“Merrily we roll along…” – the giddy road to nuclear bankruptcy
Gordon Edwards, Sep 2, 2026
I have often noted that the SMR “rush to market” is first and foremost a “money grab”.
The nuclear industry had performed poorly for a quarter if a century, losing market share steadily,
And yet many governments around the world were putting hundreds of billions of dollars on the table to combat global warming – this provided an opportunity to grab a lot of that public money by making exaggerated and often irresponsible claims that nuclear investment is a winning strategy.
The following document is an easy-to read account of how money gets used by some of the more flagrantly irresponsible companies – the document has to do with the circumstances leading up to the bankruptcy of Ultrasafe Nuclear Corp. (also known as Wind-Down Inc.) which was planning to build a gas-cooled reactor producing 5 megawatts of heat (later upgraded to 15 megawatts) at Chalk River, Ontario. In fact an environmental assessment of the project had already begun, and so far it has been paused but not cancelled….
It is worth reading this eye-popping account of how bankruptcy can be achieved in record time.
www.ccnr.org/Ultrasfafe_Bankruptcy_2026.pdf.
Case 24-12443-KBO Doc 695 Filed 08/13/26 Page 1 of 50
IN THE UNITED STATES BANKRUPTCY COURT FOR THE DISTRICT OF DELAWARE
Chapter 11 Case No. 24-12443 (KBO) (Jointly Administered)
In re: Reactor Parent Wind-Down, Inc.,1 Debtor.
WILMINGTON SAVINGS FUND SOCIETY, FSB, LIQUIDATING TRUSTEEOF THE RPWI LIQUIDATING TRUST, Plaintiff,
v.
WAQAR ZAIDI, RITESH BUDREE, and THE ESTATE OF FRANCESCO VENNERI, -Defendants.
Adv. Proc. No. 26-________ (KBO)
COMPLAINT
Wilmington Savings Fund Society, FSB, solely in its capacity as trustee (the “Liquidating Trustee”) of the RPWI Liquidating Trust (the “Trust”) formed pursuant to the First Amended Joint Chapter 11 Plan of Liquidation for Reactor Parent Wind-Down, Inc. and Its Affiliated Debtors [Dkt. No. 486] (the “Plan”) of the above-captioned debtor and its affiliated debtors (collectively, the “Debtors”),2 respectfully alleges as follows:
1
The Debtor and the last four digits of its federal taxpayer identification numbers is as follows: Reactor Parent Wind-Down, Inc. (f/k/a Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation) (9774) (“RPWI”). The Debtor’s mailing address is 500 Delaware Ave, Wilmington, DE 19801.
2
The Court previously entered an order [Dkt. No. 597], closing certain of the cases jointly administered with the above-captioned debtor’s case. Those affiliated Debtors, the last four digits of their federal taxpayer identification numbers and the associated case numbers are as follows: Reactor Sub One Wind-Down, Inc. (f/k/a Ultra Safe Nuclear Corporation – Technologies) (9815) (Case No. 24-1244 (KBO)); USNC-Power Ltd. (6500) (Case No.
SUMMARY OF THE ACTION
- In late 2023 and early 2024, Reactor Parent Wind-Down, Inc. (f/k/a Ultra
Safe Nuclear Corporation) and its affiliates (“USNC” or the “Company”) were on the precipice of bankruptcy. The Company—once a promising enterprise in the burgeoning nuclear industry with an estimated valuation of over $250 million—had squandered over $150 million in investments and was struggling to raise the capital necessary to satisfy unchecked liabilities and keep the Company afloat. As liquidity tightened, USNC was forced to cease paying key employees and critical vendors. Failure to pay these mission-critical expenses stifled any further investment, resulting in an inevitable death spiral. Eventually, in late 2024, the Company ceased operations and was sold for parts—netting $41 million in the aggregate—destroying hundreds of millions of dollars in value.
- The Company’s staggering fall from grace was caused by its ChiefExecutive Officer and founder, Francesco Venneri. Dr. Venneri intentionally disregarded red flags repeatedly raised by his executive team regarding the Company’s reckless spending—which, at nearly $7 million per month, far outpaced the Company’s available capital and any reasonable investment expectation. For example, in January of 2024, a critical moment in the Company’s life (when liquidation was not a fait accompli), the Company’s Chief Financial Officer wrote to Dr. Venneri and other key members of the executive team that “we are, at a minimum, 90 days away from any meaningful investment, yet no meaningful reduction in costs has occurred . . . best case scenarios fund us at a rate that is half of our current budget.”
- This was a common refrain, both well before January 2024 and well after.
Dr. Venneri, however, did nothing. A reasonably prudent manager would have cut costs and focused on the Company’s key, profit-making initiatives. Instead, Dr. Venneri provided frivolous payouts and out-of-market benefits to his “inner circle” of favored executives, including a $750,000 payment to the Company’s former Chief Commercial Officer, Waqar Zaidi. In a fleeting moment of self-awareness on the eve of bankruptcy, Dr. Venneri conceded his culpability, writing “it’s easy to point fingers to the former CEO who overspent . . . I have a lot to answer for.” - USNC’s nuclear fission technology was, as one potential investor described
it, “remarkable.” Founded in 2011 by Dr. Venneri, USNC was a pioneer in developing safe and commercially accessible nuclear fuel and reactor technology. In 2023, USNC was on the cusp of large-scale production of its proprietary Fully Ceramic Micro-encapsulated (FCM®) Nuclear Fuel
(“FCM Fuel”), which utilized state-of-the-art Tri-structural ISOtropic (“TRISO”) fuel particles in a uniquely contained format that could withstand extreme heat and explosive impacts. The Company was also developing nuclear plants in Canada and Illinois to demonstrate the viability of its proprietary Micro Modular Reactors (“MMR”), nuclear fission “batteries” utilizing its FCM Fuel that could be linked together to accommodate different business sites and needs. The
Company’s “remarkable” technology and its value, however, was torpedoed by Dr. Venneri’s failures as a manager. The same potential investor remarked in February of 2024 that “[a] company that has received $170M of capital to date should be lightyears ahead in commercial traction and institutional fundraising progress, not be scrambling for last minute change….” The investor prophetically concluded that “I see the most likely outcome being USNC going bust and
someone acquiring the tech for a few million.” The downfall was entirely foreseeable and avoidable. - Like other technology companies, USNC primarily relied on investors—in
particular, the Company’s controlling stockholder, Richard Hollis Helms—to fund its operations. The Company was targeting 2026 to begin commercial fuel production and sales after opening fuel manufacturing facilities and receiving qualification of its fuel. Further, USNC expected to commercialize its MMR technology beginning in or around 2028, following completion of its demo projects in Canada and Illinois. Management projected these business lines to generate hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue per year. - The Company never achieved these milestones. Instead, USNC’s upward
trajectory was cut short by Dr. Venneri’s reckless stewardship and his deliberate disregard of the advice of his executive team, advisors, and the Chairman of the Board. Throughout 2023 and early 2024, management repeatedly urged Dr. Venneri to prioritize the Company’s key value-creating initiatives (i.e., fuel and its MMR demo projects) and to drastically cut costs, so that the Company
could survive long enough to bring in critical capital—whether through sales or third-partyinvestment. - Rather than address these concerns, Dr. Venneri pursued expansive
business development plans, including potential projects and satellite offices across Europe, Asia, and Australia. As explained in further detail below, Dr. Venneri repeatedly and falsely promised that significant financing was imminent, or that he would obtain additional funds from Mr. Helms—a well that was running dry due to growing concerns regarding the Company’s increasing spend. - Dr. Venneri concurrently provided lavish, above-market benefits and payouts to former CCO Waqar Zaidi, who was a member of Dr. Venneri’s “inner circle” alongside former-CFO and Vice President of Finance Ritesh Budree. This included, among other things, causing the Company to pay approximately $750,000 to Mr. Zaidi pursuant to a purported “finder’s fee” agreement that Dr. Venneri and Mr. Zaidi signed in secret, during a time when payroll for non-executive employees was being withheld and vendors were not being paid, endangering the Company’s key operations relating to USNC’s fuel production and MMR demo projects. Dr. Venneri also agreed to an amended employment agreement that provided Mr. Zaidi with egregious severance benefits, including, among other things, a cash payment of at least $1 million if Mr. Zaidi was terminated for any reason other than a chargeable criminal offense that was proven in state court.4
- In October 2024, the Debtors filed voluntary petitions for relief under
chapter 11 of the Bankruptcy Code. Several months later, the Company’s assets were sold for a total of $41.0 million—hundreds of millions of dollars less than the Company had been valued in recent years. - Dr. Venneri’s gross negligence and recklessness as CEO—and the
misconduct perpetrated by his inner circle—must be remedied. The Liquidating Trustee thus brings claims against Dr. Venneri’s estate, as well as Messrs. Zaidi, and Budree, for (1) breach of fiduciary duty; (2) declaratory judgment that Mr. Zaidi’s finder’s fee agreement and Messrs. Zaidi’s and Budree’s amended employment agreements are void; (3) in the alternative, avoidance
of fraudulent obligations allegedly incurred under those agreements pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 548(a)(1)(B); (4) the avoidance and recovery of the payments made under the finder’s fee agreement as (i) constructively fraudulent transfers pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 548(a)(1)(B); or (ii) in the alternative, preferences pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 547; (5) avoidance and recovery of a sign-on bonus paid some 11 months after Mr. Zaidi’s hiring as a preference pursuant to 11 U.S.C. § 547;(6) unjust enrichment; (7) equitable subordination of Defendants’ claims in the Debtors’ bankruptcy proceedings; and/or (8) disallowance and/or reclassification of Defendant Zaidi’s and Budree’s claims in the Debtors’ bankruptcy proceedings.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….Despite frequent warnings to adhere to corporate formalities, the Company held no formal Board meetings and did not keep minutes, decisions were largely undocumented, and, upon information and belief, the Board never formally met with its executive team or outside advisors.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..The establishment of a wholly-owned subsidiary of USNC in Italy in July
2023, at a time when the Company was clearly experiencing severe financial distress and escalating liabilities, was emblematic of Dr. Venneri’s folly.
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………....F. The Company Crumbles in Early 2024
By early 2024, the Company was in severe financial distress, had no near-
term investment prospects, and had yet to engage in any meaningful reduction in costs………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
ED. This case goes for 50 pages.
Taxpayers Must Not Be on the Hook for Bailing Out the AI Industry
If AI goes south, we should expect major pressures from the Trump administration for a debt- or taxpayer-funded bailout.
SCHEERPOST, September 3, 2026,By C.J. Polychroniou
Hundreds of billions of dollars are flooding the AI industry. Economist Gerald Epstein says this bubble could burst.
The U.S. economy is heading toward uncharted territory. Artificial Intelligence (AI) is transforming business operations and all areas of finance, the national debt is on an unsustainable fiscal path, and most middle-income Americans cannot keep up with rising costs. Moreover, as hundreds of billions of dollars are flooding into artificial intelligence, there are serious concerns that an AI bubble could trigger another bailout with taxpayer money.
In the interview that follows, leading progressive economist Gerald Epstein, who initiated and directs the Game Changers project at the Political Economy Research Institute at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, talks about AI’s impact on finance and the bailout problem and how a transformative public finance strategy can revive democracy, promote equity and social justice, and build strong and sustainable communities. Epstein is professor of economics and founding co-director of the Political Economy Research Institute.
C.J. Polychroniou: AI is possibly the fastest-growing technology in history and is already reshaping the U.S. economy in innumerable ways as organizations of all kinds are deploying AI tools across every functional area. But there are many public concerns surrounding AI, including whether it is becoming “too big to fail.” If so, taxpayer money may be used yet again to bail out private companies and institutions from collapse. What are the dangers here?
Gerald Epstein: There are indeed many public concerns about the economic and financial implications of AI. But let me focus on AI’s impact on finance as there are legitimate fears that the government may be asked at some point to bail out the AI industry, especially given the close ties of the Trump administration to AI firms.
As Marc Jarsulic and I argue in our Game Changers policy analysis “No More Bailouts,” the AI investment boom is increasing the level of risk for AI-related firms. The reason is that for these investments to be profitable, AI revenue will need to grow substantially. But some financial analysts doubt that the revenue will materialize. For example, in Bain’s Technology Report 2025, it is estimated that capital expenditures of $500 billion per year would be required to cover anticipated AI demand. To fund this investment, annual AI revenue would need to increase to $2 trillion. However, after accounting for likely cost reductions at the AI firms, Bain’s research concluded that their annual revenues would fall $800 billion short of that mark.
In that context, some of the risks of the AI-led investment boom have been shifted to financial markets as the AI boom is relying increasingly on debt. The revenues of the tech monopolies are extraordinary, but they are insufficient to pay all the costs of data centers. In 2025, the capital expenditures of the top five hyperscalers were more than 30 percent of their total revenue. They are projected to rise to more than 40 percent by the end of 2026. This has forced these companies to turn to debt and equity markets for finance. In 2025, major tech hyperscalers alone issued $120 billion in debt, but the figure was pushed toward $175 billion in 2026 and is expected to rise to $300 billion annually in the coming years.
A distorted government response to an AI-bust is in the cards. A rational policy response to an AI bust would not include bailouts of AI-related firms or their creditors. The investment boom, and the debt that helps finance it, have been engineered by sophisticated actors aiming to dominate a potentially lucrative innovation. There is no ex ante (“before the event”) government safety net for financial bets of this kind. Caveat emptor (“let the buyer beware”) applies to the firms playing the AI domination game if it ever applied to anyone. Unfortunately, we cannot count on a rational response from the current administration. Extensive conflicts of interest and cronyism mean that government bailouts for insiders would be on the table. Hyperscalers and other AI-related firms have received extraordinary government support. The Trump administration has taken over 90 federal actions to help the AI industry, including executive orders easing permitting for massive data centers, federal support for AI exports and reducing regulatory barriers for the industry. The Trumpian transactional quid pro quo is apparent. Nvidia and Intel have given the government equity to curry favor. A number of major AI companies contributed several million dollars to Trump’s White House demolition — a.k.a. his “ballroom” — fund. And AI firms continue to finance MAGA. This is business as usual for Trump.
If AI goes south, we should expect major pressures from the Trump administration for a debt- or taxpayer-funded bailout.
Bailout operations are a trademark of neoliberalism. That being said, what is the actual problem with bailouts, and how do we put an end to the bailout problem?………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://scheerpost.com/2026/09/03/taxpayers-must-not-be-on-the-hook-for-bailing-out-the-ai-industry/
Part II — No Blank Check for the War Machine
The Pentagon’s missile shortage will not be solved tomorrow. But its long-term answer is already being built beside our communities. Project Ranger approved without us—but the Pentagon, Castelion and New Mexico officials still must answer to the people.
Elaine Cimino, Aug 29, 2026
The Pentagon’s missile shortage will not be solved tomorrow. But its long-term answer is already being built beside our communities.
Part I asked what government kept from the public while it assembled the deal. Part II asks what the emerging federal weapons record now tells us about the scale and purpose of what was approved without us.
A national weapons emergency is being converted into a private investment opportunity—and New Mexico has been selected as one of the places where the consequences will be imposed.
The August 21 Defense One investigation, “There’s No Shortcut to Replenish U.S. Munitions Stockpiles,” describes a Pentagon racing to replace missiles being consumed in the Iran war while defense companies pitch a new generation of cheaper weapons. Buried inside that national story is a name New Mexico residents must recognize: Castelion.[1]
Castelion is constructing Project Ranger, the massive solid-rocket-motor and hypersonic-weapons manufacturing complex west of Rio Rancho in Sandoval County. Its Blackbeard missile is being offered as something the Pentagon has long wanted but struggled to obtain: a hypersonic strike weapon inexpensive enough to manufacture not by the dozen, but by the hundreds and eventually the thousands.
That mention changes the frame around Project Ranger. This is not simply another economic-development project, an isolated factory or a collection of buildings on remote State Trust Land. It is being positioned inside a long-term restructuring of the American war industry.
The federal government wants cheaper missiles, more suppliers, faster testing and industrial-scale production. Castelion wants to become one of the companies that supplies them. Project Ranger is where much of that ambition is supposed to become physical reality.
And while the Pentagon, investors and public officials discuss speed, scale and deterrence, the people living beside the factory are still waiting for something far more basic: full disclosure of what will be manufactured, burned, tested, stored, transported and released near their homes and water.
Blackbeard will not solve the immediate Iran stockpile crisis
The first fact must be stated precisely. Blackbeard is not a replacement for the Patriot and Terminal High Altitude Area Defense interceptors being depleted in the Iran war.
Patriot and THAAD missiles are defensive weapons intended to destroy incoming missiles or aircraft. Blackbeard is an offensive, long-range hypersonic strike weapon intended to hit targets on land or at sea. Producing one does not replenish the other.
That is why the Defense One article warns that the Pentagon’s low-cost weapons campaign will not quickly repair the immediate stockpile crisis. New missiles must still be developed, tested, evaluated, certified, placed under contract and manufactured. That takes years, not weeks. Experts quoted in the article describe a continuing window of vulnerability while the military attempts to rebuild inventories depleted not only by Iran, but by years of global commitments.[1]
Blackbeard is therefore not the emergency cure being delivered to today’s battlefield. It is part of the arsenal the Pentagon wants for the wars it is preparing to fight in 2027, 2028, 2029 and beyond—particularly a possible conflict with China.
That distinction does not make Project Ranger less consequential. It makes it more so. A temporary emergency might end. A permanent industrial strategy can expand for decades.
The Pentagon is building a high-low arsenal
The larger strategy is a “high-low mix”: retain a smaller inventory of extraordinarily expensive weapons while acquiring far greater numbers of cheaper missiles for missions that do not require the most sophisticated system available.
Castelion is marketing Blackbeard as the hypersonic expression of that strategy. It is advertised as a weapon capable of exceeding Mach 5 but designed from the beginning for lower-cost, industrial-rate production.
Reuters reported in April that Navy planning documents contemplated the purchase of 4,500 air-launched hypersonic missiles for F/A-18 aircraft over five years, at an average projected price of about $384,000 each. The same report explained that a $105 million Navy award would fund Blackbeard’s integration onto the F/A-18, including flight tests, safety work and airworthiness certification.[2]
That is not the same as a funded order for 4,500 Blackbeards. But it shows what the Pentagon is testing: whether a weapon once treated as an exotic, multimillion-dollar rarity can become a routinely deployed instrument of war.
If that experiment succeeds, Project Ranger will not be a boutique research site. It will be an arsenal factory………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… https://elainecimino652909.substack.com/p/part-ii-no-blank-check-for-the-war?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3194544&post_id=213199756&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=false&r=281p2&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
UKRAINE DEAL DEAD
Russia, in his view, would still prefer a compromise closer to Istanbul and the later Anchorage discussion than the occupation of the whole of Ukraine.
Governing a hostile country is not Moscow’s first choice.
George Beebe on Iran, Trump’s shrinking leverage, and the crash coming in Ukraine
Ian Proud, Sep 01, 2026, https://thepeacemonger.substack.com/p/ukraine-deal-dead?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3221990&post_id=213666173&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
George Beebe was CIA Director for Russia analysis and is now Director of the Grand Strategy Programme at the Quincy Institute. In this conversation he describes a Trump Administration that wrote a coherent National Security Strategy and then walked away from it. This has left prospects for a credible peace deal for Ukraine remote at best.
“………………………………………………………………………………………. The United States is now in a cul-de-sac: damaged reputation, strained forces, a distracted White House, and no clean exit that does not involve concessions.
That matters for Ukraine because attention and political capital are finite within the Trump White House.
Beebe’s strategic case for ending the war has not changed. A forever proxy war leaves Europe unstable, incentivises a tighter Russia-China partnership, and makes a China-first American strategy impossible.
Russia, in his view, would still prefer a compromise closer to Istanbul and the later Anchorage discussion than the occupation of the whole of Ukraine.
Governing a hostile country is not Moscow’s first choice.
What has changed is Washington’s ability to deliver.
Iran has taken the oxygen out of the room.
Trump needs political juice to force a deal through a hostile Senate and a permanent bureaucracy that still treats detente with Russia as heresy.
Beebe does not think he has that juice.
Midterms loom.
The president is fighting an unpopular war with a precarious economy. Other countries are already pricing him as a lame duck.
If Moscow concludes the administration is not agreement-capable — cannot lock in NATO limits, cannot move sanctions — Plan B is the battlefield.
That is not the conquest of Kyiv. It is a rump Ukraine, too weak to be rebuilt as a Western military outpost, and a worse peace for Ukrainians, Europeans and Americans alike.
Then comes what Beebe calls it a hard crash.
Time is not on Ukraine’s side.
Manpower is failing.
Energy infrastructure is already in tatters ahead of another winter.
Russia can hit harder than Ukraine can endure.
When the gap between Western media victory narratives and the facts becomes undeniable, Washington does not usually say “we did our best.”
It goes into “do-something” mode.
That is how mismanaged wars become direct NATO-Russia crises.
I agree with him.
Europe has no plan.
It has a reflex: ask for more Patriots, flatter Trump, keep Kyiv fighting.
That is not friendship.
It is spending Ukrainian lives to delay an admission of failure.
Beebe’s alternative is old-fashioned and unfashionable: a concert among the United States, Russia and China, starting with Iran and Ukraine, based on self-interest rather than trust.
Whether this White House can still do that is the live question.
Thousands of potential jobs & billions of dollars may tempt Idaho into becoming America’s nuclear waste dump
By Roland Beres, Sep. 1, 2026, https://www.kmvt.com/2026/08/31/thousands-potential-jobs-billions-dollars-may-tempt-idaho-into-becoming-americas-nuclear-waste-dump/
BOISE, Idaho (KIVI) — The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is choosing three states to receive all of the country’s high-level nuclear waste by year’s end.
Idaho is among five finalists pursuing what’s known as a Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Center.
The center would be located in the eastern Idaho, and could bring thousands of jobs and billions of dollars to the state.
Nuclear energy is often referred to as clean energy, because it doesn’t produce greenhouse gasses, but The World Nuclear Association says used nuclear fuel can remain radioactive and deadly for thousands of years.
“How much we talking about a few hundred pounds?” Idaho 6 senior reporter Roland Beres asked.
“We’re talking about 33 thousand tons,” Leigh Ford, Executive Director of the nuclear watchdog group the Snake River Alliance responded.
“Worst case scenario if it comes in. We have a whole bunch of nuclear waste, forever and our kids are going to have to figure out what to do with it,” Ford added.
The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1987 designated Nevada’s Yucca mountain as the nation’s permanent nuclear waste storage site. However, they fought tooth and nail to stop it and won. As a result, that high-level waste is being stored in temporary pools at nuclear power sites around the country.
Now, to attract state interest the DOE has shifted from mandating a host community to proposing economic incentives like billions in investments and job creation.
Although details are quite limited, that grabbed Idaho Governor Brad Little’s attention.
“We’re going to consume the spent fuel to create electricity,” Little told Idaho 6. ”We are not going to put any spent fuel or whatever it is over the Idaho aquifer. They know that.”
According to the State’s application with DOE, the Snake River aquifer underlies almost 11 thousand square miles.
Figures on Fox News’ key programs have called for escalation in the Iran war more than 250 times since the initial ceasefire
Jason Campbell, 08/28/26, https://www.mediamatters.org/media-matters-weekly-newsletter/media-matters-weekly-newsletter-august-28
In the four months since the initial ceasefire agreement between the United States and Iran, Fox News figures have continuously warmongered. Throughout the cycle of ceasefire violations and stalled peace talks, individuals on Fox have urged President Donald Trump to “decapitate and destroy this regime” and send Iran “back to the Stone Age,” and encouraged him to “send the SEALs in and blow something up just for grins.”
Media Matters studied 7 key shows on Fox News — which includes the network’s evening programming as well as some shows hosted by commentators whom Trump has praised or promoted during the Iran war — called for escalatory action in the war at least 252 times since the initial ceasefire agreement on April 7. The escalatory rhetoric on the network includes arguments for military strikes, ground invasions, regime change, arming Iranian citizens, or attacks on civilian infrastructure.
I invite you to check out this study to see how the data breaks down. You can find it here.
Also: Many right-wing figures promised an early and easy victory against Iran when the U.S. and Israel launched the war in February. Six months later, it seems very clear the Trump administration has fallen quite short of its objectives. Nonetheless, a set of especially sycophantic pundits — including Sean Hannity, CNN contributor Scott Jennings, and Benny Johnson — are claiming that Trump has already won the war.
You Could Be Next: Trump’s Gestapo Tactics Are Getting Worse
You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.
The US military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong US campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs.
Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state.
Wake up, America. You’re living in a nightmare.
Robert Reich, Common Dreams, Aug 29, 2026
Imagine living in a country that can arrest and imprison you whenever it wants, without any judge or jury deciding you did anything wrong. It can call you a “domestic terrorist” and put you in prison for life. It can even execute you on the basis of nothing more than its own decision that you’re dangerous.
Well, I have bad news for you. You’re living in that country right now.
As he loses power and popularity — and faces mounting resistance abroad and at home — Trump is enlarging his police state.
His regime is having ever more people arrested, imprisoned, and deported without any judge or jury deciding they did anything wrong. It’s using racial profiling in deciding whom to target. It’s making warrantless searches and seizures of people, their cars, and their homes. All of this violates the US Constitution.
Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day.
According to a new analysis by The New York Times, the regime’s surge in immigration arrests this summer has swept up thousands of people, most of whom have not been charged with or convicted of a crime (less than 4 percent had a past violent criminal conviction).
Those being arrested, imprisoned, and potentially deported include some married to US citizens, others who entered the US legally and are pursuing asylum claims, and some who came here with temporary legal status that the Trump regime has decided to revoke.
In other words, they were all here legally.
If you have temporary protected status because you escaped from inhumane conditions in another country, ICE might now summon you to an ICE office and put a monitor around your ankle — even if you have no criminal history and are in full compliance with your immigration status. The Trump regime has unilaterally revoked temporary protected status and claims the ankle monitors are necessary to track people whom it may want to deport at some point.
You’re not even safe if you’re a US citizen born in America. ProPublica has found that more than 170 US citizens have been wrongfully detained by ICE agents in raids and protests over a recent nine-month span. It described cases involving alleged force and multiday detention without access to counsel or communication.
Some estimates put the number of US citizens subjected to ICE as much higher, but there’s no way of knowing because there’s no legal process for filtering out and protecting American citizens, just as there’s no legal process for protecting anyone else who’s here legally. Trump’s police state is extrajudicial, and it’s being done in secret.
You might even be murdered, without a trial finding you guilty of anything. In addition to Renee Good and Alex Pretti in Minnesota last January, ICE agents have murdered two others just this summer…………………………………..
You might also be murdered without a trial if you happen to be on a vessel off Latin America’s Caribbean coast or in the eastern Pacific Ocean. A mere accusation of drug trafficking is enough to kill you, without any evidence presented before any court of law or neutral magistrate.
The US military announced Monday that it had again carried out a strike on a vessel in the eastern Pacific Ocean, killing two people it accused of trafficking drugs — bringing the overall death toll to 223 people killed in 67 strikes during the nearly yearlong US campaign of bombing boats alleged to be smuggling drugs.
Finally, the Trump regime is imprisoning Americans who demonstrate against its police state………………………
These cases are the first to incorporate new guidance from the regime that classifies Antifa as a “domestic terrorist organization.” That’s despite the fact that Antifa is a decentralized movement rather than a single organization and that there is no federal charge of domestic terrorism under existing US law.
I want to make three concluding points about all this.
First, Trump’s police state not only continues, but it is growing larger by the day. Kristi Noem’s replacement as secretary of homeland security, Markwayne Mullin, along with his boss in the White House, Stephen Miller, and the secretary of defense, Pete Hegseth, have more money, manpower, and firepower than ever. They are ramping up all of their extrajudicial arrests, detentions, deportations, and murders.
The only difference between last year and now is they’re no longer announcing what they’re doing with fanfare and braggadocio, because the American public has grown wary of it.
Second, none of us is safe from this because the arrests, installations of ankle bracelets, imprisonments, deportations, and murders are made without any judge, jury, or neutral party deciding that the assumptions on which they’re based are adequate and truthful.
Not even “domestic terrorism” arrests and lengthy prison sentences necessitate judicial inquiry into what exactly is meant by “domestic terrorism” and whether defendants have done anything to justify that appellation.
Finally, this growing menace is cruel, inhumane, and likely unconstitutional. It is causing hundreds of thousands of families in our country extreme mental distress; many people are not leaving their homes for fear of being arrested or worse. It is likely chilling First Amendment rights to speak up and protest against these atrocities.
Historians looking back on this shameful period will wonder how this was allowed. How can one maniacal man in the Oval Office, his fanatical assistant, and two suck-up Cabinet secretaries have been so cruel and oblivious to basic human rights? How can their Republican enablers in Congress have been willing to go along? How can the American public have been so quiet? https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-s-gestapo-tactics
Walt Zlotow – Some inconvenient truths about Trump’s Iran war
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL , 31 Aug 2026, https://theaimn.net/some-inconvenient-truths-about-trumps-iran-war/
The US lost the war within the first 3 days when the US, Israeli attack and assassination of Iranian leader Ali Khomenei did not collapse the Iranian regime
Bombing Iran for 39 days was a catastrophic military failure. Iran’s retaliatory defense decimated all 20 US Gulf State bases inflicting over 750 US casualties including 18 dead.
Running out of both offensive and defensive missiles, Trump blinked first and called for a ceasefire on April 8, war day 40.
The June 17th signing of the Memorandum of Understanding (MOU) was essentially a US surrender document.
Realizing the MOU signaled his defeat, Trump simply ignored it, implemented a blockade and resumed periodic bombing. Both utterly failed to reopen the Strait of Hormuz to resume the critical flow of oil to prevent worldwide economic calamity.
Having been sucker punched with bombs twice by Trump during negotiations, Iran has signaled it will never negotiate with Trump during his remaining 2 years, 5 months in office.
Trump’s statements that Iran is negotiating surrender on Trump’s terms, the Strait is open, and will become US territory, the blockade is a resounding success, the oil is flowing, are so detached from reality one must ponder Trump’s sanity.
Refusal to capitulate is spreading the war within the region to Yemen, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, West Bank, Iraq, Syria, possibly even Turkey v. Israel.
If Trump’s last gasp is to utterly destroy Iranian infrastructure, Iran will retaliate and destroy the entire Gulf States oil infrastructure and possibly Israel’s infrastructure as well.
Unlike for the US, Trump’s war is an existential threat to Iran’s existence. They have been preparing for the US, Israeli tag team war machine to destroy them for decades. They are and will prevail regardless of the cost.
Israel will do whatever is necessary to keep Trump in the war to destroy Iran. Trump’s only way out is to sever ties with Israel and capitulate to Iran’s sensible terms. Given Trump’s history, the chances of that are nil. Removing Republican control of Congress in 9 weeks may be only chance for America to avoid economic collapse.
But only if a Democratic Congress has the wisdom, decency and good sense to end the most self destructive war in America’s 251 years.
Trump’s shipping race with Xi goes nuclear
COMMENT AA BB
Have they factored in the staggeringly huge cost of the multi decades long decomissioning process and disposal of the reactor and nuclear waste? NS Savanna was built 1961, out if service 1972 – the reactor and ship will ‘remain regulated until 2031″ (wikipedia)
Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.
Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.
US bets uranium-powered British vessels can challenge China’s maritime dominance
Christopher Jasper, Transport industry editor, 29 August 2026
Donald Trump has opened up a new battleground in his trade war with Beijing, and a British start-up building nuclear-powered ships has found itself on the front line.
A US effort to challenge China’s dominance in shipping by building a fleet of nuclear-fuelled vessels is being led by UK-based Core Power.
The start-up, which has 100 employees and moved to London from Singapore in 2020, says it is unique outside Russia and China in having the expertise to integrate reactors with commercial ships, and the White House seems to agree.
Mikal Bøe, the Norwegian founder and chief of Core Power, flew to Washington last week to sign a seven-year pact with the US Maritime Administration…………….
The deal aims to deliver a fleet of zero-emission vessels that travel at 30 knots, or twice the pace of today’s ships, which typically sail slowly to conserve fuel.
They would be assembled in a multibillion-dollar nuclear yard operated by Core Power in the US. Work is slated to commence by 2028, with the first deliveries in 2033.
Trump hopes the plan can revive American shipbuilding and provide a ready market for a nuclear industry.
While China is developing its own maritime nuclear propulsion, the sector is one of the few in which the US is confident it has a major lead.
Onboard reactors heat water to create steam, which generates electricity to drive the engines, providing a permanent source of power and “free speed”, Bøe said…………
The deal aims to deliver a fleet of zero-emission vessels that travel at 30 knots, or twice the pace of today’s ships, which typically sail slowly to conserve fuel.
While the nuclear vessels would cost around $700m (£515m), compared with up to $250m for a large merchant ship, their speed would let them complete far more journeys………………..
Establishing the business case for nuclear power over traditional engines will open up a market to replace 8,000 ships over the next 25 years, Bøe estimates……
Bøe said the Trump administration had been instrumental in accelerating its plans……………
Core Power plans to announce a supplier of nuclear reactors for its ships as early as next month, with BWX Technologies viewed as the frontrunner.
The company is already partnered with BWX – which helped develop the first nuclear submarine in the 1950s – on plans for floating nuclear power plants to supply coastal industrial complexes.
A decision on the location for its nuclear shipyard will follow in the next six months.
A facility capable of producing three vessels a year would have construction costs of about $3bn, increasing to $15bn to churn out ships for the global market………………….
Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.
Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.
‘The talk of the industry’
Britain’s dominance of the maritime insurance industry could see it play a key role in establishing an insurance regime.
The Technology Prosperity Deal signed by Trump and Sir Keir Starmer last year included a commitment to explore civil nuclear applications at sea and the establishment of a UK-US corridor, which could form the basis of a maritime nuclear insurance zone…………..
Core Power has $200m in financing and will seek to raise a further $600m next year. While existing investors are mostly shipbuilders and owners, the next round will seek to bring in private equity, venture capital and energy companies.
It has also agreed an alliance with authorities in Corpus Christi, Texas, a major US port, to lay out plans for new infrastructure that will be needed for nuclear-propelled tankers.
Mr Bøe said the door was also “wide open” for Britain to become involved in the sector.
Establishing the business case for nuclear power over traditional engines will open up a market to replace 8,000 ships over the next 25 years, Bøe estimates.
He said the first ships could operate on transatlantic routes and that Washington was open to allies – including Britain – becoming involved in the project, although ships were unlikely to be built here.
Bøe said the Trump administration had been instrumental in accelerating its plans.
“The pace at which both nuclear reactors and maritime policy and an action plan to build back shipbuilding capacity have been developed is remarkable,” he said.
“You cannot compete with Beijing on its own terms, we cannot outbid them. But we can put these two things together and establish the world’s first programme for civil maritime nuclear propulsion which creates a whole new adventure and competes with China.”
Core Power plans to announce a supplier of nuclear reactors for its ships as early as next month, with BWX Technologies viewed as the frontrunner.
The company is already partnered with BWX – which helped develop the first nuclear submarine in the 1950s – on plans for floating nuclear power plants to supply coastal industrial complexes.
A decision on the location for its nuclear shipyard will follow in the next six months.
A facility capable of producing three vessels a year would have construction costs of about $3bn, increasing to $15bn to churn out ships for the global market.
The hulls for the ships will be built in Japan or South Korea and floated to the US to be fitted with reactors and engines. The same yard will undertake maintenance and midlife refuelling once supplies of uranium are spent.
Backing from Washington should help address regulatory challenges as well as insurance issues, which represent one of the main hurdles to expanding nuclear propulsion beyond military submarines, aircraft carriers and a handful of Russian icebreakers.
Whereas shipping lines today require coverage for damage to their vessels, the loss of cargoes and injuries to employees, the new ships will need a new level of insurance against nuclear incidents.
Walt Zlotow -Trump first president in America’s 251 years to preside over 2 lost wars
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL .30 Aug 26
President Trump loves to brag he ended 8 wars. The truth is a tad darker. He’s presiding over the lost US proxy war in Ukraine to destroy Russia. At the same time he’s presiding over the lost war to destroy Iran in the Middle East on behalf of Israel.
Trump didn’t start the Ukraine war. He correctly blamed predecessor Joe Biden for provoking it on his watch in February 2022. Said it wouldn’t have occurred if Biden hadn’t stolen the 2020 election from him. That’s a wild claim as Trump spent the preceding term arming Ukraine to smash the Ukrainian separatists in Donbas and promoting NATO membership for Ukraine. Both actions were instrumental in Russia’s eventual invasion under Biden.
When reelected in 2024, Trump boasted he’d end the war on day one of his second term. Five hundred, eighty days on, Ukraine is a mere rump state largely land locked and near collapse. Trump has done nothing to end Ukraine’s impending defeat. Just the opposite. He’s still supporting Ukraine with intelligence to fire missiles and drones into Russia having no strategic value promoting victory whatsoever. He’s still selling weapons to NATO to gift Ukraine in their futile effort to stay in the fight.
Trump’s impending defeat in the Iran war is even more catastrophic. This war is all on Trump. He made the biggest foreign policy blunder in US history by believing Israeli war whisperer Benjamin Netanyahu that Iran would collapse within a couple of days if only Trump would assassinate Iran’s supreme leader Ali Khamenei.
That two day victory expectation has turned into a six month catastrophe, not only for the US military, but possibly also for the world economy unless Trump admits defeat and settles on Iran’s sensible terms.
Two wars, one Trump helped facilitate in his first term, then prolonged in his second term into certain defeat. The second he started all by his demented self whose dire consequences have yet to be sorted out.
Trump’s two lost wars in term two…a dubious presidential achievement, unprecedented and likely never to be repeated or topped in US history.
Thank Trump for This: He Has Exposed the Leaking Guts of the War Machine
Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement)
American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky.
Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength.
There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget.
As Trump’s approval ratings crater due to his war on Iran, there may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.
Phil Wilson, Aug 28, 2026, Common Dreams, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/trump-exposes-war-machine
Forget about Ancient Sparta, Attila the Hun, Hernán Cortés, Julius Ceasar, Alexander the Great, Adolf Hitler, and all of the conquerors that terrified the world with colonial aspirations and a psychopathic lust for blood. None of these ever imagined a $1.5 trillion military budget. President Donald Trump requested that grotesque figure, but don’t give him the kudos—our “fois gras” military machine is a US tradition that predates us all.
The US war machine has scaled Orwellian heights to achieve a virtual blank check to spend on death. For we, stateside, have built a culture entirely at the service of warfare, with myths, stories, and platitudes hardwired into the brains of 349 million people extolling war, not as a necessity, but as ritual, as cleansing, as meditation, and as redemption. We are bombing schools and hospitals to secure the rapture, for the war industry in the apocalyptic end times has been tasked with the creation of biblical events. A recent Huffpost piece by Brandi Buchman quotes US soldiers’ allegations of lunatic fringe Evangelical propaganda from haranguing superiors:
They (US soldiers) are promised a 200-mile-long river that is four-and-a-half feet deep filled with nothing but the blood that their weaponized version of Jesus will spill at the Battle of Armageddon.
Thus, war in the Middle East has morphed from the sterile narrative of fighting for freedom and democracy, to the more spectacular notion that US military force has been mobilized to serve Christian prophecy. A military budget cannot achieve the pinnacle of a trillion dollars without a highly evolved story telling industry to prime the population to either enthusiastically back each aggressive nationalistic paroxysm of violence, or to (at the very least) passively capitulate. Think of the advent of apocalyptic biblical warfare as a means of addictive escalation—the nation has gone from coffee and cigarettes to cocaine and crystal meth.
No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.
The war propaganda machine in the US is a ceaseless, multifaceted contraption that includes legacy media, the educational system, and the entertainment industry. A nation does not eviscerate tens of millions of “enemy” civilians without first laying a meticulous foundation of brainwashing. I can run the tapes backward to a moment in my own childhood, riveted to the black and white TV absorbing the 1955 Disneyfied tale of Davey Crockett at “The Alamo.” There is Davey outsmarting a gambler, beating up an “Indian,” and bringing both along as conscripts to fight for an Independent Texas. Crockett met his end at the Alamo, but the manner of his death will never be resolved. Did he surrender to Mexican forces (and face execution) or did he die fighting to the death, wielding his exhausted rifle like a club, and falling from a bullet while standing on a hill comprised of Mexican corpses? Of course, the Disney version has Davey Crockett swinging his rifle madly against a vast onslaught of faceless Mexican soldiers as the background song plays out:
The story books say they were all cut low.
But the truth of it is that this just ain’t so,
The spirits will live and their legends grow,
so long as we remember the Alamo.
The film ends with the inscription: “March, 6, 1836, Liberty and Independence Forever.”
Regarding the Alamo, Raul Ramos wrote (in the context of the 2019 effort to remove confederate monuments):
It’s not that the Spanish-built presidio should be demolished or stashed away in some remote museum. The story of the Alamo should be widely studied—but it should be the real history, the one that intersects with and embodies the nation’s history of enforcing a racial order through violence, and the campaigns of white supremacy and slavery that accompanied America’s expansion. The Alamo’s history and myth belong to a war that was inspired, in part, by the drive for slavery, and by a belief in the superiority of whites and their divine right to conquer lands. The Alamo is where the campaign of southern slavery and Native American genocide migrated west and expressed itself in the demonization of Mexicans. It came to symbolize belonging, or, more accurately, defining who belongs and who doesn’t. Rather than being remembered for its historical context, the Alamo represents a litmus test for entry into participation and membership in civic society: Accept the dominant myth, or be marginalized.
The Alamo became a rallying cry, a foundational component of the emerging concept of “manifest destiny”—the ideological core of the most expansive colonial settler state in all of history. But for me it is personal—Davey Crocket at The Alamo inducted me into US war culture at the age of 7. I had my faux coon skin cap, my “smoke gun” that emitted a loud crack and a puff of smoke. The cocking mechanism on this “toy” sometimes snapped shut violently, and many children endured a trip to the ER to have a few stitches to repair a bloody thumb. I remember that well 71 years later.
Every child in the US has a story of this sort, a rendezvous with military propaganda (disguised as amusement) at a defenseless early age. War is implanted into our fragile subconscious at the very dawn of our awareness. But we are not largely destined to embrace warrior culture in the sense of the mythical Davey Crockett, but, rather, we have been trained to get out of the way. American warfare since Vietnam has aspired to be fought by gadgets that attack civilians from the sky. For most of us military patriotism means politely deferring to veterans with a muttered, “Thank you for your service.” We who do not enlist balance personal fear with the idea that war participation manifests the purest virtue.
Vietnam exposed a quiet ambivalence in public opinion—the American people have no stomach for massive body counts of US soldiers, and yet poll after poll reveals an atavistic longing for military strength. . A Gallup poll taken last February showed that 64% of respondents felt that it was important for the US to have the most powerful military on Earth. While the US military budget is larger than the combined military budgets of the next nine highest spending nations, Gallup polling seldom shows more than a third of people complaining that spending is too high.
The public is little more than a shadow of the media culture. In 2014 William A. Galston lamented about President Barack Obama’s minor military funding cuts in a piece posted on The Brookings Institute (a centrist, Democratic Party-adjacent think tank) website. Sen. Bernie Sanders’ (I-Vt.) recent proposal to cut military spending by a token 10% fell 88-11 in a Senate vote in which both parties reflexively succumbed to orthodox US jingoism. War is not a partisan issue. We all come together to praise and feed the military. US political performance art might be seen as a slavish competition to grovel before the war industry.
There is, however, a new and sudden trickle of hope—Trump’s ham-fisted version of imperialism allows for the public to witness the unflattering inner machinery, the leaking guts of the wounded military organism. The ongoing war in Iran offers something brand new—a nation with a $9 billion military budget has just thrashed a country with a trillion dollar war budget. The US defeat at the hands of Iran is unprecedented—while the US hasn’t won a significant war in 80 years, we have never suffered a defeat with comparable financial consequences. The Iran war, according to Reuters, has a disapproval rating of a staggering 63% of the electorate. The economic fallout from the bungled attack on Iran threatens to escalate to the point of financial collapse in future months. We all live within walking distance of a filling station offering $6 diesel—and that runaway price will almost certainly expand and double, threatening to strangle the US commercial transport system. Mass hunger looms.
We also have American Israel Public Affairs Committee approval ratings at an all-time low and Trump’s approval ratings at catastrophic and utter decline—ostensibly due to his war in Iran. There may never have been a time in US history so ripe for an attack on military spending and militarism.
War once had such an esteemed role in human progress that even the peaceful transcendentalist, Ralph Waldo Emerson, could not wholly dismiss its virtues:
The student of history acquiesces the more readily in this copious bloodshed of the early annals, bloodshed in God’s name too, when be learns that it is a temporary and preparatory state, and does actively forward the culture of man. War educates the senses, calls into action the will, perfects the physical constitution, brings men into such swift and close collision in critical moments that man measures man. On its own scale, on the virtues it loves, it endures no counterfeit, but shakes the whole society, until every atom falls into the place its specific gravity assigns it.
Emerson believed that war would become obsolete, but I doubt that anyone from the mid 19th century could have imagined that war would one day be the cornerstone of societal and biological collapse. No other era has been forced to see war with the unflinching clarity that this moment demands.
War elevates the need for oil and oil demands war. The oil industry, the military-industrial complex, Big Tech, and mass media have all been structurally conjoined at the intersection of war. War is where capitalist profits interface with mass psychology.
But the gig is up. Public opinion has shifted as Trump and his goons have driven the war machine off of a cliff.
Climate sustainability abides no compromise with war. We are on the cusp of extinction, and war is the primary driver. The US, under Trump, has taken war out of the closet and decoupled it from its patriotic slogans and jingoistic habits. It’s all about the oil, stupid. War has followed the magnet of fossil fuels unerringly to the Middle East. And to compound the predicament, war is environmentally filthy, annually burning more fossil fuels in aggregate than most nations. The US military coughs as much CO2 into the atmosphere yearly as the nation of Portugal. War is also the gauge of our fossil fuel addiction, for US leaders have spent decades murdering millions to procure it.
We all have our psychological histories, our childhood encounters with Disney’s Alamo, with the domino theory, with Saddam Hussein’s invisible weapons of mass destruction. We have reverentially gawked at our father’s and grandfather’s WWII uniforms hanging in the attic, but we all need to thank Trump for creating history’s most transparent war machine. The US military needs to be gutted, cut out like a metastasizing lesion. The patient heaves at death’s door. Do we merely watch?
US Army to spend $2 bln on nuclear microreactors for bases
The Army program uses the military’s “deep pockets to provide a hidden subsidy” to nuclear companies that can’t find private-sector customers for their hypothetical and uneconomical reactors
DW Sean Sinico with AP, Reuters, August 27, 2026
The US Army has announced a plan to install what it calls nuclear microreactors at five of its bases across the country. The move would ensure the facilities’ energy independence from the rest of the electric grid.
The United States Army said Wednesday that it will award $2.2 billion (€1.7 billion) in contracts to five companies to build and operate small nuclear reactors on military bases. The program set a goal of deploying the first such reactor by the end of September 2028.
Called microreactors, developers say each of the nuclear plants would be easy to transport and provide up to 20 megawatts of power.
The reactors will adhere to all environmental and safety regulations that apply to commercial reactors, but an Army spokesperson said the reactors will be regulated by the Army rather than the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which regulates commercial reactors.
“The whole idea here is that at the back end of this we want a commercial product,” said Jeff Waksman, principal deputy assistant secretary of the Army for Installations, Energy and Environment.
Army Secretary Dan Driscoll said the awards will speed up the military’s ability “to deliver safe, reliable baseload power directly to our installations.”
“We are building the energy resilience necessary to project combat power globally, without relying on potentially vulnerable external grids,” he added………………………………………………………………………
‘Hidden subsidy’ for expensive reactors, critics say
Critics of microreactors say they will be expensive compared to conventional reactors. Safety advocates point out that nuclear technology carries significant risks that other low-carbon energy sources don’t, such as the danger of accidents or targeted attacks.
The Army program uses the military’s “deep pockets to provide a hidden subsidy” to nuclear companies that can’t find private-sector customers for their hypothetical and uneconomical reactors, Alan J. Kuperman, associate professor at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs at the University of Texas at Austin and coordinator of the Nuclear Proliferation Prevention Project, told the AP news agency.
The Army’s Waksman said nobody thinks that microreactors will be lower in cost than conventional plants.
“What we are trying to do here with Janus … is to flesh out how can we get those prices down,” he said.
What will happen with the radioactive waste?
Waksman said the microreactors would safely shut down in case of a failure and that the Army wouldn’t add them to installations without being certain they are safe.
He added that the Army is working on a deal with the Energy Department to remove radioactive waste, and there won’t be any long-term storage on these installations.
Last month, five states offered to accept nuclear waste in exchange for federal support in developing nuclear energy facilities.
Trump pushing nuclear power in US
Executive orders signed by US President Donald Trump in May 2025 aimed to accelerate the development of nuclear power. Trump has called for the US to quadruple its nuclear energy production — just two new large reactors have been built from scratch in the United States in nearly 50 years. Those two reactors were completed years late and at least $17 billion over budget, AP reported.
The nation’s 94 nuclear reactors supply about 19% of U.S. electricity, compared to about 60% for fossil fuels and 21% for renewables, according to the US Energy Information Administration. https://www.dw.com/en/us-army-to-spend-2-billion-on-nuclear-microreactors-for-bases/a-78518374
Nuclear regulator prepares to abandon a decades-old radiation safety rule
August 27, 2026, Geoff Brumfiel, NPR
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission is preparing to change a foundational rule designed to minimize radiation exposure. The update is part of President Trump’s expansive changes to nuclear oversight, as his administration seeks to revive nuclear energy to power data centers for artificial intelligence.
Under a new proposed rule, the agency is eliminating a 50-year-old standard known as “As Low As Reasonably Achievable” (ALARA), which requires the nuclear industry to drive radiation exposure for workers and the public below the stated limits where possible. The new rule also creates a carveout for some workers to get higher exposures to radiation in special circumstances.
For some, the elimination of ALARA is overdue. “Keeping doses as low as reasonably achievable was a fair idea,” said Emily Caffrey, a radiation health physicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But in practice, the standard forced companies to take increasingly stringent radiation protection measures. It also created ambiguity, Caffrey said, “because what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person isn’t reasonable to another person.”
But others warn that the change could lay the groundwork for higher radiation exposures.
For some, the elimination of ALARA is overdue. “Keeping doses as low as reasonably achievable was a fair idea,” said Emily Caffrey, a radiation health physicist at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. But in practice, the standard forced companies to take increasingly stringent radiation protection measures. It also created ambiguity, Caffrey said, “because what’s ‘reasonable’ to one person isn’t reasonable to another person.”
But others warn that the change could lay the groundwork for higher radiation exposures.
Since shortly after the dawn of the nuclear age, scientists have been aware of the risks of radiation exposure, and decades of data makes it clear.
“At high radiation doses, nobody’s really arguing: radiation causes cancer,” said David Brenner, director of the Center for Radiological Research at Columbia University. High doses of radiation damage DNA and can cause mutations that lead to cancer. But when the dose is low, it’s much harder to determine risk because about 40% of the U.S. population develops cancer at some point in their lifetime.
“As you go down in dose, what you’re looking for is a very small increase in cancer risk over a very large background,” Brenner said. “That’s what makes it really, really hard.”
For the past 50 years or so, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has dealt with this uncertainty by requiring that the nuclear industry adhere to ALARA and keep radiation exposure as low as possible.
Then last May, President Trump signed an executive order calling for a wholesale overhaul of nuclear regulations. The order specifically called out ALARA, claiming the principle was a “flawed” understanding of radiation risks.
The NRC decided not to change its scientific model of radiation risk, known as the Linear No Threshold model, but it has proposed eliminating ALARA.
Speaking this week on the Federal News Network, NRC Chairman Ho Nieh said that ALARA is no longer working…………………………………………………
“Loosey-goosey” rules
The NRC will instead use the existing current threshold of 5 rem for a worker and 0.1 rem for the public as the upper limit for radiation exposure. A whole body CT scan is about 1 rem, according to the EPA…………………………………
The proposed NRC rule doesn’t change its other regulatory limits, but it does create some carve-outs. In particular, the industry would now be able to ask for a “planned occupational dose limit extension,” which would allow workers to receive 10 rem instead of 5 in any given year, providing their overall exposure doesn’t pass 25 rem in a five-year period………………………………
But Lyman, with the Union of Concerned Scientists, thinks that ALARA should stay. He said while it may be imperfect, its net effect has been to reduce radiation exposure to very low levels. The harms of low-dose radiation exposure are difficult to see, but Lyman says NRC’s own models suggest those harms exist.
In his opinion, the revised rule ignores that risk and is designed to desensitize the public to the dangers of radiation. “It’s trying to devalue and deemphasize the harm of ionizing radiation exposure,” he warned. https://www.npr.org/2026/08/27/nx-s1-5920368/nrc-nuclear-radiation-safety-rules-alara-update
Provoked: How Decades of American Policy Set the Stage for Catastrophe in Ukraine
In conversation with Scott Horton
Ian Proud, Aug 29, 2026
In my conversation with Scott Horton about his landmark book Provoked: How Washington Started a New Cold War with Russia and the Catastrophe in Ukraine, one theme emerged with striking clarity: the Ukraine war that began in 2022 did not erupt from nowhere. It was the culmination of more than three decades of deliberate American choices.
Horton’s eight-hundred-page account is not a polemical rant but a meticulously documented timeline. Drawing on thousands of primary sources, he traces the story president by president—from George H.W. Bush through Clinton, the younger Bush, Obama, Trump, and Biden.
The central argument is straightforward and devastating: successive U.S. administrations systematically dismantled the post-Cold War settlement, broke explicit assurances given to Moscow, and treated Russian security concerns with open contempt.
The most consequential early breach concerned NATO expansion.
During the negotiations over German reunification in 1990, James Baker, Helmut Kohl, Hans Dietrich Genscher, Robert Gates and others repeatedly assured Mikhail Gorbachev that NATO would not move “one inch to the east.”
Those assurances were not casual asides. They formed the basis on which Gorbachev agreed to allow a reunified Germany to remain inside the alliance while Soviet troops were still stationed in the east.
Later State Department reviews under Warren Christopher quietly confirmed that the Russians had every reason to believe those promises were binding. Yet the Clinton administration proceeded with expansion anyway, first into Central Europe and later, under George W. Bush, into the Baltic states—leaving the Russian exclave of Kaliningrad stranded behind NATO lines.
Opposition to this course was widespread and bipartisan. With great prescience, George Kennan, the architect of containment, warned that the policy would produce a “devastating reaction” from Russia and that the very people dismissing those concerns would later claim the reaction proved their point.
Two-thirds of the Council on Foreign Relations opposed expansion. Career diplomats, military officers and even hardline hawks such as Henry Kissinger and Zbigniew Brzezinski argued that Ukraine required a special neutral status—something resembling the Cold War Finland or Austria model—precisely to avoid a catastrophic collision.
Those voices were ignored.
The pattern continued.
The 2008 Bucharest Summit promised eventual membership to Ukraine and Georgia without a membership action plan or credible security guarantees—the “worst of all worlds,” as several analysts later described it.
Color revolutions, the deliberate sidelining of the Partnership for Peace, and the refusal to implement the Minsk agreements further eroded any residual trust.
When the same cohort of officials who had driven the policy under earlier administrations returned under Biden – most notably Daniel Fried – the trajectory accelerated toward open conflict.
Horton is careful not to justify Russia’s invasion. He simply insists that calling the attack “unprovoked” is an exercise in willful blindness.
The word itself, repeated endlessly by Western governments and media, seeks to close off inquiry rather than invite it.
Horton’s book reopens that inquiry with forensic detail—names, dates, cables, memoirs—leaving readers free to draw their own conclusions.
What makes Provoked essential is precisely this refusal to operate on the short time horizon of the daily news cycle.
Most public discussion still treats either 2014 or 2022 as year zero. Horton shows that the roots stretch back to the moment the Cold War ended, when a victorious America chose (to quote the title of Professor Jonathan Haslam’s also excellent book) hubris over restraint.
The result is a tragedy that was both foreseeable and avoidable.
I am taking the book with me on holiday.
It is heavy—literally and figuratively—but the weight is justified.
Anyone who wants to understand how we arrived at the present catastrophe, rather than simply recycle the slogans of the moment, should read it.
You can see the full conversation here.
The push to clear nuclear power’s waste-disposal hurdle
The technical issues have mostly been solved, but the long-term potential peril of radioactive material has made it difficult to find politically acceptable sites.
Nature, By Brian Owens, 26 August 2026
Inside a nondescript warehouse in an industrial park in Oakville, Canada, sits a squat forklift truck that requires no driver. When activated by its remote operator, the vehicle trundles to a stack of huge clay blocks, each weighing 8,000 kilograms, and carries them into a narrow rock tunnel. Another custom-built machine then fills the spaces around the blocks with crumbled clay.
Each block is made of bentonite clay and encases a copper-coated steel container built to hold spent fuel from a nuclear reactor. The blocks will be sealed behind yet more clay and concrete in tunnels deep underground, and the radioactive material inside will be left to slowly decay over thousands of years.
Or it would be, if there were any nuclear waste stored on-site. The warehouse is a test facility for the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO), the group in Toronto, Canada, that is responsible for dealing with the long-term storage of the country’s nuclear waste. The life-sized mock-up, complete with simulated rock tiling, enables Peter Keech, manager of engineered barrier science at the NWMO, and his colleagues to test technologies that will be used to store the waste and to demonstrate the storage process to the public.
The metal fuel containers, for example, are designed to withstand the pressure of being buried under a 3-kilometre-thick glacier, should the next ice age arrive before the radiation has decayed fully. But Keech and his team take the testing much further, subjecting several canisters to crushing forces equivalent to being more than 6 km under the ocean. The containers looked like toothpaste tubes that had been squeezed in the middle — but they were still fully sealed.
“These are much higher forces than they will ever see in the repository, but we take it to failure to understand the materials,” says Keech. “And even in failure it still offers containment.”
Canada’s real waste repository will be built roughly 1,600 km to the northwest of the test facility, hosted by the Wabigoon Lake Ojibway Nation and the town of Ignace. It is buried some 750 metres under the hard rock of the Canadian Shield, which was once the base of a vast mountain range. When the facility opens in around 2040, its 80–100 km of tunnels will be capable of storing the nearly 6 million bundles of spent fuel that will be produced by Canada’s four nuclear-power plants over their operational lives, isolating the waste from people and the environment until long after the material’s radiation levels return to that of natural uranium.
World tour
Almost every country with a nuclear-power industry is working on some variation of this plan. Finland’s is the most advanced: its Onkalo repository on the country’s west coast is expected to open later this year.
The storage facility is built 430 metres below ground in a hard crystalline bedrock, and will eventually consist of about 50 km of tunnels that can store around 6,500 tonnes of spent uranium fuel, says Linda Kumpula, a nuclear-safety engineer at Finland’s Ministry of Economic Affairs and Employment in Espoo.
A site in Sweden, also built into hard crystalline rock, is expecting to begin accepting radioactive waste in the 2030s. France and Switzerland have each selected a site in natural clay formations and are in the process of gaining regulatory approval. And in December 2025, China completed the first stage of construction for its underground laboratory in the Gobi Desert, a facility that will test the area’s suitability for long-term waste storage.
In the United States, plans for a spent-fuel repository at Yucca Mountain in Nevada have been a political hot potato for decades, and the project is currently stalled. But the nation does already have one permanent facility: the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, a repository for radioactive waste from the country’s nuclear-weapons programme that is located in salt caverns beneath New Mexico’s desert. That facility has been a major source of learning for other countries, says Keech — particularly how to protect communities when transporting waste to the site and how to minimize the time the material spends on the surface when it arrives.
These issues and other technical ones, such as how best to build a deep geological repository, have now mostly been resolved. “We’ve been working on this for a long time and it is no longer a major technical or scientific challenge,” says Stefan Mayer, team leader of radioactive waste disposal at the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna.
The real challenge is political and social. “You have to find a site that’s technically suitable, but you also need a site that is hosted by a community that is willing,” says Allison Macfarlane, a geologist at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada, and former chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. “It turns out that the latter problem is harder than the former.”
Types of waste
Waste from nuclear plants generally falls into four categories: materials with very low, low, intermediate and high levels of radioactivity.
Very-low-level and low-level waste make up most radioactive waste — about 95%. Very-low-level waste consists of the soil, concrete and rubble generated when a nuclear plant is decommissioned. Low-level waste is made up of used protective equipment and other lightly contaminated materials from the plant. Both types can be disposed of in near-surface secure facilities and need to be isolated for several hundred years.
Intermediate-level waste consists mainly of metal parts of the reactor that are contaminated with radiation. These metallic isotopes are so concentrated and long-lived that the material remains radioactive for thousands of years and cannot be disposed of near the surface — it needs to be isolated underground.
The biggest issue is the high-level waste. This is the spent nuclear fuel and its containers, as well as the waste from the reprocessing of spent fuel that some countries do to extend their fuel supplies. By volume, it represents just 3% of the waste generated by a power plant, but it is responsible for 95% of the radioactivity. And it remains radioactive for hundreds of thousands or even millions of years — longer than any human civilization has yet lasted. Because of the waste’s longevity, it must be safely isolated deep underground where it cannot contaminate the ecosystem or harm future generations………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Another important adjustment for the United States would be to change who is responsible for dealing with the waste. Instead of the Department of Energy, with its revolving door of politically appointed leaders, Macfarlane thinks that it should be an independent organization: either a government agency similar to New York’s port authority or an industry-led group such as Canada’s NWMO.
“You need more of a corporate structure with leadership that’s going to be there a long time, because this is a slow process,” Macfarlane says. “It takes decades to do properly.”
This was one of the main recommendations in 2012 of the Blue Ribbon Commission on America’s Nuclear Future, which Macfarlane took part in. But so far there has been no movement on the issue.
The United States, Macfarlane says, should not be afraid to admit defeat on Yucca Mountain and start again with a more consent-based process. “I think the US has failed and they just have to acknowledge that — and decide they’re going to try again,” she says.
The long timelines involved in dealing with nuclear waste make it tempting to continually kick the can down the road and trust that future generations will eventually find a solution. But Macfarlane is adamant that it is the responsibility of people today to at least get the ball rolling.
“It’s imperative that we do something sooner rather than later,” she says. “I can tell you one thing with 100% certainty: if we do nothing, this material will get into the environment and will harm humans in the future.”
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