“We are waiting for Nuclear Waste Services to Come Up with Recommendations on Siting….”
Marianne Birkby, May 02, 2026, https://radiationfreelakeland.substack.com/p/we-are-waiting-for-nuclear-waste
“We are waiting for Nuclear Waste Services to Come Up with Recommendations on Siting….”
But meanwhile ‘we are already building new nuclear reactors which would produce even hotter nuclear wastes. Hot nuclear wastes are in the pipeline for which there is no “away” in blatant disregard of the Flowers Report: “There should be no commitment to a large programme of nuclear fission power until it has been demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that a method exists to ensure the safe containment of long-lived highly radioactive waste for the indefinite future.”
Well it is safe to say that not only is there reasonable doubt that a method exists as no country has demonstrated beyond reasonable doubt that they can contain high level wastes indefinitely without repackaging – but there is also no where NO WHERE willing to be the ultimate nuclear guinea pig in the UK. Unless that is you count the four members of Copeland now Cumberland Council that said on behalf of the region, ‘hey yes let’s sacrifice the safety of Cumbria and her neighbours for nuclear £bungs’.
Good on Wera Hobhouse LibDem MP for Bath for asking the questions.. Click for video on facebook
Key US science panels are being axed — and others are becoming less open
A Nature analysis shows that the Trump administration has terminated more than 100 advisory committees to science agencies — and reduced the transparency and independence of those that remain.
Last August, the DOE terminated six FACA panels that provided advice in areas such as high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research. The DOE has since consolidated these discipline-specific panels into one overarching body called the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).
“How good is the advice coming from a committee of people that probably only have passing knowledge of some of the areas?”
By Max Kozlov, Alexandra Witze & Dan Garisto, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-026-01301-5
President Donald Trump and his administration downsized US science by historic margins last year as it reduced the workforce at federal research agencies by tens of thousands of people and terminated thousands of research grants. But another set of cutbacks in federal science has drawn less attention.
Across the government, the administration terminated more than 100 independent advisory panels, comprising university scientists and other outside experts who help to guide national science priorities.
The cuts — driven by a February 2025 executive order aimed at shrinking federal bureaucracy — target committees that agencies rely on to assess biomedical and environmental policy, provide guidance on setting research priorities and ensure transparency in how the government makes science-based decisions.
The scope of these committee terminations is unprecedented, a Nature analysis finds (see ‘Cancelled committees’). For example, the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), which includes the National Institutes of Health, disbanded 77 advisory boards — more than one-quarter of all its advisory committees — in 2025. By contrast, in fiscal year 2024, the agency terminated just two committees.
A similar pattern of committee closures played out at other agencies such as the National Science Foundation (NSF) and the Department of Energy (DOE). At NASA, more than half of the advisory boards were disbanded.
These panels, which are governed by the Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA), are typically staffed by researchers and other experts from outside the government. Some of those that were closed in fiscal year 2025 had been advising on topics such as organ transplantation, HIV prevention, high-energy-physics research and planetary science.
The February 2025 executive order’s stated purpose was to “minimize Government waste and abuse, reduce inflation, and promote American freedom and innovation”. And some scientists and agency employees said there can be sound reasons to streamline FACA committees by combining some or eliminating ones that no longer serve a purpose. But many researchers say that the scale of the administration’s efforts greatly reduces the amount and quality of advice that the government receives from the scientific community and businesses, as well as organizations that represent people with diseases such as Alzheimer’s
Researchers who spoke to Nature say that by terminating such a large number of scientific advisory committees and not replacing the vast majority of them, the administration is cutting off federal agencies from independent outside expertise. At the same time, it limits the flow of information from the government to the scientific community and the public.
“That two-way street, I think, was invaluable,” says Juan Meza, an applied mathematician at the University of California, Merced, who formerly served on two panels at the NSF and the DOE that have been disbanded. “We could act as ambassadors in both directions,” he says.
The terminations aren’t the only changes to advisory committees that the administration rolled out last year. Nature found that the US government has sharply reduced the number of open FACA meetings — by more than 50% for some agencies — at which the public could observe deliberations and provide input. Some agencies substantially reduced the number of public reports they issued.
And in some other cases — including the prominent example of the Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) that makes recommendations on vaccines — the federal government has drastically changed the composition of the committees, removing people who disagree with its stance and installing ones who agree. Last week, the Trump administration abruptly fired all 22 members of the board that advises and oversees the NSF. As a rationale for the terminations, a White House spokesperson pointed to the 2021 Supreme Court case United States v. Arthrex, Inc., which it says “raised constitutional questions” about the board’s membership and the fact that its members are not confirmed by the Senate. The spokesperson said the White House aims to update the law so that the board can “perform its duties as Congress intended”.
Researchers say that the elimination of panels and other changes seemingly contradict the Trump administration’s promise, outlined in an executive order on ‘gold-standard science’ on 23 May last year, to improve transparency in federally funded science and in science-related decisions taken by federal agencies.
“The fewer of these advisory panels there are, it inherently diminishes the transparency of the entire operation,” says Carrie Wolinetz, who previously administered several advisory panels as the former head of the NIH’s science-policy office.
The White House rebutted these claims. Spokesperson Kush Desai says that, during the COVID-19 pandemic, the “federal government’s glut of redundant, taxpayer-funded advisory committees did little to meaningfully inform policymaking for the benefit of the American people”. “The Trump Administration is eliminating the bureaucratic bloat and taking a hands-on approach to ensure that policymaking is driven by Gold Standard Science.”
Biomedicine behind closed doors
The 77 committee terminations at the HHS in 2025 represent a sharp departure from historical levels. Since 1997 — the full extent of publicly available FACA data — annual terminations have exceeded ten only once.
In 2025, the number of open HHS committee meetings also decreased, Nature found. In the ten years before 2025, the average number of committee meetings open to the public was 255. But in 2025, there were just 91 (see ‘Closed science’).
There are many more closed meetings at the HHS in any given year because most of the FACA committees assess research grants, a process that is kept confidential. But in 2025, the ratio of open to closed meetings dropped from an average of over 9% for the previous ten years to 4%, representing a shift towards closed meetings even outside the grant-review process
Among the disbanded groups was one charged in 2023 with making recommendations on research into long COVID and treatment for millions of people with the condition in the United States. The committee was a unique bridge between patients, federal science agencies and policymakers, says Ian Simon, the former head of the HHS Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, which was eliminated amid the government downsizing last year.
The committee was “designed to give patients a significant voice equal to those of researchers and physicians”, Simon says, and its closure is a blow to research. “It is very hard to see how these actions will advance the work that’s needed to understand long COVID and other infectious chronic conditions.”
Other panels terminated by the HHS include the Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation, which advised the agency on policies regarding organ donation, procurement and equitable allocation, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tasked with reviewing current nutritional science to inform the federal government’s dietary recommendations. The federal government subsequently issued new dietary guidelines in January without the committee’s input, a move that sparked controversy among some nutrition experts who argued that aspects of the revisions bypassed the scientific consensus.
The downsizing of HHS advisory committees is starker than the 2025 termination numbers suggest: some of the FACA committees are also meeting less often than in typical years or have not met at all since Trump took office again.
For example, the NIH leadership has historically relied on the Advisory Committee to the Director and the congressionally mandated Scientific Management Review Board — both of which have not been officially terminated — to navigate major agency reorganizations or funding shifts, says Wolinetz.
But the NIH leadership did not convene either of these panels last year as the agency cut thousands of projects on disfavoured topics and reduced the autonomy of each of its institutes by centralizing peer review and other administrative functions.
Wolinetz says that it’s smart to consider, on a semi-regular basis, whether each committee is still serving its purpose and justifying its taxpayer cost; some panels can become obsolete “vestiges”, she says.
But by terminating so many committees and not consulting others, Wolinetz says the federal government loses a crucial mechanism for ensuring that its decision-making is transparent and subject to scrutiny, including by the public. Advisory committees act as a “locus of public engagement that federal agencies can’t do on their own” about issues the government is grappling with, she says. The actions seem at odds with the ‘radical transparency’ at HHS that is a stated policy goal of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, she says.
She also worries about cases in which the Trump administration has not terminated committees — but instead drastically changed them.
For example, last June, Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 members of ACIP, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s premier vaccine advisory panel. Claiming that the panel was plagued by conflicts of interest and acted as a “rubber stamp” for the pharmaceutical industry, Kennedy reconstituted the committee with appointees whom, he argued, would bring outsider scrutiny. However, scientists and medical organizations contend that some of the new members have a history of promoting vaccine scepticism, a position long held by Kennedy.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued the HHS over its changes to ACIP. In March, a federal judge temporary halted the installation of Kennedy’s picks for ACIP, ruling that the selections probably violated federal law requiring that such panels be fairly balanced in terms of expertise and viewpoints. The HHS later revised ACIP’s charter to broaden its scope and focus on the risks of vaccines.
Kennedy also overhauled the HHS’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, terminating its existing members and appointing a slate of new ones. The new slate has drawn criticism from some autism researchers who argue that it includes people who are aligned with Kennedy’s disproven claims that autism is a preventable condition linked to vaccines and environmental toxins.
These reconstituted committees were not “formulated in the traditional highly vetted manner” outlined in each panel’s charter, Wolinetz says. Instead, they seem to be “constituted to support particular predetermined points of view” and are being “used to certify policy actions the administration wants to take”, she adds.
Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told Nature that the agency’s actions were in accordance with a White House order to terminate unnecessary advisory committees, adding that “these previous committees allowed the United States to remain the sickest developed nation despite spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care, driving unsustainable debt and worsening health outcomes.” The HHS will continue to convene committees as necessary, she added.
The HHS did not respond to requests for comment about other issues, such as criticisms of the way the agency changed the composition of the vaccine and autism panels.
Loss at the NSF
The NSF, which is the premier US funder of fundamental research across all areas of science and engineering, also sharply restricted its advice pipeline last year by terminating 14 of its 52 advisory committees. These had provided the agency with advice in areas such as engineering, cybersecurity and geosciences. (All but one of the panels that review grant applications for the NSF remain active.)
Meza served on one of these terminated bodies, the Advisory Committee for Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and was also an NSF programme officer from 2018 until he left in 2022. He says that such panels can provide valuable information to agencies; for example, the committee he served on informed the NSF that the research community had concerns about the lack of support for mid-sized laboratories. Heeding the advice, the NSF established the Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity in 2016 to support what it called “a ‘sweet spot’ for science and engineering that has been challenging to fund through traditional NSF programs”.
The NSF declined to comment on the criticisms about the changes in its advisory committees.
Consolidation at DOE
Last August, the DOE terminated six FACA panels that provided advice in areas such as high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research. The DOE has since consolidated these discipline-specific panels into one overarching body called the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).
Meza, who served on the terminated Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, worries about the loss of specific expertise. “How good is the advice coming from a committee of people that probably only have passing knowledge of some of the areas?” he asks.
Persis Drell, chair of the SCAC and a physicist at Stanford University in California, acknowledges the worries researchers have raised. “In a time of turbulent change, I totally understand all of the concerns that are in the community,” she says. Drell adds that she hopes to reassure the scientific community that the SCAC is listening and is serious about helping science at the DOE. “I have two goals: one of them is to ensure that we have a strong basic science foundation and the other is that we are able to make progress on the strategic pillars that the administration has put forward,” she says.
There are many more closed meetings at the HHS in any given year because most of the FACA committees assess research grants, a process that is kept confidential. But in 2025, the ratio of open to closed meetings dropped from an average of over 9% for the previous ten years to 4%, representing a shift towards closed meetings even outside the grant-review process.
Among the disbanded groups was one charged in 2023 with making recommendations on research into long COVID and treatment for millions of people with the condition in the United States. The committee was a unique bridge between patients, federal science agencies and policymakers, says Ian Simon, the former head of the HHS Office of Long COVID Research and Practice, which was eliminated amid the government downsizing last year.
The committee was “designed to give patients a significant voice equal to those of researchers and physicians”, Simon says, and its closure is a blow to research. “It is very hard to see how these actions will advance the work that’s needed to understand long COVID and other infectious chronic conditions.”
Other panels terminated by the HHS include the Advisory Committee on Organ Transplantation, which advised the agency on policies regarding organ donation, procurement and equitable allocation, and the Dietary Guidelines Advisory Committee, tasked with reviewing current nutritional science to inform the federal government’s dietary recommendations. The federal government subsequently issued new dietary guidelines in January without the committee’s input, a move that sparked controversy among some nutrition experts who argued that aspects of the revisions bypassed the scientific consensus.
The downsizing of HHS advisory committees is starker than the 2025 termination numbers suggest: some of the FACA committees are also meeting less often than in typical years or have not met at all since Trump took office again.
For example, the NIH leadership has historically relied on the Advisory Committee to the Director and the congressionally mandated Scientific Management Review Board — both of which have not been officially terminated — to navigate major agency reorganizations or funding shifts, says Wolinetz.
But the NIH leadership did not convene either of these panels last year as the agency cut thousands of projects on disfavoured topics and reduced the autonomy of each of its institutes by centralizing peer review and other administrative functions.
Wolinetz says that it’s smart to consider, on a semi-regular basis, whether each committee is still serving its purpose and justifying its taxpayer cost; some panels can become obsolete “vestiges”, she says.
But by terminating so many committees and not consulting others, Wolinetz says the federal government loses a crucial mechanism for ensuring that its decision-making is transparent and subject to scrutiny, including by the public. Advisory committees act as a “locus of public engagement that federal agencies can’t do on their own” about issues the government is grappling with, she says. The actions seem at odds with the ‘radical transparency’ at HHS that is a stated policy goal of health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr, she says.
She also worries about cases in which the Trump administration has not terminated committees — but instead drastically changed them.
For example, last June, Kennedy abruptly fired all 17 members of ACIP, the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s premier vaccine advisory panel. Claiming that the panel was plagued by conflicts of interest and acted as a “rubber stamp” for the pharmaceutical industry, Kennedy reconstituted the committee with appointees whom, he argued, would bring outsider scrutiny. However, scientists and medical organizations contend that some of the new members have a history of promoting vaccine scepticism, a position long held by Kennedy.
The American Academy of Pediatrics (AAP) sued the HHS over its changes to ACIP. In March, a federal judge temporary halted the installation of Kennedy’s picks for ACIP, ruling that the selections probably violated federal law requiring that such panels be fairly balanced in terms of expertise and viewpoints. The HHS later revised ACIP’s charter to broaden its scope and focus on the risks of vaccines.
Kennedy also overhauled the HHS’s Interagency Autism Coordinating Committee, terminating its existing members and appointing a slate of new ones. The new slate has drawn criticism from some autism researchers who argue that it includes people who are aligned with Kennedy’s disproven claims that autism is a preventable condition linked to vaccines and environmental toxins.
These reconstituted committees were not “formulated in the traditional highly vetted manner” outlined in each panel’s charter, Wolinetz says. Instead, they seem to be “constituted to support particular predetermined points of view” and are being “used to certify policy actions the administration wants to take”, she adds.
Emily Hilliard, an HHS spokesperson, told Nature that the agency’s actions were in accordance with a White House order to terminate unnecessary advisory committees, adding that “these previous committees allowed the United States to remain the sickest developed nation despite spending $4.5 trillion annually on health care, driving unsustainable debt and worsening health outcomes.” The HHS will continue to convene committees as necessary, she added.
The HHS did not respond to requests for comment about other issues, such as criticisms of the way the agency changed the composition of the vaccine and autism panels.
Loss at the NSF
The NSF, which is the premier US funder of fundamental research across all areas of science and engineering, also sharply restricted its advice pipeline last year by terminating 14 of its 52 advisory committees. These had provided the agency with advice in areas such as engineering, cybersecurity and geosciences. (All but one of the panels that review grant applications for the NSF remain active.)
Meza served on one of these terminated bodies, the Advisory Committee for Mathematics and Physical Sciences, and was also an NSF programme officer from 2018 until he left in 2022. He says that such panels can provide valuable information to agencies; for example, the committee he served on informed the NSF that the research community had concerns about the lack of support for mid-sized laboratories. Heeding the advice, the NSF established the Mid-scale Research Infrastructure opportunity in 2016 to support what it called “a ‘sweet spot’ for science and engineering that has been challenging to fund through traditional NSF programs”.
The NSF declined to comment on the criticisms about the changes in its advisory committees.
Consolidation at DOE
Last August, the DOE terminated six FACA panels that provided advice in areas such as high-energy physics, scientific computing, and biological and environmental research. The DOE has since consolidated these discipline-specific panels into one overarching body called the Office of Science Advisory Committee (SCAC).
Meza, who served on the terminated Advanced Scientific Computing Advisory Committee, worries about the loss of specific expertise. “How good is the advice coming from a committee of people that probably only have passing knowledge of some of the areas?” he asks.
Persis Drell, chair of the SCAC and a physicist at Stanford University in California, acknowledges the worries researchers have raised. “In a time of turbulent change, I totally understand all of the concerns that are in the community,” she says. Drell adds that she hopes to reassure the scientific community that the SCAC is listening and is serious about helping science at the DOE. “I have two goals: one of them is to ensure that we have a strong basic science foundation and the other is that we are able to make progress on the strategic pillars that the administration has put forward,” she says.
Iranian Group Submits Evidence of US-Israeli War Crimes to International Criminal Court.
“All cases of attacks on civilians are being legally pursued based on the Geneva Conventions,” said the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society.
Jake Johnson, Apr 26, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/news/iran-us-war-crimes
The head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society said Saturday that his organization has submitted evidence of US-Israeli war crimes to the International Criminal Court and other global bodies, seeking accountability for massive attacks on civilian infrastructure and other violations.
“The ICC prosecutor announced that the documents provided by the IRCS are accepted as official evidence,” said Pir-Hossein Koulivand, the head of the Iranian Red Crescent Society. “All cases of attacks on civilians are being legally pursued based on the Geneva Conventions.”
The IRCS estimates that US and Israeli airstrikes have destroyed more than 132,000 civilian structures throughout Iran, including hospitals, apartment buildings, universities, research facilities, and bridges. US President Donald Trump has repeatedly threatened to destroy all of Iran’s bridges and power plants if the country’s leadership does not succumb to his administration’s demands in negotiations to end the war.
Luis Moreno Ocampo, the founding chief prosecutor of the ICC, said earlier this month that Trump could be indicted if he follows through on his threats.
“My suggestion: You read the indictment of the Russians, change the name, and it is very similar,” said Ocampo, referring to ICC arrest warrants issued against senior Russian officials in 2024 for alleged war crimes in Ukraine.
In a series of social media posts on Saturday, the IRCS provided video footage and photographic evidence of what the group described as war crimes committed by the US and Israeli militaries.
“Among the most bitter war crimes of America and Israel in Iran is the attack on the home of 19-month-old Helma in Tabriz, in which four members of her family were martyred,” the IRCS wrote Saturday. “The only survivor of this family is Helma.”
The ICC is tasked with investigating and prosecuting individuals for war crimes, crimes against humanity, and other grave violations of international law. Iran is not currently a party to the Rome Statute, which established the ICC—so the court does not have jurisdiction over war crimes committed on Iranian territory.
Human rights organizations and advocates have implored Iran to grant the ICC jurisdiction to pursue justice for war crimes committed during the illegal US-Israeli assault that began on February 28. On the first day of the war, the US bombed an elementary school in southern Iran.
“From the killing of over 150 students and teachers to strikes on hospitals full of newborns, every day more and more evidence emerges pointing to the commission of grave war crimes in Iran since the start of the war,” said Omar Shakir, executive director of DAWN. “Victims deserve justice. The mechanisms exist, and the US has no veto over them.”
Kenneth Roth, former executive director of Human Rights Watch, wrote earlier this month that “the Iranian government could join the court now and grant it retroactive jurisdiction, similar to what Ukraine did to allow prosecution of Russian war crimes.”
Last month, the IRCS formally requested that the ICC initiate “an investigation into war crimes arising from attacks by the United States of America and the Israeli regime against civilian objects.”
“According to field reports from relief workers, operational documentation, and data recorded by the Iranian Red Crescent Society, a wide range of residential areas, medical facilities, schools, humanitarian facilities, vital urban infrastructure, and public places were directly or indiscriminately targeted during the recent military attacks,” the group wrote in a letter to the ICC’s top prosecutor.
Israel: The most dangerous nation on Earth
By George Grundy | 22 April 2026, https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/israel-the-most-dangerous-nation-on-earth,20955
Israel’s escalating actions and influence over U.S. policy are framed as the trigger for a global crisis, with Australia set to bear the economic fallout, writes George Grundy.een enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
“The [IDF] is the most moral army in the world” ~ Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu.
‘I have seen enough to say it with absolute certainty: the Israeli army is the most depraved army’ ~ Francesca Albanese, UN Special Rapporteur.
Benjamin Netanyahu’s influence over U.S. President Donald Trump may be the defining reason why America made the catastrophic decision to go to war with Iran, which is why the Strait of Hormuz remains closed, which in turn explains why Australia seems poised to experience an unprecedented oil shock.
Many economists forecast that our economy is about to grind to a halt, perhaps for months, so Australians must be clear-eyed about the role Israel has played in this disaster.
The prevailing view in Western politics, media and society has, for many decades, been that the Middle East is a “tough neighbourhood” (implicitly absolving Israel of blame for its occasional bouts of brutality), and an assumption that the “only democracy in the region” was committed to peace and, ultimately, a two-state solution with the Palestinians.
This was and remains an absolute fiction. Even the most casual glance at a map showing the shrinking landmass of Gaza and the West Bank (particularly since 1967) makes clear that the two-state solution was a lie, a fig-leaf allowing successive Israeli governments to expand territory and further immiserate the hapless Palestinians.
Yet what was an ongoing and immoral delusion moved from disaster to catastrophe, following the atrocious attack by Hamas in October 2023. Prime Minister Netanyahu appears to have viewed the atrocity as an opportunity to implement the long-held Zionist goal of establishing a “Greater Israel”, the first stage of which was to be the complete obliteration of Gaza.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese has attempted to walk a fine line in his relations with Israel, recognising a Palestinian state but risking significant political damage by inviting Israel’s President to our shores.
Albanese’s clinging to established international dogma, whilst a betrayal of his past beliefs, might be acceptable in earlier times, but global tectonic plates are shifting at a pace unmatched since perhaps 1945.
Australians of all political persuasions should rightly consider whether Israel is indeed a moral player on the world stage and whether our country should continue to align itself with a regime that has:
- Used snipers to deliberately target infants and children in Gaza, killing thousands and creating the largest group of childhood amputees in modern history. Israel has subsequently blocked the distribution of prosthetic limbs for survivors.
- Dropped bombs on civilians sheltering in tents, burning people alive. An Australian doctor said she delivered a baby by C-section from a nine-month pregnant woman with no head, following an Israeli strike. In late 2023, the IDF forced staff out of a Gaza hospital at gunpoint and left newborn babies to starve and die. Every hospital in the territory has now been destroyed.
- Killed at least 80,000 in Gaza (the true number is probably much higher), targeting children, medical and power facilities, schools, mosques, hospitals and ambulances, water purification, journalists and civic leaders, whilst stopping nearly all aid and medicine from entering — actions clearly aimed at devastating every aspect of civil society and starving the population. A genocide, in other words.
- Attacked and killed UN peacekeepers in Lebanon. Used banned white phosphorous and cluster munitions while destroying countless villages, and carried out clear acts of ethnic cleansing that have left over a million people displaced, including around 370,000 children. Oxfam has stated that Israeli tactics used in Gaza are now being exported to Lebanon, a nation now suffering one of the world’s worst humanitarian crises on Earth.
- Tortured and murdered Palestinian children. The IDF buried captured Palestinian children alive in mass graves, after tying their hands behind their backs. An 18-month-old Palestinian child recently taken into custody by the IDF was returned with cigarette burns on its legs, having been tortured to get a confession from its father.
- Institutionalised the practice of “double tap” attacks, whereby an initial bombing is followed by subsequent attacks on the same location, killing first responders and medics. Just last week, Israel carried out a “quadruple tap” in southern Lebanon, killing those trying to help the injured over and over again.
- Trained and used dogs to rape Palestinian detainees and prisoners (according to B’Tselem and EuroMed Human Rights Monitor). In fact, sexual torture of Palestinians is so widespread that it has been described as “organised state policy”. One UN report highlighted the use of rape with bottles, metal rods and knives.
This is far from an exhaustive list. There is much, much more, often filled with unimaginable horror and moral degeneracy. As defined by Australian law, Israel is a terrorist state and carries out war crimes and grave violations of international humanitarian law almost daily.
Recently, Israel passed a law allowing capital punishment for Palestinians found guilty of “terrorism-related” crimes (which, given how Israel practices law against Palestinians, could mean nearly anything). The law only applies to Palestinians — an Israeli convicted of the same crime is not subject to it, and judgment will be carried out by martial law, with no due process, clemency or appeal process.
National Security Minister Itamar Ben-Gvir proudly posted a video of the proposed execution chamber in which convicted Palestinians will be hanged. Armed Israeli forces have begun the practice of putting numbers on the hands of displaced Palestinians in the West Bank.
As the IDF has advanced across southern Lebanon, they have explicitly warned Christian and Druze leaders not to harbour Shiite Muslims in their homes — Jewish troops forcing one particular religious group of people out of Lebanese society, potentially searching for them in their attics. Anyone with a knowledge of history should see the historical resonance of these monstrous practices.
Race-based execution laws, genocidal destruction, institutionalised rape, pogroms in the West Bank, military expansion in nearly all directions. A network of at least 16 torture camps, where thousands are held, often without charge. Were it not such a forbidden comparison, we might spot similarities to another fascist regime in the 1930s.
Those making the connection are hardly from the fringe. Almost half of Britons in one poll said they believed Israel treats Palestinians like the Nazis treated the Jews. Ehud Olmert, a former Prime Minister of Israel, signed a letter describing settler violence in the West Bank as ‘Jewish terrorism’.
Political scientist John Mearsheimer recently said:
“If there were Nuremberg trials, right, where the Israelis and the Americans were brought before the court, President Trump, along with President Netanyahu and many of their advisors, would be hanged.”
Imagine this horror was being carried out by any nation on Earth not named Israel. Ask yourself what poses the greater threat — Iran, which until Trump tore up the JCPOA agreement was clearly not developing a nuclear bomb, or Israel, wildly attacking everyone in sight, led by a genuine maniac and possessors of the world’s only undeclared nuclear arsenal.
Far from operating the most moral army in the world, overwhelming evidence shows that Israel is now an entirely rogue state, raping, starving, torturing and murdering its prisoners, bombing its neighbours indiscriminately, annexing nearby territory and goading its patron, America, into actions that could easily lead us to a new world war.
Israel is hardly shy about its intentions. Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich recently gave a speech in which he said, “There will be expansion in Gaza that will extend our borders. In Lebanon, to the Litani, in Syria, Mount Hermon, parts of the north, south, and east.” This would represent a “Greater Israel” plan, stretching (one might say) from the river (Litani) to the (Mediterranean) sea.
Such is the insanity of the time in which we live that voicing this same expression in Queensland will land you in prison, while it is so widely used by Israeli politicians that it’s literally in the Twitter (X) bio of the Prime Minister’s son.
Yet, despite heartening protests in Tel Aviv, poll after poll shows that a majority of Israelis support this endless militarism. Young Israelis are more right-wing, religious and conservative than their elders. An eventual end to Netanyahu’s appalling leadership seems unlikely to reform Israeli society.
An unprecedented oil shock is nearly at Australia’s shores. It’s likely to be the most devastating event for this country since the Second World War and when it arrives, Australians should remember that the crisis originated in the White House situation room on 11 February, when Netanyahu finally convinced a gullible American president to carry out his decades-long wish for an attack on Iran.
Benjamin Netanyahu is a violent extremist, a fugitive from justice at the International Criminal Court, who cannot enter even the commercial airspace of many countries for fear of arrest. It was Netanyahu who convinced Trump to catastrophically withdraw from the JCPOA, Israel that is primarily responsible for the catastrophe currently re-shaping our world and Israel who will be culpable, should a worldwide famine ensue.
Israel is the single greatest threat to world peace today. The past comfy assumptions about global partnerships are gone. Australia should join the growing list of nations that want nothing to do with this belligerent, fascistic country.
Inside the bizarre race to secure Earth’s nuclear tombs
Our generation must find a way to bury the waste very deep to avoid radioactive pollution or exposure to people and animals up to one million years into the future.”
With nuclear energy production increasing globally, the problem of what to do with the waste demands a solution. But where do you store something that stays dangerous for thousands of years?
Jheni Osman, Science Focus, May 1, 2026
Uniformed guards with holstered guns stand at the entrance and watch you lumber past. Ahead lies a wasteland of barren metal gantries, dormant chimney stacks and abandoned equipment.
You trudge towards the ruins of a large, derelict red-brick building. Your white hazmat suit and heavy steel-toe-capped boots make it difficult to walk. Your hands are encased in a double layer of gloves, your face protected by a particulate-filtering breathing mask. Not an inch of flesh is left exposed.
Peering into the building’s gloomy interior, the beam from your head torch picks out machinery and vats turned orange with rust. On a wall nearby, a yellow warning sign featuring a black circle flanked by three black blades reminds you of the danger lurking inside.
Apart from the sound of your own breathing behind your mask, the only thing you can hear is the crackling popcorn of your Geiger counter.
This is what entering the Prydniprovsky Chemical Plant is like for nuclear researchers, including Tom Scott, professor of materials at the University of Bristol and head of the UK Government’s Nuclear Threat Reduction Network.
Prydniprovsky was once a large Soviet materials and chemicals processing site on the outskirts of Kamianske in central Ukraine. Between 1948 and 1991, it processed uranium and thorium ore into concentrate, generating tens of millions of tonnes of low-level radioactive waste.
When the Soviet Union dissolved, Prydniprovsky was abandoned and fell into disrepair.
“The buildings are impressively awful and not for the faint-hearted,” says Scott. “As well as physical hazards, such as gaping holes in the floor, there’s no light or power. And obviously there are radiological hazards. Until very recently, the Ukrainian Government didn’t have a clue what had gone on at the site, so there were concerns about the high radiation levels and ground contamination.”…………………………………”
Scott and his team are known as industrial nuclear archaeologists, and they’re working to find, characterise and quantify the ‘legacy’ radioactive waste at sites around the world.
“High-level radioactive waste gives off a significant amount of radioactivity, sufficient to make humans sick if they get too close,” he says. “Some of this waste will be dangerously radioactive for very long periods of time, meaning that it needs to be physically kept away from people and the environment to ensure that no harm is caused.”
But finding legacy waste like this, which has been amassing since the 1940s, is only part of the challenge. Once it’s been found, it has to be isolated and stored long enough for it to no longer pose a threat. And that’s not easy.
“Currently we’re storing our high-level wastes above ground in secure, shielded facilities,” Scott says. “Such facilities need to be replaced every so often because buildings and concrete structures can’t last indefinitely.”
Safely storing the nuclear waste that already exists is only the start of the problem, however. With the world moving away from fossil fuels towards low-carbon alternatives, nuclear energy production is set to increase, which means more waste is going to be produced – a lot more……………………………………………………
Safe spaces
In the UK, most nuclear waste is currently sent to Sellafield, a sprawling site in Cumbria, in the north-west of England, with about 11,000 employees, its own road and railway network, a special laundry service for contaminated clothes and a dedicated, armed police force (the Civil Nuclear Constabulary).
Sellafield processes and stores more radioactive waste than anywhere in the world.
But more hazardous material is on the way, much of which will come from the new nuclear power station being built at Hinckley Point in Somerset. To keep pace, experts have been hunting for other, much stranger, disposal solutions.
t’s a challenge for nuclear agencies all around the world. All sorts of proposals have been put forward, including some bizarre ideas like firing nuclear waste into space. (The potential risk of a launch failure showering the planet with nuclear debris has silenced that proposal’s supporters.)
So far, the most plausible solution is putting the waste in special containers and storing them 200–1,000m (660–3,280ft) underground in geological disposal facilities (GDFs). Eventually, these GDFs would be closed and sealed shut to avoid any human intrusion.
These ‘nuclear tombs’ are the safest, most secure option for the long-term and minimise the burden on future generations.
“In the UK, around 90 per cent of the volume of our legacy waste can be disposed of at surface facilities, but there’s about 10 per cent that we don’t currently have a disposal facility for. The solution is internationally accepted as being GDFs,” says Dr Robert Winsley, design authority lead at the UK’s Nuclear Waste Services.
“We estimate that about 90 per cent of the radioactive material in our inventory will decay in the first 1,000 years or so. But a portion of that inventory will remain hazardous for much longer – tens of thousands, even hundreds of thousands of years.
“GDFs use engineered barriers to work alongside the natural barrier of stable rock. This multi-barrier approach isolates and contains waste, ensuring no radioactivity ever comes back to the surface in levels that could do harm.”
But how do you keep that radioactivity in the ground? Radioactive waste is typically classified as either low-, intermediate- or high-level waste………………………………………………………………………………..
Rock solid
The hunt is also on to find facilities with bedrock that can withstand events such as wars and natural disasters (‘short-term challenges’, geologically speaking). Sites that won’t change dramatically over the millennia needed for nuclear waste to no longer pose a risk.
“A misconception is that we’re looking for an environment that doesn’t change, but the reality is the planet does change, very slowly,” says Stuart Haszeldine, professor of carbon capture and storage at the University of Edinburgh.
“Our generation must find a way to bury the waste very deep to avoid radioactive pollution or exposure to people and animals up to one million years into the future.”
To achieve this, the site ideally needs to be below sea level. If it’s above sea level, rainwater seeping down through fractures in the rock around the site might become radioactive and eventually find its way to the sea.
When this radioactive freshwater meets the denser saltwater, it’ll float upwards, posing a risk to anything in the water above.
Another challenge is predicting future glaciations, which happen roughly once every 100,000 years. During such a period, the sort of glaciers that cut the valleys in today’s landscape could form again, gouging new troughs in the bedrock that might breach an underground disposal facility.
“Accurate and reliable future predictions depend on how well you understand the past,” says Haszeldine.
“Typically, repository safety assessments cover a one-million-year timeframe, and regulations require a GDF site to cause fewer than one human death in a million for the next million years. Exploration doesn’t search for a single best site to retain radioactive waste, but one that’s good enough to fulfil these regulations.”
Hiding places……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Hide and seek
But even after you’ve found a suitable site and buried the radioactive material safely inside it, you still need to warn future generations about what’s hidden inside.
The trouble is, even if humans are still around in a million years’ time, there’s no guarantee the languages our ancestors speak, or the symbols they use, will be anything like those of today…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://www.sciencefocus.com/planet-earth/inside-the-bizarre-race-to-secure-earths-nuclear-tombs
Obliteration Ecocide from Gaza to Lebanon and Beyond
1 May 2026 AIMN Editorial, By Dr Dan Steinbock
Lebanon accuses Israel of committing ecocide in country since 2023. It is an extension of Israel’s destruction of Gaza – and its obliteration doctrine.
Israeli military aggression has “reshaped both the physical and ecological landscape” of southern Lebanon, according to the Lebanese report (which does not consider the impacts of Israel’s latest barrage of attacks this spring).
In her foreword, Lebanon’s minister for the environment Tamara el Zein notes: “The scale and intentionality of the damage to forests, agricultural lands, marine ecosystems, water resources, and atmospheric quality constitute what must be recognized as an act of ecocide, with consequences that extend far beyond immediate destruction.”
Obliteration ecocide in Lebanon
Released by the country’s National Council for Scientific Research and presented by the environment ministry, the report accuses Israel of “ecocide” during the 2023–2024 war and subsequent escalations. It frames environmental destruction not as incidental “collateral damage” but as systematic transformation of ecosystems.
Key findings are damning. They include:
- 5,000 hectares of forest destroyed
- Massive agricultural losses ($118m direct infrastructure damage; much larger indirect losses)
- Soil contamination (including high phosphorus levels)
- Air pollution from repeated strike cycles
- Destruction of orchards and irrigation systems
Minister el Zein characterizes this as “intentional ecological destruction” affecting food systems, public health, and long-term viability of southern Lebanon’s rural economy.
International reporting on the same dossier highlights an estimated total damage burden of over $25 billion when recovery costs and economic losses are included. The figure is a combined total from the assessments by the Lebanese report and the World Bank Rapid Damage and Needs Assessment (RDNA) 2025.
This framing aligns with a growing legal discourse around “ecocide” as a potential international crime, particularly where environmental damage is widespread, long-term, and strategically embedded in military operations.
It is also aligned with UN reporting on the broader Israel–Lebanon escalation confirming extensive infrastructure destruction, civilian displacement, and strikes affecting residential areas.
As the ecocide of Gaza has gone effectively unpunished by the international community, the Netanyahu government is extending the environmental devastation into Lebanon and the proximate region.
Obliteration doctrine in Gaza
In The Obliteration Doctrine (2025), related commentaries and excerpts, I define this doctrine as the lethal mix of scorched earth policy, collective punishment and civilian victimization, coupled with massive indiscriminate bombardment and systematic use of artificial intelligence (AI).
The concept is vital because it connects the dots between military strategies, aerial bombardment, lethal deployment of artificial intelligence (AI) and international law, particularly the Geneva Conventions and the Genocide Convention. As Professor William Schabas, a leading scholar of genocide, notes, “the Obliteration Doctrine” “adds a new term to the lexicon on genocide, notably in the application of international law and its judicial mechanisms.”
Modern warfare in Gaza is no longer just counterinsurgency but systems-level destruction of the environmental and infrastructural substrate of life—water, soil, agriculture, energy, and urban continuity.
This interpretation overlaps with empirical reporting on Gaza’s environmental collapse:
Satellite analysis shows 38–48% of tree cover and farmland destroyed
Severe contamination of soil and groundwater
Large-scale destruction of greenhouses and irrigation systems
Air pollution from sustained bombardment and debris burning
These patterns are described in independent investigations as producing conditions of near-uninhabitability in many parts of Gaza.
Warfare is no longer bounded by battlefield geography. It becomes the restructuring—or “obliteration”—of ecological systems that sustain civilian life.
Ecocide here is not merely destruction of nature, but destruction of life-support systems as purposeful strategy. It is another word for cultural genocide.
Lebanon and the Gaza template
The Lebanese report and international commentary suggest strong structural parallels between Gaza and southern Lebanon operations:…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://theaimn.net/obliteration-ecocide-from-gaza-to-lebanon-and-beyond/
Settler pogroms in Palestine are part of Israel’s illegal expansion policy
Armed colonists burn, beat, and kill with near-total impunity – because their violence serves a larger system of land theft and expulsion
Eva Karene Bartlett, Apr 30, 2026
Almost daily, there are updates on brutal attacks by armed settlers – really, colonists – against Palestinians. The colonists shoot or ferociously beat—sometimes to the point of muder—Palestinian civilians, male and female, young and old, including entire families.
These attacks have been occurring for decades. I’ve written about them many times, including what I saw in different regions of the West Bank during my eight months there in 2007. Back then, the violence of the colonists was already horrific. Now, the attacks are exponentially more frequent. The end goal is clear – drive the Palestinians permanently off their own land.
While many rightly note the increase of such attacks since 2023, and even more so following the Israeli-US attack on Iran, the drastic increase in colonist attacks began in 2021 and has continued to increase up to the present.
In November 2021, the Israeli publication Haaretz noted a 150% rise in settler attacks from 2019. A United Nations Office for the Coordination of Humanitarian Affairs (OCHA) report posted in September 2023 likewise showed an increase in attacks from 2021 and throughout 2022. It noted, “Three settler related incidents per day occurred on average in the first eight months of 2023 compared to an average of two per day in 2022 and one per day the year before. This is the highest daily average of settler-related incidents affecting Palestinians since the UN started recording this data in 2006.”
The independent human rights organization and legal center Adalah reported in October 2023 on new regulations passed by the Israeli Knesset enabling still more Jewish Israelis to acquire and carry guns, an initiative put forth by National Security Minister Ben-Gvir. This is on top of the fact that illegal Jewish colonists have already carried and used guns against Palestinian civilians for decades.
Adalah noted, “By labeling Palestinians as ‘enemies’, Ben-Gvir, who does not conceal his racist views towards Palestinians, seeks to legitimize the blanket impunity granted to both Israel’s armed forces and ruthless Jewish-Israeli vigilantes for killing and injuring Palestinians.”
Arson crimes committed by colonists in recent months include setting fire to homes and vehicles in the southern community of Susiya; to homes in the Jenin region; setting fire to and burning the emergency room of a Palestinian Medical Relief clinic in the Nablus area; torching homes and vehicles in Tayasir village east of Tubas (and slashing open the forehead of a Palestinian resident) – to list just a handful of cases. Back in 2014, colonists kidnapped and deliberately burned a young teenager alive. In 2015, they firebombed a Palestinian home and burned to death a year-old infant inside.
In February, The Cradle reported that Israel’s internal security agency, the Shin Bet, downgraded attacks by Israeli colonists against Palestinian civilians from ‘terror attacks’ to ‘serious incidents’, meaning most crimes, including the arson attacks, are only recorded as “serious incidents.”
In March, swarms of Israeli colonists raided Palestinian villages near an illegal colony between Nablus and Jenin, setting homes, vehicles, and property ablaze, according to Palestinians from the region who also said Israeli forces prevented the entry of firefighters and ambulances.
“Israeli forces’ jeeps came with the settlers. Israeli forces chased people and opend fire on them to ensure they couldn’t fight off the settlers,” an older resident testified.………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The 2021 Haaretz article also cited a senior Israeli security figure saying, “These are not attacks by bored children. You have to call things by their name. In some of the cases it’s simply Jewish terrorism.”
Complete impunity
In April 2026, Haaretz, published an article about how Palestinians who were being endlessly abused by illegal, armed, Jewish settlers’ violent incursions filed a complaint against the colonists, including with video footage of their car. He was detained and released the same day.
The next time the same Palestinians called the police when the same colonists invaded their land, the Israeli police arrested them under the pretext of allegedly “throwing stones” at the colonists. One of the Palestinians was beaten by Israeli soldiers who extinguished cigarettes on his wrist. He was interrogated about having the audacity to film the invading colonists.
Palestinian Christian human rights advocate Ihab Hassan, in an April 2026 post about Israeli colonist attacks, noted, “If a Palestinian tries to defend his home from these terrorists, he will be killed or imprisoned for life. If settlers shoot and kill Palestinians in their own homes, nothing will happen to them. What should we call a system that punishes victims and grants criminals full impunity based on religion, race, and nationality?”
Indeed, in April, Israeli human rights NGO B’Tselem reported on an Israeli colonist invasion of a Palestinian village “as part of ongoing efforts to take it over,” noting, “Residents who tried to fend them off with stones came under heavy fire from a settler on military reserve duty who joined his friends as reinforcement. One of the bullets fatally hit Ali Hamadneh, 23, in the back while he was running away and posed no danger, as is evident in footage of the incident.”
B’Tselem noted that the Israeli army spokesperson later claimed that a reservist soldier carried out a “suspect-arrest procedure that included firing in the air and then firing at one of the stone-throwers.”
In March, after an Israeli colonist ran over a five year old Palestinian child, seriously injuring her, police then detained three solidarity activists, not arresting the colonist who had hit the girl……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. https://evakarenebartlett.substack.com/p/settler-pogroms-in-palestine-are?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=3046064&post_id=195969004&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
‘Fish disco’ not enough to protect nature at nuclear plant, says green quango.
Natural England demands new salt marshes be created before Hinkley Point C can open
Matt Oliver, Industry Editor
The Hinkley Point C nuclear power station is facing fresh
delays as a green quango demands extra nature protections on top of a
controversial “fish disco”. Natural England has told developer EDF that
existing plans to stop aquatic life in the Severn Estuary from being sucked
into the Somerset plant’s cooling pipes will not be enough to satisfy
environmental rules.
The company had proposed using £700m of special
equipment to ward off fish, including a bespoke underwater loudspeaker
system which campaigners have called the “fish disco”. EDF provided new
research data to regulators in February following promising trials of the
technology, formally known as the acoustic fish deterrent, by university
scientists.
But in recent weeks, Natural England is understood to have
claimed that further protections are necessary, such as the creation of new
salt marshes to boost fish populations in the area. The quango is refusing
to sign off the plant until new plans are set out and approved.
It has prompted concern that Hinkley’s targeted 2030 opening date is now
effectively impossible to deliver, owing to the time it will take to win
approval for and build the new salt marshes. Sam Richards, the chief
executive of Britain Remade, a Right-leaning think tank, said: “Hinkley
Point C is already the most expensive nuclear power station ever built.
“It also has more fish protection measures than any reactor built
anywhere in the world. “For Natural England to now demand even more
mitigation – regardless of the wider impact on the project and for
minimal added benefit to nature – shows just how out of touch with
reality they really are. “This out of control quango has become a direct
threat to Britain’s energy security.”
Telegraph 2nd May 2026, https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2026/05/02/fish-disco-not-enough-to-protect-nature-at-nuclear-plant/
Unfounded Health Concerns Are Powering a Solar Backlash
SCHEERPOST, April 26, 2026
Kevin Heath had hoped there would be solar panels by now on his family farm in southeastern Michigan, roughly 50 miles outside Detroit.
About six years ago, he agreed to lease part of his land for a solar project. It would help him pay off debt and keep the farm in the family, he said. But the opportunity was thwarted when, in 2023, following pushback from some local residents, his township passed an ordinance that banned large solar projects from land zoned for agriculture.
In the fight over solar development, Heath said he was bombarded by just about every argument from critics — including claims that solar fields are a health hazard. “I’ve heard them say that, but I’ve never heard anybody prove that,” Heath said.
“The health and safety issue,” he added, “that is just a joke.”
Michigan has big prospects in solar farming — measured by the expected growth in the capacity of its farms to add electricity directly to the grid. According to the U.S. Energy Information Administration, most of the nation’s new capacity from this type of solar farm is planned this year for four states, including Michigan. The others, with their hot deserts and big-sky plains, seem more obvious: Texas, Arizona and California.
To some, in Michigan and beyond, this growth feels dangerous. They pressure public officials to stop, stall or otherwise complicate new solar projects with an array of arguments that now go beyond just land use to include public health.
There is little reputable evidence to back their claims. But health concerns have helped power a solar backlash that undercuts efforts to broaden energy sources even as customer costs are rising.
Restrictions on solar development are proliferating nationwide, “often rooted in misinformation or unfounded fears,” including ones that involve “potential environmental and human safety risks,” according to an article published late last year in the Brigham Young University Law Review.
To generate electricity, solar projects harvest energy from the sun. “And that’s really not that different from what a field of corn or alfalfa does,” said Troy Rule, the Arizona State University law professor who authored the article. “In fact, arguably, it’s even more environmentally friendly.”
Still, a state board in Ohio rejected an application for a solar project last month, citing local opposition, even though its staff initially said it met all requirements. Along with other concerns, according to the board, opponents “testified about the potential impacts on the health of residents.”
A bill in Missouri would halt commercial solar projects in the state, including those under construction, through at least 2027, as a state agency develops new regulations. The bill’s emergency clause says this is “deemed necessary for the immediate preservation of the public health, welfare, peace, and safety.”
And, on the eastern edge of Michigan, St. Clair County adopted a novel public health regulation last year that set limits on solar development and battery storage. The move was encouraged by the county’s medical director who, in a memo, warned of the threat of noise, visual pollution and potential sources of contamination. Some local residents have long pressed leaders to act, saying that intrusive noise could worsen post-traumatic stress disorder and other ailments.
Public officials don’t always examine the validity of health claims, according to Rule. And local deliberations rarely compare the impact of solar farms to common agricultural practices, which can lead to runoff from fertilizers and herbicides, for example, or waste lagoons from concentrated animal feeding operations.
People have many reasons for taking issue with large-scale solar development, said Michael Gerrard, an environmental lawyer and founder of Columbia University’s Sabin Center for Climate Change Law. But as for the feared health impact, he said, “there’s no basis for that.”
“People try to come up with a rationale to justify their dislike of things they dislike for other reasons,” Gerrard added.
President Donald Trump’s administration, meanwhile, is adding to the skepticism that renewable energy is worthwhile. Among other moves, it’s phasing out federal tax credits for the solar and wind industries.
It all takes a toll on the effort to build out solar infrastructure. Last year, new solar installations in the U.S. dropped by 14%.
Fear vs. Science
Large solar developments can transform hundreds, or even thousands, of acres of rural land, paneling them with crystalline silicon and tempered glass.
It’s a big change, and people have questions.
Locals worry that electromagnetism and even glare can pose a health risk. They wonder if toxic materials could leach into the soil and contaminate groundwater, if not while the solar site is operational, then some decades in the future, when it reaches the end of its life. That certainly has been the case with orphaned oil wells, which also were built with promises of safety.
But researchers point out that the most common types of panels have only small amounts of such materials, if any. They are encased and unlikely to leach into the soil. Rather than sitting in landfills when a site is decommissioned, most of the materials used in solar panels can be recycled (though the process can be costly).
Craig Adair, vice president of development at Open Road Renewables, which has pursued renewable energy projects in several states, has fielded a range of concerns over the years — from how soil could be contaminated to the possibility of electromagnetic fields causing cancer.
“Those questions, in just about every case, have an answer,” Adair said. “There is rigorous academic study, and there are examples of projects that have been operating.”
While the future farmability of the land is often a concern, many researchers — and farmers — say that a solar lease will help preserve it.
With proper planning on the front end, equipment can be removed from a decommissioned solar site and green space restored, said Steve Kalland, executive director of the NC Clean Energy Technology Center, which, along with its partners, provides technical assistance to local governments in the Carolinas.
And a person’s exposure to the electromagnetic field, or EMF, from a solar farm is roughly the same as what they would encounter from ordinary household appliances, according to researchers. EMF levels also decrease rapidly with distance.
Chronic exposure to noise is also a recurring complaint from critics. In challenging a proposed project from Adair’s company in Morrow County, Ohio, one woman said in a brief to the state siting board that she was troubled about how noise from the facility might affect people with neurological noise sensitivities, including her daughter………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
Intense Battles in Michigan
In Michigan’s St. Clair County, it isn’t just a number of residents who are worried about large solar facilities. The Health Department’s medical director echoed their concerns.
In two memos to other county officials, Dr. Remington Nevin said that large solar sites are a public health risk for the area’s predominantly rural residents. The state’s solar standards, he wrote, weren’t enough to protect them from “environmental health hazards, the spread of sources of contamination, nuisance potentially injurious to the public health, health problems, and other conditions or practices which could reasonably be expected to cause disease.”
Any detectable tonal noise, he added, must be considered an unreasonable threat to public health. He recommended new regulations.
The county administrator at the time, Karry Hepting, noted that Nevin’s initial memo “does not address the question or provide support for what are the potential health/environmental risks,” according to internal emails provided to ProPublica. “It appears we will need to hire an outside expert to get the level of detail and supporting data necessary to consider potential next steps,” she added. Hepting said that she’d begun researching prospects.
But County Commissioner Steven Simasko — now the county board’s chair — wrote in an internal email that he accepted Nevin’s medical opinion “as a good standard for the protection of the public health of our citizens” and disagreed with the need for outside input.
Simasko told ProPublica in an email that he believed it wasn’t the role of the administrator to get involved in a public health matter, and that he objected “to essentially paying for a second public health medical opinion” more to Hepting’s liking.
Hepting, who has since retired from her post at the county, disputed Simasko’s depiction of her motivations in a message to ProPublica. “Nothing could be farther from the truth,” she wrote. “It had nothing to do with shopping for a different opinion. Mr. Nevin’s initial memo did not address the initial question posed by the Board. It did not state what the health risks were and what negative health impacts exist. It basically said it’s a risk because he said so.”
To legally justify the adoption of health regulations, Nevin said in his second memo, it wasn’t necessary for his department “to prove, with a precise scientific or medical rationale, that eligible facilities pose an unreasonable threat to the public’s health.” Instead, expert opinion, public comment and the consent of the local government were reason enough, he wrote.
In the end, county officials were persuaded to act. The commissioners approved the Health Department’s new policy for solar energy and battery facilities, including a nonrefundable $25,000 fee to cover the cost of reviewing a proposed project. It also said that policy violations were punishable by up to six months in prison.
An electric utility promptly sued, and a solar company joined the case. The Health Department, they argued, has no authority to issue what are, in effect, zoning regulations. What’s more, they said in legal filings, the county can’t override the solar standards established by the state………………………………………………..
Solar capacity in Michigan continues to grow, despite local pushback, but so far, only 2.55% of the state’s electricity comes from solar. In Ohio, it’s nearly 6%, according to the Solar Energy Industries Association, a trade group. In Texas, it’s nearly 11%. Michigan is requiring electricity providers to reach an 80% clean energy portfolio by 2035, and 100% by 2040.
Michigan has more local restrictions on renewable energy than any other state, according to the Sabin Center. “Practically nowhere in the country has seen more conflict” about where to allow large solar farms that add electricity directly to the grid than rural Michigan, according to a 2024 article in the Case Western Reserve Law Review authored by a Sabin Center senior fellow………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/26/unfounded-health-concerns-are-powering-a-solar-backlash/
Why Expanded Plutonium Pit Production is Wrong.
30 April 26, https://nukewatch.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/04/Primer-Pit-Production-is-Wrong.pdf
The Department of Energy’s (DOE’s) semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is aggressively expanding the production of plutonium pits, the radioactive cores or “triggers” of nuclear weapons. Their production has been the choke point of resumed industrial-scale U.S. nuclear weapons production ever since a 1989 FBI raid investigating environmental crimes shut down the Rocky Flats Plant near Denver.
In 1996 production was transferred back to the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico, but capped at no more than 20 pits per year. In 2018 NNSA declared it would produce at least 30 pits per year at LANL and 50 per year at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. NNSA now plans to produce up to 205 pits every year for the new arms race.
| Expanded plutonium pit bomb core production is wrong because: |
| • No future production is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, tested stockpile. New pits are for new nuclear weapons designs, specifically the W87-1 ICBM and the W93 sub-launched warheads. New designs can’t be tested under the global testing moratorium, thereby perhaps degrading stockpile confidence. Or the U.S. could resume testing, after which other countries would surely follow. • There are existing, lasting pits. An expert 2006 study showed most pit types have minimum lives over 100 years and those that don’t have clear fixes. A 2012 study reaffirmed that. Pits are now around 43 years old. More than 15,000 existing pits are already stored at NNSA’s Pantex Plant near Amarillo, TX. • Pit production is NNSA’s most expensive program ever, with $5 billion to be spent over each of the next six years and at least $60 billion over the next 20 years. However, the independent Government Accountability Office has repeatedly found that NNSA has no credible cost estimates. • The rad waste problem: The New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) is demanding that DOE prioritize LANL’s Cold War wastes for disposal at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in southern New Mexico instead of new plutonium pit bomb wastes. NMED is also requiring DOE to look for a new out-of-state dump. In short, there is no certain path for the safe disposal of future radioactive bomb wastes. • LANL’s existing limited pit production capability should be sufficient should stockpile problems arise in the future. It should not be expanded. Pit production at SRS should be vigorously opposed because it could be scaled up way beyond LANL for the new nuclear arms race. In addition, DOE is legally required to remove plutonium from South Carolina, not add plutonium because of pit production • LANL’s pit production facility is outdated and unsafe: Known as “PF-4,” it is 48 years old, not designed for mass production, and has a long history of nuclear safety infractions. Moreover, DOE is “deferring” comprehensive cleanup at the Lab until pit production is done (which in effect means never). • DOE ordered a “special assessment” of NNSA’s troubled pit production program scheduled for completion in mid-December 2025. It is being covered up and should be immediately released. • Planned plutonium pit production for the next 50 years violates the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty’s requirement for nuclear weapons states to enter into negotiations leading to disarmament. • NNSA illegally pursued expanded pit production without completing required National Environmental Policy Act review. However, it is being forced to do so by co-plaintiffs’ (including NukeWatch) successful lawsuit. Hearings for a draft Pit Production Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement are being held this May. We strongly encourage concerned citizens to fully participate. |
State Dept. spills the beans…’Bibi made Trump do it’
“the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally”
Walt Zlotow West Suburban Peace Coalition Glen Ellyn IL, 28 Apr 26
Apparently, State Dept. legal advisor Reed Rubinstein didn’t get Trump’s memo to erase Israel’s major involvement in Trump’s failed war on Iran.
It’s bad enough the war is a complete failure, accomplishing none of Trump’s objectives while precipitating global economic decline. If stopped today, it would take months to fully restore the economic calamity engulfing the world. Further delay, currently conducted by Trump desperately seeking an off ramp, spells economic catastrophe.
As horrendous as Trump’s war is, it wasn’t even his idea. Trump was simply following orders from his real boss, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. On February 11, Netanyahu arrived at the White House with Mossad Director David Barnea. They encouraged if not demanded invasion. The Netanyahu-Barnea tag team argued Iran would collapse within a couple of days from a combination of assassinating Iran’s leader Ali Khamenei, massive bombing, Mossad-fomented civil unrest and ground incursions by Kurdish fighters. Not surprisingly, the opposite occurred. The Iranian people rallied around their government in as existential battel to the death. Iran closed the Strait of Hormuz choking off a fifth of world oil supply and inflicted massive damage on Israel and US Gulf States bases with thousands of missiles. The Netanyahu-Barnea presentation was a blizzard of lies Trump swallowed whole in spite of Intelligence assessments to the contrary.
Trump blundered into the biggest military disaster in America’s 250 years. But he refuses to tell the truth Netanyahu made him do it because he must maintain the fiction the war is necessary to protect the Homeland from an imaginary Iranian nuke fired from an imaginary Iranian ICBM. Gifting Netanyahu with a favor to obliterate his arch enemy Iran is not in the US rulebook for allowing 13 US servicepersons killed and over 400 injured in furtherance of a lost war.
Of course anyone following the war knows the sordid truth. Under pressure Trump blatantly lied: “Israel never talked me into the war with Iran. The results of Oct. 7th, added to my lifelong opinion that IRAN CAN NEVER HAVE A NUCLEAR WEAPON. I watch and read the FAKE NEWS Pundits and Polls in total disbelief. 90% of what they say are lies and made up stories, and the polls are rigged, much as the 2020 Presidential Election was rigged.”
But Rubenstein punctured that fiction with this public statement: “As the United States has explained in multiple letters to the UN Security Council, including most recently on March 10, the United States is engaged in this conflict at the request of and in the collective self-defense of its Israeli ally as well as in the exercise of the United States’ own inherent right of self-defense,”
Good grief. Trump launched a failed criminal war blowing up the world economy because he had to enable an ally rid itself of an imaginary threat. Trump forgot Diplomacy 101 which teaches Allies don’t let allies launch criminal wars, much less take the lead in that murder and mayhem.
Reining In The Pentagon – Can the Military-Industrial Beast Be Tamed?
On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”
the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique
Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities.
we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing
William D. Hartung, SCHEERPOST, April 28, 2026
Right at this moment, we are witnessing an unprecedented shift of resources from domestic investments in the United States to the military-industrial complex (aka the war machine). The only comparable period in our history was the buildup to World War II, when the United States confronted a powerful adversary in Nazi Germany with designs to control not just Europe, but the world. The current buildup is breathtaking in scope and will certainly prove devastating in its impact — not just on this country’s foreign and domestic policies but also on the economic prospects of average Americans.
When, in 2023, my colleague Ben Freeman and I first conceived of our book, The Trillion Dollar War Machine, we viewed it in part as a cautionary tale about just how high the Pentagon budget might rise in the years to come (absent pushback from Congress and the taxpaying public). By the time our book came out in November 2025, however, the Pentagon budget had already topped the $1 trillion mark and, only recently, President Trump has proposed to instantly add another $500 billion to that already staggering figure and to do so in a single year’s time. And imagine this: such a proposed increase alone is higher than the total military budget of any other nation on Earth. Mind you, the current high levels of spending have already underwritten a provocative, unnecessary intervention in Venezuela and a region-wide war in the Middle East, and the larger costs of all this in human lives and damage to the global economy are guaranteed to shape the lives of the rest of us globally for years to come.
To add insult to injury, the Pentagon announced that it would seek a $200 billion supplemental appropriation to pay for its war on Iran, which has spread across the Middle East. That $200 billion would have been in addition to the $1.5 billion proposed for the Pentagon’s future budget. According to an analysis by Pentagon budget expert Stephen Semler, the Iran war, which started on February 28th with Israeli and U.S. air strikes on that country, cost the United States more than $28 billion just in its first two weeks. And to put that in perspective, $28 billion is more than three times the Trump administration’s proposed annual budgets for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention and the Environmental Protection Agency (at a time when the climate crisis and the need to head off future pandemics are essential to the health and security of all Americans). Worse yet, it’s all for a completely senseless war that should never have been started.
As President Trump alternates between engaging in negotiations to end the war and threatening to wipe Iran off the map — or even just walking away to bomb another day — there are reports that the supplemental budget request to pay for the war on Iran will shrink from the proposed $200 billion to $98 billion. And that $98 billion will include other things in addition to war costs, including disaster relief and aviation modernization.
The Garrison State and the Reign of the War Profiteers
On the campaign trail in 2024, Donald Trump pledged to drive the “war profiteers” and “war mongers” from Washington, suggesting that they like wars because “missiles cost $2 million each,” while bragging that, in his first term in office, “I had no wars.”
And his rhetoric as the ultimate champion of peace has continued during his second term, even as he has indeed launched reckless wars guaranteed to fill the coffers of the “war profiteers” he railed against on the campaign trail. He has, however, also pledged to help the weapons industry quadruple production of the same sort of “$2 million bombs” he decried during the campaign, plus — even better for the arms makers — missile interceptors that cost up to $12 million each. Worse yet, the demands of the current war on Iran, coupled with support for Israel’s war on Gaza and Ukraine’s efforts to defend itself from Russia, have left the Pentagon and the giant weapons corporations complaining that, if the U.S. doesn’t radically increase its production of artillery shells, bombs, and missiles, the cupboard could soon be bare.
Of course, filling that cupboard again to the tune of staggering sums of money is exactly the wrong solution. The answer to the current munitions shortage is not to further supersize this country’s arms manufacturing base, but to refrain from supplying the weapons used by Israel to commit genocide in Gaza and ethnic cleansing in Lebanon, or to fuel unjustified wars like the current conflict with Iran. The best policy to prevent such stocks of military equipment from running low would, of course, be a more discriminating approach to military aid and a more restrained approach to U.S. foreign policy and war-making (writ large).
Washington should, in fact, put diplomacy first and only engage in military action if there is a genuine threat to the United States itself. We need a smarter policy toward military procurement and military strategy, not the garrison state with its “military-industrial complex” that President Dwight D. Eisenhower warned us against more than six decades ago.
In addition, of course, the Pentagon needs to shift its procurement strategy toward producing more reliable weapons at a more reasonable cost, while avoiding unnecessary complexity so that they can be made more rapidly and spend more time ready to be used and less time down for maintenance. Such a formula was a watchword of the bipartisan congressional military reform caucus of the 1980s, which at one point included more than 100 members of Congress and helped roll back the extremes of the military buildup launched by President Ronald Reagan.
The Diminishing Economic Returns of Pentagon Spending
In a detailed forthcoming study for the Transition Security Project and in her own writings, investigative journalist Taylor Barnes of Inkstick Media has charted the diminishing returns from Pentagon spending. Despite a soaring Pentagon budget, direct jobs in arms production are now one-third of what they were 30 years ago, down from three million then to 1.1 million now, according to the arms industry’s own trade association. Unionization rates in the arms production sector are also down sharply, with some big weapons firms like Northrop Grumman having unionization rates of less than 10%. In keeping with that trend, Lockheed Martin moved the production of its F-16 fighter — a staple of foreign arms exports — to the anti-union state of South Carolina.
Even worse, many states provide special tax breaks and other subsidies to attract or keep weapons factories — and that’s on top of the hundreds of billions the industry receives in federal tax dollars. In Utah, the state government staunchly refused to reveal how many jobs Northrop Grumman had promised in return for state subsidies, with one official claiming it would “compromise” the interests of the company to do so. Meanwhile, Northrop Grumman’s work on the Sentinel, the newest intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM), has been a poster child for dysfunctional weapons development, with the estimated cost of the program as a whole growing by 81% in just a few years. Part of the problem was that Northrop Grumman somehow managed to ignore the fact that its new missile would be too large to fit in existing silos, creating the need for further costly new construction efforts.
The spending of scarce tax revenues goes to ICBMs that former Secretary of Defense William Perry once labeled “one of the most dangerous weapons we have.” After all, a president might literally have only minutes to decide whether to launch them on being warned of a potential enemy attack, greatly increasing the risk of an accidental nuclear war prompted by a false alarm. And there have been many false alarms and nuclear accidents in the nuclear age (even if not yet an actual nuclear attack loosed on the world), as meticulously documented in Eric Schlosser’s essential book Command and Control.
Then there’s the Golden Dome missile “defense” system, a fantasy of President Trump’s that, in reality, could never provide the promised “leakproof” protection against weaponry ranging from ICBMs and hypersonic missiles to low-flying drones. By now, more than 40 years after President Ronald Reagan promised a perfect defense against ICBMs in his 1983 “Star Wars” speech, it should be all too obvious that such a leakproof shield is physically impossible, since enemy ICBMs with nuclear warheads would come in at 15,000 — and no, that is not a misprint! — miles per hour and could be surrounded by large numbers of decoy balloons that would be indistinguishable from a warhead when floating in space. There could be hundreds of such incoming warheads in a full-scale nuclear attack. To even have a chance of intercepting all of them, a defensive system would have to devote as many as 1,600 interceptors to take down incoming missiles. An analysis by the conservative American Enterprise Institute estimates that a full-blown effort to build a comprehensive Golden Dome shield could cost $3.6 trillion just to construct.
In fact, the Golden Dome concept is so delusional that it barely merits a detailed critique, though many such analyses are available. A more reasonable way to deal with it would, of course, be ridicule.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………… Another reason AI-driven weapons may not be as cheap as advertised is that Luckey, Thiel, and their merry band of unhinged techno-optimists want to eliminate virtually any oversight of their activities, whether through independent testing of their new systems or measures to prevent price gouging by unscrupulous contractors. At present, the motto of the military tech sector is “trust me.” I don’t know about you, but I’d prefer to have someone minding the store, so that the tech billionaires don’t simply rob us blind.
Of course, what would it mean if Silicon Valley could deliver cheaper, more deadly advanced weaponry? After all, artificial intelligence systems were indeed used in recent times to accelerate targeting during Israel’s genocidal war on the people of Gaza, and they have been used in President Trump’s disastrous assault on Iran. And neither of those situations has yet had a happy ending. But that’s the point. The truth is we really don’t need ever more new weaponry that kills even faster. We need to stop the killing. And that means blunting the political influence of the warmongers and war profiteers that Donald Trump criticized on the campaign trail in 2024 and then so warmly embraced as president.
And to put all of this in grim perspective, he is now presiding over perhaps the most corrupt, incompetent, repressive regime in the history of this republic. And worse yet, some of his most dismal policies — like unstinting support for Israeli aggression — have, sadly enough, had bipartisan backing in Washington. In short, he has taken what were already some of the worst American policies and accelerated them, even as he destroys positive aspects of the government like the U.S. Agency for International Development’s provision of food, clean water, and public health services abroad or any further engagement in constructive international institutions.
Among other things, he is now narrowing America’s foreign policy options by dismantling civilian tools of statecraft, while doubling down on military approaches that haven’t “won” a war in this century (or the second half of the last one either). Meanwhile, the economic damage and humanitarian costs are spreading globally, including to his own supporters.
The challenge now is to build a movement that not only turns back Trump’s policies, but gets at the underlying economic, political, and cultural forces that have kept the United States in a permanent state of war for so long, while robbing us of opportunities to build a better, more peaceful, tolerant, and just future. Given the pace of destruction and chaos being visited upon us, it’s important to act now and continue to do so until we build enough power to rein in the war machine and begin creating actual structures of peace. https://scheerpost.com/2026/04/28/reining-in-the-pentagon-2/
‘Spring 2026’ Flotilla Sets Sail From Sicily To Break Gaza Blockade.
April 28, 2026 , https://english.palinfo.com/news/2026/04/27/362011/
The “Spring 2026 mission,” part of the Global Sumud Flotilla, set sail on Sunday from the Italian island of Sicily, aiming to break the Israeli blockade on the Gaza Strip and deliver humanitarian aid to Palestinians.
According to flotilla sources, the vessels had arrived in Sicily on 23 April after departing from Barcelona on 12 April. They were later joined by additional boats and activists from across Italy, particularly through the ports of Syracuse and Augusta.
The number of participating vessels rose to 65 boats at the Augusta marina before completing final departure procedures. The flotilla then began sailing gradually into the Mediterranean Sea in coordinated stages during the afternoon.
While at sea, the flotilla was joined by a vessel affiliated with Greenpeace, which expressed support for the mission.
As the boats departed the port, activists chanted “Free Palestine” and lit flares, bidding farewell to one another with the phrase “See you in Gaza.”
Turkish activist Ali Deniz, who joined the flotilla from Barcelona, described the atmosphere as highly energized. “There is great enthusiasm here, just as we saw in Spain,” he said, expressing confidence that the flotilla would reach Gaza’s port and meet children there.
Italian activist Martina said the Palestinian people continue to demonstrate strong resilience, adding that participants see their role as serving the Palestinians.
She criticized governments for failing to act, noting that activists decided to mobilize independently with a large number of vessels.
German activist Tom, one of the youngest participants at 19, said his motivation stemmed from what he described as his country’s complicity in what is happening in Palestine.
He stressed that injustice and human rights violations are unacceptable, adding that he believes a genocide is unfolding in plain sight, which compelled him to take action.
US to give $100 million to repair damaged Chornobyl nuclear shelter, Kyiv says
By Reuters, April 30, 2026, Reporting by Max Hunder Editing by David Goodman
The U.S. will give $100 million towards repairs of the vast radiation containment dome at the Chornobyl plant in northern Ukraine, site of the world’s worst atomic accident in 1986, after the dome was damaged by a Russian drone, Kyiv’s energy minister, Denys Shmyhal, said on Wednesday.
One of Chornobyl’s four reactors exploded in 1986 and is now enclosed by a shelter to contain the lingering radiation. A Russian drone hit that structure in February last year.
In a post on Telegram, Shmyhal said funding for repairs of the dome, at an estimated cost of 500 million euros ($584.95 million), was discussed with international partners at a recent conference about the plant.
Rosyth councillor Brian Goodall wants public consultation.
29th April, By Ally McRoberts, Content Editor, https://www.dunfermlinepress.com/news/26063183.rosyth-councillor-brian-goodall-wants-public-consultation/
THE UK Government’s refusal to give local residents a say in Trident nuclear submarines coming to Rosyth has been slammed as “disgusting and undemocratic”.
Local SNP councillor Brian Goodall was fuming that a request for a public consultation on the move, which he said would require “radiation shelters” and iodine tablets for people who live in the town, has been sunk.
He said: “The UK Government are effectively saying we won’t ask the Scottish public if we should do this because we know they’d say no.”
Cllr Goodall added: “The MoD confirmed at a previous meeting of the area committee that these nuclear submarines may have nuclear missiles on board when they come into Rosyth.
“This not only presents massive additional health and safety concerns but also makes Rosyth even more of a target for rogue nations and international terrorist groups.”
The next generation of Trident nuclear submarines is the Dreadnought class and a contingent dock is to be in place at Rosyth Dockyard by 2029.
The vessels are to be maintained at Faslane but a temporary home is needed in Fife, and the UK Government have provided £340 million to help “bridge the gap”, as the site on the Clyde won’t be ready until the mid 2030s.
In December the MoD told local councillors they would not reveal if any of the subs that need repairs or maintenance at Rosyth will be carrying nuclear warheads.
In February, at the South and West Fife area committee, Cllr Goodall submitted a successful motion asking the convener to write to the Secretary of State of Defence, requesting that the public are consulted on plans to “potentially bring nuclear weapons” to the dockyard.
Opponents have argued that maintaining nuclear-powered subs and storing nuclear weapons are entirely separate – and that nuclear warheads are not kept onboard when a sub goes in for maintenance.
This week Cllr Goodall said: “The UK Government, through the MoD, have now responded to the request for them to hold a public consultation on their plans to bring nuclear fuelled, and possibly nuclear armed, submarines to Rosyth Dockyard, and their response is as predictable as it is disgusting and undemocratic.”
He said the letter from the Minister for Defence Readiness and Industry, Luke Pollard MP, “not only confirms their refusal to consult with local residents on their plans, it also admits that public safety, while a major concern, is not the main priority of the MoD”.
Cllr Goodall went on: “These submarines will still have their nuclear fuel onboard, unlike the decommissioned subs that are already at the dockyard, so there will need to be additional emergency plans put in place, including arrangements for radiation shelters for some local residents and to distribute potassium iodide tablets to the local population.
“The communities around the dockyard should be allowed to have their say on this and the campaign for a public consultation will go on.”
The work on the Dreadnought class would be in addition to the submarine dismantling project at the dockyard, which is cutting up an old nuclear sub, Swiftsure, and removing the radioactive waste left within it.
There are another six decommissioned subs laid up at Rosyth – and 15 at Devonport – and although no decision has been made, Babcock are recruiting for more people to work on the dismantling project.
Cllr Goodall has also expressed concern about the Swiftsure demonstrator scheme, arguing that work to remove the reactor should not go ahead as it’d be cheaper not to do so and there was nowhere safe to store the radioactive waste.
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Shut down the radiation-damaged Heysham nuclear reactors now
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Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
Say No to NASA’s Reckless Nuclear Reactor on the Moon
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