Things are getting tougher for fossil fuel industries
The Sun Is Setting On Fossil Fuels http://www.forbes.com/sites/jonmarkman/2016/06/27/the-sun-is-setting-on-fossil-fuels/#25586259588fJon Markman ,
Things are getting a lot tougher for the embattled carbon fuels industry. That’s according to a new Bloomberg research piece predicting a slow, inevitable death for the widespread use of crude oil.
To be sure, fossilized dinosaur goo has been under siege for a while. The politics of climate change coupled with spills, fires, explosions and other self-inflicted wounds have made industry survival challenging. Weak commodity prices have made it all much worse. In the past, the industry has persevered. The difference this time is that competing energy sources are finally starting to make economic sense.
Take solar. Prices for solar panels are plummeting. The cost of solar panels has declined 95% since 2008, and the trend is accelerating. While that makes it very difficult to be in the business of making panels, it’s a dream scenario for large utility businesses building out capacity. That’s exactly what has been happening. There has been more corporate investment in solar in the first quarter of this year than all of the other energy sources combined.
Meanwhile, the math for fossil fuels has been predictable and grim. Prices for coal can’t fall fast enough. There is no demand for new supply. In the developed world, environmentalists have squashed debate. Coal’s share of U.S. electricity production has gone down 17% since 2005. This comes even as companies like General Electric (GE) use Big Data analytics to make the idea of cleaner coal a reality. In the developing world, economic upheaval in China has meant less demand, leaving most producers waiting for India to come on line with new coal-fired power plants. Good luck with that in the current world political climate.
Oil and gas has not fared much better. U.S. oil and gas drilling rig counts sit at a 40-year low as investment grinds to a noisy halt. And, while prices for oil have rebounded from their recent moribund lows, there remains little appetite for new investment because most believe it’s just a matter of time before prices resume their downward trek.
It’s the very same deflation dilemma solar panel makers face, which, if you think about it, is weird because oil doesn’t really compete with most energy types. It’s mostly used for transportation – powering cars, planes and ships.
Bloomberg’s New Energy Outlook suggests the peak of the fossil fuel business will come as early as 2025, just nine years away. That’s the year researchers expect a tipping point as electric cars eat into excess demand for oil and renewables finally kill the growth potential of coal and natural gas. That’s not to suggest these energy sources will go away; they won’t. They’ll just begin a gradual decline that suddenly steepens, like horseback riding shrank dramatically but did not disappear after the automobile went into mass production.
This development should produce a reliable list of winners. I’m not that crazy about solar stocks right now, as the industry is still wracked by the margin-depleting force of commoditization. But there are other plays. Refiners thrive with low feedstock prices, and the future will bring plenty of that. Tesoro and Valero are key operators in the United States. Utilities companies have been aggressive investors in renewables, especially solar and wind. Southern Co. is an all-of-the-above company with scale. And Tesla has a battery technology that will finally allow the cost-effective storage of solar power. Put all these on your watch list.
Governments’ denial and dismissal of climate change – a crime against humanity
The climate Titanic And The Melting Icebergs, COUNTER CURRENTS.org by Andrew Glikson — June 30, 2016
“In a time of universal deceit telling the truth is a revolutionary act” –George Orwell
March 2016 set a new record temperature for that time of year, according to NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The global temperature was 2.30 °F (1.28 °C) warmer than the average for March from 1951 to 1980, which is used as a baseline. http://climate.nasa.gov/news/2432/
In total, CO2 levels have risen from ~280 to ~407 ppm since the 18th century, currently rising at a rate of ~3 to 4 ppm/year as measured at Mouna Loa observatory, Hawaiihttp://www.esrl.noaa.gov/gmd/ccgg/trends/
Little mention is made of the existential threats posed by the climate and nuclear issues in the context of the current elections in the US and Australia.
According to the world’s climate research institutions and the bulk of the peer reviewed scientific literature, the Earth has now entered a critical stage at which amplifying feedback effects to global warming transcend points of no return. Manifestations of a shift in state of the climate include; current rise in CO2 at 3.3 parts per million per year, the fastest recorded for the last 65 million years; extreme rises in Arctic temperatures; a plethora of extreme weather events such as cyclones, floods and fires; demise of habitats such as the Great Barrier Reef where corals die due to high water temperatures and coral bleaching; and other developments.
The extreme rise of atmospheric carbon dioxide since the onset of the industrial age, and the corresponding rise in mean global temperatures as a direct result of the rise in carbon gases, pose an existential risk to the future of nature and civilization.
The consequences of further burning of the vast carbon reserves buried in sediments and in permafrost and bogs can only result in a mass extinction of species which rivals that of the five great mass extinctions in Earth history.
Thus, according to James Hansen, NASA’s former chief climate scientist:
“Burning all fossilfuels would create a different planet than the one that humanity knows. The palaeoclimaterecord and ongoing climate change make it clear that the climate systemwould be pushed beyond tipping points, setting in motion irreversible changes,including ice sheet disintegration with a continually adjusting shoreline, exterminationof a substantial fraction of species on the planet, and increasingly devastatingregional climate extremes.”
Conducted with the knowledge of the consequences of continuing combustion of carbon constitutes an act whose lingual description exhausts the resources of the English language. The term‘crimes against humanity and nature’ comes to mind.https://www.theguardian.com/environment/cif-green/2010/nov/01/climate-science-disinformation-crime
Is there anything in international and national laws which can avert the continuation of current carbon emissions?
The manifest paralysis of the global political system in the face of the climate impasse, evidenced by the failure of a succession of UN Framework Conventions on Climate Change to undertake meaningful steps to reduce CO2 emissions, requires a search for alternative avenues to limit the deleterious consequences of continuing carbon emissions as reported by the IPCC Working Group II, and pending the report by Working Group III.
Traditionally, political and economic negotiations aim ata compromise. Unfortunately, no negotiation is possible with the basic laws of physicswhich dominate the climate system.
Do global and national legalsystems offer any possibilities in this regard?
In exploring potential legal restrictions on carbon emission, I believe the following international and nationalinstrumentsare relevant.
Crimes against humanity, as defined by the Rome Statute of the international Criminal Court Explanatory Memorandum,which says:
“…crimes against humanity are particularly odious offences in that they constitute a serious attack on human dignity or grave humiliation or a degradation of one or more human beings. They are not isolated or sporadic events, but are part either of a government policy (although the perpetrators need not identify themselves with this policy) or of a wide practice of atrocities tolerated or condoned by a government or a de facto authority…”………http://www.countercurrents.org/2016/06/30/the-climate-titanic-and-the-melting-icebergs/
Britain’s nuclear white elephant preventing clean energy development, and energy efficiency
The nuclear white elephant that stands in the way of green growth http://www.rechargenews.com/incoming/1433306/the-nuclear-white-elephant-that-stands-in-the-way-of-green-growth By Jeremy Leggett , June 06 2016 EDF’s Hinkley Point C plant in western England will have much to do with the nuclear industry’s prospects globally — and hence for the ability of renewables to grow quickly.
I start with a set of numbers surely destined to become a classic case history for business schools.
Imagine you are the chief financial officer of a company with a market capitalisation of €18bn ($20.3bn). You are being asked to find investment of €22bn to build a nuclear plant, the first of a whole new fleet.
Without that fleet, your company cannot hope to grow, assuming it sticks with nuclear generation, and therefore without that one plant its business model will be exposed as broken.
Yet your plant is the most expensive power station in the world — one of the most expensive human construction projects ever, in real terms. And here is the thing: you carry €37bn of net debt on your balance sheet.
You have two further problems. The first is €55bn in estimated liabilities to keep a fleet of ageing reactors open beyond their long-scheduled close-down dates. The second is an unknown number of billions to fix a grave safety flaw in the steel of a pressure vessel in the forerunner of the new plant you must build.
What do you do? You resign, of course.
Which is exactly what EDF chief financial officer Thomas Piquemal did on 8 March.
Now imagine you are the abandoned chief executive, Jean-Bernard Lévy.
You face a few problems beyond the loss of your financial chief, the market signal that sends and the reasons for his departure. Moody’s has warned that your credit rating will be downgraded if you proceed with the plant, making it far more difficult for you to raise yet more debt.
Your labour unions are begging you not go ahead, and threatening to strike if you do. They are saying that they fear this single project will bankrupt the company. Worse, they have seats on the board, because the workforce are part-owners of the company.
What do you do? In a rational world, you resign too.
But now imagine you have a rock-solid belief system. You cannot conceive of a world without nuclear power, or at least your vital power plant. So instead of resigning, you announce your renewed determination to build the project.
You confer with your bosses in the French government, which owns the majority of the company. They in turn confer with your client, the British government, and your minority co-investors, the Chinese government. All are populated with people who share your belief system, so they too restate their commitment that this project will go ahead.
The British say they absolutely need the 7% of national electricity that the project would provide by 2025, the scheduled start date. That is why they have agreed an unprecedented deal with you that will pay £92.50 ($133) per MWh — more than twice the current retail price of electricity, guaranteed for 35 years, and linked to inflation, in so doing loading many billions onto future household and business energy bills.
British officials are meanwhile actively suppressing renewables and energy efficiency. Cynics suspect they are doing so in part to ensure a market for the electricity your nuclear plant will provide, when you finish it — as you say you can.
Yet still your catalogue of problems grows.
French authorities open an investigation into the faking of records at a factory making vital parts for your power station. They have identified anomalies in documents related to 400 components made for existing nuclear facilities running today.
At the UN, a committee rules that the UK government is in breach of international obligations in failing to consult neighbouring countries over the potential environmental impacts of your intended plant.
Then you realise you have left contingency out of the budget. You are forced to add a further €3bn+ to the already record-breaking bill.
The day after that, Moody’s carries out its threat to downgrade your credit rating. Standard and Poor’s goes further, cutting a significant part of your debt to junk status.
And so it goes on.
As for the denouement, the only thing yet to be resolved is the exact shape of the inevitable tragedy. Including the extent to which this white-elephant product of a broken and dying belief system can slow the growth of renewables.
Jeremy Leggett is founding director of international PV company Solarcentury. See www.jeremyleggett.net for a free download of The Winning of The Carbon War, his account of the dramas in energy and climate from 2013 to the Paris summit. Also available for order as a printed book, with all proceeds going to SolarAid.
The painful, drawnout death of nuclear power in Illinois
In Illinois, the nuclear age comes creaking to a halt, St Louis Post Dispatch By the Editorial Board Jul 2, 2016 In the glory days of the late 1960s and early 1970s, when nuclear power generation held the promise of electricity “too cheap to meter,” Illinois jumped in with both feet. Fourteen nuclear generating plants were built at nine sites across the state. The 11 that remain provide half of the state’s electricity.
But now those plants are getting old. Like any piece of complex equipment, the older a nuclear station gets, the more it costs to operate and maintain. Exelon Corp., the multistate holding company based in Chicago that owns 23 reactors among its operations around the country, has announced plans to close three reactors at two sites in Illinois. Unless, of course, the state would like to bail it out.
Here’s a $34.5 billion company that earned $2.2 billion last year, operating monopoly utilities, that for two straight years tried to convince Illinois lawmakers to cover its losses. Exelon wanted permission to pass on an estimated $170 million in costs to taxpayers and ratepayers in each of the next six years. The idea’s not dead, but it’s on life support.
The Legislature and Gov. Bruce Rauner, a year into their staring match over the state’s budget crisis, are too busy to entertain Exelon’s request. The Republican governor generally supports it. Illinois Attorney General Lisa Madigan calls it a bailout and opposes it. But it’s not like the state has a spare $170 million in its budget. If it had a budget.
with a worldwide energy glut caused in large part by abundant supplies of natural gas, and alternative energy getting cheaper, nuclear plants can’t compete.
Absent technological breakthroughs, the “nuclear miracle” is on ice. Bailing out Exelon would save those plants and their jobs for just a few more years. Even if Illinois had the money, the numbers just aren’t there to justify a long-term investment.http://www.stltoday.com/news/opinion/columns/the-platform/editorial-in-illinois-the-nuclear-age-comes-creaking-to-a/article_b8011ab3-baca-5e9b-870d-a3c8b9ec1350.html
Nuclear lobby funding education to promote nuclear power
KEPCO school expands education on nuclear power http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20160703000243 By Song Ji-won (jiwon.song@heraldcorp.com) 3 July 16 A graduate school run by the state-run Korea Electric Power Corp. is expanding its education on nuclear power to foreign students.
Oh Se-kee, president of KEPCO International Nuclear Graduate School, or KINGS, visited Kenya in May to discuss nuclear issues in both countries and to reaffirm mutual cooperation. Oh also had a meeting with 10 Kenyan KINGS alumni who now work in their home country. KINGS offers a master degree program exclusively focusing on nuclear power studies. Since it opened in 2012, the school has stood as a global educational institution forming a wide ranging network, school officials said. It admits 80 students every year, half of them non-Koreans, from nuclear power-related businesses.
The school also signed a memorandum of understanding with various universities in the United States, United Arab Emirates, Vietnam, Egypt and Iran to produce nuclear power professionals. It has also made an agreement with the International Atomic Energy Agency to offer four-week training courses to countries seeking to build nuclear power plants. The Angolan ambassador to Korea recently visited the school in Ulsan to discuss a student exchange program.
“International demand in nuclear power plants will globally increase to reduce greenhouse gas emissions following the Paris Agreement,” Oh said.
“We aim to become the world’s best energy education institute and would like to produce leading professionals armed with expertise in power plants.”
Japan’s anti-democratic secrecy law means no accountability in the nuclear industry
No accountability in nuclear industry http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/06/25/reader-mail/no-accountability-nuclear-industry/#.V3BNqtJ97Gh ROBERT MCKINNEY Following the June 16 quake in Hakodate, Hokkaido, nuclear plant operators in the area reported no damage, but even if there were problems, because of Prime Minister Shinzo Abe’s new anti-democratic secrecy law, they would not necessarily report them, nor would they feel any compunction to do so. The Nuclear Village Idiots can cover their backsides very nicely with this new secrecy law.
Public safety is hardly a concern of politicians or the nuclear power plant owners. Japan’s very much a totalitarian state once again. It simply uses democratic-sounding titles to cover up the true authoritarian nature of the government and senior industrial officials. It’s Tojo’s Japan with velvet gloves. Let’s hope the gloves never come off.
Diablo Canyon’s nuclear power plant leaves radioactive trash for a long time
Nuclear plant closes, but it will not go away, Ventura County Star, 22 June 16, The announcement Tuesday of plans to close the Diablo Canyon nuclear power plant in 2025 was a historic moment in California.
It means the end of nuclear power generation in the state. The announcement by owners Pacific Gas & Electric was cheered by thousands who have fought since long before the plant went online in 1985 to end nuclear power production at the coastal facility at Avila Beach in San Luis Obispo County.
PG&E made the decision based, as best we can tell, for economic rather than environmental reasons. Although the majority of Americans now oppose the use of nuclear energy to provide electricity, the utility realized that there probably were going to be cheaper ways to provide power in the future than Diablo Canyon…….
there is one thing that will be left behind. They are the spent fuel rods, the most controversial, the most dangerous and the most difficult parts of a nuclear generating station.
At Diablo Canyon, the spent fuel rods are cooled in a special concrete pool for about five years. Then the rods are put in a helium-filled canister and set inside a 20-foot-tall concrete-filled steel storage cast that is cooled by natural air convection. The casks are bolted to a seven-and-one-half-foot thick concrete pad.
All of this is on the Diablo Canyon property, a short hike from the picturesque Avila Bay.
And there they will stay. The final responsibility for disposing of this high-level nuclear waste rests with the U.S. Department of Energy. And currently the federal government has no approved plan to dispose of any high-level nuclear fuel waste from any nuclear plant in the United States.
The nuclear rods are highly radioactive, enough to kill anyone exposed to them or contaminate local soil or groundwater, and will be in that state for thousands of years.
So until the federal government figures out how to safely get rid of our collective high-level nuclear waste — if it ever does — there will be a piece of Diablo Canyon plant, the most dangerous piece, creating minimal but potential risk for generations. http://www.vcstar.com/opinion/editorials/editorial-nuclear-plant-closes-but-it-will-not-go-away-35e17170-2354-07d3-e053-0100007fa1df-384027791.html
Nuclear Envy: Donald Trump’s not alone in having this problem
Donald Trump’s Nuclear Envy Problem, and Ours The Republican front-runner isn’t the only one stoking fears about Russian missiles. But size doesn’t matter when it comes to nuclear arsenals. FP, BY JEFFREY LEWIS JUNE 20, 2016
The Republican front-runner isn’t the only one stoking fears about Russian missiles. But size doesn’t matter when it comes to nuclear arsenals. “…..he’s gone and done it again. This time, during a rambling speech in Atlanta best known for a Twitter account of the crowd, Trump said, “Our nuclear is old. Putin’s is tippy-top, from what I hear. We’ve got to be careful.”……..
There is probably no idea about nuclear weapons that is simpler, older — or more harmful — than the idea that we ought to measure our nuclear weapons against theirs. The idea is a simple one, and it befits Trump, a man who sincerely seems to believe that size matters in all things.
But Trump isn’t alone. Consider the debate six years ago over the New START arms reduction treaty between the United States and Russia. Bob Joseph, a former Bush administration official, testified that the agreement put the United States “at risk of sacrificing or changing … a nuclear posture second to none.” Joseph then took a jab at the treaty with a little pun, “I think we are approaching a nuclear posture second to one.” It struck me as a pretty dumb line, so naturally Joseph committed to using it all the time. A couple of years later, Joseph used the “second to one” catchphrase again in an article, and the editors at the National Review liked it so much they used it as the title.
The worry about being “second to one” is as old as the arms race – which is to say, as old as nuclear weapons themselves. From the beginning of the Cold War, there was an understandable impulse to measure American nuclear forces against those of the Soviet Union. If you know one thing about the arms race, it is probably the infamous “missile gap” that John F. Kennedy alluded to during the 1960 presidential election – which turned out, contrary to his claims, to be running in our favor……..
all these arguments are rarely about the underlying facts, but rather whether facts can be marshaled in support of nuclear wonks’ typical preferred policy – nuclear modernization. The Team B experiment was 40 years ago – and that means the nuclear forces that were built upon its assessments during the Carter and Reagan administrations are now reaching the end of their service lives and must be replaced. As part of the political deal to win support in the Senate for the New START treaty, the Obama administration committed to the simultaneous modernization of all three legs of the triad – a fleet of new ballistic missile submarines (the SSBN-X), new bombers and cruise missiles (B-21/LRSO), and a replacement for the Minuteman III ICBM. Washington is in the middle of another debate about superiority and inferiority because it is time to make big decisions about how much money to spend.
Too often the question left unasked in our finely tuned analyses of nuclear quality and nuclear superiority is: So what? Why would deterrence require that weapons be tippy-top? Would it matter if you were incinerated with a new shiny warhead rather than an old rusty one? These comparisons are ultimately appeals to emotion, not logic. And those appeals work only if we accept the metaphor that the nuclear dilemma is a race and our only escape is to cross the finish line first. But what if Warnke had it right? What if there is no finish line other than nuclear catastrophe and that the United States and Russia are jogging in tandem on a treadmill? What do we do then?
Warnke had an answer to that. “We can be first off the treadmill,” he wrote. “That’s the only victory the arms race has to offer.” http://foreignpolicy.com/2016/06/20/donald-trump-has-nuclear-warhead-envy/
Uranium – a fossil fuel also
Indian Point Safe Energy Coalition April 11, 2016 Marilyn Elie, “……..Coal, oil, and gas are all remnants from our prehistoric past. They are mined from the earth at great cost and labor…….
The price of civilization has been the destabilization of the natural system of checks and balances that has kept our atmosphere – the air we breathe – operating within the narrow band of gases that is hospitable to life.
Uranium, although it is not rich in carbon, fits into this category of mined fuels. The Navajo have a saying, “You might meet old coal miners, but you will never meet old uranium workers.” The mining and enrichment of the ore into fuel requires an enormous amount of electricity, and most of all, the reactors that are fueled by uranium alter the fuel rods and produce plutonium. One of the most deadly substances on the face of the planet, plutonium leaves a legacy that is deadly for 240,000 years and takes us to a time in the future that we cannot even begin to imagine.
There is no going back. What has happened cannot be undone. What we can do is work to keep all of these ancient fuels, including uranium, in the ground where they belong. We can only hope that we have not yet reached the tipping point that will return us to the Earth’s stormy past and a world inhospitable to life…https://closeindianpoint.wordpress.com/2016/04/11/uranium-as-a-fossil-fuel/
2 Workers Killed in Construction of Emirati Nuclear Plant
abc news, By THE ASSOCIATED PRESS DUBAI, United Arab Emirates — Jun 19, 2016 Two workers were killed and three others injured while building the first nuclear power plant in the United Arab Emirates, officials said Sunday.
The incident happened May 12 and was first reported this weekend by a state-owned newspaper in the UAE, a federation of seven sheikhdoms. It’s unclear why it took a month for authorities to acknowledge the fatalities……..http://abcnews.go.com/International/wireStory/workers-killed-construction-emirati-nuclear-plant-39969494
Obama – disarmament talk, but his action is different
Obama’s nuclear deception, Japan Times, JUN 19, 2016
U.S. President Barack Obama deeply impressed the Japanese public with the speech he delivered in the world’s first atom-bombed city of Hiroshima on May 27. But on his home turf, he is clandestinely pushing a plan to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. The plan, with its development cost estimated at $1 trillion over the next 30 years, is aimed at downsizing missiles capable of carrying nuclear warheads and improving their mobility with new delivery systems and platforms.
When does Obama expect to achieve a world without nuclear weapons, which he called for again in Hiroshima?….
He impressed the people of Japan to some extent while deftly avoiding using words like “remorse” or “apology.” Behind a glamorous diplomatic show, however, a major revolution occurring only once in decades is taking place in the U.S. nuclear weapons scheme, without being noticed by most Americans, let alone Japanese…….
Of the four categories of the development programs pursued by the Pentagon and the NNSA, the most controversial is modernization and downsizing of nuclear warheads, which constitutes the core of the whole scheme. In parallel with making warheads smaller, new models of platforms and nuclear weapons delivery systems will be introduced step by step in three fields: intercontinental ballistic missiles, submarine-launched ballistic missiles, and submarines and strategic bombers……….
“modernization and maintenance” programs will cost $1.8 billion annually from fiscal years 2021 to 2035. When expenses of the related facilities are added, the share of the nuclear weapons-related costs in the total defense budget is to rise from the present 3 percent to 7 percent. In other words, the Obama administration plans to make U.S. military forces far more dependent on nuclear arms than they are today.
Not only do these development programs run counter to Obama’s ideal of a world without nuclear weapons — downsizing the nuclear warheads will increase the chances of them being used, as stated on a PBS news program by James Cartwright, former vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Regardless of what Washington says to justify its nuclear modernization programs, Russia and China have objected to it, saying that it poses a major threat to them. Indeed, when a mock test flight of the Model 12 warhead was conducted, Russia condemned the U.S. for “preparing a new weapon.”
It is certain that if the U.S. continues to pursue the modernization of its nuclear arsenal, China and Russia will take countermeasures. The possibility is rising day by day that these superpowers will confront each other with light and compact nuclear weapons in the not-so-distant future — despite Obama’s speech in Hiroshima. http://www.japantimes.co.jp/opinion/2016/06/19/commentary/japan-commentary/obamas-nuclear-deception/#.V2cWOdJ97Gh
The myth of carbon-free nuclear energy
http://www.latimes.com/opinion/readersreact/la-ol-le-nuclear-energy-carbon-footprint-20160617-snap-story.html Ron Rodarte, San Clemente How does one cheer nuclear as “clean” in the sense of carbon dioxide emissions when the entire process of mining uranium ore, processing the uranium into fuel pellets and loading the fuel frames into the reactor core are all carbon-intensive aspects of this power source?
Add the extreme dangers faced in ongoing climate change vis a vis flooding and loss of critical cooling water sources, the yet unresolved issues with radioactive spent fuel posing risks for thousands of years and the distinct possibility of a meltdown, and nuclear ought to be a no-go.
Nuclear is not safe, it is not carbon free, and it is the most expensive energy source on the market — and it is dangerous.
US govt funding universities for nuclear power development
USU engineering faculty receive $5.8 million in nuclear energy research grants Award is largest of nationwide Nuclear Energy University Program grants
UTAH STATE UNIVERSITY LOGAN, UTAH – Two professors of mechanical engineering at Utah State University will receive grants from the U.S. Department of Energy totaling $5.8 million for nuclear energy research. The news came in a Tuesday announcement from DOE officials who awarded more than $35 million to 48 university-led nuclear research and development projects around the country through the Nuclear Energy University Program, or NEUP…….http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2016-06/usu-uef061616.php
If India joins Nuclear Suppliers Group, the strategic India -Pakistan balance will be shaken – China
India’s entry into NSG will break India-Pakistan nuclear balance: Chinese media, Times of India, Jun 16, 2016
HIGHLIGHTS
- Chinese media said that India’s entry into NSG will ‘shake strategic balance in South Asia’
- New Delhi have inched closer to NSG membership after PM Modi gained backing from US.
- Major goal for India’s NSG ambition is to obtain an edge over Islamabad in nuclear capabilities
The US recognised New Delhi as a “major defence partner” during Modi’s recent visit, meaning that the White House has given India the treatment as a US military ally, it said.
The article said that over the years, the US has been “bending the rules” to back India’s nuclear projects……………..http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/world/china/Indias-entry-into-NSG-will-break-India-Pakistan-nuclear-balance-Chinese-media/articleshow/52774701.cms
US Congress only just failed to pass law to defund a new nuclear cruise missile program
Nuclear Cruise Missile Survives Challenge in House Aaron Mehta, Defense News June 16, 2016 WASHINGTON — The House today defeated an amendment to defund a new nuclear cruise missile program for the Air Force, despite a slowly rising chorus of influential voices arguing against the weapon…….
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