USA « nuclear-news

Protesters call on Hopkins University to drop nuclear weapons research

Protesters call on Hopkins to drop nuclear weapons research The Johns Hopkins Newsletter, By CHRIS H. PARK and MIN-SEO KIM | January 27, 2021 Members of Prevent Nuclear War Maryland, a Baltimore-based anti-war, anti-nuclear weapons organization, protested the University’s involvement in nuclear weapons research with the U.S. government on Friday, Jan. 22.

The group also celebrated the ratification of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) — a legally binding international treaty prohibiting the development, ownership and deployment of nuclear weapons by nation………..

On Friday, around a dozen protesters held bright yellow banners reading “nuclear weapons are illegal” on the Charles Street median and in front of the marble Hopkins sign on the Merrick Gateway, conversing with passers-by. Protesters criticized the University’s engagement with nuclear weapons research at the Applied Physics Lab (APL).

Hopkins is the top recipient of federal research and development funds, receiving $2.351 billion in a contract from the U.S. Department of Defense (DOD) in 2019. The International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons identified Hopkins to be one of the universities involved in developing and maintaining the U.S. nuclear arsenal in its 2019 report.

Max Obuszewski, one of the co-founders of Prevent Nuclear War Maryland, said he has been protesting nuclear weapons for over 30 years. He believes that continued development and possession of nuclear weapons poses an existential threat to the world.

“Our government is going to spend trillions of dollars to refurbish the nuclear arsenal. We have to make the legislators give us security, like health care and education. We don’t have any of that,” he said. “What we’re doing now is to shame the United States and the nuclear weapons contractors into joining the treaty.”

Prevent Nuclear War, the parent organization of the group Obuszewski founded, has worked to mobilize support for the “back from the brink” resolution in local and state governments. The resolution calls on the federal government to renounce its nuclear first-use policy, limit presidential authority to launch a nuclear attack, reduce spending on nuclear weapons research and work with other states to eliminate nuclear weapons.

Baltimore was the first major city to endorse its version of the resolution, introduced by then-City Councilman Bill Henry.

Because APL research is classified — unlike work in other University divisions — it is unclear how many of its contracts with the DOD are related to nuclear weapons.

In an email to The News-Letter, Karen Lancaster, the assistant vice president of external relations for the Office of Communications, noted that the APL was a research division of the University, not an academic one, thus is exempt from the University-wide rule on not allowing classified work…….

Lancaster did not comment specifically on APL’s nuclear weapons research program.

Dr. Gwen DuBois, a co-founder of Prevent Nuclear War Maryland, stated that the University should turn its efforts to research that would have immediate positive effects on people’s lives. She is an alum of the Bloomberg School of Public Health and teaches part-time at the School of Medicine.

“Johns Hopkins University of Medicine has played a great role in the COVID-19 pandemic. That is what we expect of this great institution, but not profiting off immoral and illegal weapons,“ she said. “What we want to see from Hopkins is to pull out from contracts with nuclear weapons. Hopkins is knee-deep in this stuff and isn’t transparent.”

Obuszewski also stated that nuclear weapons research is a reckless avenue to allocate University resources.

“We think it’s abominable,“ he said. “Especially in this pandemic, let’s not waste all this money on nuclear weapons.”

DuBois expressed hope that Hopkins students and faculty would pressure the University leaders to stop engaging in this research, citing the impact made by students who protested the now-suspended plans to create a private police force.

“[TPNW] is an opportunity for universities and corporations to reassess what they do. For corporations, it’s going to come from the shareholders. For universities, the pressure’s going to come from the students or professors,“ she said. “There’s nothing that gives us more hope than seeing students help us. If nothing else, if this opens up a dialogue with the University, that would be tremendous: Bring it out into the open and let the University debate this.” https://www.jhunewsletter.com/article/2021/01/protesters-call-on-hopkins-to-drop-nuclear-weapons-research

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, opposition to nuclear, politics, USA | Leave a comment

America’s nuclear industry in bed with safety regulators – can Biden fix this?

Biden can rescue the Nuclear Regulatory Commission from industry capture, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Frank N. von Hippel | January 27, 2021 Over the past two decades, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) has been captured by the nuclear power companies it is supposed to regulate. The process of capture and resulting erosion of regulation has been driven in part by the increasingly poor economics of nuclear energy as companies struggle to avoid large costs due to additional safety measures. However, the path has been laid to a potential disaster. The consequences of a severe nuclear accident in the US could potentially be 100 times worse than the 2011 Fukushima accident (Figure 1). The Biden administration has an opportunity to turn the situation around, but it is important to understand the problem.

Nuclear power is struggling economically in the United States. Nuclear power is declining— especially in states hosting about half of US nuclear capacity, where nuclear power plants have to compete with natural gas, photovoltaic, and wind-energy power plants.

In Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Ohio, and Illinois, nuclear utilities have persuaded state legislatures to mandate subsidies averaging about $100 million per reactor per year to keep reactors on line. One justification has been that nuclear power is climate friendly and therefore should be subsidized as solar and wind power have been. Another locally important argument has been to preserve about 1,000 jobs per reactor. Finally, in Ohio and Illinois, utility bribes to legislature leaders are being investigated.

In the absence of such subsidies, in 2019, nuclear power plants were shut down for economic reasons in Massachusetts and Pennsylvania. In 2020, the Indian Point 2 reactor in New York was shut down because Governor Cuomo considered its location near New York City to be dangerous and excluded it from the state subsidy deal. Indian Point 3, the remaining reactor operating on the site, will be shut down in 2021. A reactor in Iowa, was also shut down in 2020 because of storm damage that was deemed too costly to repair. In Illinois, Exelon, the nation’s largest nuclear operator, has threatened to shut down in 2021 four reactors that were not included in the state subsidy deal.

In regulated markets, where state regulators guarantee utilities that they will be able to recoup their investment and operating costs plus an agreed profit, most existing nuclear power plants are continuing to operate. One exception is California, where Pacific Gas & Electric decided to shut down the state’s last two nuclear power reactors in 2024 and 2025 because they “would be uneconomical to run in the near future.”

That is the situation for existing reactors. The economic situation for new nuclear reactors is much worse because they have to pay off their high capital costs in additional to their operating costs. As a result, since the 1970s, there have been only two efforts in the US to launch construction of new power reactors. In 2008. nuclear utilities in the adjoining states of South Carolina and Georgia contracted to build a pair of new nuclear power reactors in each of those states. These decisions were facilitated by state regulators allowing the companies to charge their customers for a substantial part of the capital cost during construction. In addition, the US Energy Department guaranteed $12 billion in loans for the Georgia plant, enabling it to obtain low-interest credit.

In 2017, however, the South Carolina project was abandoned due to huge cost overruns and schedule slippages. The project in Georgia continues despite a doubling of its estimated cost and at a delay of at least five years in its completion. These adverse developments caused the bankruptcy of Westinghouse Electric Co., the world’s leading designer of nuclear power plants in the 1970s.

Given this history, it is generally agreed that US utilities are unlikely to make significant new investments in nuclear power. This is true despite the claims of advocates for “advanced” sodium-cooled and molten-salt reactors. Although beloved by some nuclear engineers, these are designs from the 1960s that were abandoned because they could not compete with the water-cooled reactors that dominate nuclear power today. Similarly, the “small modular reactors” that the US Department of Energy has been promoting for the past decade also appear to be noncompetitive.

For the foreseeable future, therefore, the contribution of nuclear power to the US electricity supply will be almost entirely from the existing fleet of reactors. Even though the oldest US power reactor has only operated for 51 years, and the 11 power reactors that shut down during the past decade were all less than 50 years old, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission has already begun to extend the licenses of US nuclear power plants to 80 years of operation

……..Risk-informed regulation or deregulation? Our protection against future accidents depends on expert and vigilant regulation. Unfortunately, as with the Federal Aviation Administration, which was captured by Boeing, resulting in the avoidable crashes of two new Boeing 737-MAX aircraft in 2018 and 2019, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission too is currently compromised by the industry it regulates. Because of the industry’s economic situation, the NRC has been pressed by its congressional overseers and the nuclear industry not to mandate costly safety upgrades such as those costing more than a billion dollars per reactor that regulators in France and Japan required after the Fukushima-Daiichi accident.

“Risk-informed regulation” is the way in which the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has justified avoiding imposing costly upgrades. It basically involves doing a cost-benefit analysis for any proposed new safety regulation for already-licensed nuclear power plants. The costs considered are those that would be incurred by the nuclear utilities if the safety improvement were required. The benefits are the projected reductions of the probability-weighted number of cancer deaths and losses of property due to accidents.

One problem with risk-informed regulation is that probability calculations for major accidents are very uncertain and subject to arbitrary assumptions. An example is the commission’s decision to assume that there is zero probability that terrorists could cause a large release because regulatory requirements have been established for protections against terrorist attack:

Because various studies and regulatory changes implemented following the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001, have considered security issues associated with [spent fuel pools], malevolent acts are not included in this analysis.

On the basis of that logic, the probability of criminal acts should be zero because we have crime-prevention programs,

Major errors in consequence calculations also are buried in the commission’s massive, opaque regulatory analyses. For example, the commission underestimated by more than an order of magnitude the economic losses due to a release of radioactivity from a spent fuel fire 100 times larger than that from the Fukushima accident by: 1) only taking into account losses within a 50-miles radius (see Figure 1); 2 on original) secretly increasing the threshold contamination level for long-term population relocation by a factor of three in its consequence calculations; and 3) assuming that huge areas could be decontaminated within a year, in complete disregard to actual post-Fukushima experience in Japan.

Correction of these errors would have increased the estimated average cost of a spent fuel pool fire in the United States to about $2 trillion and forced the commission to end its unsafe practice of allowing US nuclear utilities to dense-pack their spent fuel pools up to five times their original design capacity.

The opaqueness of the cost-benefit analyses—along with assumptions such as those above that the commission refuses to change when challenged—suggests that these analyses may be deliberately skewed to avoid requiring nuclear power plant operators to make costly investments in safety at a time when many plants are in a precarious economic situation.

That suspicion is consistent with an account of the origin of risk-informed regulation given by former US Sen. Pete Domenici in his 2004 memoir, A Brighter Tomorrow: Fulfilling the Promise of Nuclear Energy…………..

When the commission’s staff urged that, despite the results of the cost-benefit analysis, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission should require the improvements because of “the importance of containment systems within the [commission’s] defense-in-depth philosophy,” the nuclear industry mobilized a furious letter of opposition from the Republican majority of the House oversight committee and the majority on the commission voted against the staff recommendation.

Under the Trump administration, the commission moved further toward industry self-regulation…………..

In response to the commission’s request, the plant operators of 55 of the 61 US nuclear power plants reported that their plants faced flood heights beyond those they had been designed against. But upgrades in seismic and flood protection could be costly, and some plants might close down if required to make those investments. The Trump-appointed commission majority overruled the staff and decided that any upgrades would be voluntary, not compulsory………

Rescuing the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. The Biden administration has an opportunity to fix this situation. After President Biden won the election, NRC Chair Christine Svinicki announced she would resign on his inauguration day, sparing herself the indignity of being replaced as chair as President Trump had replaced her predecessor three days after Trump’s inauguration.

This left the 5-person commission with both a vacancy and a need for a new chair. As a first step, President Biden appointed one of the Democratic commissioners, Christopher Hanson, as chair.

With regard to the vacancy, by statute, no more than three members of the commission can be from the same party. Of the remaining four commissioners, two are Democrat and two are Republican appointees. The president therefore can fill the vacancy. With a knowledgeable and independent nominee, the NRC could be put back in the middle of the regulatory road.

Commissioners are subject to Senate confirmation, however, and if the nuclear utilities deem a candidate to be anti–nuclear energy, industry opposition could make confirmation impossible.

It is therefore important to find a nominee for the next vacancy who is knowledgeable but cannot be credibly attacked by the industry as “anti-nuclear.” At the same time, however, the Biden administration should not lean over backward—as some previous administrations have—and require advance clearance for its nominee from the nuclear industry.

It is critical that the US have an independent and credible Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Historically, the NRC has had a strong staff and should be able to recover from the anti-regulatory bias of its recent majority. If there is a new leadership that is willing to endorse real safety improvements while avoiding to the extent possible accelerating the demise of the industry, the staff will support it. Informing regulatory decisions with cost-benefit analyses can be part of the process, but the biases that have been built into the process will have to be fixed, and the large uncertainties in estimates of the probabilities of low-frequency events will have to be taken into account in the policy-making process https://thebulletin.org/2021/01/biden-can-rescue-the-nuclear-regulatory-commission-from-industry-capture/

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, safety, USA | Leave a comment

Universities in collusion with nuclear industry

U.S. universities have continued to build connections to the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Although students and faculty have opposed university participation in nuclear weapons research and development at various points in the last 70 years, such participation continues.

November 15, 2020 by beyondnuclearinternational https://wordpress.com/read/feeds/2663585/posts/3150281214 An ICAN report

Universities across the United States are identified in this report for activities ranging from directly managing laboratories that design nuclear weapons to recruiting and training the next generation of nuclear weapons scientists. Much of universities’ nuclear weapons work is kept secret from students and faculty by classified research policies and undisclosed contracts with the Defense Department and the Energy Department. The following is the executive summary from ICAN’s report: Schools of Mass Destruction, with some changes made for timeliness.

Over the next ten years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates U.S. taxpayers will pay nearly $500 billion to maintain and modernize their country’s nuclear weapons arsenal, or almost $100,000 per minute. A separate estimate brings the total over the next 30 years to an estimated $1.7 trillion. In a July 2019 report, National Nuclear Security Administrator Lisa Gordon-Haggerty wrote, “The nuclear security enterprise is at its busiest since the demands of the Cold War era.”

In addition to large amounts of funding, enacting these upgrades requires significant amounts of scientific, technical and human capital. To a large extent, the U.S. government and its contractors have turned to the nation’s universities to provide this capital.

Over the next ten years, the Congressional Budget Office estimates U.S. taxpayers will pay nearly $500 billion to maintain and modernize their country’s nuclear weapons arsenal, or almost $100,000 per minute. A separate estimate brings the total over the next 30 years to an estimated $1.7 trillion. In a July 2019 report, National Nuclear Security Administrator Lisa Gordon-Haggerty wrote, “The nuclear security enterprise is at its busiest since the demands of the Cold War era.”

Despite these debates, U.S. universities have continued to build connections to the U.S. nuclear weapons complex. Although students and faculty have opposed university participation in nuclear weapons research and development at various points in the last 70 years, such participation continues.

Universities involve themselves in the nuclear weapons complex through the four channels listed below. In return for this engagement, universities receive funding, access to research facilities, and specific career opportunities for students.

1) Direct Management

A handful of universities directly manage nuclear weapons related activities on behalf of the federal government, retaining contracts worth billions of dollars per year collectively. These include the University of California, Texas A&M University, Johns Hopkins University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, and the University of Rochester.

2) Institutional Partnerships

Many of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) sites advertise collaborative agreements with local and national universities. These formal agreements allow the institutions to cooperate on research and share personnel and expertise. They can also provide university researchers access to funding and advanced facilities in the NNSA laboratories. The report highlights more than 30 such agreements with schools in 18 states.

3) Research Programs and Partnerships

In addition to formal institutional partnerships, numerous connections exist between universities and the nuclear weapons complex at the research project level. In a report delivered to Congress in July 2019, the NNSA highlights that more than $65 million in grants were delivered to academic institutions in the last year to support stockpile stewardship. When including grants and subcontracts from the NNSA labs as well, the total amount of funding to universities for research may be higher than $150 million per year.

4) Workforce Development Programs

Former Department of Energy Secretary Rick Perry has written that finding “the next generation workforce of world-class scientists, engineers and technicians is a major priority.” Through university partnerships, vocational training programs and research fellowships, the NNSA creates employment pipelines for the development of its future workforce.

A primary goal of this report is to facilitate a shared understanding of university connections to nuclear weapons research and development. A common factual basis will help communities of university faculty, students and administrations engage in robust internal debates and take action. Universities would not willingly participate today in the production of chemical and biological weapons; for the same humanitarian reasons, no university should seek an association with the other category of weapons of mass destruction: nuclear weapons.

While American universities have played a key role in the development and continuation of nuclear weapons, they can now join U.S. cities and states that have rejected U.S. nuclear weapons and called on the federal government to support nuclear reductions and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In light of the research presented, this report offers the following recommendations to universities:

Recommendations

• Provide greater transparency into connections with the nuclear weapons complex;

• Stop directly managing nuclear weapons production sites and dissolve research contracts solely related to nuclear weapons production;

• For contracts with dual-purpose research applications, demand greater transparency and create specific processes for ethical review of this research;

• Advocate for reinvestment of weapons activities funding to non-proliferation and environmental remediation efforts; and

• Join cities and state legislatures in urging the federal government to support the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and reverse course on nuclear arms control backsliding.

See the full list of universities.

The above is the Executive Summary of ICAN’s report on US Universities. Read the full report. Beyond Nuclear is a member of ICAN.

In addition to large amounts of funding, enacting these upgrades requires significant amounts of scientific, technical and human capital. To a large extent, the U.S. government and its contractors have turned to the nation’s universities to provide this capital.

At the same time, the United States is shirking its previous commitments to nuclear arms control and reducing nuclear risks despite its obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty to pursue good-faith measures towards nuclear disarmament.

In August 2019, the United States officially withdrew from the landmark 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, testing a treaty-prohibited missile shortly thereafter. The Trump Administration’s 2018 Nuclear Posture Review expanded the circumstances under which the United States would consider the first use of nuclear weapons and called for the development of two new sea-based low-yield nuclear weapon systems.

Internationally, many member states of the United Nations have recognized the devastating humanitarian and environmental impacts of nuclear weapons: debating, adopting, signing and now ratifying the 2017 Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, Reference, USA | Leave a comment

Far right American extremists could pose nuclear terrorism risks

Sarkar Published Op-Ed on Domestic Nuclear Terrorism. https://www.bu.edu/pardeeschool/2021/01/27/sarkar-published-op-ed-on-domestic-nuclear-terrorism/ 27 Jan 21, Boston University Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies, Jayita Sarkar, Assistant Professor of International Relations at the Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies at Boston University, published an op-ed in the Washington Post discussing the threat of domestic nuclear terrorism in the United States.

The article, titled “It’s time to take domestic nuclear terrorism seriously,” examines why the Biden administration needs to move away from the 1970s understanding of nuclear terrorism as the threat of radical Islam from outside of U.S. borders. She argues that the new administration needs to pay close attention to apocalyptically-minded White supremacists who have been calling for nuclear attacks on non-White people also since the 1970s.

An excerpt:

The key to preventing such a catastrophic attack will be moving beyond a one-dimensional understanding of terrorism as the violent threat of radical Islam, and better understanding the different ways in which far-right domestic terrorism has grown in the United States and the specific threats this brings. Despite ample evidence to support the concern that insider threats pose high security risks in nuclear and radiological environments, little has been done at the policy level.

The full op-ed can be read on The Washington Post‘s website.

Jayita Sarkar is Assistant Professor of International Relations at Boston University’s Frederick S. Pardee School of Global Studies. Her expertise is in the history of U.S. foreign policy, nuclear proliferation, the global Cold War, South Asia and Western Europe. Her research has appeared or is forthcoming in the Journal of Cold War Studies, Journal of Strategic Studies, Cold War History, International History Review, and elsewhere. Dr. Sarkar obtained a doctorate in International History from the Graduate Institute Geneva in Switzerland. Read more about her here.

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | safety, USA | Leave a comment

Nuclear weapons now illegal – only rogue states have them, Puget Sound should not!

Only Rogue States Have Nuclear Weapons, https://limitlesslife.wordpress.com/2021/01/27/only-rogue-states-have-nuclear-weapons/ By David Swanson, Executive Director of World BEYOND War, and Elizabeth Murray, of Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action, published by Kitsap Sun, January 24, 2021

From January 18 to February 14, four large billboards are going up around Seattle that proclaim “Nuclear Weapons Are Now Illegal. Get them out of Puget Sound!”

What can this possibly mean? Nuclear weapons may be unpleasant, but what is illegal about them, and how can they be in Puget Sound?

Since 1970, under the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty, most nations have been forbidden to acquire nuclear weapons, and those already possessing them or at least those party to the treaty, such as the United States have been obliged to “pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament, and on a treaty on general and complete disarmament under strict and effective international control.”

Needless to say, the U.S. and other nuclear-armed governments have spent 50 years not doing this, and in recent years the U.S. government has torn up treaties limiting nuclear weapons, and invested heavily in building more of them.

Under the same treaty, for 50 years, the U.S. government has been obliged “not to transfer to any recipient whatsoever nuclear weapons or other nuclear explosive devices or control over such weapons or explosive devices directly, or indirectly.” Yet, the U.S. military keeps nuclear weapons in Belgium, the Netherlands, Germany, Italy, and Turkey. We can dispute whether that state of affairs violates the treaty, but not whether it outrages millions of people.

Three years ago, 122 nations voted to create a new treaty to ban the very possession or sale of nuclear weapons, and the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize. On January 22, 2021, this new treaty becomes law in over 50 nations that have formally ratified it, a number that is rising steadily and is widely expected to reach a majority of the world’s nations in the near future.

What difference does it make for nations with no nuclear weapons to ban them? What does it have to do with the United States? Well, most nations banned landmines and cluster bombs. The United States did not. But the weapons were stigmatized. Global investors took their funding away. U.S. companies stopped making them, and the U.S. military reduced and may have finally ceased its use of them. Divestment from nuclear weapons by major financial institutions has taken off in recent years, and can safely be expected to accelerate.

Change, including on such practices as slavery and child labor, has always been far more global than one might infer from the typical U.S. history text. Globally, nuclear weapons possession is becoming thought of as the behavior of a rogue state. One of those rogue states keeps some of its stigmatized weaponry in Puget Sound.

The Naval Base Kitsap-Bangor hosts eight Trident submarines and arguably the largest concentration of deployed nuclear weapons in the world. Former Seattle Archbishop Raymond Hunthausen famously characterized Kitsap-Bangor as “the Auschwitz of Puget Sound.” New nuclear-armed submarines are now planned for deployment to Kitsap-Bangor. The relatively tiny nuclear weapons on these submarines, horrifyingly characterized by U.S. military planners as “more usable” are two to three times as powerful as what was dropped on Hiroshima.

Do the people of the Seattle area support this? Certainly we have never been consulted. Keeping nuclear weapons in Puget Sound is not democratic. It’s also not sustainable. It takes funding badly needed for people and our environment and puts it into environmentally destructive weaponry that increases the risk of nuclear holocaust. Scientists’ Doomsday Clock is closer to midnight than ever before. If you want to help dial it back, or even eliminate it, you can get involved with the Ground Zero Center for Nonviolent Action and with World BEYOND War.

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Why Samantha Power should not hold public office in USA administration

JANUARY 27, 2021 BY DAVIDSWANSON https://davidswanson.org/why-samantha-power-should-not-hold-public-office/ It took a variety of approaches to market the 2003 war on Iraq. For some it was to be a defense against an imagined threat. For others it was false revenge. But for Samantha Power it was philanthropy. She said at the time, “An American intervention likely will improve the lives of the Iraqis. Their lives could not get worse, I think it’s quite safe to say.” Needless to say, it wasn’t safe to say that.Did Power learn a lesson? No, she went on to promote a war on Libya, which proved disastrous.

Then did she learn? No, she took an explicit position against learning, publicly arguing for the duty not to dwell on the results in Libya as that might impede willingness to wage war on Syria.

Samantha Power may never learn, but we can. We can stop allowing her to hold public office.

We can tell every U.S. Senator to reject her nomination to lead the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID).

Samantha Power, as “Human Rights Director” at the National Security Council and Ambassador to the United Nations, supported the U.S.-Saudi war on Yemen and Israeli attacks on Palestine, denouncing criticisms of Israel and helping block international responses to the attacks on Yemen.

Power has been a major proponent of hostility toward Russia and of unfounded and exaggerated allegations against Russia.

Power has, in lengthy articles and books, shown remarkably little (if any) regret for all the wars she’s promoted, choosing instead to focus on her regret for missed opportunities for wars that didn’t happen, especially in Rwanda — which she misleadingly depicts as a situation not caused by militarism, but in which a military attack would have supposedly reduced rather than increased suffering.

We don’t need war advocates who use more humanitarian language. We need peace advocates.

President Biden has nominated a far less enthusiastic war proponent than usual to direct the CIA, but it’s not clear how much that will matter if Power is running USAID. According to Allen Weinstein, a co-founder of the National Endowment for Democracy, an organization funded by USAID, “A lot of what we do today was done covertly 25 years ago by the CIA.”

USAID has financed efforts aimed at overthrowing governments in Ukraine, Venezuela, and Nicaragua. The last thing we need right now is a USAID run by a habitual “intervener.”

Here’s a link to an online email-your-senators campaign to reject Samantha Power.

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

Reviving the Iran nuclear deal will test Joe Biden

Reviving the Iran nuclear deal will test Joe Biden, Tehran says the ball is in America’s court, but Washington first wants compliance, Ft.com, DAVID GARDNER, 27 Jan 21,

US president Joe Biden’s incoming foreign policy team, full of veterans from the Barack Obama administrations, will have no illusions about how tricky it will be to refloat the 2015 nuclear deal with Iran that was torpedoed by Donald Trump in 2018. They know from direct experience how canny Iranian negotiators are — and how antagonistic relations have become with the Islamic Republic. ………

Both sides, moreover, are adopting a “you first” approach. Iran says the ball is in America’s court since the Trump administration unilaterally tore up a deal Tehran was then fulfilling. The Biden team says Iran must first resume compliance with the 2015 accord (it raised uranium enrichment above agreed levels of volume and purity, albeit one year after Washington’s withdrawal). …..

For the mullahs and militiamen who ultimately run Iran’s tyrannical theocracy, the 2015 deal was a threat and a swindle. Watching how Iranians warmly embraced it as a path back to the modern world, they saw a slippery slope to regime change. When the US reneged on its commitment to readmit Iran to world markets, the Islamist reactionaries in Tehran were able to force pragmatists led by President Hassan Rouhani to retreat.

When reformists led by then-president Mohammad Khatami offered the US a “grand bargain” in 2003, George W Bush as US president placed Iran on the “axis of evil” alongside Iraq and North Korea. For hardliners, and many Iranians, Mr Trump was therefore merely being true to form. America and Iran have haunted each other for generations. ……….

The US, therefore, might once again be tempted to overplay its hand. Mr Biden’s negotiators will know from the run-up to 2015 that talks only really began once Washington took regime change off the table. But if they do that now they will demand measurable assurances on Iran’s regional behaviour. That is not so very distinct in Tehran’s eyes from the Trumpian (and Israeli and Saudi) demand it axes its ballistic missile programme and wraps up the militia networks through which it has built a Shia axis of power from the Caspian Sea to the Mediterranean and down into the Gulf.

That is, right now, a non-starter. Especially as Israel steps up its air strikes and sabotage against Iranian targets and assets across the region. The US policy of “maximum pressure” has met maximum pushback.

The US, and other guarantors of the nuclear compact, should walk it back towards 2015. But regional detente requires a new security architecture, including all the actors. This needs to be built from the ground up, and reinforced by a broad international diplomatic coalition that underwrites it. The US has lost trust among allies as well as adversaries. It cannot attempt this alone. david.gardner@ft.com https://www.ft.com/content/a1c3caf8-4f3f-4f79-a7e1-3f727ae55e76

January 28, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | Leave a comment

Biden’s USA headed for confrontation with Russia? The troubling appointment of Victoria Nuland

Nuland’s actions helped produce the regime change in Ukraine which led to U.S. arms sales, U.S. sanctions on Russia, even the first Trump impeachment over the matter of anti-tank missile delivery. The coup damaged U.S.-Russian relations

Basic Notes on Victoria (“Fuck the EU!”) Nuland, more https://www.counterpunch.org/2021/01/25/basic-notes-on-victoria-fuck-the-eu-nuland/ BY GARY LEUPP, 25 Jan 21
On January 5 Joe Biden quietly announced the nomination of Victoria (“Fuck the EU!”) Nuland as Deputy Secretary of State for Political Affairs. This announcement may signal the inception of the confrontation with Russia placed on hold during the Trump presidency.

For four years the Democrats have pilloried Trump for “coddling” Putin, although in fact Trump has heaped sanctions on Russia bringing relations to their lowest point since the early Cold War. Now they want some more serious anti-Russian measures. They want their president, Commander-in-Chief of the Exceptional Nation and Leader of the Free World against its adversaries, return us to Clinton-Obama normalcy. That means “getting tougher” with Russia. But what does tougher mean?

Nuland is eminently qualified for the task of making things much worse, even provoking war with the other superpower that while lacking foreign bases, and spending a fraction of what NATO spends on military defense, has over 6000 nuclear weapons. (Remember? The U.S. developed and used nuclear weapons in 1945, the only country to ever do so. The Soviets followed by developing their own bomb in 1949, in self-defense. That’s when Truman established NATO as an anti-Soviet, anti-communist military alliance.)

Moscow feels a mounting resentment over the expansion of a hostile military alliance, formed during the Cold War under conditions no longer pertinent, to surround it. Is this hard to fathom? How would Congress view a gradual expansion of a Russian-led military alliance committed to spending 2% of its members’ GDPs on military spending to embrace Mexico, Cuba, Nicaragua, Venezuela, Panama and maybe Canada next year?

Nuland is a career official, serving under multiple administrations, representing bipartisan imperialism. She was deputy director for “affairs in the former Soviet republics” in the Bill Clinton administration. Her task was to exploit the pain and suffering caused by the implosion of the Soviet Union to assert greater U.S. hegemony over Eurasia, using the traditional mix of covert operations, National Endowment for Democracy meddling, “color revolutions,” aid promises, etc.

During this period Clinton reneged on the U.S. promise to Moscow in 1989 that NATO would not advance “one inch” east after the Soviets accepted German reunification. Instead he drew Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia, long members of the dissolved Warsaw Pact, into the anti-Russian military alliance in 1999. It was an extraordinary repudiation of the Bush-Gorbachev agreement, an egregious provocation of a now-friendly country (then headed by the buffoonish Boris Yeltsin), unremarked on by the U.S. press at the time as anything controversial. Since then the expansion of NATO has been treated as no more remarkable than the expansion of UNESCO. Thank Nuland in part for making you think relentless NATO growth is normal, and that it makes sense for North Macedonia and Montenegro to have joined most recently (during the Trump term).

Thank Nuland too, in part, for the “color revolutions” in Serbia (2000), Georgia (2003), Ukraine (2004) and Kyrgyzstan (2005). The (fake) concept of the popular uprising against (Russian-backed) tyranny, backed by an altruistic America that stands for Freedom and Democracy—that’s Nuland’s baby. She surely has plans for Belarus. And she must be deeply alarmed that the State Department did not try to interfere in the last flare-up of violence in Nagarno-Karabakh leaving Russian diplomacy to resolve the situation. (Just because Russia itself extends into the Caucasus and borders Georgia and Azerbaijan doesn’t mean that it should “interfere” in countries that ought by rights to be ruled by the U.S.A.—due to Exceptionalism and all.)

The extremely reactionary chauvinistic Nuland was deputy foreign advisor to Dick Cheney during the Bush-Cheney administration (2003-2005) and then U.S. ambassador to NATO (2005-2008). Under Obama she was Under Secretary of State for Europe and Eurasia, handpicked by Hillary Clinton. She is married to noted neocon warmonger-scholar Robert Kagan. Both were deeply complicit in spreading the Big Lies leading to the Iraq War in 2003. Nuland supported Hillary Clinton’s terroristic regime change efforts in Libya and Syria. But her main mission in life is to expand NATO. Joe Biden shares her passion for this project.

Nuland is perhaps best known for her pithy ejaculation: “Fuck the EU!” in a telephone call with the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine in 2014.

In that year, while Nuland built support for the coup in Kiev (Feb. 18 to 21), she boasted openly that the U.S. had invested $5 billion in supporting “the Ukrainian people’s European aspirations.” (This referred to the support of some Ukrainians for the violent overthrow of the democratically elected president, Viktor Yanukovych, on the basis of his alleged pro-Russian policies and his opposition to European Union affiliation under the conditions the EU was then offering.) To state the matter honestly: the U.S. spent $5 billion to install a government in Kiev that would request NATO membership (ostensibly to protect it from always-aggressive, always expanding Russia) and bind it forever to the U.S. military-industrial complex and “Free World.”

Since NATO membership since the end of the Cold War has invariably been followed by EU membership, it was easy for Nuland to pose as the champion of Ukraine’s EU membership versus the evil Russians (supposedly) opposing that membership. Yanukovych himself had negotiated seriously with the EU but rejected a plan for association due to its austerity provisions. Meanwhile Moscow offered an attractive aid package. This in the world of U.S. propaganda was a choice between Europe and Russia, with Yanukovych siding with America’s adversary.

The Maidan coup occurred just a month after Nuland was recorded discussing the upcoming event with U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, Geoffrey Pyatt. Nuland, who had joined Sen. John McCain and other U.S. politicians in offering cookies to the Maidan protestors, discussed with Pyatt who should serve as prime minister after the coup. Pyatt noted that the EU favored Vitali Klitschko, the ex-boxer.

“Fuck the EU!” replied Nuland, who wanted banker and NATO supporter Arseniy Yatsenyuk to lead the new government. She soon got her way.

Nuland worked with Oleh Tyahnybok, head of the neo-Nazi Svoboda Party (and one of the three leaders Nuland ordered Pyatt to keep in touch with) and the Right Sector militia. Both glorify Stephan Bandera, the Ukrainian fascist leader who aided the Nazis in rounding up Ukrainian Jews during the war. Tyahnybok publicly inveighs against the “Moscow-Jewish mafia ruling Ukraine.”

When Congressman Dana Rohrbacher Nuland in a hearing was asked soon after the coup whether there had been any neo-fascists on the Maidan she refused to answer the question, stating there were “mothers, grandmothers, and veterans…all colors of Ukraine, including ugly colors” on the Maidan. In other words, a diverse anti-Russian crowd. (Notice how she ignored the existence of the 30% of Ukrainians who are ethnic Russians and were a support base for the president targeted for toppling. Just the sort of sensitivity to ethnicity you’d expect from a top U.S. State Department official who’d been comfortable with the slaughter of Iraqis.) Continue reading →

January 26, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, Russia, secrets,lies and civil liberties, Ukraine, USA | Leave a comment

A dangerous out-dated ”zombie” U.S. Navy policy on ballistic missile submarines

one of those zombie policies that keeps going long after it ought to be dead and buried.

Failure to consider new technology may result in a situation where a nuclear first strike is seen as the only way to guarantee “winning” a war, despite the almost incomprehensible levels of destruction involved. As the situation gets complex with China developing its own submarine-based deterrent force, such instability will be dangerous to everyone.

Dismukes argues that to reduce this danger we have to recognize the two factors it stems from: advances in submarine detection technology; and a dubious, outdated U.S. policy on strategic ASW. The new administration should tackle that policy ASAP.

The Hidden Nuclear Policy The Biden Administration Needs To Tackle, https://www.forbes.com/sites/davidhambling/2021/01/26/the-hidden-nuclear-policy-the-new-administration-needs-to-tackle/?sh=268d0adb58d4, David HamblingContributorAerospace & Defense 26 Jan 21,

A U.S. Navy policy on ballistic missile submarines may threaten the stability of the strategic nuclear balance.

This seems to be the result of the inertia of a strategy laid down in a different era, one which is becoming increasingly precarious as technology advances.

Previous administrations have failed to spell out the actual policy, preferring to keep it under wraps. Continuing this lack of clarity could prove catastrophic.

Bradford Dismukes is a strategy expert with thirty years’ experience at the Center for Naval Analyses or CNA, having headed a group which supported and developed U.S. Navy strategy. His new blog challenges ideas which have, as he says, “marched zombie-like out of the Cold War,” without being questioned. One such idea is the policy of Strategic Anti-Submarine Warfare (ASW), which Dismukes says makes nuclear escalation more likely, not less, if threatened in time of crisis or executed in war.

ASW is all about finding, tracking and destroying enemy submarines. Strategic ASW targets the submarines carrying nuclear missiles. During the Cold War, Strategic ASW was about tying up enemy forces and affecting the war on the ground, but now the situation is quite different.

“Today, the Russians would have every reason to see the mission primarily as preparation for a U.S. first strike,” says Dismukes. Continue reading →

January 26, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

The aerospace industry – the goal is weaponry and global dominance

Keep Space for Peace! Save the Heavens fro!m Hegemony https://www.womenagainstmilitarymadness.org/articles/2020/12/22/keep-space-for-peace-save-the-heavens-from-hegemony Bruce K. Gagnon

Recently we learned that the aerospace industry is pushing to turn a former naval air station in Brunswick, Maine, into a spaceport. Promising lots of “high tech” jobs, a bill is being pushed in Augusta, our capital, by some of the most “progressive” legislators in the state.

Similarly, we are hearing from many other states where launch complexes are being promoted – from Hawaii to New Mexico to Alaska – that the industry wants some of the most pristine places on Earth to become spaceports. Why?

A spaceport in Kodiak Island, Alaska (locals call it “Spacepork”), was built some years ago in spite of overwhelming opposition by local residents. They were promised that it would be used only for civilian launches. So far, all the launches at Kodiak have actually been for Pentagon (and Israeli) space-weapons technology tests.

We’ve been hearing for several years now that new companies formed by tech-industry billionaires Elon Musk (whose projects include Tesla and SpaceX) and Jeff Bezos (Amazon, Blue Orbit) plan to launch as many as 35,000 mini-sats (satellites) into orbit. Imagine the enormous hole these polluting launches will punch into the ozone layer. The plan is to have a satellite orbiting over the head of every person on Earth 24 hours a day, making it possible for the new 5G wireless technology system to be profitable. Many questions are being raised about the military (dual-use) applications of these satellites as well.

Space Force

Earlier this year, Trump was able to “stand up” his new high-tech legacy branch of the military, called the Space Force. Congress was overwhelmingly in favor – that means both parties supported it; the only thing the Democrats (who could have stopped it cold in the House of Representatives) wanted to change was the name ¾ to “Space Corps.” They surrendered on that as well.

When the new leaders of the Space Force speak about it, they keep using the word “lean” to describe the new service branch. They want to make it sound as though it won’t be a “fiscal burden” to the nation, especially at a time when we have more unemployment than during the Great Depression. But facts are facts, and I can testify that the aerospace-industry publications have been bragging about since the 1980s when Ronald Reagan first proposed Star Wars, that this would be the largest industrial project in the history of the planet. So $15 billion is just the foot in the door. Where will the funds come from to pay for this? Our entitlement programs ¾ Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid, and what little is left of the social safety net –– are on the chopping block to be sacrificed to the aerospace industry.

During his presidency, Trump announced that the U.S. rejects the United Nations Outer Space and Moon Treaties that declare the planetary bodies are the “province of all humankind” – meaning that no nation, corporation, or individual can claim ownership of them. Thus the way is open for a new gold rush to grab the planets for resource extraction. And, if Biden were to continue Obama’s legacy, the way will be paved.

The Real Missions of Space Force

In 2015, Obama signed the U.S. Commercial Space Launch Competitiveness Act into law. The act grants companies the rights to whatever they manage to pluck out of these extraterrestrial bodies. Effectively an extension of capitalism into space, the bill is one of the few during Obama’s presidency that received widespread support from the GOP as well as from the Democrats, because apparently nothing screams bipartisanship louder than asteroid mining. (Asteroids are rocky and metallic objects that orbit the sun but are smaller than planets.)[1]

“This is the single greatest recognition of property rights in history,” said Eric Anderson, a founder of Planetary Resources, Inc., a company whose mission it is to mine asteroids. “This legislation establishes the same supportive framework that created the great economies of history, and will encourage the sustained development of space.”

I’ve long believed that the Space Force (and before that the Space Command) will have two primary missions: first, to give the U.S. and its Western capitalist allies “control and domination” of Earth; and secondly, the Space Force will be given the task to create the technologies to “control and dominate” the pathway on and off our sacred Mother Earth.

In 1989, the U.S. Congress published an internal study called “Military Space Forces: The Next 50 Years.” In this study, the congressional staffer who wrote it explained the need to control the pathway between the Earth and the Moon. He suggested that armed space stations on either side of the Moon would allow the Pentagon to seize the “Earth-Moon gravity well.” He wrote: “Armed forces might lie in wait at that location to hijack rival shipments on return.” So this plan has been in the works for many years – in fact, since a former Nazis first briefed Congress back in 1958.

From Nazi Rocket Science to the U.S. Militarizing Space Program

Walter Dornberger was Hitler’s head man in charge of his World War II era V-1 and V-2 rocket program. He was the staff link between rocket scientist Wernher von Braun and Hitler. Dornberger, like von Braun and 1,600 other Germans, was smuggled into the U.S. after the war in the secret military program called Operation Paperclip.

Speaking at a congressional hearing in 1958, Dornberger insisted that America’s first space priority ought to be to “conquer, occupy, keep and utilize space between the Earth and the Moon.”

There has been unanimity in the halls of Congress since Dornberger’s testimony – both parties have faithfully kept the funding for the militarized space program alive and growing. Dornberger would be happy today to see that his Nazi prophecy has largely come to fruition.

International Treaties and an Achilles Heel

The U.S. has been leading the way to militarize and weaponize space since the beginning of WW II. For a while the former Soviet Union was in the game – until its collapse in 1991. Neither Russia nor China could keep up with the U.S. in the ensuing years, and they continually begged the U.S. to join them in negotiating a treaty to ban all weapons in space – in other words, close the door to the barn before the horse gets out. During Republican and Democrat administrations since Bill Clinton, the response to Moscow and Beijing was the same from Washington – NO.

So Russia and China slowly but steadily have moved forward since the early 1990s and have begun to close the space gap – always continuing to urge the creation of a space-weapons ban treaty. But Washington still refuses to even consider it. In fact, the U.S. has gone in the opposite direction of international treaties under Trump – pulling out of the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty (ABM), Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), and the Iran Nuclear Deal.

Will the U.S. under Biden renew the Strategic Arms Reduction Talks (START), which run out in 2021?

It’s all really quite simple – the U.S. has not wanted to be bound by any treaties that limit its goal for “control and domination.” One could say the U.S. has become a renegade or pirate nation controlled by the soulless corporate agenda, which is all about power and greed.

This all makes the job of the Global Network[2] terribly difficult. Since our founding in 1992 we’ve been working hard to build an international constituency to keep space for peace. The corporate agenda is determined to block any progress toward that goal.

But I’ve always maintained that like everything else, the aerospace industry and its Star Wars project has an Achilles heel. It’s money. The current global virus pandemic is only bringing this reality to bear as never before.

We Must Stop an Arms Race in Space!

If we hope to beat this insane and provocative plan, then we must starve the beast. We can do that by bringing our national priorities down to earth and fighting for social progress – for programs like Medicare for All and funding to deal with our real problem today: climate crisis.

Please help us beat the expensive and dangerous Space Force by demanding our government provide programs that honor life on this lovely planet.

Best wishes to all of you. Keep your spirit strong!

~ Bruce K. Gagnon is coordinator of the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space (keepspace4peace.org) and lives in Bath, Maine. He began working on space issues in 1982.

Endnotes

[1] Definition from solarviews.com

[2] Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power in Space

January 26, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | space travel, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Protest rally against University of Arkansas’ involvement with nuclear weapons corporation

Group protests UA involvement with nuclear corporation, https://www.nwahomepage.com/news/group-protests-ua-involvement-with-nuclear-corporation/ by: Megan Wilson, Jan 22, 2021, FAYETTEVILLE, Ark. (KNWA/KFTA) – Northwest Arkansans join peace groups around the world celebrating an international treaty on prohibiting nuclear weapons.

While 86 countries signed the treaty, the U.S. was not one of them.

A group gathered at the University of Arkansas to protest its contract with the nuclear weapons corporation Honeywell International.

Abel Tomlinson is the founder of Arkansas Non-Violence Alliance.

He said the University contradicts its mission statement by building non-nuclear components for the bombs.

“Its mission statement says that they’re ‘determined to build a better world.’ and we belive that building nuclear bombs is the complete opposite of that. Nobody should be having them. They’re endangering everyone, it’s unacceptable,” Tomlinson said.

The University of Arkansas was aware of today’s protest, but did not wish to comment.

January 25, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Education, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Strong opposition to USA’s Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission extending nuclear reactors’ lives to 100 years

Well, I can’t help think that all these officials are looking out for themselves here. They hope that the disasters and cleanups won’t be their problem, – but the problem of future taxpayers.

RESOUNDING NO – TO LETTING NUCLEAR PLANTS RUN FOR 100 YEARS, The Sentinel By Karl Grossman, Jan 22, 2021

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission held a “public meeting” this week on what it titled “Development of Guidance Documents To Support License Renewal For 100 Years Of Plant Operation.”

Comments from the “public” were strongly opposed to the NRC’s desire for it to let nuclear power plants run for a century.

“I request you pause and consider before you go ahead on this reckless path,” testified Michel Lee, chairman of the New York-based Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy.

“Our position and that of our constituents is a resounding no,” declared Paul Gunter, director of the Reactor Oversight Project at the national organization Beyond Nuclear.

“It’s time to stop this whole nuke con job,” said Erica Gray, nuclear issues chair of the Virginia Sierra Club. There is “no solution” to dealing with nuclear waste, she said. It is “unethical to continue to make the most toxic waste known to mankind.” And, “renewable energy” with solar and wind “can power the world.”

Jan Boudart, a board member of the Chicago-based Nuclear Energy Information Service, spoke, too, of the lack of consideration of nuclear waste.

Cited was the higher likelihood of accidents with plants permitted to run for 100 years.

Whether the NRC—often called the Nuclear Rubberstamp Commission—listens is highly unlikely considering its record of rubberstamping whatever has been sought by other nuclear promoters in government and the nuclear industry.

Nuclear power plants when they began being built were not seen as running for more than 40 years because of radioactivity embrittling metal parts and otherwise causing safety problems. So operating licenses were limited to 40 years.

But with the major decline of nuclear power—the U.S. is down to 94 plants from a high of 129 and only two are now under construction—the nuclear promoters in the U.S. government and nuclear industry are pushing to let nuclear power plants run for 100 years to somehow keep nuclear power going……..

In further discussing the “Life Beyond Eighty” scheme for nuclear power plants, Rosseel showed a U.S. Energy Information Administration slide projecting the amount of energy nuclear power would contribute to the U.S. energy supply in decline from 19% in 2019 to 12% in 2050 while renewable energy sources would jump from the current 19% to 38%.

For the DOE, which inherited the role of promoting nuclear power from the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, abolished by Congress in 1974 for being in conflict of interest for having a dual role of both promoting and regulating nuclear power, this decline is of great concern.

At the start of the “public meeting” on January 21—held online as a teleconference—Allen L. Hiser, Jr., senior technical advisor for the Division of New and Renewed Licenses of the NRC, said the Atomic Energy Act of 1954 gave authority to the U.S. government to license nuclear power plants for 40 years. “But nothing in the AEA [Atomic Energy Act] prohibits a number of license renewals,” said Hiser.

Using this lack of prohibition in the Atomic Energy Act, the NRC is now pushing ahead on the scheme to let nuclear power plants run for 100 years.

The NRC—which was supposed to only get the regulatory function from the eliminated U.S. Atomic Energy Commission—has also, with DOE, been a promoter of nuclear power.

Earlier, it began extending the operating licenses of nuclear power plants to run for 60 years—and most of the plants in the U.S. now are being allowed to run for 60 years. And in recent years it has given the go-ahead for nuclear plants to run for 80 years, and several have been licensed for that length.

In granting the license extensions to 60 and 80 years, the NRC has also been allowing the plants to be “uprated” to generate more electricity—to run hotter and harder—further asking for disaster.

Gunter testified about an NRC cover-up involving the extending of nuclear power plant licenses. Using PowerPoint to reinforce his points, Gunter displayed a 2017 report commissioned by the NRC made by the DOE’s Pacific Northwest National Laboratory. The “very critical report,” said Gunter, looked at conducting research on the impacts of extending nuclear power plant operating licenses. It is titled “Criteria and Planning Guidance for Ex-Plant Harvesting to Support Subsequent License Renewal.” http://www.beyondnuclear.org/storage/aging/slr/autopsy_PNNL-27120_harvesting_Dec2017.pdf

The report listed many significant issues considering the “harsh” degradation of nuclear power plant components over the years, he said. It pointed to “a host of critical technical gaps.”

fter he “raised questions about” issues in the report at a meeting on operating license

extensions held in 2018 at the NRC’s headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, the report was “taken down from government websites,” said Gunter. However, Beyond Nuclear saved a copy of the report. He spoke of an email that Beyond Nuclear obtained, after two years of trying under the U.S. Freedom of Information Act, from an NRC employee saying: “Big picture, I think the entire report needs to be scrubbed.” A “sanitized” version of the report, said Gunter, was “republished” in 2019. Gunter spoke of “public safety” being threatened.

Gunter, also at the “public meeting” this week, said among the issues not being considered in the NRC’s drive to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants to 100 years is the management of the radioactive waste generated by the plants and “the advent of reliable, competitive and abundant renewable energy.”

The oldest nuclear power plant in the U.S. was Oyster Creek in Toms River, New Jersey which opened in 1969 and was shut down 49 years later in 2018.

What President Joe Biden does about nuclear power—he has said he is for “advanced” nuclear power—and the pro-nuclear NRC remains to be seen. The president appoints the five members of the NRC, and its current chairperson, a nuclear engineer and Trump appointee, is resigning.

Biden could move to have done to the NRC what was done to its predecessor agency, the AEC, to have it abolished. And to push to end nuclear power in the U.S.

Most U.S. nuclear power plants, according to a PowerPoint slide shown by the NRC’s Hiser, have already operated more than 40 years—the numbers of years they were seen as running safely when they began operating. https://www.thesentinel.com/communities/montgomery/news/science/resounding-no-to-letting-nuclear-plants-run-for-100-years/article_4cef89fc-5cc1-11eb-bfab-8b68f4bca770.html

January 23, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | opposition to nuclear, safety, USA | Leave a comment

USA and Iran must overcome 9 hurdles to revive the nuclear deal.

Nine hurdles to reviving the Iran nuclear deal, Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Seyed Hossein Mousavian | January 19, 2021, Although reviving the agreement is certainly still possible, it won’t be easy. The two sides will need to overcome nine hurdles to make it happen.

First, the sequencing of a mutual return could be an immediate problem. Iran expects the United States to lift sanctions first, because it was the Trump administration that withdrew first. While Tehran’s demand is legitimate, Washington may ask that Iran come into full compliance before lifting sanctions. …….

Second is the issue of what compliance constitutes …….

Third, the Trump administration imposed numerous sanctions against Iran under the guise of terrorism and human rights, aimed at preventing the Biden administration from returning to the deal. For a clean implementation of the agreement, Biden will need to remove all of these sanctions as well.

Fourth, Trump’s withdrawal from the agreement and violation of the UN Security Council Resolution 2231 as well as other international commitments has damaged US credibility abroad. …..Fifth, because of Trump’s maximum pressure policy, the Iranian economy has suffered hundreds of billions of dollars of losses while Iran was in full compliance with the terms and conditions of the deal……..

Sixth, the “snapback” mechanism built into the agreement allows any country to force the UN Security Council to reimpose multilateral sanctions against Iran if Iran fails to fulfill its commitments. But this is one-sided: There is no such remedy for Iran if other parties fail to do their part. ………

Seventh, in the first week of December 2020, the Iranian parliament passed a bill mandating Iran’s Atomic Energy Organization to resume enriching uranium to 20 percent purity. The legislation also requires the Iranian government to cease voluntary implementation of the IAEA’s Additional Protocol within two months of the bill’s enactment if the other signatories fail to fully deliver on their commitments under the agreement. …….

Eighth, there are some in the United States who are worried that Trump may start a reckless last-ditch war with Iran before leaving office. ……

Ninth, some pundits and politicians in Washington want Biden to leverage the Trump administration’s sanctions to pressure Iran to accept additional commitments beyond the original agreement as a condition for US return to compliance……..

Despite these hurdles, Biden should nevertheless seek a reentry into the deal. Only a clean and full implementation by all parties can save the world’s most comprehensive nuclear agreement, contain rising US-Iran tensions, and open the path toward more confidence building measures. That path should include, upon Biden’s issuing an executive order to rejoin the JCPOA, the creation of a working committee of parties to the agreement tasked with ensuring full compliance by all signatories, and a forum, organized by the UN secretary general, in which Iran and the Gulf countries can discuss a new structure for improving security and cooperation in the region. https://thebulletin.org/2021/01/nine-hurdles-to-reviving-the-iran-nuclear-deal/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter01212021&utm_content=NuclearRisk_9hurdles_01192021

January 23, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Iran, politics international, USA | 1 Comment

Biden keeps Trump appointee as acting nuclear weapons chief

Biden keeps Trump appointee as acting nuclear weapons chief

By: Aaron Mehta 22 Jan 21, WASHINGTON — Charles Verdon will serve as acting administrator for the National Nuclear Security Agency, serving under acting energy secretary David Huizenga as the Biden administration begins.

Huizenga, the new acting energy secretary, had been serving as associate principal deputy administrator for NNSA. He comes from the nonproliferation side of the agency and has experience with DoE’s office of environmental management.

Verdon, who was confirmed in 2018 as head of defense programs at the National Nuclear Security Administration, is one of the few Trump political appointees being kept in a national security position. Previously a career NNSA employee, Verdon has largely avoided politics during his time in office, focusing instead on the technical details behind America’s planned nuclear warhead modernization efforts.

The NNSA is a semi-autonomous agency located within the DoE. While the Pentagon is in charge of developing the planes, submarines and missiles that deliver nuclear weapons, the NNSA is in charge of developing and producing the actual warheads. The department’s fiscal 2021 budget request for nuclear weapons activities was $15.6 billion. ……. https://www.defensenews.com/smr/nuclear-arsenal/2021/01/21/biden-keeps-trump-appointee-as-acting-nuclear-weapons-chief/

January 23, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics, USA | Leave a comment

The 70-year nuclear gloom begins to lift on January 22

Abolishing Nuclear Weapons: A New Chance, https://portside.org/2021-01-19/abolishing-nuclear-weapons-new-chance– 20 Jan 21,

Anuclear darkness has engulfed the world for seven decades, with only intermittent breakthroughs of light when treaties among nuclear nations were negotiated. Some treaties have been violated for decades; others, walked away from by Trump. Any progress made on eliminating nuclear weapons has ceased. Worse, a new weapons upgrade is in the works by the nuclear nations. In 2009 President Obama spoke of the dream of a world without nuclear weapons, yet a handful of years later he put the U.S. on course to spend nearly $2 trillion on upgrading its nuclear weapons arsenal and delivery systems over a period of 30 years. Trump has augmented the budget for and added new nuclear weapons with threats to use them.

The 70-year nuclear gloom begins to lift on January 22, 2021. The nine countries that have held the world captive to the threat of nuclear war are losing moral ground to 122 smaller countries that approved the world’s first nuclear weapons ban in July 2017. Once 50 of those 122 approving countries completed the ratification process of the UN Treaty for the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons in their legislatures, it became international law in October 2020.

The law goes into effect January 22, 2021 to the profound relief of most people of the world. Those now 51 “freedom fighter” countries commit to having nothing to do with nuclear weapons – no design, testing, manufacturing, storage, transport, use or threat of use. Consider this a marathon for disarmament to outpace the current nuclear arms race in which all nuclear-armed countries are, in lockstep, upgrading their weapons.

And this is only the beginning. Thirty five additional countries are in the process of ratifying the Treaty; 50 more support the Treaty; a dozen more have immense popular support, among them Canada, and are one election away from signing the Treaty. If the United States, where a majority of citizens does not want to use nuclear weapons, signed the Treaty, the rest would follow.

Actions of note:

The General Electric Company stopped production of nuclear weapons in 1993.
Two of the world’s largest pension funds have divested from nuclear weapons.
Mitsubishi UFG Financial Group, 1 of the 5 largest banks in the world, has excluded nuclear weapons production from its portfolio, labeling them “inhumane.”
Kennedy and Khrushchev were working toward the abolition of nuclear weapons when Kennedy was assassinated.
Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to a radical dismantling of their nuclear weapons.
Our goal must be a world “without nuclear weapons… “nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought:” Former Republican Secretary of State George Schultz and former Democrat Secretary of Defense William Perry.
Mayors for Peace: 7675 cities in 163 countries support the total abolition of nuclear weapons.
56 former presidents, prime ministers, foreign and defense ministers from 20 NATO countries and Japan and South Korea recently signed an open letter in support of the UN treaty to ban nuclear weapons. “Sooner or later our luck will run out – unless we act…There is no cure for a nuclear war,” they asserted. “Prevention is our only option.”
Pope Francis: “The use of atomic energy for purposes of war is immoral. As is the possession of atomic weapons.”

A limited nuclear war could trigger a global famine that would likely end billions of lives. A full scale nuclear war would end human and most other life on Earth, reminding us of the classical depiction of total war: they had to destroy the village to save it. A nuclear war, whether by accident, misjudgment or intention to destroy the enemy would destroy the rest of us as well – how insane is that?

What then can President-elect Biden do?

Open dialogue with and renew nuclear agreements and diplomacy with Russia immediately.

Change US policy in 3 key ways: No first use of nuclear weapons; take weapons off of hair trigger alert; and select another senior official to share decision-making about “pressing the button.”

Revive the agreement with Iran: they do not develop nuclear weapons, we lift sanctions.

With South Korea, engage in diplomacy with North Korea to freeze and roll back their nuclear weapons program.

Stop the new program of upgrading nuclear weapons.

Listen to the world’s majority and lead the United States toward signing the new UN Treaty and the others will follow. It is our only solution to exit a dead-end system that permits a single human being, in the words of national security analyst Joseph Cirincione, “to destroy in minutes all that humanity has constructed over millennia.”

Pat Hynes, retired from Boston University, is on the board of the Traprock Center for Peace and Justice https://traprock.org.

January 21, 2021 Posted by Christina Macpherson | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

« Previous Entries Next Entries »