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Indigenous, scientific, environmental and citizen groups strongly oppose Ottawa’s push for small nuclear reactors

 Ottawa pours more money into next-gen nuclear tech; critics to push back
against ‘dangerous distraction’. Innovation, Science and Industry
Minister François-Philippe Champagne announced a $27.2-million investment
Thursday in the development of next-generation nuclear technology he said
will make energy more accessible to remote communities.

However, numerous Indigenous, scientific, environmental and citizen groups have called the
technology a “dirty, dangerous distraction” from real climate action.
The money will go to the development of Westinghouse Electric Canada
Inc.’s eVinci micro-reactor, a small modular reactor (SMR) the company
says will “bring carbon-free, transportable, safe and scalable energy
anywhere Canada requires reliable, clean energy.”

 National Observer 17th March 2022

https://www.nationalobserver.com/2022/03/17/news/ottawa-pours-more-money-next-gen-nuclear-tech-prompting-critics-push-back-against

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Canada, opposition to nuclear, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Putin set to hold nuclear evacuation drill; moved family to Siberia: Reports

Hindustan Times, 20 Mar 22, ………  Not much is known about Putin’s family members, but since the Russia-Ukraine war started, reports claimed Putin moved unidentified members of his immediate family to a hi-tech underground bunker, which is a whole underground city, in the Altai Mountains of Siberia.

Putin’s Doomsday plan

Kremlin has a Doomsday plan ready and it is no secret. For a nuclear conflict, if any, Russia has Doomsday planes that would be used by Putin and his closes allies to stay above the war. A sky bunker was also under the Doomsday plan but is believed to be not ready yet. All these have been reported by the Russian press earlier and the veracity remains questionable………   https://www.hindustantimes.com/world-news/putin-set-to-hold-nuclear-evacuation-drill-moved-family-to-siberia-reports-101647744184485.html

March 21, 2022 Posted by | Russia, safety | Leave a comment

Radioactive iodine levels in primary cooling water at the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant Unit 3 increase threefold.

(From left) Units 3, 2, and 1 of Shikoku Electric Power Co.’s Ikata Nuclear Power Plant in Ikata Town, Ehime Prefecture, Japan, December 14, 2021; photo by Takao Kitamura from a Honsha helicopter.

2022/3/18

Shikoku Electric Power Co. and Ehime Prefecture announced on April 18 that the concentration of radioactive iodine in the primary cooling water passing through the reactor at the No. 3 reactor of the Ikata Nuclear Power Plant (Ikata-cho, Ehime Prefecture) had risen to about three times the normal level. There is no external radiation impact, and the plant will continue to operate under enhanced monitoring. There is a possibility that a small hole has been made in the fuel rods and radioactive material is leaking out.

　According to the prefectural government, at around 5:45 p.m. on the 18th, the iodine concentration rose to 0.25 becquerels per cubic centimeter, up from the normal level of 0.09 becquerels per cubic centimeter. This is less than 1/120,000 of the operational limit (32,000 becquerels per cubic centimeter). Shikoku Electric Power Co. has increased the number of inspections from three times a week to once every three to four hours and will continue to monitor the situation.
https://mainichi.jp/articles/20220318/k00/00m/040/392000c?fbclid=IwAR1HC9IruRF-sg9P-EfgXgq1uzN50-xW5dPzw3FPGE2BgNBO0ArZnMEBu94

March 20, 2022 Posted by | Japan | | Leave a comment

Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable, The US made a huge mistake?

Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable, The US refused to consider Ukraine’s NATO status as Putin threatened war. Experts say that was a huge mistake, MSNBC, March 5, 2022,  By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist

The prevailing wisdom in the West is that Russian President Vladimir Putin was never interested in President Joe Biden’s diplomatic efforts to avert an invasion of Ukraine. Bent on restoring the might of the Soviet empire, this narrative goes, the Russian autocrat audaciously invaded Ukraine to fulfill a revanchist desire for some combination of land, power and glory.

In a typical account operating under this framing, Politico described Putin as “the steely-eyed strongman” who proved immune to “traditional tools of diplomacy and deterrence” and had been “playing Biden all along.” This telling suggests that the United States exhausted its diplomatic arsenal and that Russia’s horrifying and illegal invasion of Ukraine, which has involved targeting civilian areas and shelling nuclear plants, could never have been prevented.

But according to a line of widely overlooked scholarship, forgotten warnings from Western statesmen and interviews with several experts — including high-level former government officials who oversaw Russia strategy for decades — this narrative is wrong.

Many of these analysts argue that the U.S. erred in its efforts to prevent the breakout of war by refusing to offer to retract support for Ukraine to one day join NATO or substantially reconsider its terms of entry. And they argue that Russia’s willingness to go to war over Ukraine’s NATO status, which it perceived as an existential national security threat and listed as a fundamental part of its rationale for the invasion, was so clear for so long that dropping support for its eventual entry could have averted the invasion.

……………..    the abundance of evidence that NATO was a sustained source of anxiety for Moscow raises the question of whether the United States’ strategic posture was not just imprudent but negligent.

The fact that the NATO status question was not put on the table as Putin signaled that he was serious about an invasion — so plainly that the U.S. government was spelling it out with day-by-day updates — was an error, and potentially a catastrophic one. It may sound cruel to suggest that Ukraine could be barred, either temporarily or permanently, from entering a military alliance it wants to be in. But what’s more cruel is that Ukrainians might be paying with their lives for the United States’ reckless flirtation with Ukraine as a future NATO member without ever committing to its defense.

………….    by dangling the possibility of Ukraine’s NATO membership for years but never fulfilling it, NATO created a scenario that emboldened Ukraine to act tough and buck Russia — without any intention of directly defending Ukraine with its firepower if Moscow decided Ukraine had gone too far.

But for the West to offer to compromise on Ukraine’s future entry into NATO would have required admitting the limitations of Western power.

“It was the desire of Western governments not to lose face by compromising with Russia,” Anatol Lieven, senior research fellow on Russia and Europe at the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft and the author of “Ukraine and Russia: A Fraternal Rivalry,” told me. “But it was also the moral cowardice of so many Western commentators and officials and ex-officials who would not come out in public and admit that this was no longer a viable project.”

The West didn’t want to set limits on NATO’s enlargement and influence or lose face. So what it did was gamble.

“The choice that we faced in Ukraine — and I’m using the past tense there intentionally — was whether Russia exercised a veto over NATO involvement in Ukraine on the negotiating table or on the battlefield,” said George Beebe, a former director of Russia analysis at the CIA and special adviser on Russia to former Vice President Dick Cheney. “And we elected to make sure that the veto was exercised on the battlefield, hoping that either Putin would stay his hand or that the military operation would fail.”

What’s happened has happened, and there’s no going back. But it still matters.

The U.S. must do everything it can do to end this war — which is already brutalizing Ukraine, rattling the global economy, and could quite easily spiral into a nuclear-armed confrontation between the U.S. and Russia, if things get out of hand — as swiftly as possible, including negotiating on Ukraine’s NATO status and possible neutrality with an open mind. And over the longer term, Americans must realize that in an increasingly multipolar world, reckoning with the limits of their power is critical for achieving a more peaceful and just world………………………………………………..

Russia has grown concerned again about Ukraine for a number of reasons. Analysts like Lieven and Beebe point out that Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy has taken a number of sharp measures to eradicate Russian influence in Ukraine recently by doing things like banning the use of Russian language in schools and state institutions, shutting down Kremlin-linked television stations and arresting some of the most prominent Russo-sympathetic leaders in the country — all while cooperating on the ground with NATO. Russia read this as a sign that Kyiv was throwing its lot in with the U.S. and the prospect of an agreement ensuring autonomy for the separatist-held Donbas region, crucial to Russia’s plan to thwart Ukraine’s NATO entry, might be dead……………………

Emma Ashford, resident senior fellow with the New American Engagement Initiative in the Scowcroft Center for Strategy and Security, wrote in an email that it was a “pity” that “NATO’s open-door principle was not up for debate.” Though she was skeptical about the political ability of the West to “promise to close NATO’s open door, particularly in a way that would have been credible to Moscow,” she said there were potential ways to deal with Moscow’s concerns, such as “a moratorium on NATO membership for Ukraine and Georgia, conventional arms control agreements limiting the scope of NATO military integration and cooperation with Ukraine, or some form of negotiated Ukrainian neutrality.”

The idea behind a moratorium — of, say, 20 years — is to provide a way for the West to propose to Russia that the issue can be taken up by a future generation of leaders, at a time when Russia’s political class has changed and geopolitics may have shifted………….

All we do know is that the NATO element mattered a great deal to Russia’s political establishment, and there’s reason to think it could’ve changed the course of negotiations. When things looked dicey, it was worth trying……..

dangling is incredibly dangerous, and it’s possible that it just caused Ukraine to experience the worst of all worlds: not receiving NATO protection while also enduring one of the most aggressive forms of Russian domination possible.

Many of the experts I spoke to said Ukraine’s neutrality or some kind of altered NATO status should be part of the discussion in diplomatic backchannels. Critics will say this constitutes “appeasement” of Putin. But as Biden has already made clear, the U.S. is not willing to wage war with Russia, and it certainly isn’t going to allow Ukraine into NATO when Russia is attacking it, since that would require all of NATO to go to war with Russia. The issue now is to think clearly about how to end a conflict that could spiral into World War III.

It is imperative that America develops a clearer understanding of its adversaries and behaves more judiciously in an increasingly multipolar world. It is not difficult to imagine the U.S. making a miscalculation over what China would be willing to do to secure its domination of the South China Sea. The U.S. may want to be the only great power in the world, free to expand its hegemony with impunity, but it is not. Refusing to see this is dangerous for us all.  https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine-invasion-may-have-been-preventable-n1290831?featureFlag=true#anchor-ExpandingNATOwasalwayshugelycontroversial

March 19, 2022 Posted by | politics international, USA, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Chris Hedges: Waltzing to Armageddon 

Consortium News, 18 Mar 22, The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter.

The Cold War, from 1945 to 1989, was a wild Bacchanalia for arms manufacturers, the Pentagon, the C.I.A., the diplomats who played one country off another on the world’s chess board, and the global corporations able to loot and pillage by equating predatory capitalism with freedom. In the name of national security, the Cold Warriors, many of them self-identified liberals, demonized labor, independent media, human rights organizations, and those who opposed the permanent war economy and the militarization of American society as soft on communism. 

That is why they have resurrected it.

The decision to spurn the possibility of peaceful coexistence with Russia at the end of the Cold War is one of the most egregious crimes of the late 20th century. The danger of provoking Russia was universally understood with the collapse of the Soviet Union, including by political elites as diverse as Henry Kissinger and George F. Kennan, who called the expansion of NATO into Central Europe “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold War era.” 

This provocation, a violation of a promise not to expand NATO beyond the borders of a unified Germany, has seen Poland, Hungary, the Czech Republic, Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia, Slovenia, Albania, Croatia, Montenegro and North Macedonia inducted into the Western military alliance.

This betrayal was compounded by a decision to station NATO troops, including thousands of U.S. troops, in Eastern Europe, another violation of an agreement made by Washington with Moscow. The Russian invasion of Ukraine, perhaps a cynical goal of the Western alliance, has now solidified an expanding and resurgent NATO and a rampant, uncontrollable militarism. The masters of war may be ecstatic, but the potential consequences, including a global conflagration, are terrifying. 

Peace has been sacrificed for U.S. global hegemony. It has been sacrificed for the billions in profits made by the arms industry. Peace could have seen state resources invested in people rather than systems of control. It could have allowed us to address the climate emergency. But we cry peace, peace, and there is no peace. Nations frantically rearm, threatening nuclear war. They prepare for the worst, ensuring that the worst will happen. 

So, what if the Amazon is reaching its final tipping point where trees will soon begin to die off en masse? So what if land ice and ice shelves are melting from below at a much faster rate than predicted? So what if temperatures soar, monster hurricanes, floods, droughts, and wildfires devastate the earth? In the face of the gravest existential crisis to beset the human species, and most other species, the ruling elites stoke a conflict that is driving up the price of oil and turbocharging the fossil fuel extraction industry. It is collective madness.

The march towards protracted conflict with Russia and China will backfire. The desperate effort to counter the steady loss of economic dominance by the U.S. will not be offset by military dominance. If Russia and China can create an alternative global financial system, one that does not use the U.S. dollar as the world’s reserve currency, it will signal the collapse of the American empire. The dollar will plummet in value. Treasury bonds, used to fund America’s massive debt, will become largely worthless. The financial sanctions used to cripple Russia will be, I expect, the mechanism that slays Americans, if not immolation in thermonuclear war.

Washington plans to turn Ukraine into Chechnya or the old Afghanistan, when the Carter administration, under the influence of the Svengali-like National Security Advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski, equipped and armed the radical jihadists that would morph into the Taliban and al Qaeda in the fight against the Soviets. It will not be good for Russia. It will not be good for the United States. It will not be good for Ukraine, as making Russia bleed will require rivers of Ukrainian blood.

Pandora’s Box of Evils

The decision to destroy the Russian economy, to turn the Ukrainian war into a quagmire for Russia and topple the regime of Vladimir Putin will open a Pandora’s box of evils. Massive social engineering — look at Afghanistan, Iraq, Syria, Libya or Vietnam — has its own centrifugal force. It destroys those who play God.

The Ukrainian war has silenced the last vestiges of the Left. Nearly everyone has giddily signed on for the great crusade against the latest embodiment of evil, Vladimir Putin, who, like all our enemies, has become the new Hitler.

The United States will give $13.6 billion in military and humanitarian assistance to Ukraine, with the Biden administration authorizing an additional $200 million in military assistance. The 5,000-strong EU rapid deployment force, the recruitment of all Eastern Europe, including Ukraine, into NATO, the reconfiguration of former Soviet bloc militaries to NATO weapons and technology have all been fast tracked.

Germany, for the first time since World War II, is massively rearming. It has lifted its ban on exporting weapons. Its new military budget is twice the amount of the old budget, with promises to raise the budget to more than 2 percent of GDP, which would move its military from the seventh largest in the world to the third, behind China and the United States.

Once military forces are deployed, even if they are supposedly in a defensive posture, the bear trap is set. It takes very little to trigger the spring. The vast military bureaucracy, bound to alliances and international commitments, along with detailed plans and timetables, when it starts to roll forward, becomes unstoppable. It is propelled not by logic but by action and reaction, as Europe learned in two world wars.

Staggering Hypocrisy

The moral hypocrisy of the United States is staggering. The crimes Russia is carrying out in Ukraine are more than matched by the crimes committed by Washington in the Middle East over the last two decades, including the act of preemptive war, which under post-Nuremberg laws is a criminal act of aggression.  Only rarely is this hypocrisy exposed as when U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Linda Thomas-Greenfield told the body: 

“We’ve seen videos of Russian forces moving exceptionally lethal weaponry into Ukraine, which has no place on the battlefield. That includes cluster munitions and vacuum bombs which are banned under the Geneva Convention.”

Hours later, the official transcript of her remark was amended to tack on the words “if they are directed against civilians.” This is because the U.S., which like Russia never ratified the Convention on Cluster Munitions treaty, regularly uses cluster munitions. It used them in Vietnam, Laos, Cambodia, and Iraq. It has provided them to Saudi Arabia for use in Yemen. Russia has yet to come close to the tally of civilian deaths from cluster munitions delivered by the U.S. military.

The Dr. Strangeloves, like zombies rising from the mass graves they created around the globe, are once again stoking new campaigns of industrial mass slaughter. No diplomacy. No attempt to address the legitimate grievances of our adversaries. No check on rampant militarism. No capacity to see the world from another perspective. No ability to comprehend reality outside the confines of the binary rubric of good and evil. No understanding of the debacles they orchestrated for decades. No capacity for pity or remorse.

Elliott Abrams worked in the Reagan administration when I was reporting from Central America. He covered up atrocities and massacres committed by the military regimes in El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras and by the U.S.-backed Contra forces fighting the Sandinistas in Nicaragua. He viciously attacked reporters and human rights groups as communists or fifth columnists, calling us “un-American” and “unpatriotic.” He was convicted for lying to Congress about his role in the Iran-Contra affair. During the administration of George W. Bush, he lobbied for the invasion of Iraq and tried to orchestrate a U.S. coup in Venezuela to overthrow Hugo Chávez.

There will be no substitute for military strength, and we do not have enough,” writes Abrams for the Council on Foreign Relations, where he is a senior fellow:……………………….

Putin played into the hands of the war industry. He gave the warmongers what they wanted. He fulfilled their wildest fantasies. There will be no impediments now on the march to Armageddon. Military budgets will soar. The oil will gush from the ground. The climate crisis will accelerate.

China and Russia will form the new axis of evil. The poor will be abandoned. The roads across the earth will be clogged with desperate refugees. All dissent will be treason. The young will be sacrificed for the tired tropes of glory, honor and country. The vulnerable will suffer and die.

The only true patriots will be generals, war profiteers, opportunists, courtiers in the media and demagogues braying for more and more blood. The merchants of death rule like Olympian gods.  And we, cowed by fear, intoxicated by war, swept up in the collective hysteria, clamor for our own annihilation.

Chris Hedges is a Pulitzer Prize–winning journalist who was a foreign correspondent for 15 years for The New York Times, where he served as the Middle East bureau chief and Balkan bureau chief for the paper. ……….https://consortiumnews.com/2022/03/15/chris-hedges-waltzing-to-armageddon/

March 19, 2022 Posted by | 2 WORLD, weapons and war | Leave a comment

 Expanding NATO was always hugely controversial

Russia’s Ukraine invasion may have been preventable, The US refused to consider Ukraine’s NATO status asPutin threatened wae. Experts say that was a huge mistake, MSNBC, March 5, 2022,  By Zeeshan Aleem, MSNBC Opinion Columnist  ”……………………………………….Expanding NATO was always hugely controversial

NATO was originally formed as a military and political alliance between the U.S., Canada and several Western European nations in 1949. It was meant to serve as a collective defense organization to contain the Soviet Union during the Cold War, and its most important provision, Article 5, held that an attack on one member of the alliance was an attack against all of them.

n 1990, the West led the Soviets to believe NATO would not expand further eastward across Europe in exchange for Germany reunification and the agreement that the new Germany would be a NATO member. Most famously, U.S. Secretary of State James Baker once assured Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev that the NATO alliance would move “not one inch eastward” in exchange for this agreement, but as the late Princeton University scholar Stephen Cohen pointed out in 2018, this pledge was in fact made multiple times by several Western countries.

These assurances were not honored, and NATO has expanded eastward over the years to include many more countries, all the way up to Russia’s borders.

“It is the broken promise to Gorbachev that lingers as America’s original sin,” Cohen said then.

NATO’s expansion was hugely controversial in policy circles in the 1990s. As foreign policy commentator Peter Beinart has noted, around the time the Clinton administration was considering NATO in the ’90s to include Poland, Hungary and the Czech Republic — a debate that almost caused President Bill Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Perry to resign — many influential voices dissented:

George Kennan, the living legend who had fathered America’s policy of containment against the Soviet Union, called NATO expansion “a strategic blunder of potentially epic proportions.” Thomas Friedman, America’s most prominent foreign policy columnist, declared it the “most ill-conceived project of the post-Cold War era.” Daniel Patrick Moynihan, widely considered the most erudite member of the US Senate, warned, “We have no idea what we’re getting into.” John Lewis Gaddis, the dean of America’s Cold War historians, noted that, “historians—normally so contentious—are in uncharacteristic agreement: with remarkably few exceptions, they see NATO enlargement as ill-conceived, ill-timed, and above all ill-suited to the realities of the post-Cold War world.”

The major concern was that expansion would backfire — that it would, as Kennan put it in 1997, “inflame the nationalistic, anti-Western and militaristic tendencies in Russian opinion.” Indeed, Russia hated it. As Lieven previously told me, for decades the Russian political establishment and commentators have vociferously objected to NATO expansion and “warned that if this went as far as taking in Georgia and Ukraine, then there would be confrontation and strong likelihood of war.”

Russia perceives NATO as an existential threat

Russia is no longer at the helm of a global superpower, but it is still, at the very least, a regional great power, and as such it devotes considerable resources to exerting its influence beyond its borders and using the states around it as buffers. Russia views Ukraine, a large country to which it has long-running cultural and historical ties, as a particularly critical buffer state for protecting its capital.

The issue that Russia saw in NATO was not just an expanding military alliance, but one that had shifted gears to transforming and proactively intervening in global affairs. After the end of the Cold War, NATO’s raison d’être no longer existed, but instead of disbanding, its mission shifted to democracy promotion. The carrot of membership in NATO was used to encourage countries to adopt liberalization and good governance and align with U.S. political, economic and military interests.

Of particular concern to the Russians have been NATO’s operations outside of NATO countries. The Russians were shocked by NATO’s bombing campaign in Yugoslavia, where NATO not only intervened in the affairs of a non-NATO country, but took sides against the Serbs, allies of the Russians, and did so without United Nations Security Council approval. NATO has also been involved in regime change and nation-building projects in places like Libya and Afghanistan………..

Things turned up a notch in 2008, when NATO declared that Ukraine and Georgia “will become members” of NATO. It did not specify a timeline, and it was assumed that it was conditional on the countries adopting political reforms, but it infuriated the Russians……

John Mearsheimer, an international relations scholar at the University of Chicago, also warned that this was foreshadowing, and Ukraine’s pseudo-membership status was going to bait Moscow and result in catastrophe. “The West is leading Ukraine down the primrose path, and the end result is Ukraine is going to get wrecked,” he said in a lecture…………………………….https://www.msnbc.com/opinion/msnbc-opinion/russia-s-ukraine-invasion-may-have-been-preventable-n1290831?featureFlag=true#anchor-ExpandingNATOwasalwayshugelycontroversial

March 19, 2022 Posted by | 2 WORLD, politics international | Leave a comment

UK’s Nuclear All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) condemned for calling on govt to reclassify nuclear energy as ‘green’

CND condemns Westminster nuclear group’s call for nuclear energy to be re-classified as ‘green’ https://cnduk.org/cnd-criticises-westminster-nuclear-groups-call-for-nuclear-energy-to-be-re-classified-as-green/?fbclid=IwAR3H1WnXXIVuZY0u8smeKP097HzFohe3_Xgonazrwhe1X6sldhOzfhX12T0CND has condemned MPs and Peers from the Nuclear All-Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) for calling on the UK government to reclassify nuclear energy as ‘green’ so it can avail of the Green Finance Initiative.

The informal cross-party group included the demand as part of a five-point plan published this week, after Prime Minister Boris Johnson announced “big new bets on nuclear” as part of efforts to cut reliance on gas and oil imports from Russia . 

The APPG is also urging that the government sets out key targets for nuclear energy ambitions such as 15GW of power generated by 2035, and at least 30GW generated by 2050, as well as fast-tracked decisions on both large-scale nuclear plants and small modular reactors (SMRs).

In addition to opening up nuclear energy to green financing, the group wants unused former nuclear sites to be made available for further nuclear development. 

CND has long-pointed out that genuinely sustainable alternatives to nuclear power exist in renewable energy sources and calls on the government to invest in these technologies rather than diverting billions of pounds into subsidising the nuclear industry. By doing so, we could secure enough clean energy sources while creating thousands of new jobs

CND Vice-President and nuclear energy expert, Dr Ian Fairlie, said the APPG’s proposals for a nuclear bonanza were ill-considered: “The idea that nuclear power, in any shape or form, was a ‘green technology’ was absurd. Nuclear wastes last for millennia and  the  government has nothing but hazy ideas and paper plans for its nuclear waste, so these proposals for yet more nuclear power make rational people shake their heads in disbelief. In our view, nuclear power with all its problems is not just unsustainable, it is a veritable insult to any notion of sustainability. It is for this reason that several EU Member States have objected to current proposals to make nuclear power eligible under the EU’s Green Financing Framework.”

March 19, 2022 Posted by | climate change, politics, UK | Leave a comment

Small modular nuclear reactors – no good for Canada’s indigenous communities, no good for climate action

The Government of Canada is further delaying climate action with an
announcement of $27 million in funding today to develop a Small Modular
Nuclear Reactor (SMR).

There is no guarantee SMRs will ever produce energy
in a safe and reliable manner in Canada. During his remarks for the
announcement, François-Philippe Champagne, Minister of Innovation, Science
and Economic Development Canada, as well as Westinghouse representatives,
said that the technology to be developed, the e-Vinci reactor by the
Westinghouse Electric Company, will be suitable for remote Indigenous
communities currently using diesel energy.

However, research has demonstrated that small modular nuclear reactors such as the type
Westinghouse is proposing are not the energy answer for remote communities.
The researchers–Froese, Kunz & Ramana (2020)–concluded that the
economics of SMRs do not compete when compared with other alternatives. The
cost of electricity from SMRs was found to be much higher than the cost of
wind or solar, or even of the diesel supply currently used in the majority
of these communities.

 Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility 17th March 2022

http://www.ccnr.org/

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Canada, Small Modular Nuclear Reactors | Leave a comment

Danger of radioactive disaster at Chernobyl and other nuclear sites, with exhausted staff, and risk of loss of remote control

The staff, who are still at the Chernobyl nuclear power plant, came in on
February 23. The enemy has not allowed any opportunity to change the staff,
who are psychologically and physically exhausted due to the lack of
rotation and the constant pressure caused by armed people.

This can lead to loss of control over the safety of the facility and the inability to
respond to internal and external initial events such as fire, which in turn
can lead to severe radiation effects. In case of a complete power outage,
there is a risk of disabling the safety of important systems and equipment,
in particular: ventilation, heat dissipation, technological, and radiation
control systems.

The possibility of remote control over nuclear and
radiation safety indicators at storage facilities, the New Safe Confinement
facility, and other facilities will be lost. Operators will be unable to
control the level and temperature of water in spent nuclear fuel storage
pools. There are long-lived radionuclides in the spent nuclear fuel
storage, which in case of an accident can get into the Kakhovka Reservoir,
and further along the Dnipro river into the Black Sea. A huge area would be
contaminated by radiation for thousands of years. If there is an accident
with one power unit or one container for spent fuel, depending on the
direction of wind the radioactive cloud will affect Russia, Bulgaria,
Greece, Romania, and other border countries.

 Time 17th March 2022

https://time.com/6158274/chernobyl-russia-ukraine-nuclear-disaster/

March 19, 2022 Posted by | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Renewed worries in Japan about restarting nuclear plants, after 7-4 earthquake near Fukushima

An earthquake has hit Japan just when the country is debating whether to
restart nuclear power plants. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida believes it is
crucial to resume operations. Fresh concerns over nuclear safety will
weaken his case and weigh down utilities stocks.

Four people died on Wednesday night after a magnitude-7.4 earthquake struck northern Japan near
the Fukushima prefecture. It is in this region that a 9.0-magnitude
earthquake and tsunami unleashed a nuclear crisis 11 years ago.

Local utilities are most likely to sustain long-term damage. Shares of Tepco, the
electric utility that operated the devastated Fukushima Daiichi nuclear
power plant, were unmoved by the most recent earthquake. They have been
strengthening this year, ending a two-year long losing streak of more than
60 per cent

Kishida remains intent on restarting nuclear plants. He
responded to earlier safety concerns triggered by Russian attacks on
Ukrainian nuclear facilities with plans for a police unit to protect
Japan’s nuclear plants. But opposition from locals is strong, show
opinion polls. That is understandable given the dire consequences of the
Fukushima meltdown. More than 1mn tonnes of contaminated water is planned
to be released into the Pacific Ocean. The clean-up and damages bill is
more than ¥22tn ($185bn).

 FT 17th March 2022

https://www.ft.com/content/eb96f84c-6e95-48d8-abfa-c263ec80f6c5

March 19, 2022 Posted by | Japan, safety | Leave a comment

Push for UK govt to call nuclear power ”green”, so that nuclear industry can get money from theGreen Financing Framework.

 Westminster’s Nuclear All Party Parliamentary Group (APPG) has published
a roadmap that calls for 15GW of new nuclear generation by 2035 and 30GW by
2050. In light of the current energy crisis and comments from the prime
minister earlier this week about ‘big new bets on nuclear power’, the
Nuclear APPG set out a five-point plan that urges commitment to both
large-scale plants as well as small modular reactors (SMRs).

Alongside the 15GW and 30GW ambitions, the plan also includes reclassifying nuclear as
green energy to make it eligible under the Green Financing Framework,
accelerating decisions and funding on Sizewell C and SMRs, freeing up
unused nuclear sites for prospective developers, and streamlining the
development and planning processes. 

 The Engineer 17th March 2022

https://www.theengineer.co.uk/nuclear-roadmap-calls-for-15gw-by-2035/

March 19, 2022 Posted by | politics, UK | Leave a comment

Fate of Radioactive Waste at Plymouth Nuclear Site Continues to Raise Concerns

PILGRIM NUCLEAR POWER STATION

Fate of Radioactive Waste at Plymouth Nuclear Site Continues to Raise Concerns https://www.nbcboston.com/news/local/radioactive-waste-at-plymouth-nuclear-site-continues-to-raise-concerns/2672927/

The Plymouth Board of Health has issued a resolution strongly opposing any potential plan to dump nearly 1 million gallons of radioactive waste into Cape Cod Bay.

This comes amid ongoing conversations about how Holtec International, which purchased Plymouth’s Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in 2019, intends to complete the plant’s decommissioning. While Holtec says no final decisions have been made about what it will do with Pilgrim’s radioactive waste, many in the area fear it will be released into the bay.

The Board of Health Resolution said that type of release could likely cause “immense” damage to the area’s shell fishing, aquaculture, maritime and tourist-based economy. It also notes that there would be health hazards for exposure to the type of radioactive compounds in question, including increased risk of cancers and potential harm to pregnant women and their fetuses.”All of these radioactive compounds have already been found in the surface water, groundwater and soils at Pilgrim at levels exceeding “background levels,” the resolution reads. “There is also a longer-term risk to our sole source aquifer water supply – especially from tritium which isn’t removed by existing filtration producers used to purification attempts.”

The resolution goes on to urge Holtec to choose the “safest possible disposal method” for the radioactive water that must be removed during the decommissioning process. It also urges lawmakers to add new language to state law to prohibit this type of release of solid or radioactive material in coastal or inland waters.

March 19, 2022 Posted by | USA, wastes | Leave a comment

Why a No-Fly Zone over Ukraine is a bad idea – (lead to World War 3)

No-Fly Zone in Ukraine Would Be “Direct Involvement in the War,” Experts Warn,  Amy Goodman, Democracy Now!, March 16, 2022  , Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky continues to demand the U.S. and NATO allies impose a no-fly zone over Ukraine, an idea that President Biden has rejected even as a growing number of Republicans embrace the idea despite the risk it could draw the U.S. directly into the war against Russia and possibly spark a nuclear confrontation. 

 Stephen Wertheim, a senior fellow in the American Statecraft Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, co-authored an open letter signed by foreign policy experts who oppose a no-fly zone over Ukraine. It urges leaders to continue diplomatic and economic measures to end the conflict. “As you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia, and rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war,” says Wertheim.

TRANSCRIPT……………………

STEPHEN WERTHEIM:……….  what it means is that the United States and NATO forces would commit to shoot down enemy planes, any enemy plane that enters the zone. It’s quite clear Russia would not voluntarily comply with our verbal declaration of a no-fly zone, so we’d have to shoot those planes down. ………..

as you start thinking about how a no-fly zone would actually unfold, it becomes very obvious this would be direct involvement in the war against Russia. And rather than end the war, a no-fly zone would enlarge the war and escalate the war. And that’s why the Biden administration has, rightly, been very clear throughout this conflict that a no-fly zone would be escalatory and is not something that it wants to do………..

there is no really limited no-fly zone. A no-fly zone means a commitment not just to declare something, but to enforce it, by making sure that Russian planes cannot fly within that zone. And so, it would clearly be viewed as an act of war and an escalation by Russia………… What it really would be is an intermediate step toward a much wider war.

AMY GOODMAN: So, I wanted to ask you about the state of negotiations to end this war. The Ukrainian President Zelensky suggested earlier today that Russian demands are becoming more realistic. …………..    Zelensky’s remarks came a day after he acknowledged he doesn’t expect Ukraine to join NATO anytime soon, which is very significant.

………… STEPHEN WERTHEIM:………..   there are also some encouraging words coming out of the Biden administration, as well. Secretary of State Tony Blinken just recently suggested that the sanctions that have been imposed on Russia were not intended to be permanent. And what that signals is perhaps a willingness on the part of the United States to drop some of the most draconian sanctions on Russia if that becomes necessary in order to secure a peace settlement that the legitimate government of Ukraine, led by Zelensky, would desire. …………………………………………..    https://truthout.org/video/no-fly-zone-in-ukraine-would-be-direct-involvement-in-the-war-experts-warn/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6141299d-bdd4-4062

March 17, 2022 Posted by | Ukraine, weapons and war | Leave a comment

Safety fears, as Chernobyl nuclear staff tired and stressed.

As Russian troops hold staff at the Chernobyl nuclear plant ‘hostage’,
the mayor of a nearby town warns ‘complete catastrophe’ could be round
the corner. Yuri Fomichev says fuel is running out at the site, including
for back-up generators supplying its safety systems. With the plant being
besieged for three weeks now, food supplies are also becoming scarce, and
the stress of being held at gunpoint could lead to ‘a new accident’, he
adds. His concerns were echoed by the official in charge of a 19-mile
Exclusion Zone around Chernobyl who warned staff were ‘on the edge of
their human capabilities due to physical and emotional exhaustion’.

 Metro 16th March 2022

Chernobyl ‘faces new nuclear disaster’ with ‘exhausted and hungry’ staff held at gunpoint

 Mirror 16th March 2022

https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/world-news/fears-chernobyl-in-danger-nuclear-26478660

 Chilling warnings that Chernobyl is in danger of a new nuclear accident
because the 100 staff at the stricken plant being kept ‘hostage at
gunpoint’ by the Russians are on the edge of collapse.

 Daily Mail 15th March 2022

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-10616879/IAN-BIRRELL-Chernobyl-staff-battling-avert-nuclear-disaster-warns-mayor.html

March 17, 2022 Posted by | safety, Ukraine | Leave a comment

Extradition looms for Julian Assange, after Supreme Court refuses to hear his appeal.

Extradition Looms for Assange After UK Supreme Court Refuses to Hear His Appeal, Marjorie Cohn, Truthout, March 16, 2022  

The British judicial system has erected still another barrier to Julian Assange’s freedom. On March 14, the U.K. Supreme Court refused to hear Assange’s appeal of the U.K. High Court’s ruling ordering his extradition to the United States. If extradited to the U.S. for trial, Assange will face 17 charges under the Espionage Act and up to 175 years in prison for revealing evidence of U.S. war crimes.

With no explanation of its reasoning, the Supreme Court denied Assange “permission to appeal” the High Court’s decision, saying that Assange’s appeal did not “raise an arguable point of law.” The court remanded the case back to the Westminster Magistrates’ Court, which is the same court that denied the U.S. extradition request on January 4, 2021.

In all likelihood, the magistrates’ court will refer the case to the British Home Office where Home Secretary Priti Patel will review it. Assange’s lawyers then have four weeks to submit materials for Patel’s consideration. If she orders Assange’s extradition — which is highly likely — his lawyers will file a cross-appeal in the High Court asking it to review the issues Assange lost in the magistrates’ court.

If the High Court refuses to review those additional issues, Assange can appeal to the European Court of Human Rights. That could take years. Meanwhile, he languishes in London’s high-security Belmarsh Prison, in fragile mental and physical health. He suffered a mini-stroke as his extradition hearing began. United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture Nils Melzer wrote in a Twitter post that the “U.K. is literally torturing him to death.”

The Legal Background……………….

Issues Assange Seeks to Raise on Cross-Appeal

In the cross-appeal, Assange’s lawyers will raise the following points:

*The extradition treaty between the U.S. and the U.K. forbids extradition for a political offense and since espionage is a political offense, the court lacked jurisdiction to hear the case;

*Extradition would be oppressive or unjust due to the passage of time;

*The charges against Assange do not satisfy the “dual criminality test” which requires that they constitute criminal offenses in both the U.S. and the U.K.;

*Extradition is barred because the request is based on Assange’s political opinions;

*Extradition is barred because it would violate Assange’s rights to a fair trial and freedom of expression, as well as the prohibition on inhuman and degrading treatment, under the European Convention on Human Rights; and

*The request for extradition is an abuse of process because it is being pursued for a political motive and not in good faith.

Human Rights Organizations Decry Supreme Court’s Refusal to Hear Appeal…………………..

Assange’s Fiancée Says U.S. Wants to Imprison Him for Exposing Its War Crimes

Stella Moris, Assange’s fiancée, says Assange is being persecuted for carrying out a core journalistic mission: telling the truth.

“Whether Julian is extradited or not, which is the same as saying whether he lives or dies, is being decided through a process of legal avoidance,” Moris said. “Avoiding to hear arguments that challenge the UK courts’ deference to unenforceable and caveated claims regarding his treatment made by the United States, the country that plotted to murder him. The country whose atrocities he brought into the public domain. Julian is the key witness, the [principal] indicter, and the cause of enormous embarrassment to successive US governments.”

Moris added, “Julian was just doing his job, which was to publish the truth about wrongdoing. His loyalty is the same as that which all journalists should have: to the public. Not to the spy agencies of a foreign power.”

According to Moris, the United States wants to imprison Assange for 175 years because he “published evidence that the country that is trying to extradite him committed war crimes and covered them up; that it committed gross violations that killed tens of thousands of innocent men, women and children; that it tortured and rendered; that it bombed children, had death squads, and murdered Reuters journalists in cold blood; that it bribed foreign officials and bullied less powerful countries into harming their own citizens, and that it also corrupted allied nations’ judicial inquiries into US wrongdoing.”

Assange and Moris, who have two small children together, have finally received permission to marry. They will be wed later this month in Belmarsh Prison.  https://truthout.org/articles/extradition-looms-for-assange-after-uk-supreme-court-refuses-to-hear-his-appeal/?eType=EmailBlastContent&eId=6141299d-bdd4-4062-8b24-47c47f1bdba5

March 17, 2022 Posted by | legal, Reference, UK | Leave a comment

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