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Energy firm newcleo will suspend its programme to develop lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR) in Britain. 

 Energy firm newcleo said on Wednesday it would suspend its programme to
develop lead-cooled fast reactors (LFR) in Britain and substantially wind
down its UK activities due to the lack of support and funding from the
government.

LFRs are a type of advanced nuclear reactor technology which
are smaller and more efficient than conventional nuclear reactors and can
be built in factories and assembled on site to provide heat for industrial
processes and hydrogen production.

The firm, established in 2021 and
headquartered in Britain, said it had planned to develop up to four such
reactors in the UK, producing a total of 800 megawatts, enough to power
around 1.6 million homes, and representing around 4 billion pounds ($5
billion) of investment.

The company said it had engaged with successive UK
governments on access to the country’s stock of stored plutonium which it
had planned to recycle for use in the reactors. “Sadly, despite many
attempts to engage with political stakeholders, the UK government has
decided to not make its plutonium available for the foreseeable future and
to lend its political support and considerable funding to other
technologies,” Stefano Buono, founder and CEO of newcleo, said in a
statement.

In addition, support and funding have been made available to
other small modular reactor technologies but they have not been forthcoming
for LFR developers such as newcleo in Britain, the firm said. Instead, it
will focus on other important markets. In Slovakia, newcleo said it had
created a joint venture with state-owned nuclear company JAVYS to build up
to four LFRs powered by the country’s spent nuclear fuel stocks, which
has received endorsement from government officials. In June, an agreement
with the Lithuanian government was signed based on a similar strategy.

 Reuters 30th July 2025, https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/energy-firm-newcleo-says-it-will-suspend-uk-lead-cooled-fast-reactor-development-2025-07-30/

August 3, 2025 Posted by | technology, UK | Leave a comment

Genocide’s Hard When You’ve Got a PR War to Win.

Israel is inviting over 500 delegations of social media influencers to tour Israel and learn the right message to spread to their millions of followers because Israel realizes it is losing the PR war.

For Israel this is the hard part: completing a genocide while making it look like you are not completing a genocide.  In an age of mobile telephone cameras and wireless transmission of images from virtually anywhere by anyone, genocide while few are looking is a thing of the past. 

Israel’s quest to cleanse Gaza of Palestinians through expulsion or extermination keeps getting interrupted for photo ops of aid airlifts or a few aid trucks to satisfy feigned Western grievance, writes Joe Lauria.

 Joe Lauria, Consortium News, July 28, 2025, https://consortiumnews.com/2025/07/28/genocides-hard-when-you-have-to-win-the-pr-war-too/

Winning the public relations war is proving to be a lot more difficult for Israel than the genocide against the Palestinian people.

As the conscience of Western publics pushes their governments to stop supporting Israel’s historic crimes, U.S. and European governments are forced to make displays of scolding Israel. 

But that act is getting old. The money and guns keep flowing as the killing and starvation keeps growing. 

Western allies want Israel to make a gesture that it still has a shred of humanity left. At various junctures during the slaughter, U.S. and European governments have disingenuously leveled  criticism of Israel’s treatment of Palestinian civilians to keep their own populations at bay.  

For instance, during the last U.S. presidential campaign, with a large number of Democrats condemning Israel for their actions, Joe Biden and then Kamala Harris had to issue criticism of Israel while insincerely repeating that they were working “tirelessly” for a ceasefire. 

This was fake because if the Biden or now Trump administrations really want to stop the killing they can do it almost immediately: tell Israel no more guns and money if the killing doesn’t stop. 

The German authorities, who seem to relish the opportunity to enforce a new genocide, could do the same, as Germany is Israel’s second largest arms supplier after the U.S.

Losing on the PR Front

Whenever Western governments start feeling the heat they tell Israel to cool it for a while and stage some kind of show of humanitarian aid.

Israel usually complies because they are fighting two wars: one of ethnic cleansing and/or extermination of the Palestinians, and the other a public relations war with the Western public, particularly its youth. 

As Consortium News reported last week, Israel is inviting over 500 delegations of social media influencers to tour Israel and learn the right message to spread to their millions of followers because Israel realizes it is losing the PR war.

The daily Haaretz reported: 

“Foreign Ministry officials say the tour delivers significant media, advocacy, and diplomatic benefits – and represents a strategic shift, as traditional outreach is no longer sufficient to shape public opinion. … We’re working with influencers, sometimes with delegations of influencers. Their networks have huge followings, and their messages are more effective than if they came directly from the ministry.”

On Friday, Britain, France and Germany issued a joint statement saying the Gaza “humanitarian catastrophe must end now.” They said Israel must “immediately lift restrictions on the flow of aid.”

“The humanitarian catastrophe that we are witnessing in Gaza must end now,” the joint statement says. “Withholding essential humanitarian assistance to the civilian population is unacceptable.”

Italy separately said, “We can no longer accept carnage and famine.”  Barack Obama chimed in too, also on Friday. On Monday, Donald Trump said: “There is real starvation in Gaza — you can’t fake that.”

France said it would recognize the State of Palestine,  a step too far for Britain, Germany and Italy, and which the U.S. condemned.  

These leaders’ consciences would be shocked if they indeed have a conscience. They’ve seen reports like this one from the BBC confirming that desperately starving people have been shot and killed as they try to reach the only food aid distribution points by the Israeli forces and private U.S. contractors. 

And yet they keep sending 2,000 lbs. bombs and F-35 spare parts.

Nevertheless, Israel realizes it must win the PR war fought not against the Western leaders who back them, but against the Western public. (Western leaders are engaged in their own PR war with their people.) Thus on Sunday Israel announced it would begin an airlift of food into Gaza. 

It’s surely part of a genocidal plan to occasionally respond to this criticism, hold some fire and make a big show of letting in aid before resuming the gruesome task. It sure makes finishing a genocide more difficult.

The Hard Part

For Israel this is the hard part: completing a genocide while making it look like you are not completing a genocide.  In an age of mobile telephone cameras and wireless transmission of images from virtually anywhere by anyone, genocide while few are looking is a thing of the past. 

One way to mislead the public is to kill at a pace intended to fool them into thinking there is more or less routine combat going on in Gaza and an unfortunate number of civilians are just being killed in the crossfire. (There was an uproar over the Australian Broadcasting Corporation last week ignorantly reporting the deliberate murder of unarmed, starving civilians at the aid distribution points as having died in “the crossfire.”)

So Israel needs to keep the official daily death toll in Gaza to around 100. Don’t start wiping out entire encampments, killing thousands a day. Make it look more or less like a normal war. Leave doubt in people’s minds. Netanyahu did say this would take a very long time.

Israeli Defense Minister Israel Katz openly says the plan is to concentrate the entire 2 million plus population of Gaza in a camp in the south to ready them for expulsion. And if Egypt and others refuse to take them?  The rate of killing in this concentration camp may well explode if Western governments keep tolerating this evil.

But for now, the rate of killing allows a propagandist like Bret Stephens to argue in The New York Times that it can’t be genocide because the killing is too slow.  He actually wrote this:

“If the Israeli government’s intentions and actions are truly genocidal — if it is so malevolent that it is committed to the annihilation of Gazans — why hasn’t it been more methodical and vastly more deadly? Why not, say, hundreds of thousands of deaths, as opposed to the nearly 60,000 that Gaza’s Hamas-run Health Ministry, which does not distinguish between combatant and civilian deaths, has cited so far in nearly two years of war? It’s not that Israel lacks the capacity to have meted vastly greater destruction than what it has inflicted so far.” 

Quick, somebody show the Genocide Convention to Stephens. It defines genocide in black and white:

(d) Imposing measures intended to prevent births within the group; (e) Forcibly transferring children of the group to another group.”

“In the present Convention, genocide means any of the following acts committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part, a national, ethnical, racial or religious group, as such:

(a) Killing members of the group;
(b) Causing serious bodily or mental harm to members of the group;

(c) Deliberately inflicting on the group conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part;

Stephens falls prey to a common misconception of genocide, namely that it depends on the number of people killed. Acts must be “committed with intent to destroy, in whole or in part.”

The hardest part of proving genocide is intent. Israeli leaders have provided folders full of statements of genocidal intent. It was then followed by actions that systematically destroyed the conditions of life for the Palestinians of Gaza.

One by one they wiped out the infrastructure of Palestinian culture and civilization: schools, universities, mosques, churches, museums, theaters, libraries, hospitals and incalculable residential buildings, while people were still living in them. There has been a wholesale assassination of journalists, artists, academics and doctors — and an imposed starvation.  

This is textbook genocide.

The Big Lie sent out from Israel, parroted almost word-for-word by the likes of Stephens and Alan Dershowitz, Israel-defender supremo, and by an Israeli zealot who appeared on Piers Morgan’s show last, week with piercing, fanatical eyes is this: This is war, unfortunately civilians get killed and there is no army in the world that takes greater care to avoid civilian casualties than Israel’s, none. 

The zealot with Morgan went a step further to say he was “proud” of the conduct of the IDF in Gaza, to which Haaretz columnist Gideon Levy, also on the panel, said, “I’m sorry, only Nazis spoke like that.”

There is also a Big Truth. If Western governments and media repeated it and more crucially acted upon it, it would cause Israel to lose both wars: public relations and the elimination of the Palestinian people.

The world is waiting.

August 2, 2025 Posted by | Israel, spinbuster | 1 Comment

Nuclear power drive obsesses over baseload: Do we need it?


Lately there has been a mounting noise on behalf of more nuclear power in
Scotland, pleas for John Swinney to do a u-turn on his ruling out of new
nuclear reactors.

Calls for Scotland to embrace nuclear have been greeted
with a certain amount of enthusiasm in some quarters, including many SNP
voters. But what troubles me, in the current debate, is that all too often
it feels like we are stuck in an old vision of the grid – and one of the
terms that suggests this is ‘baseload’.

Baseload is defined as the
minimum amount of electricity required by a grid to meet the continuous
demand for power over a day. Currently, it’s mostly used to refer to the
generating capacity that we need to always be there if the wind stops and
the sun doesn’t shine. Britain Remade, for instance, talks about nuclear
in terms of “clean, reliable baseload power”.

But what if nuclear is actually a technology that does not suit a modern renewable grid? What if wind and nuclear are not good bedfellows and, as a baseload, new plants
will only make our electricity more expensive?

In a recent Substack, David Toke, author of Energy Revolutions: Profiteering versus Democracy, described the “accepted truth” in the media that new nuclear power is
needed because there is no other practical or cheaper way to balance
fluctuating wind and solar power, as “demonstrably false”.

He said it
“runs counter to the way that the UK electricity grid is going to be
balanced anyway” – which, he noted, is by gas engines and turbines
“that are hardly ever used”. Simple gas fired power plants, he said,
are many times cheaper per MW compared to nuclear power plant.

Toke advocated for a system balanced by more batteries and other storage as well
as gas turbines or engines which will proved “capacity” rather than
generate much energy. He has a strong point. Of course, the problem with
gas, is that it is, famously, a fossil fuel and produces greenhouse gas
emissions.

However, if, as Toke says, that gas is an increasingly small
percentage of electricity generation, about handling the moments when
demand is not met by wind and solar, the 5% predicted by the UK
Government’s Clean Power 2030 Action Plan, to be what we require, perhaps
that’s no big deal. It’s a bigger deal, though, if the gas power
station emissions required to balance the grid are, as another Substack
write calculated recently more like 19 percent.

Interestingly, Toke, whose
main criticisms of nuclear are its high cost of electricity generation and
lack of grid balancing flexibility, also noted that if we are thinking
about the financial costs of reducing emissions we might be better off
spending our money in other ways. For instance: “setting up a scheme to
pay £15000 each to 500,000 residents not on the gas grid to switch to heat
pumps will likely save as much carbon as Sizewell C is likely to
save”.

But it seems to me the question is not whether nuclear power is
simply right or wrong, but what its place is within the kind of modern grid
we are developing, a grid which faces transmission challenges between
Scotland, already producing more energy than it uses, and elsewhere, and
whether the costs are worth it. Too often those that argue for nuclear sell
it via the concept ‘baseload’.

But you only have to do a quick scan of
the internet to see it is brimming also with articles about how baseload is
extinct or outdated. These critics point out that what the grid actually
needs is more flexible sources, both of storage and power. One of the
problems is that traditional nuclear power stations tend to be all on or
all off. Torness, for instance, has either one or both of its reactors,
either at full or zero capacity.

That kind of inflexibility in nuclear
plants has already led to constraint payments being made to wind farms,
which have been switched off because there was too little demand even as
the nuclear power stations kept producing. In 2020 energy consultants
Cornwall Insight estimated the quantity in MWh of constraints that could
have been avoided had nuclear power plants in Scotland been shut during two
recent years. It found that, in 2017, 94 per cent worth of windfarm output
that had been turned off (constrained) could have been generated had
nuclear power plant not been operating.

 Herald 29th July 2025, https://www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/25350226.nuclear-power-drive-obsesses-baseload-need/

August 2, 2025 Posted by | spinbuster, UK | Leave a comment

U.S. Nuclear Energy Plans Could Proliferate Weapons

All of these companies also claim their plutonium extraction would utilize new technologies that are “proliferation resistant”—but that, too, is bunk.

The White House has now fully embraced bomb-prone nuclear fuel technology. This should stop before an arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war results

Scientific American, By Alan J. Kuperman, 30 July 25

Recent events in Iran demonstrate that dropping “bunker buster” bombs on nuclear plants is not an ideal, or even necessarily effective, way to prevent proliferation. It is far preferable to prevent the spread of nuclear-weapon-usable technologies in the first place.

A simplistic way to achieve that might be to halt the worldwide growth of nuclear power. Public approval of nuclear energy, however, is actually growing in the U.S., and the White House recently announced policies to quadruple American nuclear power by 2050 while also promoting nuclear exports. This surge of support is somewhat surprising, considering that new reactors not only pose radiation risks from nuclear waste and potential accidents but also produce electricity that costs considerably more than solar or wind power (which can be similarly reliable when complemented by batteries). But nuclear power plants are touted for other attributes, including their small footprint, constant output, infrequent refueling, low carbon emissions and ability to produce heat for manufacturing. If customers decide this justifies the higher cost—and are willing to wait about a decade for new reactors—then nuclear energy has a future.

That leaves only one other way to stop the spread of dangerous atomic technology – by prudently limiting nuclear energy to the “bomb-resistant” type, which entirely avoids weapons-usable material by disposing of it as waste, rather than the “bomb-prone” variety that creates proliferation risks by purifying and recycling nuclear explosives.

Regrettably, however, the White House recently directed government officials to facilitate the bomb-prone version in a set of executive orders in May. That decision needs to be reversed before it inadvertently triggers an arms race, atomic terrorism or even nuclear war. As Iran has highlighted, ostensibly peaceful nuclear technology can be misused for a weapons program. That is why, from now on, the U.S. should support only bomb-resistant reactors and nuclear fuel.

Most Americans probably don’t realize that nuclear reactors originally were invented not for electricity or research but to produce a new substance, plutonium, for nuclear weapons such as the one dropped on Nagasaki. Every nuclear reactor produces plutonium (or its equivalent), which can be extracted from the irradiated fuel to make bombs.

This raises three crucial questions about the resulting plutonium: How much of it is produced? What is its quality? And will it be extracted from the irradiated fuel, making it potentially available for weapons?

Bomb-resistant nuclear energy—the only type now deployed in the U.S.—produces less plutonium, which is of lower quality and does not need to be extracted from the irradiated fuel. By contrast, bomb-prone nuclear energy produces more plutonium, which is of higher quality and must be extracted to maintain the fuel cycle.

Of course, a declared facility to extract plutonium in a country lacking nuclear weapons could be monitored, but history shows that international inspectors would stand little chance of detecting—let alone blocking—diversion for bombs. That is why the U.S. made bipartisan decisions in the 1970s to abandon bomb-prone nuclear energy, aiming to establish a responsible precedent for other countries.

In light of today’s growing concerns about nuclear weapons proliferation in East Asia, the Middle East and lately even Europe, one might assume that U.S. industry and government would promote only bomb-resistant nuclear energy—but that is not so. A growing number of venture capitalists and politicians are aggressively supporting technologies to commercialize plutonium fuel. They are doing so despite the security, safety and economic downsides that have doomed previous such efforts. These past failures are evidenced by the fact that of the more than 30 countries with nuclear energy today, including many which previously attempted or considered recycling plutonium, only one (France) still does so on a substantial scale—at considerable financial loss. However, if the U.S. government continues subsidizing nuclear technologies without regard to proliferation risk, then the plutonium entrepreneurs will keep hopping on that gravy train. Eventually, they even may find willing customers for their pricey, bomb-prone technology—but mainly among countries willing to pay a premium for a nuclear-weapon option.

The most egregious proposal has come from start-up Oklo, a company originally spearheaded by venture capitalist Sam Altman (who stepped down as chairman in April). It is pursuing “fast” reactors that can produce larger amounts of higher-quality plutonium, and it has declared the intention to extract plutonium for recycling into fresh fuel. Oklo even says it plans to export this proliferation-prone technology “on a global scale.” The Biden administration and Congress, despite the obvious dangers of dispersing nuclear weapons-usable plutonium around the world, chose to subsidize the company as part of a wholesale push for new nuclear energy. Then the Trump administration picked as secretary of energy an industrialist named Chris Wright, who actually was on Oklo’s board of directors until his confirmation. In 2024, Wright and his wife also made contributions to a fundraising committee for Trump’s presidential campaign totaling about $458,000, along with contributions to the Republication National Committee of about $289,000. In the first quarter of 2025, Oklo increased its lobbying expenditures by 500 percent compared to the same period last year.

Biden also gave nearly $2 billion to TerraPower, a nuclear energy venture founded by billionaire Bill Gates, for a similar but larger “fast” reactor that also is touted for export. Experts say this inevitably would entail far greater plutonium extraction, even though the company denies any intention to do so. The U.S. Department of Energy also has funded the American branch of Terrestrial Energy, which seeks to build exotic “molten salt” reactors that use liquid rather than solid nuclear fuel. Such fuel must be processed regularly, thereby complicating inspections and creating more opportunities to divert plutonium for bombs.

Most baffling are proposals for large “reprocessing” plants to extract huge amounts of plutonium from irradiated fuel without plausible justification. The company SHINE Technologies, with technical assistance from a firm named Orano, is planning a U.S. pilot plant to process 100 metric tons of spent fuel each year. This would result in the annual extraction of about a metric ton of plutonium—enough for 100 nuclear weapons. SHINE claims the plutonium is valuable to recycle as reactor fuel, but the U.K. recently decided to dispose as waste its entire 140-metric-ton stockpile of civilian plutonium because no one wanted it as fuel. The U.S. similarly has been working to dispose of at least 34 metric tons of undesired plutonium as waste.

Officials from five previous U.S. presidential administrations, and other experts including me, protested in an April 2024 letter to then president Biden that SHINE’s plan would increase “risks of proliferation and nuclear terrorism.” Despite this, President Trump recently issued an executive order in May that directed U.S. officials to approve “privately-funded nuclear fuel recycling, reprocessing, and reactor fuel fabrication technologies … [for] commercial power reactors.” Even more troubling, a separate order directed the government to provide weapons-grade plutonium—retired from our arsenal—directly to private industry as “fuel for advanced nuclear technologies,” which would jump-start bomb-prone nuclear energy before assessing the risks.

SHINE and a similar company, Curio, claim their facilities would slash the country’s radioactive waste stockpile. But realistically, they could barely dent its growth of 2,000 metric tons annually. They also propose to extract valuable radioactive isotopes for medical and space application, but these materials already are available elsewhere at less expense or are needed in such tiny amounts that they require processing only hundreds of kilograms of irradiated fuel annually, not the proposed hundreds of metric tons, which is a thousand times more.

All of these companies also claim their plutonium extraction would utilize new technologies that are “proliferation resistant”—but that, too, is bunk. As far back as 2009, six U.S. national laboratories concluded that, “there is minimal additional proliferation resistance to be found by introducing … [such] processing technologies when considering the potential for diversion, misuse, and breakout scenarios.”………………… https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/u-s-nuclear-energy-policy-could-accelerate-weapons-proliferation/

August 2, 2025 Posted by | technology, USA | Leave a comment

Trump moves nuclear submarines after ex-Russia president’s tweet

Andrew Roth  Guardian, 2 Aug 25

Order comes after president’s anger at tweet from Dmitry Medvedev which called Trump’s threat to sanction Russia over Ukraine a ‘step towards war’.

Donald Trump has said that he has deployed nuclear-capable submarines to the “appropriate regions” in response to a threatening tweet by Russia’s former president Dmitry Medvedev, suggesting that he would be ready to launch a nuclear strike as tensions rise over the war in Ukraine.

In a post on Truth Social on Friday, Trump wrote that he had decided to reposition the nuclear submarines because of “highly provocative statements” by Medvedev, noting he was now the deputy chairman of Russia’s security council.

Medvedev had earlier said that Trump’s threats to sanction Russia and a recent ultimatum were “a threat and a step towards war”.

“I have ordered two Nuclear Submarines to be positioned in the appropriate regions, just in case these foolish and inflammatory statements are more than just that,” Trump responded. “Words are very important, and can often lead to unintended consequences, I hope this will not be one of those instances.”

He did not specify whether he was referring to nuclear-powered or nuclear-armed submarines.

Asked later by reporters why he ordered the submarine movement, Trump said: “A threat was made by a former president of Russia and we’re going to protect our people.”…………………………………………………………………………………….. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2025/aug/01/trump-nuclear-submarines-russia-ukraine

August 2, 2025 Posted by | USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Sizewell C to build further education campus in Leiston.

Education and employment leaders have hailed new plans for an education campus in Leiston as a “landmark moment”. 

The education campus will include College on the Coast, a new permanent further education college delivered in partnership with Suffolk New College, that will provide technical, vocational, and academic pathways aligned to the workforce needs of the new nuclear power plant and the wider energy, infrastructure and engineering sectors.

Sizewell C announced further details of the centre, which will include a post-16 college, at a well-attended public exhibition in July. 

A planning application for the College on the Coast and Apprentice Hub, on the eastern edge of Leiston, will be submitted in the coming months. ………..


 East Anglian Daily Times 31st July 2025, https://www.eadt.co.uk/news/25353049.sizewell-c-build-education-campus-leiston/

August 2, 2025 Posted by | Education, UK | Leave a comment

Trump’s Fantasy Bid for the Nobel Peace Prize

1 August 2025 Michael Taylor, https://theaimn.net/trumps-fantasy-bid-for-the-nobel-peace-prize/

In what may go down as one of the most surreal moments of Donald Trump’s second presidency, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt stood before the press corps and delivered a speech so dripping with delusion that it would have made even the most seasoned propagandist blush.

With a straight face and a tone of practiced reverence, she read from a statement that claimed:

“The President has now ended conflicts between Thailand and Cambodia, Israel and Iran, Rwanda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo, India and Pakistan, Serbia and Kosovo, and Egypt and Ethiopia. This means President Trump has brokered, on average, about one peace deal or ceasefire per month during his six months in office. It is well past time that President Trump was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize.”

The language bore all his hallmarks: self-congratulation, historical revisionism, and the casual rewriting of reality. If you closed your eyes, you could practically hear Trump dictating it himself, likely from a golf cart: “No president has ever done more for peace… The world is calmer because of President Trump.”

Meanwhile, America burns.

Cities across the country remain divided and anxious. Violent crime is rising in some areas. Racial tensions have intensified under his inflammatory rhetoric. Migrants are being plucked off the streets and separated from their families under legally murky executive actions. The economy, battered by trade wars and broken promises, limps along. The climate crisis – arguably the greatest threat to long-term peace – continues to be denied by the administration altogether.

And yet, here we are, talking about a Nobel Peace Prize.

It’s not that Americans don’t value peace. It’s that they can see through a bad sales pitch. The spectacle was not only cringeworthy, it was offensive. Offensive to genuine peacemakers. Offensive to Americans living pay to pay. Offensive to veterans of actual wars.

To be clear, this isn’t the first time Trump has floated his Nobel ambitions. He’s been obsessed with the prize since taking office the first time. He has tweeted about it. Endlessly. He rages that Obama – a lesser president than himself – has one in his trophy cabinet while his own cupboard is bare. But now, with his second term spiraling and his political capital shrinking, the pursuit of a symbolic trophy has become a sad distraction – a transparent bid for legacy over substance.

This press conference wasn’t about peace. It was about ego. It was about shifting the narrative from legal troubles and legislative failures to a grandiose alternate reality where Donald Trump is not just a divisive figure but a global peacemaker.

The Nobel Peace Prize stands for something: diplomacy, de-escalation, justice. Not manufactured press releases. Not fantasies of greatness. And certainly not a list of imaginary accomplishments recited by a spokesperson who knows better, but has clearly chosen not to care.

August 2, 2025 Posted by | spinbuster, USA | Leave a comment

Russian nuclear submarine base hit by tsunami.

Waves triggered by 8.8 magnitude earthquake damaged base that houses Pacific Fleet

 Russia’s far east nuclear submarine base appears to have been damaged by
the tsunami that swept the country’s Pacific coast on Wednesday,
according to satellite imagery obtained by The Telegraph. The waves,
triggered by an 8.8 magnitude earthquake, hit the Rybachiy base in
Kamchatka peninsula, which houses most of the nuclear submarines in
Russia’s Pacific Fleet. A section of one pier has bent away from its
original position, possibly indicating that it was detached from its
moorings, images taken by the Umbra Space satellite on Thursday morning
have revealed.

It does not appear that a submarine was moored alongside at
the time of impact and experts said damage to the structure alone would
have little military significance. However, questions were raised about
whether the tsunami caused any further harm to the base, which was thought
to have been hit within 15 minutes of the earthquake.

 Telegraph 1st Aug 2025, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/world-news/2025/08/01/russian-nuclear-submarine-base-earthquake-satellite/

August 2, 2025 Posted by | climate change, Russia | Leave a comment

 Radiation dangers at “Sea Fest” in Cumbria

 Campaigners have sent a letter to Cumbria Wildlife Trust urging them to
inform families of the dangers at “Sea Fest” on 2nd August. Radiation
Free Lakeland have been writing to the wildlife charity for many years and
even taken direct action at the Sand Sculpture events on St Bees Beach
producing their own sand sculpture of “The Scream” and presenting
Cumbria Wildlife Trust with a “Blinky” statue.

The letter asks that
Cumbria Wildlife Trust inform families of the risks of encountering
radioactive particles whilst spending hours digging sand sculptures.


Campaigners point to Sellafield’s own recent Particles in the Environment
Reports which outline alpha and beta rich finds one of which is Cesium-137
with an activity of 1.23 ± 0.25 MBq “the 2nd highest Cs-137 activity
measured in any find since the programme (of monitoring and retrieval)
began”. Also stated by Sellafield: “Alpha-rich particle find rates at
Sellafield beach and Northern Beaches appear higher than those measured in
recent years” as reported in Sellafield Particles in the Environment
Update (1-Jan to 1-April 2025).

 Radiation Free Lakeland 1st Aug 2025, https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2025/08/01/cumbria-wildlife-trust-sand-castle-event-where-alpha-rich-particle-find-rates-at-sellafield-beach-and-northern-beaches-appear-higher-than-those-measured-in-recent-years/

August 2, 2025 Posted by | environment, UK | Leave a comment

Debris removal at Fukushima nuclear plant pushed back to 2037 or later

30 July 25, https://www.japantimes.co.jp/news/2025/07/30/japan/fukushima-nuclear-plant-debris-removal/

Full-scale removal of nuclear fuel debris from the No. 3 reactor of Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings’ crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant will not start before fiscal 2037, officials said Tuesday.

The removal was previously planned to begin in the early 2030s. This delay may push the completion of the plant’s decommissioning process beyond the target year of 2051 set by the government and Tepco.

The new timeline for the work was announced by Tepco and Nuclear Damage Compensation and Decommissioning Facilitation, or NDF, at separate news conferences. They determined that preparations for the work, such as the demolition of an adjacent building, will take about 12 years to 15 years.

“We aren’t in a situation where we should deny (the feasibility of) the decommissioning target,” said Akira Ono, head of Tepco’s in-house company in charge of the decommissioning work. “We remain committed to the goal of completing (the decommissioning process by 2051.)”

A total of 880 metric tons of debris, or a mixture of melted nuclear fuel and reactor structures, is believed to be in the No. 1 to No. 3 reactors at the nuclear plant, which suffered a triple meltdown following the March 2011 massive earthquake and tsunami.

Tepco began to extract debris from the No. 2 reactor on a trial basis last year, and has collected a total of about 0.9 gram so far.

According to Tepco and the facilitation organization, debris removal will be carried out using a combination of what is known as the nonsubmerged method, in which the debris is collected from the air, and what is called the filling and solidification method, which involves pouring a filling agent into the reactor and solidifying it.

A small hole will be opened in the upper part of the reactor building to insert a device that will crush the debris into fine pieces, while a filling agent will be injected as needed. The debris will be collected using a device inserted from the side of the building.

Tepco and the organization said demolishing a waste treatment building on the north side of the No. 3 reactor is necessary to ensure work safety and create space for new equipment. They also said that necessary facilities need to be built in the upper part of the reactor building, and such preparations are expected to take about 12 years to 15 years.

August 1, 2025 Posted by | Fukushima continuing, wastes | Leave a comment

Report Slams Canada’s “Systematic Deception” Over Weapons Transfers to Israel

Activists say the government is misleading the public as Canadian weapons flow to Israel despite pledged restrictions.

By Jillian Kestler-D’Amours , Truthout, July 29, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/report-slams-canadas-systematic-deception-over-weapons-transfers-to-israel/?utm_source=Truthout&utm_campaign=dd4ceeb9ab-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2025_07_29_09_02&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_bbb541a1db-dd4ceeb9ab-650192793

Rights advocates in Canada are accusing the government of misleading the public by allowing huge amounts of weapons to be sent to Israel despite a pledge to curtail such transfers.

In a new report issued on July 29, a coalition of advocacy groups released new details about the scope of Canadian-made arms exports to Israel amid the country’s war on the Gaza Strip.

Using commercial shipping and Israeli import data, the report found that at least 47 shipments of military related components were sent from Canadian weapons manufacturers to Israeli arms companies between October 2023 and July 2025.

That’s only a few months after the Canadian government said it was opposed to Canadian-made weapons being used in Gaza, where Israeli forces have killed tens of thousands of Palestinians.

Rachel Small, the Canada lead at World Beyond War, one of the groups behind the report, told Truthout that the findings expose “one of the biggest propaganda campaigns in Canadian foreign policy in many decades”.

“What we’ve seen over the past 21 months is, over and over again, Liberal [government] ministers standing in parliament, making public statements, claiming that Canada had paused or restricted or limited or was no longer sending arms to Israel,” Small told Truthout in an interview.

“And while Palestinian families were literally burying their children [in Gaza] … we now know that fighter jet parts literally flew from Halifax to Israel on Air Canada flights, hidden in the cargo underneath passenger seats,” Small said.

“What this report reveals is not bureaucratic oversight; what this looks like is systematic deception. It makes Canada directly complicit in what scholars and organizations all agree is a genocide.”

Pressure to Suspend Exports

The report’s findings come as Israel faces a fresh wave of global condemnation over its blockade of Gaza, which has led to a starvation crisis across the bombarded coastal enclave.

According to Gaza’s Health Ministry, nearly 150 Palestinians have died of hunger since the war began in October 2023, including dozens in recent days.

More than half of those casualties are children, and the United Nations has warned that the number of starvation-linked deaths could rapidly rise unless aid is allowed into the territory in a sustained way.

But long before Israel’s escalation of its blockade in March, people around the world had been calling on their governments to stop sending weapons to Israel that could be used in deadly attacks on Palestinian civilians in Gaza.

In Canada, Palestinian rights advocates and other civil society groups demanded an arms embargo against Israel and called on the government to uphold its obligations under the UN Arms Trade Treaty.

That pact stipulates that signatories cannot send arms to a country when they have knowledge that those weapons could be used in war crimes, genocide, and attacks on civilians, among other violations of international law.

In March 2024, Canada’s parliament passed a non-binding motion urging the government to suspend further arms sales to Israel.

As pressure continued to mount, in September of last year, then-Canadian Foreign Minister Mélanie Joly announced that the government had not approved any new export permits for Israel since January 8, 2024.

Joly said Ottawa had suspended “around 30” existing permits. She also said the government was opposed to a planned sale by the United States of Canadian-made weapons parts to Israel that was made public just a few weeks earlier.

“Our policy is clear: We will not have any form of arms or parts of arms be sent to Gaza, period,” Joly told reporters at the time.

Millions in Arms Sent in 2024

Still, human rights advocates immediately questioned why the government didn’t suspend all permits that had been granted for weapons destined for Israel.

The report also noted that, under a decades-old defense pact between Canada and the U.S., most Canadian-made weapons and weapons parts do not need permits to be exported to the country’s southern neighbor.

That has created what some experts have described as a black hole in terms of reporting requirements — and raised concerns that Canadian weapons components could end up in Israel if they are shipped via the U.S.

In fact, in March, anti-war group Project Ploughshares reported that a Canadian Crown corporation — a government contracting agency — had signed a contract in September 2024 with the U.S. Department of Defense to provide artillery propellants used to launch explosive 155m shells that will be sent to Israel.

“This agreement was finalized while the intensive bombardment of Gaza continued,” Project Ploughshares noted, as well as after Canada announced it was suspending weapons exports to Israel.

Tuesday’s report focused on direct military exports from Canada to Israel, not weapons that reach Israel via the U.S.

In an emailed statement sent to Truthout on Wednesday afternoon, Global Affairs Canada, Canada’s foreign affairs department, said it could not confirm the details included in the report, including the number of shipments of items to Israel as well as their method of transit. The department also did not directly answer Truthout’s question about why it hasn’t cancelled all existing weapons export permits to Israel.

“Canada has not approved any new permits for items to Israel that could be used in the current conflict in Gaza since January 8, 2024,” it said, adding that the approximately 30 export permits that were suspended last year “remain suspended and cannot be used to export to Israel”.

“Global Affairs Canada continues to assess all permit applications on a case-by-case basis under Canada’s risk assessment framework, including the criteria set out in the Arms Trade Treaty and enshrined in the Export and Import Permits Act. Any items requiring an export permit adhere to Canada’s rigorous export permit regime,” it said.

The government’s own data shows that Canada exported $13.8 million ($18.9 million Canadian) in direct military supplies and technology to Israel last year.

The weapons were authorized for transfer through 164 permits issued before the January 8 freeze, the government said.

“Global Affairs Canada’s approach since January 8, 2024, has been to not issue permits and to suspend a limited number of export permits for military items destined for Israel,” the ministry said in its report on 2024 exports.

“These suspensions allow for further review into whether the authorized items could be used in the ongoing conflict in a manner inconsistent with Canada’s foreign policy objectives.”

Two-Way Arms Embargo

Tuesday’s report calls on the Canadian government to impose a two-way arms embargo that would cancel all existing arms export permits from Canada and prevent Canada from importing weapons from Israel.

That’s because advocates say the Canadian government should not be buying weapons marketed as “battle tested” on Palestinians or providing profits to Israeli arms manufacturers.

The report also urges Canada to end indirect weapons transfers to Israel through the U.S., including by requiring “end-use assurances” that no arms sent to the U.S. will end up in Israel.

Corey Balsam, national coordinator of Independent Jewish Voices Canada, another one of the groups involved in the report, said arms embargoes are tools the Canadian government has used before in other circumstances.

“I think the government recognizes that it has a responsibility to stop the arms [to Israel], and that’s why they’ve taken some limited measures. But those measures are obviously insufficient,” Balsam told Truthout.

“We’ve grown up with this idea of never again post-Holocaust and that’s something that we hear politicians in Canada repeating,” he said. “And here we are, just letting this happen, and worse, actually contributing. It’s really shameful.”

Balsam added that “if Canada really supports international law and human rights, it needs to be applied across the board”, including to its ally, Israel.

Small also said Canada is at a crossroads.

“I think they are really going to have to choose whether they’re going to continue to try to hide the Canada-Israel arms trade … or whether they’re going to take action and actually stop the flow of these weapons,” Small said.

“We’re not asking them to move mountains,” she added. “It’s the bare minimum to [ask them to] stop Canada from being deeply complicit in what I would say is one of the greatest moral crises of our time.”

August 1, 2025 Posted by | Canada, weapons and war | Leave a comment

An unwanted visitor to Britain’s shores – a harbinger of death

28th July 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/an-unwanted-visitor-to-britains-shores-a-harbinger-of-death/

Not reference to the recent visit of US President Donald Trump to Scotland, but instead the Nuclear Free Local Authorities are highlighting the delivery of US nuclear weapons to RAF Lakenheath earlier this month. Fortunately Mr Trump will be leaving after a short stay, unfortunately the B-61 nuclear weapons will not.

RAF Lakenheath is, despite its cover name, the United States Air Force’s largest airbase in the United Kingdom, a home to two squadrons of the F35A nuclear capable fighter bomber able to carry the B61-12 ‘tactical’ nuclear bomb. Rather than being a weapon designed for delivery as part of a strategic nuclear exchange, the B-61 is intended for use as a ‘battlefield’ weapon for more immediate employment in a direct conflict in Europe with Russia.

Given the current ongoing war between Ukraine and Russia with heightened tensions between Russia and the USA and its NATO allies, this makes it employment frightening more likely in the present than it was in the past.

Anti-nuclear campaigners at Nukewatch have published a detailed expose of a recent flight of a giant C-17 Globemaster from the United States which observed by the Nukewatchers on its arrival at the Suffolk airbase. As the aircraft was operated by a specialist unit authorised to transport nuclear weapons and had travelled in-bound from the US Air Force’s main nuclear weapons storage site at the Kirtland Air Force base in New Mexico to Suffolk, Nukewatch  believe that this aircraft was carrying nuclear weapons. This would be the first deployment of US nuclear weapons in the UK since 2008.

Nukewatch ‘judge that the evidence publicly available from our observations and flight-tracking data now supports the conclusion that nuclear weapons are based at the Lakenheath US airbase.’

Their excellent report can be found at https://www.nukewatch.org.uk/how-the-us-air-force-brought-nuclear-weapons-to-lakenheath-air-base-the-inside-story/

In response, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament has launched a campaign calling on the UK Government to make a full public disclosure and hold a debate and a vote in Parliament about the acceptance of this deployment. These nuclear weapons will be available for use at the command of US President with the British Prime Minister Starmer has zero say on the matter. This makes Lakenheath an obvious future target for a pre-emptive nuclear attack in the event of a future conflict with Russia. In recent polling, 61% of Britons surveyed were opposed to any deployment of US nuclear weapons in the UK.

CND is inviting its supporters to sign an online petition to their local MP at https://cnd.eaction.org.uk/dontmakeusatarget

CND previously uncovered through a legal challenge that the US military – as ‘visiting forces’ – have a blanket exemption from nuclear safety regulations. This was issued in March 2021 by the former Defence Secretary Ben Wallace. It means that there is no requirement for the USAF to carry out emergency planning on nuclear matters.

August 1, 2025 Posted by | UK, weapons and war | Leave a comment

UK Government abandons plan to greenwash nuclear in a new taxonomy

28th July 2025, https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/government-abandons-plan-to-greenwash-nuclear-in-a-new-taxonomy/

Much to the delight of the Nuclear Free Local Authorities, the UK Government has  abandoned the latest plan to introduce a new taxonomy for ‘green’ energy technologies. Why? Because, in the small print, Ministers wanted to include nuclear so the plan would have amounted to ‘greenwashing’ the industry.

The government recently published its response to a consultation conducted earlier this year by the Treasury. In the consultation, a taxonomy was described as ‘a classification tool which provides its users with a common framework to define which economic activities support climate, environmental or wider sustainability objectives.’ 

It should have been a mechanism to facilitate further investment in ‘green’ energy projects, but the proposal was in the NFLA’s view fatally flawed as in the small print the consultation document obliquely included nuclear.

28th July 2025

Government abandons plan to greenwash nuclear in a new taxonomy

Much to the delight of the Nuclear Free Local Authorities, the UK Government has  abandoned the latest plan to introduce a new taxonomy for ‘green’ energy technologies. Why? Because, in the small print, Ministers wanted to include nuclear so the plan would have amounted to ‘greenwashing’ the industry.

The government recently published its response to a consultation conducted earlier this year by the Treasury. In the consultation, a taxonomy was described as ‘a classification tool which provides its users with a common framework to define which economic activities support climate, environmental or wider sustainability objectives.’ 

It should have been a mechanism to facilitate further investment in ‘green’ energy projects, but the proposal was in the NFLA’s view fatally flawed as in the small print the consultation document obliquely included nuclear.

The NFLAs opposed this plan and Dr Paul Dorfman, who kindly drafted our response, explained why: ‘The ‘UK Green Consultation’ document stated that, ‘Subject to stakeholder feedback on the value and use cases of a UK Green Taxonomy, the government proposes that nuclear energy will be classified as green in any future UK Green Taxonomy’ – a ‘horse and cart’ situation that brought into question the role, process and purpose of consultation, with all that has implications for trust in government.

Now Emma Reynolds MP, Economic Secretary to the Treasury, has stated that Ministers have abandoned the plan: ‘the government has concluded that a UK Taxonomy would not be the most effective tool to deliver the green transition and should not be part of our sustainable finance framework.’  Ms Reynolds claimed that ‘other policies were of higher priority to accelerate investment into the transition to Net Zero and limit greenwashing.’

The NFLAs support the aspiration to achieve Net Zero, but nuclear, as a technology associated with resource intensive activities, environmental damage and contamination, and a deadly legacy of radioactive waste, is in the NFLA’s view most certainly not ‘green’ and its inclusion would have amounted to ‘greenwashing’.

Dr Paul Dorfman succinctly expressed our relief at the government’s U-turn: ‘In this contest, it seems fair that Government has taken a considered step back and has made the right decision not to pursue this Taxonomy.’

The decision appeared to have a near immediate impact with Schroders Greencoat, which describes itself as ‘a specialist renewables infrastructure investor’, widely reported to have decided to withdraw as a prospective investor in Sizewell C. Stop Sizewell C executive director Alison Downes said: “It’s welcome news that Schroders Greencoat won’t be investing in Sizewell C. Based on our dialogue with Schroders, we attribute this to the government deciding not to adopt a green taxonomy, which thankfully has the outcome that nuclear energy cannot be erroneously labelled ‘green’”.

August 1, 2025 Posted by | spinbuster, UK | Leave a comment

Netanyahu Is Reportedly Planning to Annex Gaza Strip, With Trump Admin’s Backing

Israeli sources say the plan has already been presented to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has the approval of the White House.

Israeli sources say the plan has already been presented to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has the approval of the White House.

If Netanyahu’s plan goes forward, Israel will be in the process of annexing the entirety of Palestine.

By Sharon Zhang , Truthout, July 29, 2025, https://truthout.org/articles/netanyahu-is-reportedly-planning-to-annex-gaza-strip-with-trump-admins-backing/

Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is reportedly prepared to propose a plan to annex the entire Gaza Strip that has the backing of the Trump administration, signalling the next horrific phase in Israel’s genocide as it also moves forward with annexing the occupied West Bank.

On Tuesday, Israeli outlet Haaretz reported that Netanyahu is expected to propose the plan to his cabinet soon. The plan would entail giving Hamas a few days to accept a ceasefire deal — likely one designed for Hamas to reject, given Netanyahu’s history — and beginning annexation if Hamas rejects the deal.

The Israeli military would first annex parts of the “buffer zone,” an area spanning all of Gaza’s border created by the military amid its genocide. The zone encompasses over half of Gaza’s land area, and Israeli forces have bulldozed everything inside it, including homes, schools, farming sites, and more.

The military would then move to annex parts of northern Gaza, which Israel has worked diligently to isolate from the rest of Gaza, and move gradually until Israel has annexed the entirety of the Gaza Strip, Haaretz reports.

Netanyahu is reportedly presenting the plan in order to keep Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich in his government, following the prime minister’s longtime pattern of taking drastic military actions in order to maintain his coalition and stay in power. Citing sources familiar, Haaretz says that Smotrich has said that he will stay in his position if the annexation plan goes forward.

Israeli sources say the plan has already been presented to U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio and has the approval of the White House.

Numerous military officials in Netanyahu’s government have said in recent months that annexation has long been the goal of Israel’s genocide, forcible removal of Palestinians, and near-complete destruction of Gaza. Israel has previously distanced itself from an Israeli general’s comments about Israel’s intentions for total occupation in the Strip, but has recently become even more emboldened.

The genocide has accelerated in the past weeks, with Israel’s near-total blockade on all basic resources reaching a breaking point last week, causing at least dozens of starvation deaths.

If Netanyahu’s plan goes forward, Israel will formally begin the process of annexing the entirety of Palestine. In many ways, however, Israel has already been carrying out an annexation plan in all but name.

Israeli officials have vastly accelerated settlement-building and violence in the occupied West Bank throughout their genocide, and last week, the Israeli Knesset passed a nonbinding measure calling for the annexation of the West Bank. Smotrich is a key architect of this plan, and has been pushing for annexation alongside many of the most extremist Israeli politicians for years.

In light of Israel accelerating its genocide and moving to annex Palestine, human rights advocates and experts have issued urgent calls for the world to act.

“The absolute incapacity of Western leaders to enforce international law when it comes to Israel is EPIC,” said UN special rapporteur for the occupied Palestinian territory Francesca Albanese on Tuesday. “Ministers, Prime Ministers, Presidents of Republic: Doing NOTHING, diverting attention, sanctioning individual ministers IS NOT enforcing the [international] law that was developed after the Holocaust and WWII to prevent another Holocaust and WWII.”

July 31, 2025 Posted by | Israel, politics international, USA | 1 Comment

Trump puts Putin on ‘Double Secret Probation’ for not ending Ukraine war.

31 July 2025 AIMN Editorial By Walt Zlotow, https://theaimn.net/trump-puts-putin-on-double-secret-probation-for-not-ending-ukraine-war/

President Trump channeled Animal House’s Dean Vernon Wormer in trying to reign in the out of control John ‘Bluto’ Blutarsky, a.k.a. Vladimir Putin.

Trump is livid over Putin’s refusal to cave into his demand he end the Ukraine war. And what will Trump do if Putin doesn’t enact ceasefire in “10 to 12” days?

Send in American troops to replace the rapidly disappearing Ukraine soldiers filling up numerous freshly dug Ukraine cemeteries? Nope.

Pour another $170 billion in US weapons that have done nothing but cause loss of one fifth of Ukraine territory to Russia? Nope.

Threaten Russia with nuclear annihilation? Nope.
Trump is planning something so horrific Putin will cave the moment Trump drops it on him… the Mother of all Sanctions. Only Trump knows what horrifying sanctions he has in store for Putin. Hence, Double Secret Probation (DSP).

Putin’s Bluto simply thumbed his nose at Trump’s Dean Wormer, hurling hundreds of drone bombs into Ukraine every day since Trump imposed DSP.

Trump’s Ukraine war policy is as chaotic as the administration of Faber College in Animal House. Big difference? Trump’s presiding over a catastrophe, destroying Ukraine in the lost cause to weaken Russia. All things considered, I prefer John Landis’ ‘Animal House’ to the Donald Trump version.

July 31, 2025 Posted by | politics international, USA | 1 Comment

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