security Council spokesman John Kirby was forced to address it in a press briefing on Tuesday. He sought, and failed, to calm anxiety by saying, “the president understands that there’s strong emotions and feelings here, all around, all across the board – and here inside the administration and the federal government, that’s certainly the case as well.”

These tensions are likely only to grow given there are no signs Israel’s military is ready to exercise any restraint, given Israeli leadership likely perceives that Washington has given it a ‘blank check’ (akin to Ukraine). Already Israel receives at least $3.8 billion in military aid annually, and Biden is now seeking some $14 billion more in assistance this year.

November 13, 2023 Posted by | politics, USA | Leave a comment

No possibility of Gaza ceasefire – Biden

Rt.com 12 Nov,23

Israel has, however, agreed to daily “four-hour pauses” in fighting, the White House says

US President Joe Biden has ruled out any hope of achieving a lasting ceasefire between Israel and Hamas in Gaza.

“None. No possibility,” Biden told reporters outside the White House on Thursday when asked about the chances of a firm cessation in hostilities.

Speaking to reporters separately later in the day as he was boarding Air Force One, the president revealed he had been pushing for a “pause” in fighting “for a lot more than three days.”

The US, however, has not managed to secure any significant pause from Israel, which is reportedly determined to continue its war on Hamas until the militant group is completely destroyed…………………………………………………………. more https://www.rt.com/news/586950-gaza-ceasefire-no-possibility/

November 13, 2023 Posted by | Israel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Small Nuclear Reactor Contract Fails, Signaling Larger Issues with Nuclear Energy Development in U.S

Statement by Dr. Edwin Lyman, Director of Nuclear Power Safety, Union of Concerned Scientists, Nov 9, 2023
https://www.ucsusa.org/about/news/small-nuclear-reactor-contract-fails-signaling-larger-issues-nuclear-energy-development

NuScale Power Cooperation, the first company in the United States to secure approval for the design of a small modular nuclear reactor (SMR), ended its contract with the Utah Associated Municipal Power Systems (UAMPS) on Wednesday. The companies cited rising costs as the reason for terminating the contract.

Throughout the development process, NuScale made several ill-advised design choices in an attempt to control the cost of its reactor, but which raised numerous safety concerns. The design lacked leak-tight containment structures and highly reliable backup safety systems. It also only had one control room for 12 reactor units despite the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) typically requiring no more than two units per control room.

Additionally, the company led efforts to sidestep critical safety regulations, including requirements for offsite emergency response plans to protect nearby communities. But NuScale’s justification for all this regulatory corner-cutting—that the design is “passively safe”—was undermined when concerns about its passive emergency core cooling system arose late in the design certification process.

The end of the project reflects the fragility of the advanced nuclear power industry in the U.S., which has been driven by an oversupply of reactor developers and a lack of genuine demand. As new reactor developers look for utilities and other end users to buy their products, the high cost and risks of their experimental, untested technologies are proving too onerous.

Below is a statement by Dr. Edwin Lyman, the director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists (UCS).

“The termination of NuScale’s contract signals the broader challenges of developing nuclear energy in the United States. Placing excessive reliance on untested technologies without adequate consideration of economic viability, practicality, and safety concerns is irresponsible and clearly won’t work. The failure of this project underscores the need for decision makers to work diligently to ensure that the pursuit of nuclear energy aligns with the imperatives of public safety and financial feasibility.

“For all its problems, NuScale is one of the designs with the best prospects for commercialization because of its similarity to conventional light-water reactors, which allowed the company to learn from extensive operating experience and to leverage much of the existing nuclear power supply chain. Thus, the failure of the NuScale project with UAMPS does not bode well for the dozens of other, more exotic reactor types in various stages of development that are being touted as the next best thing in nuclear power, such as sodium-cooled fast reactors, gas-cooled reactors and molten-salt reactors. These reactors, which are based on much less mature designs and generally require fuels and materials that are not readily available, will be even riskier bets than NuScale for the foreseeable future. There are currently no other new nuclear power reactor designs under NRC licensing review.

“As private interests continue to turn their attention to emerging nuclear energy technology, lessons from this project should be held top of mind.” #nuclear #antinuclear #nuclearfree #NoNukes

November 12, 2023 Posted by | Small Modular Nuclear Reactors, USA | Leave a comment

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