Democracy out the window in USA – as teachers and others punished for making pro-Russian comments
Tammy, 17 June 23
Three St. Louis residents indicted on charges of illegally pushing pro-Russian propaganda
First of all Russia is not a socialist country and being a socialist in the usa is not a crime. Bernie sanders is a democratic socialist. The biden administration, is behind these prosecutions.
https://news.yahoo.com/substitute-teacher-suspended-remarks-supporting-004938324.html
Substitute teacher suspended for remarks supporting Putin’s invasion of Ukraine
Other teachers in Florida, Utah, and Idaho have been suspended or fired for similar views.
Not democratic. Semi totalitarian.
People from across the usa, have complained about FBI interrogations about, their views on Russia and the Ukraine. Some taken from social media. This is totalitarian at many levels.
Lawmakers propose shoring up nuclear cyber standards ahead of National Defense Authorization Act markup
NextGov, By Edward Graham, JUNE 16, 2023
The bipartisan proposal, which could be added to the FY2024 defense policy bill, would establish a federal working group to help address gaps in the cyber practices securing the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile.
A bipartisan trio of lawmakers on the House Armed Services Committee unveiled a measure on Thursday that would address security risks to the nation’s nuclear weapons systems by creating a federal working group to help mitigate previously identified cybersecurity gaps.
The proposal — from Reps. Salud Carbajal, D-Calif., Don Bacon, R-Neb. and Mike Gallagher, R-Wis. — would establish a Cybersecurity, Risk Inventory, Assessment and Mitigation Working Group within the Department of Defense that is tasked with creating “a comprehensive strategy for inventorying the range of National Nuclear Security Administration systems that are potentially at risk in the operational technology and nuclear weapons information technology environments, assessing the systems at risk and implementing risk mitigation actions.”
The lawmakers are looking to include the measure in the 2024 National Defense Authorization Act. The committee’s markup of the must-pass defense policy bill is taking place June 21.
A September 2022 report issued by the Government Accountability Office found that the National Nuclear Security Administration — the federal agency tasked with safeguarding the nation’s nuclear weapons stockpile — failed to fully implement “foundational cybersecurity risk practices” across its systems, including in its “operational technology and nuclear weapons IT environments.”………………………….. https://www.nextgov.com/cybersecurity/2023/06/lawmakers-propose-shoring-nuclear-cyber-standards-ahead-ndaa-markup/387632/—
USA marketing nuclear power to Bulgaria
Westinghouse has signed a front-end engineering and design (FEED) contract
with Kozloduy NPP-Newbuild for the construction of an AP1000 reactor at the
Kozloduy nuclear power plant site in Bulgaria.
World Nuclear News 15th June 2023
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/FEED-contract-signed-for-Bulgarian-AP1000
USA to market small nuclear reactors to Slovakia?
The Ministry of Economy and Slovenské elektrárne have signed a memorandum
of cooperation with a range of partners in the energy field to support the
development of small modular reactors (SMRs) in Slovakia, including
applying for funding from the USA’s Project Phoenix. The other signatories
of the memorandum were US Steel Košice, the Slovak Electricity
Transmission System, VUJE, the Office of Nuclear Supervision and the Slovak
Technical University in Bratislava. There will now be an application for
funding from the US government’s Project Phoenix, which was announced by US
Climate Envoy John Kerry at COP27 last year – it aims to “accelerate the
global clean energy transition by providing technical assistance to support
decision-making on pursuing the conversion of one or more coal-fired power
plants to secure and safe zero-carbon” SMR nuclear energy generation.
World Nuclear News 13th June 2023
https://www.world-nuclear-news.org/Articles/Slovenske-elektrarne-pushes-ahead-on-SMR-plans
The US Energy Department is spending $26M to help find a temporary site to store spent nuclear fuel
Federal energy regulators have announced that they are spending $26 million
to find communities willing to accept a temporary federal site to store
spent nuclear fuel while a permanent repository is completed. Thirteen
groups made up of industry, academic, nonprofit, government and community
representatives will each get $2 million to explore the most equitable
approach to picking an interim site to store highly radioactive waste from
nuclear power plants, according to a recent news release from the U.S.
Energy Department. The approach will include a dialogue with residents and
local governments, the department said.
Daily Mail 13th June 2023
Beware: we ignore Robert F Kennedy Jr’s candidacy at our peril
When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there.
As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer – seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy..
Naomi Klein, Guardian, 14 June 23
Given the strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum. Ignoring him is not an option
When Robert F Kennedy Jr announced his plan to run for president in the Democratic party primaries this April, the dominant liberal strategy towards the once tough environmental lawyer – now spreader of all manner of dangerous, unsupported theories – seemed to be: ignore him and wait for him to go away. Don’t cover, don’t engage and don’t debate. Jim Kessler, a leader of the pro-Biden think tank Third Way, called him a “gadfly and a laughingstock”; Democratic consultant Sawyer Hackett brushed him off as “a gnat.”
Well, if recent developments in the Kennedy campaign have demonstrated anything, it’s that denial is not a viable political strategy. Kennedy honed his social media skills over years to spread his anti-vaccine message, so he has simply done an end-run around traditional media and party structures: a “Twitter Spaces” tete-a-tete with Elon Musk and a string of video streams, several with hundreds of thousands of views and listens, on every channel from Breaking Points on the left to Jordan Peterson’s podcast on the right (that one quickly broke a million views on YouTube).
He has landed an apparent endorsement from Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey and this week is being feted at a Bay Area fundraiser filled with heavy hitters. According to a CNN poll released in late May, support for Kennedy was at 20% among respondents who identify as Democrats or Democratic-leaning.
It’s time to abandon wishful thinking and figure out what is going on. What are the reasons his campaign is resonating with a consequential slice of US voters? (And voters beyond the US, where he has a large following?) What pain, silence and rage is he tapping into? What important truths and realities is he concealing and eliding? And, given the near impossible odds of him winning the race which he is currently running in, what is his real end-game?
Let’s start with the reservoirs of Kennedy’s appeal.
The Power of Story…………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Tapping Into the Rage
It’s not only the combined power of a dynastic family, violent crime and choose-your-own-adventure conspiracy culture that RFK Jr is riding. He is also tapping into a wellspring of real pain and outrage. These points may be obvious but they bear repeating: a great many voters are hurting and rightfully angry: about powerful corporations controlling their democracy and profiting off disease and poverty. About endless wars draining national coffers and maiming their kids. About stagnating wages and soaring costs. This is the world – inflamed on every level – that the two-party duopoly has knowingly created.
RFK Jr’s campaign speaks directly to this outrage, with its central message about “the corrupt merger between state and corporate power.” When he talks about drug companies controlling the national health agencies and polluters controlling environmental regulators, he is persuasive, which is why he was a good lawyer. When he rails against the corporations who made a killing during Covid, profiteering off the pandemic and using it to crush their rivals, he is speaking my language and it’s hard not to nod along.
When he talks about the machinery of endless war that shapes US foreign policy, and suggests that the goal in Ukraine should be to end the carnage, he is articulating ideas that have become unspeakable in too many liberal circles. There is great power there.
………………………………………………………………………… Giving Voice to Ecological Grief
As a lifelong outdoorsman and longtime environmental lawyer, RFK Jr also does something very few politicians in modern life seem capable of doing: put into words our moment of shattering ecological loss and grief. “Environmental protection binds us to our own humanity and to all of creation,” he said on Earth Day. “When we destroy a species, when we destroy a special place, we’re diminishing our capacity to sense the divine, understand who God is, and what our own potential is as human beings.”
Kennedy is fluent in the language of heartbreak about dead rivers and devastated fisheries; of asthmatic lungs and increasingly silent springs. As smoke blots the sun across entire continents, this is not a skill to dismiss lightly. Who else has it? Not Joe Biden. Not Kamala Harris. Not even Barack Obama. Bernie Sanders was great on the facts of the climate crisis when he ran, and full of righteous fury at fossil fuel companies – but I don’t think I ever heard him speak with unabashed emotion about extinction. This is another vacuum that RFK Jr is skillfully filling.
Given the undeniable strengths that Kennedy possesses as a candidate, we should expect him to continue to build momentum, and continue to find new audiences. Ignoring him is not an option. What is needed instead is a serious engagement with the myths that underlie the Kennedy performance and that are key to his progressive appeal.
Myth #1: He would be a climate champion.
Because RFK Jr is so eloquent about pollution, many assume he would support policies that would tame the raging climate crisis. While that may have been true in the past, the facts have radically changed. In recent interviews, he claims climate science is too complex and abstract to explain and that, “I can’t independently verify that.” He also says that the climate crisis is being used to push through “totalitarian controls on society” orchestrated “by the World Economic Forum, Bill Gates, and all of these megabillionaires” – a green-tinged reboot of the same, all-too familiar conspiracy theories he rode to pandemic stardom, when he opposed virtually every Covid public health measure, from masks to vaccines to closures. Now he is marshaling the same arguments against climate action.
…………………………………………. But we should also be clear: actively spreading terror on the scale that RFK Jr has done for two decades is itself a public health crisis. The vaccine-autism myth stigmatizes people who are neuro-atypical, presenting them as tragic, and distracts from the urgent need to fight for greater accessibility and lifelong supports. It also discourages vaccination, which is already leading to a resurgence of diseases we thought we had defeated, from measles to diphtheria.
Kennedy complains that he used to be so marginalized for his conspiratorial views that speaking felt “like talking into a fucking tin can.” Well, thanks to his primary run, his tin can has been replaced with a global megaphone and millions more people are hearing his bogus theories. We will feel the ramifications of that for decades to come.
Myth #3: He is anti-war and pro-human rights.
Kennedy is most persuasive when opposing US military intervention abroad, or when he is discussing the humanitarian cost of the war in Ukraine, and calling for a peaceful settlement. But how seriously should we take his pacifism and human rights concerns? One hint rests in the blanket support he offers the Israeli government, one of the top recipients of aid from the US military industrial complex he decries, and a nation consistently unwilling to entertain peace with justice, while escalating tensions with Iran.
…………………………………………………………. As Kennedy’s fortunes soar, the Democratic consultant class continues to sneer – seemingly learning no lessons from Trump’s rise, or the current unpopularity of their leader, or the desperate desire of so many members of their party for something that feels close enough to courage, truth, and justice that they are willing to fall for a counterfeit copy of a copy of a copy.n https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2023/jun/14/ignoring-robert-f-kennedy-jr-not-an-option?CMP=share_btn_tw
USA’s Inflation reduction act expands tax-payer funding for nuclear power plants
Bryan Cave Leighton Paisner
The Inflation Reduction Act (“IRA”) created new incentives for the generation of electricity from nuclear power plants, supplementing incentive provisions that are currently in place. The primary changes are (i) the adoption of a new 8-year production tax credit (“PTC”) for certain existing nuclear power plants, and (ii) enabling nuclear facilities to qualify under the new technology-neutral zero-emission PTC and investment tax credit (“ITC”) regime that will apply beginning in 2025. Some of the other incentives adopted by the IRA may also support the nuclear industry.
Existing Incentives Prior to IRA
The advanced nuclear production tax credit (“Advanced Nuclear PTC”) under Code Section 45J of the Internal Revenue Code (the “Code”)………………………………..
Inflation Reduction Act Incentives……………. enabling new nuclear power plants placed in service after December 31, 2024 to participate in the PTC and ITC incentives available for the production of electricity from renewable and other low-carbon sources.
Zero-Emission Nuclear Power Production Tax Credit
The IRA creates a new zero-emission nuclear power production tax credit (“Zero Emission PTC”) for certain existing nuclear power plants under Section 45U of the Code. ………………………
Clean Electricity Production Tax Credit
For facilities placed in service after December 31, 2024, the IRA replaces the existing PTC under Section 45 of the Code with a technology-neutral “zero emissions” clean electricity production tax credit (“Clean Electricity PTC”) under Section 45Y of the Code……………………………
Clean Electricity Investment Tax Credit
For facilities placed in service after December 31, 2024, the IRA also replaces the existing ITC under Section 48 of the Code with a technology-neutral “zero emissions” clean electricity investment tax credit (“Clean Electricity ITC”) under Section 48E of the Code. The credit is available for any “qualified facility” and certain energy storage technology…………………………….
Other Tax Credit Incentives
The IRA provides some additional tax credit incentives that could benefit the development of future nuclear power plants…………………………………
High-Assay Low-Enriched Uranium Funding
The IRA also earmarks $700 million for the development of a domestic market and production of high-assay low-enriched uranium (“HALEU”)…………………………. https://www.jdsupra.com/legalnews/inflation-reduction-act-expands-support-4367428/—
Connecticut Governor Lamont should veto SB 7 that would advance dangerous nuclear power
Gov. Lamont, veto bill to ‘advance’ dangerous nuclear power. CT Mirror, by Stanley Heller, June 12, 2023
What folly! Just as a dam necessary for cooling nuclear waste at Europe’s biggest nuclear power complex is blown up, members of the Connecticut legislature pass a bill that includes promotion of dangerous outmoded nuclear power.
Senate Bill 7 creates a “Council for Advancing Nuclear Energy Development” specifically packed with six positions for people who work in the nuclear energy industry. Their mission will be to discuss “advancements that are occurring in nuclear energy development.” They’ll study “small modular reactors, advanced nuclear reactors, [and] fusion energy facilities.”
Rather than seek “advancement,” we should be figuring out how to phase out this technology. We see by the Ukraine example that parties at war do not respect what one would think would be totally obvious, the need to do nothing to harm the safety of nuclear power plants. Not that we expect warfare to break out in the U.S., but this country should lead in best practices so that countries where war is a lot more likely won’t go down the nuclear path and risk huge releases of nuclear contamination that spread world-wide.
Realize that the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 led to thousands of fatalities. In Ukraine alone 35,000 women have received compensation for spouses who died because of the disaster. And that’s only the numbers from Ukraine. High levels of radiation covered southern Belarus too, but the government there has never released its statistics.
Another section of the Connecticut bill would classify nuclear power as a “Class 1 renewable energy source.” That would allow the owner of a new nuclear facility to sell renewable “energy credits,” another dubious idea. Rather than limit the use of polluting fuels, the idea is for “the market” to take care of things. Grand, let’s rely on the same market whose mindless profit seeking got us hooked on fossil fuels in the first place.
The new council will study ways to “promote nuclear energy development, expansion and research” in Connecticut. What won’t be studied is the problem of importation of Russian uranium that is used to generate nuclear power. Every year hundreds of millions of dollars are spent by U.S. companies to buy raw and enriched uranium from Russia. Presumably Connecticut nuclear power companies are no different. Reuters reports that the U.S. power industry relies on Russia and its allies Kazakhstan and Uzbekistan for roughly half of the uranium powering its nuclear power plants. Why not respond to a petition about this and study how to stop relying on a fuel that enriches the Russian dictator?
……………………………………….. Governor Lamont should veto SB 7. Then call a special session to pass a revised SB 7 clean of plans for more nuclear power. After doing that stay in session and spend time passing blockbuster legislation that will provide leadership for a country teetering on a climate precipice.
My nuclear family
“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”
Alicia Inez Guzmán, Searchlight New Mexico, 14 June 23, https://www.lcsun-news.com/story/news/2023/06/11/my-nuclear-family/70306994007/
My parents’ house sits at the foot of the Sangre de Cristos facing west toward the setting sun and the Jemez Mountains. I still remember nights looking out across the vast darkness at the twinkling lights of Los Alamos, the secret city, “a place,” as the late anti-nuclear activist and Ohkay Owingeh elder Herman Agoyo put it, “with no public memory.”
As the crow flies, Truchas is 30 miles from Los Alamos, separated by the great Tewa Basin and arid badlands checkerboarded by Hispano settlements and Indigenous Pueblos. For most of my young life, I took the Lab for granted. It was there in the background, omnipresent like a low-frequency hum.
But it didn’t always just exist. It was forced onto our homeland and into our consciousness, even if most origin stories about the Manhattan Project and the Lab’s continued presence in the region treat local people like extras in a movie.
“For the several hundred workers required to man these plants, there must also be several thousand service and supporting personnel,” a 1950 internal report read. Its writer was debating whether Los Alamos was the best place for the weapons Lab moving forward.
Scientists performed clandestine work here, yes, but that work required and continues to require the effort of so many others — “supporting personnel” — who can also be on the frontlines of exposure.
I am reminded, for instance, of an experiment that went horribly wrong just nine months after American forces decimated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with nuclear bombs. A Canadian physicist, Louis Slotin, was trying to gather data on nuclear chain reactions when the screwdriver he was holding as a wedge between a beryllium tamper and a plutonium core accidentally slipped. For a brief second, the beryllium and plutonium reached fission, sending out a blast of blue light and radioactivity.
Slotin’s death in 1946 has been famously recorded in histories of the Lab. But there were several other people in the room that day, including several colleagues and a security guard whose fate has largely been eclipsed. All that was noted in records of the event was his fear. Apparently, it was said, the security guard ran out of the room and up a hill. And that’s where his part in the story ends.
But he was there, a witness — and one, I imagine, who was exposed to the same plutonium that within a matter of nine days killed Slotin. I’ve long wondered: Who was he? What was his story?
When I think of that man, I think of my Grandpa Gilbert. Many auxiliary staff were local people who got their start on “the hill” as security guards for the Atomic Energy Commission. That was his story — a career begun as a security guard in 1946 and ended some three decades later as a staff member of the Lab and the University of California, which managed it. The position was a distinction that not many Hispanos held at the time. My mom says he felt dignified by his work there — the only means he had to raise five kids after World War II. But there was a trade-off, including discreet trips to the doctor where he was screened for cancer on a more-than-routine basis.
Many family members would follow in his footsteps — my Uncle Jerry among them. Los Alamos was a place abounding in conspiracy theories and Uncle Jerry found himself at the center of one of them. He believed that racism had created a culture of retaliation, so toxic that it led to his being framed for intentionally dosing his supervisor with plutonium-239. After my uncle’s death two years ago, the Santa Fe New Mexican published a column narrating the sordid events — his boss ultimately recanted the allegations and my uncle and others won a settlement — but he was haunted by a lasting specter. The multiple cancers that consumed his body decades later were products of the Lab, in his opinion, like sleeper fires set within him.
I only recently came to know the fragments of my Uncle Pat’s story. During his three years at the Lab in the late 1970s, he was flown on two occasions to California with a locked box chained to his wrist. His destination was TRW, the predecessor of Northrop Grumman Space Technology, and his cargo, he told me, was top-secret technology that could detect nuclear weapons testing from outer space.
There’s a kind of mental acrobatics required to compartmentalize these different realities — the opportunity and the harm, the secrets and the consent. I know this compartmentalization well, this desire to draw a line in the sand between the good and the bad. When I was 19, I spent a summer working as an undergraduate intern in the Lab’s explosives division, a building perched behind a maze of fences and guards. I didn’t have a security clearance at the time, nor could I foresee getting one, so I spent most days marooned at my desk in the front office, filing papers and sending emails. I couldn’t even take a bathroom break without a chaperone accompanying me.
Nothing of that work rings more clearly than a memory of two scientists stumbling out into the hallway, covered in blood. An experiment had gone awry — nothing radiation related — but it was so shrouded in mystery that parsing what actually happened is like trying to put a puzzle together that’s missing half the pieces. I watched in horror from the doorframe.
After that, I transferred to the Bradbury Science Museum, also in Los Alamos, where I walked by replicas of Little Boy and Fat Man daily to get to my desk. I spent that summer, among other things, writing exhibition text about the Manhattan Project’s early architects — J. Robert Oppenheimer, Enrico Fermi, Richard Feynman. I wrote not the history of mi gente, but of those agents of immense creation and destruction, those who’d exacted what Myrriah Gómez in her book, “Nuclear Nuevo México,” calls nuclear colonization. The irony.
It was only when I left the state that I had the distance to understand the debt our communities pay for the good jobs. I began to unpack what it means for New Mexico to be what the writer D.H. Lawrence once called the moon of America. This place was distant enough in America’s consciousness to be foreign, exotic even. But as that “tierra incognita,” the unknown and unknowable blankness stretched across mental maps of the Southwest, our world became America’s wasteland. We continue to sit at the periphery of centers of power, yet we have been forced into the epicenter of this nation’s nuclear weapons complex.
Now, as I write about the role of nuclear weapons across New Mexico, the nation and the globe, Toni Morrison’s words come to mind: “The subject of the dream is the dreamer.” Her ideas about literature were deeply influenced by psychoanalysis. Indeed, to her mind, the act of dreaming was not unlike the act of writing. Or, to put it another way, the subject of the writing is the writer. Here, that is me.
My family and community’s own tangled history with the Lab sits in my subconscious like an inchoate thought. Only when I hold it up to scrutiny does that thought form into the imperative, allowing me to fully fathom what the Manhattan Project birthed in our backyard. Perhaps this is what Gómez refers to as an “innate knowing,” our local “sixth sense.”
“The locals know their local land and water supplies are contaminated from the nuclear material that was either buried in nearby canyons or on riverbanks,” Gómez writes in her book. “They know their presence on the Pajarito Plateau is being erased from national memory. They know they were placed in dangerous jobs because of their identities. They know the plutonium exploded into the atmosphere during the Trinity Test is making them sick. They know nuclear waste, if buried in their backyard, poses severe threats.”
I know all of this when I drive along Highway 84/285, an artery that connects Pojoaque Pueblo to Española and the Pueblos of Santa Clara and Ohkay Owingeh, below a billboard sprawled against sienna-hued bluffs. A woman with a complexion like my own holds radiation detection equipment and smiles down at me.
“Radiation Control Technicians are vital to operations at LANL,” the billboard proclaims. “Start your career as an RCT at Northern NM College now.”
My worldview will always shape my writing on a topic that hits so close to home, but the focus of this series — The Atomic Hereafter — is to highlight all the communities most impacted by 80 years of nuclear presence, from the most recent attempts to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal to the long, drawn-out ways radiation can transmit from mother to child. Nuclear issues in this state are generational. I will take them one story at a time.
Lawmakers seek clearer picture of nuclear command and control costs
By Colin Demarest C4ISR Net 12 June 23
WASHINGTON — U.S. lawmakers are pushing for a clearer catalog of spending on nuclear command, control and communications, the means through which the devastating arsenal is readied, coordinated and potentially used.
Members of the House strategic forces panel included in a draft of fiscal 2024 defense legislation a provision to establish a major force program for NC3, a highly guarded topic. The proposal was shared June 12, alongside additional National Defense Authorization Act input from other subcommittees.
……………………………… The Biden administration’s Nuclear Posture Review, published last year, pledged to strengthen nuclear command and control, including further insulation from cyber, space-based and electromagnetic attack. Different nuclear weapon types face different risks, as well, in part because of their age and lack of ingrained information technologies. Newer nuclear weaponry is expected to enter the stockpile after 2030 — and with it, the potential for more-modern systems. https://www.c4isrnet.com/battlefield-tech/c2-comms/2023/06/12/lawmakers-seek-clearer-picture-of-nuclear-command-and-control-costs/
Stealth actions by SpaceX, as 36 space launches approved by California Coastal Commission without a vote, public hearing, or public notice
Nina Beety, 11 June 23
June 7, the California Coastal Commission approved 36 SpaceX launches at
Vandenberg AFB per year without a vote, public hearing, or public notice
in the agenda. SpaceX presently launches 6 rockets per year.
The proposal was hidden in a staff report which the Commission merely
concurred with. The public did not know it was proposed. Fortunately, a
commissioner commented on it during the meeting, and a member of the
public caught it and investigated. She and another person then spoke
during public comments the following day June 8 against this possibly
unlawful action, and hearing about it for the first time, I joined them.
If this attendee had not caught it, the action would not have come to
light.
Stealth actions are being repeated by agency after agency, exempting
projects from review, environmental evaluation, hearings, public notice,
and laws, and this must be exposed and contested very publicly whenever they
occur.
Below is the link to the agenda. Item #10 “Energy, Ocean Resources and
Federal Consistency” report.
Also, U.S. Department of the Air Force propose a new space complex at
Vandenberg Air Force Base
for private company Phantom Space Company for up to 48 launches per year
and 48 rocket tests per year. This was scheduled on the June 7 agenda
but was postponed until probably the July meeting. The staff report for
it is linked in the June agenda.
10 Energy, Ocean Resources & Federal Consistency
https://www.coastal.ca.gov/meetings/agenda/#/2023/6
Report by the Deputy Director on permit waivers, emergency permits,
immaterial amendments & extensions, negative determinations, matters not
requiring public hearings, and status report on offshore oil & gas
exploration & development. For specific information contact the
Commission’s Energy, Ocean Resources, and Federal Consistency Division
office at (415) 904-5240.
The ABCs of a nuclear education
Then she remembered the words of her grandmother, a field nurse from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, who once tended to Navajo Nation tribal members affected by uranium mining and saw the health impacts of radiation exposure firsthand.
“She used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever, ever work at Los Alamos National Labs.’”
New Mexico’s local colleges are training students to work in a plutonium pit factory. What does this mean for their future — and the world’s?
Searchlight NewMexico, by Alicia Inez Guzmán, June 7, 2023
Every day, thousands of people from all parts of El Norte make the vertiginous drive up to Los Alamos National Laboratory. It’s a trek that generations of New Mexicans have been making, like worker ants to the queen, from the eastern edge of the great Tewa Basin to the craggy Pajarito Plateau.
All in the pursuit of “good jobs.”
Some, inevitably, are bound for that most secretive and fortified place, Technical Area 55, the very heart of the weapons complex — home to PF-4, the lab’s plutonium handling facility, with its armed guards, concrete walls, steel doors and sporadic sirens. To enter “the plant,” as it’s known, is to get as close as possible to the existential nature of the nuclear age.
For 40 years, some 250 workers were tasked, mostly, with research and design. But a multibillion-dollar mission to modernize the nation’s nuclear arsenal has brought about “a paradigm shift,” in the words of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, a federal watchdog. Today, the plant is in the middle of a colossal expansion — growing from a single, aged building to what the safety board calls “a large-scale production facility for weapon components with the largest number of workers in its history.”
In short, the plant is slated to become a factory for making plutonium pits, the essential core of every nuclear warhead.
Four years ago, LANL began laying the groundwork for this expansion by searching out and shaping a highly trained labor pool of technicians to handle fissile materials, machine the parts for weapons, monitor radiation and remediate nuclear waste. The lab turned to the surrounding community, as it often had, tapping New Mexico’s small regional institutions — colleges that mostly serve minority and low-income students. The plan, as laid out in a senate subcommittee meeting, set forth a college-to-lab pipeline — a “workforce of the future.”
Taken altogether, Santa Fe Community College, Northern New Mexico College and the University of New Mexico’s Los Alamos campus are set to receive millions of federal dollars for their role in preparing and equipping that workforce. They’ve graduated 74 people to date, many of whom will end up at TA-55……………………………………
For many local families, the lab has been a gateway to the American dream. Its high wages have afforded generations of Norteños a chance at the good life — new houses, new cars, land ownership, higher education for their kids. Indeed, to work there is to become part of the region’s upper crust.
It carries a legacy of illness, death and environmental racism for countless others. History tells of a long practice of hiring local Hispano and Pueblo communities to staff some of the most dangerous positions, a practice that has its origins in the early years of the lab, as Myrriah Gómez described in her 2022 book “Nuclear Nuevo México.”
New Mexico’s academic institutions have for decades served as LANL’s willing partner, feeding students into the weapons complex with high school internships, undergraduate student programs; graduate and postdoc programs; and apprenticeships for craft trades and technicians. The lab heavily recruits at most local colleges with the assurance of opportunities not easily found in New Mexico.
Talavai Denipah-Cook can still remember LANL representatives plying her with promises of a high-paying job and good benefits at an American Indian Sciences and Engineering Society conference years ago. At the time, she was a student at a local high school, and the future that they painted looked bright.
“I was like, ‘Wow, that sounds really intriguing.’ We don’t get that around here, especially as people of color,” said Denipah-Cook, now a program manager in the Environmental Health and Justice Program at Tewa Women United, an Indigenous nonprofit based in Española.
Then she remembered the words of her grandmother, a field nurse from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, who once tended to Navajo Nation tribal members affected by uranium mining and saw the health impacts of radiation exposure firsthand.
“She used to tell me, ‘Don’t ever, ever work at Los Alamos National Labs.’” ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
“The lab has never had to be accountable for their promises,” said Greg Mello, of the Los Alamos Study Group, an influential anti-nuclear nonprofit based in Albuquerque. “Could they be a factory? Could they produce pits reliably? No. Not at all.”
LANL, regardless, was tapped as one of two sites — the other being the Savannah River plutonium processing facility in South Carolina — to produce an annual quota of “no fewer than 80 such pits by 2030,” according to the Fiscal 2020 National Defense Authorization Act. With this, LANL has been authorized to produce 30 pits per year by 2026.
What’s being proposed is so huge it has no precedent, said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, an anti-nuclear advocacy organization in Santa Fe.
“Here we have this arrogant agency that thinks it can just impose expanded bomb production on New Mexico,” said Coghlan, referring to the National Nuclear Security Administration, the lead agency for pit production. “They do not have credible cost estimates and they do not have a credible plan for production. But yet they expect New Mexicans to bear the consequences.”
The costs, according to the Los Alamos Study Group, will come to some $46 billion by 2036 — the earliest the NNSA says it can hit 80 pits per year at the two sites. It’s roughly the same amount of money it would take to rebuild every single failing bridge in America.
To support the pit mission at LANL, the NNSA estimates the lab will need 4,100 full-time employees, including scientists and engineers, security guards, maintenance and craft workers, and “hard-to-fill positions,” as LANL has dubbed the pipeline jobs.
More costly than the Manhattan Project in its day, the NNSA program is the most expensive in the agency’s history. It is also destined, Coghlan and others say, to collapse under its own weight. Both Los Alamos and Savannah River are, according to federal documents, billions of dollars over budget and years behind schedule.
Money, waste and risk
In the meantime, LANL’s budget has increased by 130 percent over the past five years, according to a June 2022 report by the Government Accountability Office. There’s no real way to determine how much money LANL will need to reach its quota.
…………………………………………………………. Radiation 101: Students get prepped for pit work
Last spring, assistant professor Scott Braley taught two back-to-back introductory courses to 13 future radiation control technicians at NNMC. His lectures covered a host of topics: the history of “industrial-scale” radiation accidents worldwide, algebraic formulas to determine the correlation between individual cancer and workplace exposure, and maximum permissible doses for future workers like themselves. The rates are higher than for the general public, Braley explained, because, for one, radiation workers “have accepted a higher risk.”
……………………………. Much of the college programs and their curricula center around minimizing risk. But because the possibility of serious harm at LANL is much higher than in most jobs, the programs present an ethical dilemma: Who are the people bearing the risk?
“What does it mean to assume that exposure is acceptable at all?” asked Eileen O’Shaughnessy, cofounder of Demand Nuclear Abolition. “Because the thing about radiation is it’s cumulative and any amount is unsafe.”
………………….. “You realize, yes, they are paying you well, but you’re being put in situations that you have no idea about,” said the retired machinist, a man with over two decades of experience working at the lab, much of it at the plant. He asked to remain anonymous for fear of retaliation. “It’s the mentality at the lab,” he said. “They don’t really think that people that are techs are even really worth much.”
A powerful neighbor
Dueling perspectives in El Norte reveal the chasms around the lab and, in particular, what some consider the Manhattan Project’s original sin: Its use of eminent domain to force Indigenous and Hispano people off their farms and sacred lands on the Pajarito Plateau. Its arrival, oral histories hold, spelled the end of land-based living.
……………………. As the single largest employer in northern New Mexico, LANL’s horizon of influence is vast. And with billions more dollars flooding in, its sway in almost every sphere — economics, politics, education — seems only to grow.
“It is hard for us at the Los Alamos Study Group to see how New Mexico can ever develop if LANL becomes a reliable, enduring pit factory,” said Greg Mello, the executive director. “We see it as a death sentence for economic and social development in Northern New Mexico.”
Despite the lab’s omnipresence, economic gains have been relatively limited. While Los Alamos County has one of the highest median household incomes in the nation, the surrounding communities — including Española — are among the poorest in the state.
The most damning indication of that disparity came in a draft report from the University of New Mexico’s Bureau of Business and Economic Research, which showed that the lab actually cost Rio Arriba County $2.6 million and Santa Fe County $2.2 million in fiscal year 2017.
According to the Rio Grande Sun, LANL suppressed that information in the report’s final version. And though LANL jobs are by far the most competitive in the region, the trickle-down hasn’t amounted to collective uplift.
“LANL has been a bad neighbor,” charged Warren. “If the economic benefits are so good for them to continue their work and expand, you would think the communities around here would be doing better. But we’re not.” https://searchlightnm.org/the-abcs-of-a-nuclear-education/
The warmonger neocons, run the show of the puppet figurehead Biden.
Contribution from readers Tom and Sue Millon, 10 July 23
For Republicans and corrupt democrats, it’s never been about the debt of the USA or ending devastating military conflict. It has never been about domestic tranquility. As the arch neocon Dick Cheney said, “Reagan taught us that the debt doesn’t matter.” It’s about re-allocating the federal budget to the people who put you in office: arms makers, the military. oil companies, slumlords, tech giants. If you don’t have a lobbyist, a PAC or a dark money conduit, you don’t count for a damn thing in Washington dc. America and the world is paying the price of this. The neocons run Biden now. Their think tanks and focus, are heavily funded by arms makers and the military. The warmonger neocons, run the show of the puppet figurehead Biden.
Their goals are out of touch with anything that is rational. They are not preventing the escalation of this potential nuclear confrontation, they are encouraging it.
Eve Ottenberg
From the human-caused climate catastrophe to a nuclear showdown between Washington and Moscow or Beijing, to fascism ascendant, three terrifying disasters loom over humanity like the shadow of death. These threats have lurked for some years, but the Ukraine war, facilitated by Joe Biden’s arrival in the white house in 2021 and his pronounced aggressiveness toward Moscow, shifted nuclear Armageddon to center stage and pushed the doomsday clock close to midnight.
Trust between the Kremlin and western governments vanished long ago, so it’s hard to see how this calamity ever gets resolved. Russian officials watched the U.S. fork over more than $30 billion in armament to Ukraine with billions more in the pipeline, arm neo-Nazis, whitewash them and cover Kiev’s government payroll. They’ve seen (and often destroyed) the weapons Washington sent. Those weapons would never include long-range missiles that could strike inside Russia, Biden promised. Well, that oath wasn’t worth the toilet paper it was written on. The U.S. would never provide Ukraine with tanks, Biden swore up and down – until he changed his mind. American fighter jets, he gave his word, would not fly in Ukraine. Well, now we see what his word is worth. What next? NATO troops in Ukraine? Because then the bombing of U.S., European and Russian cities will commence. It’s called World War III. Biden knows this. So do the Russians. And despite their loud protests in the face of this nonstop U.S. escalation, they have become ominously quiet about their red lines.
Once upon a time in Bucharest back in 2008, Moscow basically told the west that if its neighbor Kiev joined NATO, that would be the end of Ukraine. Feckless Eurocrats and birdbrain American presidents did not listen. Years passed. Washington sponsored a coup against the duly, legally elected leader of Ukraine in 2014, then installed a west friendly, Russophobic regime, or perhaps more accurately a puppet, whose idiotic economic policies led to a population outflow of millions of Ukrainians, as Washington proceeded massively to arm and train far-right fanatics.
Through all of this, until December 2021, Moscow only protested about its red lines in general terms. It also periodically indicated it might snap. Then, in late 2021, the Kremlin sent detailed letters to Washington, listing Russian security concerns, chiefly that Ukraine should not join NATO. Moscow also was alarmed at the fate of Donbas Russians, 12,000 of whom Ukraine had slaughtered since 2014 and on whose borders Kiev had massed troops and, in early 2022, dramatically stepped up assaults, as noted by the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe. Such a deadly uptick signaled assault and possibly ethnic-cleansing for Russian-speaking Ukrainians. But the U.S. blithely responded with hokum about NATO being a defensive organization. Hokum any half-wit can see right through by looking at U.S. missiles in Poland and Romania, two countries that border Russia.
Washington also insisted on every country’s sacred right to join NATO, though decades ago when Moscow mentioned joining, it got the cold shoulder; apparently Russia did not have that right. So the Kremlin could be excused for regarding NATO as a hostile military axis. Indeed, as our leading public intellectual Noam Chomsky said, “Putin’s invasion of Ukraine was clearly provoked, while the U.S. invasion of Iraq was clearly unprovoked.” (He also said whataboutism is “otherwise known as elementary honesty.”) Both invaders wrecked the target country, Russia more slowly, but make no mistake, that will be the outcome if this war doesn’t end soon.
The moral of the story is that if you can avoid war, that is a very good idea. If someone says “I will attack, if you don’t stop threatening me,” well, listen. The peacemakers are blessed, but sadly they were absent from the world’s imperial capital, Washington, in December of 2021. Currently they are absent everywhere they are needed, period.
So now, thanks to Biden, we stare down the barrel of nuclear war. The alternative in 2024 will likely be Trump, who promises accessories like martial law, a presidency for life, show trials of his political enemies and possibly nuclear war with China, in short, fascism. For this lousy choice we can blame our corrupt plutocracy and its media parasites. Put another way, those who rise to the top in Washington are not the cream of the crop, but the cream that curdled, years ago. Obama, Bush, Clinton – slick hustlers all, who slaughtered innocents across the globe, and all very short-sighted about anything other than looking out for the main chance, even if it meant bombing helpless residents of impoverished nations.
Meanwhile in the U.S. imperial capital, blood-soaked neocons run the show. This led to events May 26, when Russia’s foreign ministry summoned U.S. diplomats “over what it called ‘provocative statements’ by National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan,” according to RT. “The American official was de facto supporting Ukrainian strikes against Russian territory.” Given that Sullivan’s up to his elbows in blood for his responsibility in this Ukrainian debacle, the blood of hundreds of thousands of Ukrainian soldiers and tens of thousands of Russian ones, I’m not surprised he was, de facto or otherwise, basically advocating World War III. Moscow called his endorsement of Ukrainian attacks on Russia “hypocritical and untruthful.” That’s called understatement.
Sullivan, secretary of state Antony Blinken and his undersecretary Victoria Nuland are in charge in Washington, instead of the unfocussed, forgetful figurehead, Joe Biden, and they want war, for decades, if they so choose.
Inauspiciously, sane, non-neocons now resign from the Biden regime en masse, a development covered in depth by Moon of Alabama May 25. Rick Waters, head of the state department’s “China House” leaves his post. After the ridiculous spy balloon hysteria, with its wild delusions of assault and evil designs by a mortal enemy, Waters was one of the more rational actors, trying to limit the damage, reportedly emailing state department staff to postpone some sanctions and export controls on China, you know, moves that could have been viewed as, um, hostile.
Also dispiriting to those hoping to restrain imperial war schemes, deputy secretary of state Wendy Sherman announced her retirement. Sherman backed the original Iran nuclear pact and pushed hard to get an inept Biden administration to return to it, something, contrary to campaign promises, Biden couldn’t manage to do. As a result, the Middle East teeters constantly on the edge of regional war, which the pact would have helped prevent. Colin Kahl, a defense undersecretary departs this summer. He opposed escalating the U.S. proxy war in Ukraine. Nor was he popular with lunatic Sinophobes. To make the loss of these realists even worse, Biden tapped a ferocious China hawk to head the joint chiefs of staff, thus replacing the less rabid though rather ineffectual Mark Milley. All these moves spell trouble. They mean maniacal warmongers run the empire.
So the situation has deteriorated dangerously, and this is what Chomsky predicted if Washington didn’t face the “ugly” post-invasion choice of rewarding Moscow by enforcing Kiev’s neutrality and the Minsk Accords for the Donbas. No one has documented the U.S. empire’s depravity as long and relentlessly as Chomsky. His new book, Illegitimate Authority, continues this effort, singling out the triad of cataclysms – climate collapse, nuclear war and fascism – thundering in humanity’s front yard like the crack of doom. These interviews, collected from Truthout, at first zero in on how rich countries burning oil, gas and coal have crushed anything resembling a normal climate, with a few that focus on rising fascism.
For Republicans and corrupt democrats, it’s never been about the debt. As the arch neocon Dick Cheney said, “Reagan taught us that the debt doesn’t matter.” It’s about re-allocating the federal budget to the people who put you in office: arms makers, the military. oil companies, slumlords, tech giants, If you don’t have a lobbyist, a PAC or a dark money conduit, you don’t count for a damn thing in washington dc. Same goes for the , neocons whose think tanks are and focus, are heavily funded by arms makers and the military. The warmonger neocons, that run the show of the demented old, puppet figurehead biden.
Their goals are out of touch with anything that is rational. They are not preventing the escalation of this potential nuclear confrontation, they are encouraging it.
But when the book reaches early 2022, it shifts its emphasis to Ukraine. Chomsky is well aware of Washington’s provocations, while regarding Moscow’s response to them as criminal. He quotes Eastern Europe specialist Richard Sakwa: “NATO’s existence became justified by the need to manage threats provoked by its enlargement.” Well, now NATO has provoked a threat that, according to one whose hands are red with blood from this war, Nuland, could last “16 years.”
Chomsky also addresses the imbecilic fantasy of regime change, noting that historically this has led to worse, more extreme leaders, for which he cites a convincing discussion by Andrew Cockburn. Chomsky called NATO dreams of overthrowing Vladimir Putin “foolish,” because someone far more menacing would very likely take over. Among Kremlin leaders, Putin is, in fact, a moderate, with far less of an appetite for war than the others who advocated invading Ukraine for years, while he demurred.
In March 2022, when neutral countries sponsored talks between Moscow and Kiev, Chomsky warned, “negotiations will get nowhere if the U.S. persists in its adamant refusal to join…and if the press continues to insist that the public remain in the dark by refusing even to report Zelensky’s proposals.” Well, nowhere is exactly where they went, thanks to the then U.K. prime minister, the buffoonish Boris Johnson, who jetted into Kiev, allegedly at Biden’s behest, and clarified to Zelensky that while the Ukrainian president might be ready for peace, the west was not. That scuttled the talks.
That’s where we are now. Washington just extracted itself from losing a 20-year military quagmire in Afghanistan. Now it’s up to its neck in a proxy war its boosters say could last decades. Unfortunately for the imperial team, its opponent in this latest bloodletting is armed to the teeth with nuclear weapons. This is not some helpless undeveloped country that Washington can bully and then prevaricate about pusillanimous American behavior not amounting to a military defeat. Russia is a great power and a nuclear one.
Mayors call for action against nuclear war
Beyond Nuclear, June 9, 2023
At the close of its 91st Annual Meeting in Columbus, Ohio, on June 5, 2023, the final business plenary of the United States Conference of Mayors (USCM) unanimously adopted a new resolution, titled, “Calling for Urgent Action to Avoid Nuclear War, Resolve the Ukraine Conflict, Lower Tensions with China, and Redirect Military Spending to Meet Human Needs.” This is the eighteenth consecutive year that the USCM has adopted a resolution submitted by U.S. members of Mayors for Peace.
The resolution’s lead sponsor, Mayor Frank Cownie of Des Moines, Iowa, (pictured) and U.S. Vice-President of Mayors for Peace, commented: “This resolution carries on the U.S. Conference of Mayors’ proud tradition for nearly two decades of standing for the non-use and global elimination of nuclear weapons.”
Jackie Cabasso, Mayors for Peace North American Coordinator, added: “For the first time, a U.S. Conference of Mayors resolution on nuclear disarmament lends the organization’s support to a specific legislative measure, H. Res. 77, ‘Embracing the Goals and Provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons’.”
Res. 77, introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Jim McGovern (D-MA) and Rep. Earl Blumenauer (D-OR) on January 31, 2023, calls on the United States to adopt the Back from the Brink Campaign’s comprehensive policy prescriptions for reducing nuclear risks and preventing nuclear war. More than 70 cities, towns, counties and states have passed Back from the Brink resolutions, and more than 400 organizations have endorsed the Back from the Brink platform………………………………………………… more https://beyondnuclear.org/mayors-call-for-action-against-nuclear-war/
1 This Month
of the week – Shut Down Drone Warfare!
Tell the Ukrainian Government to Drop Prosecution of Peace Activist Yurii Sheliazhenko
Petition to revoke the licensing of the Near Surface Nuclear Disposal Facility (NSDF) at Chalk River. https://www.ourcommons.ca/petitions/en/Petition/Details?Petition=e-7247
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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