Hypothesis to explain child leukemias near NPPs – Rebuttal rebutted
Dr Ian Fairlie, September 30, 2026, https://www.ianfairlie.org/news/hypothesis-to-explain-child-leukemias-near-npps-rebuttal-rebutted/
Official Rebuttal of Tritium Hypothesis
It has recently come to my attention that in 2016 a rebuttal was published in an official report of my hypothesis to explain increased incidences of cancers among children residing near nuclear power plants (NPPs). The rebuttal is contained UNSCEAR (2016) Annex C: Biological Effect of Selected Internal Emitters -Tritium. Although this rebuttal was published 10 years ago, it’s the only official response to my hypothesis so it’s worth examining the matter. I shall show here that the UNSCEAR riposte has several shortcomings which render its argument unreliable. The main conclusion is that the absence of increased leukemias could be due to several naturally-occurring processes factors and does not necessarily invalidate the NPP hypothesis.
Exposures near NPPs
The estimation of radiation exposures from NPP emissions has rarely been examined in the scientific literature. One exception is Hill (1986). The difficulty is that such estimations are complex. Briefly, they require several computer models to estimate nuclide emission rates, the transport of radionuclides through the environment to man, human uptake and retention Bq models. Lastly, they require estimated dose coefficients to convert Bq to Sv. Further complexities occur with chronic rather than single exposures, and with organic binding in the case of tritium releases. The above models all require several assumptions to be made which may or may not have been validated by environmental or clinical data. Uncertainties abound in each model, which need to be multiplied and/or added together. The main conclusion of the UK Government’s CERRIE report (Cerrie, 2004) was that the resulting uncertainties could be very large.
The upshot is that official dose estimates from NPP emissions are not necessarily reliable and could be significant underestimates.
In 2010, Fairlie (2010) first published a hypothesis to explain the observed increases in childhood leukemia near NPPs. This suggested that large releases of tritium from NPPs during ~annual refuelling episodes (when reactors were depressurised) resulted in tritium plumes downwind from NPPs. Pregnant women living within ~5 km of these locations could have inhaled high concentrations of tritiated water vapour. It was further suggested that the haematopoietic tissues (including nascent bone marrow) in the developing fetuses/embryos were labelled with this tritium. These tissues are highly radiosensitive. This resulted in babies being born with pre-leukemic cells which, after birth, developed into full-blown leukemias. The product of large increases in estimated radiation dose times the estimated large increase in radiation risk explained the discrepancy between official estimates and the actual cancer increases.
This hypothesis was more fully developed and explained by the author in a longer published article (Fairlie, 2014) not cited by UNSCEAR. Many studies since then have indicated increased incidences of childhood cancers, including leukemias, among children near NPPs (Fairlie, 2024).
REBUTTAL
It appears that no dissenting or corrective articles on this hypothesis were published in peer-reviewed scientific journals in 2010, 2014 or in subsequent years. However in 2016 an UNSCEAR report was published with a scientific addendum (Annex C) on tritium (UNSCEAR, 2016). This contained a rebuttal of the author’s hypothesis. In brief, the UNSCEAR Annex stated that, if the NPP hypothesis were correct, then the large releases of tritium from the atmospheric bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s (see Figure 3.1) should have resulted in increases in leukemia deaths world-wide which were not observed (Wakeford et al, 2010). Therefore, in the view of the authors of the UNSCEAR 2016 Annex C report, the NPP hypothesis was not supported.
However the UNSCEAR explanation has several shortcomings which render its argument unreliable. One of the most obvious shortcomings is that the UNSCEAR scheme conflicts with the scientific axiom “absence of evidence is not evidence of absence” (Sagan and Druyan (1995); Altman and Bland, 1995). In other words, the mere fact that we lack evidence here for the NPP hypothesis does not warrant us to infer that the hypothesis is false.
But even if we look at the UNSCEAR argument in more detail, it does not withstand much scrutiny. The Annex C authors argue that an examination of childhood leukaemia incidence in cancer registries in three continents found no evidence of a wave of excess cases corresponding to the peak of radioactive fallout from atmospheric weapons testing (Wakeford et al, 2010). The authors then state that the absence of a “discernible” leukaemia increase following the main peak of testing (1962-63) is evidence against the NPP hypothesis. Let us examine the UNSCEAR argument in more detail.
Bomb Tests
The UNSCEAR argument juxtaposes tritium exposures from NPPs and the peak period (1961-1962) of the bomb tests – but these are substantially different in nature, size, and duration. Most important for health outcomes, their resulting tritium concentrations are likely to have been quite different. To wit, bomb test tritium was ejected high into the Earth’s troposphere and stratosphere and was thus distributed world-wide – mostly in the northern hemisphere, mainly in 1961-1962. See Fig 3.1 below, from IAEA (2025).
But even if we look at the UNSCEAR argument in more detail, it does not withstand much scrutiny. The Annex C authors argue that an examination of childhood leukaemia incidence in cancer registries in three continents found no evidence of a wave of excess cases corresponding to the peak of radioactive fallout from atmospheric weapons testing (Wakeford et al, 2010). The authors then state that the absence of a “discernible” leukaemia increase following the main peak of testing (1962-63) is evidence against the NPP hypothesis. Let us examine the UNSCEAR argument in more detail.
Bomb Tests
The UNSCEAR argument juxtaposes tritium exposures from NPPs and the peak period (1961-1962) of the bomb tests – but these are substantially different in nature, size, and duration. Most important for health outcomes, their resulting tritium concentrations are likely to have been quite different. To wit, bomb test tritium was ejected high into the Earth’s troposphere and stratosphere and was thus distributed world-wide – mostly in the northern hemisphere, mainly in 1961-1962. See Fig 3.1 below, from IAEA (2025).
The first is via atmospheric mixing. According to Jenkins (2001) “the detonations generally injected the tritium into the stratosphere, where it was quickly oxidized to form water vapour. Over a period of a few years, the tritiated water vapour was transferred to the troposphere, where it was rapidly ‘rained out’ to the earth’s surface. The delivery of bomb tritium to the earth’s surface was monitored by a number of World Meteorological Organization /International Atomic Energy Authority precipitation sampling stations. The pattern and timing of this delivery have been shown to consist of two primary components: a dominant northern, spike-like component, and a weaker southern component.”
The second natural process occurs by isotopic exchange between 3H and 1H. At the molecular level, atomic exchange between the two H isotopes is near instantaneous. The main point here is that the quantity of naturally-occurring hydrogen (1H) in the form of water (H2O) on Earth is very large. About 61% of the northern hemisphere is covered by oceans and seas and a further ~1% by Greenland’s ice sheet. During winter, seasonal snow and ice-covered land (including arctic tundra and boreal regions) across the northern hemisphere expand to cover about 16% to 18% of the surface area of the northern hemisphere. Therefore ~80% of the northern hemisphere is covered by forms of water – at least during winter.
Due to atmospheric mixing and isotopic exchange between 3H and the very large volumes of 1H in the oceans, seas, lakes, ice sheets, and Arctic tundra and boreal regions in the northern hemisphere, atmospheric concentrations of HTO vapour will have been reduced. This would have occurred relatively quickly.
Indeed, direct evidence of the relatively quick incorporation of atmospheric tritium into surface waters is given in figure 1 of the UNSCEAR Annex itself. This shows environmental tritium levels in surface water in the United States in 1951–1975 and is reproduced below.
This figure [on original] shows that atmospheric tritium is quickly taken up by surface waters, as their tritium concentrations mainly follow the temporal pattern of the tests shown in figure 3.1.
It is important to note that it’s tritium in atmospheric water vapour and not tritium in drinking water that would have been the main problem health-wise. This is for two reasons. First, the main uptake routes would have been via inhalation and skin absorption; and second, the main tritium sink would have been water in seas and oceans …which is not consumed as drinking water.
Source: Bennett (1973)
Another mechanism – escape of H from the stratosphere
A third natural mechanism is that some molecular3H, being much lighter than air, will have escaped from the Earth’s atmosphere in the form of hydrogen gas, shortly after the explosions.
It is not possible at this point to estimate the magnitudes of the reductions in tritium’s air concentrations due to these three natural processes. But they could be significant – leading to a paucity of observations of increased health effects.
The main conclusion is that the absence of increased leukemias could be due to several factors and does not necessarily invalidate the NPP hypothesis.
(Postscript: The above discussion of dilution mechanisms is not intended to defend tritium releases from the bomb tests. On the contrary, it shows that the atmospheric bomb tests in the 1950s and 1960s radioactively contaminated the totality of the northern hemisphere’s oceans, seas, lakes, ice sheets, and snow-covered lands with low levels of tritium. In the author’s view, this legacy of the bomb tests is regrettable and should not be repeated.)
_________________________________________
Appendix: comparison of estimated tritium concentrations…………………………………………………………………….
Simon Daigle lists the public concerns that must be addressed in planned development of BWRX-300 small nuclear reactors – Submission to Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission
Submission Concerning the Proposed Development of BWRX-300 – multiple reactors at the Darlington Site (Ontario)
Submitted November 19,2023 by Simon J Daigle, Simon J Daigle, B.Sc., M.Sc., M.Sc(A) Montreal, Quebec Canada
Response to the proposed development of OPGs BWRX-300 reactors at the Darlington CANDU reactors site and the items below are all real public concerns and must all be addressed independently and individually, as per the following categories:
CNSC licensing of the BWRX-300 reactors & Multiple Reactors nearby a NPP is inadequate [References: 1, 2, 4, 5]
- BWRX-300 stands for Boiling Water Reactor eXperimental 300 and developed by GE Hitachi Nuclear Energy (GEH) and will not aim to address any key challenges faced by traditional nuclear power plants. In fact, they will be costly, and generate extremely toxic nuclear wastes more than what would be expected by traditional NPP plants. [Ref. 4].
- This experimental compact design will not reduce construction costs, will not simplify operation nearby one NPP, or will ever enhanced safety measures. In fact, it will do the exact opposite as per IAEA [Ref. 1 and 5].
- It is questionable to say the least that by utilizing natural circulation and passive safety systems you will eliminate the need for external pumps and active cooling mechanisms because during a meltdown, fire or catastrophic event (lightening, flooding, extreme air temperatures over decades because of climate change), who will shut it off? A worker? I’m more reassured when a Pilot on commercial flight is present when he or she is using the auto-pilot function [Ref. 1].
- CNSC license to built an experimental reactor based on the CNSC’s decision that OPG has met the recommendations of the 2011 Environmental Assessment Report by the JRP is not objectively verifiable or can be validated based on the 2023 Update report [Ref. 2].
- No objective evidence is available to validate what specific recommendations of the JRP have been adopted, analysed and/or implemented by OPG or CNSC. [Ref. 2].
- No BWRX-300 reactors are operating anywhere in the world and is a real public concern for the citizens living nearby as well as the potential impacts of a catastrophic environmental event that could be transboundary across many municipalities.
Engineering Design Risks: Experimental, Natural water cooling & neutron leakage [4,5].
- Water cannot be used to cool a reactor as it is experimental design reactor that will use use low pressure water to remove heat from the core. A distinct feature of this reactor design is that water is circulated within the core by natural circulation and yet no data is measured or validated by any laboratory confirmed analysis or modelling study.
- Neutron leakage will be problematic for any SMR design as well as for the BRMX-300 reactor as no proof of any safe SMR reactor system can be validated or compared too to this very day.
- This is no experimental data to elude or conclude that this experimental reactor will work in terms of an internal cooling system of the core.
- BWRX-300 is by all means not small as it covers a full football field.
- No BWRX-300 reactors are operating anywhere in the world.
- The proposed design and operation of a BWRX-300 is entirely different from the CANDU design and involves a structure and a method of operating which is, in large part, below ground level.
- No data on any potential meltdown of the core of any modular nuclear including BWRX-300 including catastrophic events cascading located nearby a Nuclear Power Plant.
- Neutron leakage is a huge problem with SMRs and will be as well with the BWRX-300.
- SMR Neutronics and Design: [Ref. 4].
- “A nuclear reactor is designed to sustain criticality, a chain reaction of fission events that generates energy (∼200 MeV per fission event) and extra neutrons that can cause fission in nearby fissile nuclides.
- The neutron “economy” of a reactor depends on the efficiency of the chain reaction process; the fate of neutrons absorbed by abundant nuclides, such as 238U or 232Th; the fission of newly generated fissile nuclides, such as 239Pu and 233U; and the loss of neutrons across the fuel boundary.
- These “lost” neutrons can activate structural materials that surround the fuel assemblies. Each of these physical processes generates radioactive waste.
- Thus, the final composition of the SNF and associated wastes depend on the initial composition of the fuel, the physical design of the fuel, burnup, and the types of structural materials of the reactor.
- The probability of neutron leakage is a function of the reactor dimensions and the neutron diffusion length, the latter of which is determined by the neutron scattering properties of the fuel, coolant, moderator, and structural materials in the reactor core.
- The neutron diffusion length will be the same in reactors that use similar fuel cycles and fuel–coolant–moderator combinations; thus, the neutron leakage probability will be larger for an SMR than for a larger reactor of a similar type.”
- Public Consultation, indigenous peoples and social acceptability: [Ref. 2].
- No objective evidence has been elucidated or clearly documented with transparency.
- EIA Impact statement: page 84 of [Ref. 2].
- EIA impact statement, nor final PPE parameters, did not follow IAEA Multi-Unit Probabilistic Safety Assessment required for 1 or 4 experimental reactors nearby a Nuclear Power Plant despite the fact that EIA significance analysis had assessed all the residual adverse effects [Ref. 1, 5]. Please refer to the list of EIA and PPE selected quotes below as the reference to compare with the IAEA Multi-Unit Probabilistic Safety Assessment that is lacking [Ref. 1, 5].
EIA and PPE selected quotes:
“EIS significance analysis had assessed all the residual adverse effects to be “Not Significant”. Of the likely residual adverse effects that were forwarded for assessment of significance in the EIS:
• Seven (7) were also determined to result in minor residual adverse effects from the BWRX-300 but less than that described in the EIS,
• Four (4) were not applicable to the BWRX-300 reactor,
• Five (5) were determined to have residual adverse effects not significant after completion of additional studies to assess the likely effects to retained terrestrial features not considered in the EIS.
- The PPE Of the 198 PPE parameters, 60 PPE parameters were not applicable to the BWRX-300. Of the 138 applicable PPE parameters evaluated, eight (8) BWRX-300 parameters are currently not within their respective PPE parameters. These are largely due to characteristics inherent to the design of the GEH reactor technology. These eight parameters are related to the following topics:
- The rate of fire protection water withdrawal and the quantity of water in storage,
- Deeper foundations (38 m below grade) than the reactors previously assessed in the EIS (13.5 m),
- Airborne releases of radioactive contaminants and normal operation minimum release height above finished grade,
- The different proportions of radionuclides in solid wastes generated by the operation of the BWRX-300,
- The weight of the cask used to transport the BWRX-300 spent fuel on site, and
- The multiplication factors applied to basic wind speed to develop the plant design.
- A full environmental impact assessment is required to fulfill provincial and federal jurisdiction best practices for air, water and soil & biosphere impacts during a catastrophic event or meltdown of this experimental reactor as well as maritime and lake biosphere impacts.
Nuclear accidents, incidents, multiple explosion risks or 1 or 4 BMRX-300 reactors nearby a NPP, Soil Stability, hydrogeology, lithospheric & seismic Risks: [Ref. 1,2, 5].
- No objective risk assessment has been completed by OPG or CNSC as per the required IAEA Multi-Unit Probabilistic Safety Assessment required for 1 or 4 experimental reactors nearby a Nuclear Power Plant. [Ref. 1,5].
- The appropriateness of building 1 or 4 untested reactors next to the 4 existing CANDUs at Darlington as well as the current and potential stored nuclear waste is questionable given the fact that the probabilistic safety assessment was not completed according to the IAEA methodology [Ref. 1].
- JRP recommendations concerning the physical conditions of the Darlington site need to be applied with transparency by OPG and the CNSC. [Ref. 2].
Other public and safety concerns: these issues need to be addressed
- Climate change impacts have not been included in the EIS report.
- Unknown: reliability data to reduce the risk of potential accidents.
- Unknown: demonstrating that the BMRX-300 is a clean and reliable source of electricity, capable of generating vast amounts of energy without producing greenhouse gas emissions as it is only an experimental design.
- Concerns surrounding safety, waste disposal, and cost have hindered its widespread adoption globally. A handful of countries have adopted this design but no data on the true financial costs to governments or to that taxpayer. [Ref. 4].
Unknown: BWRX-300 did not address safety concerns, efficiency, efficacy as a cost-effective alternative compared to renewables such as hydro, solar or wind energy generation.
Unknown: sustainability and reliability compared to wind and solar energies to meet the growing demand for electricity.- BWRX-300 represents a significant step backwards in power technology. It is not compact, it does not meet nuclear wastes (as per the IAEA ALARA principle) that will last for thousands of years, and most certainly, it is not cost effective over time to store and monitor SMR or BWRX-300 nuclear wastes based on the probability of any heat instability of the nuclear core over time and the generation of highly toxic nuclear waste. You cannot turn off radioactivity like an electrical light bulb as there are no fuse switch off for ionizing radiation.
Sodium cooled nuclear reactors are not necessarily safer
While no sodium-cooled reactors currently operate in the United States, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working with industry on a number of “advanced” reactor designs, including the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR). One of the SFR’s safety advantages, to quote the DOE, is that the design provides a “Long grace period for corrective action, if needed.” SRE’s meltdown transpired over a two-week period. Fermi Unit 1 had indications of inadequate core cooling in June that were repeated in August and dismissed until extensive damage occurred in October 1966. The “if needed” grace period is never long enough when warning sign after warning sign is dismissed or ignored.
DOE did acknowledge some “challenges” for the SFR: their higher speed and higher energy neutrons can embrittle and degrade nearby materials, liquid sodium coolant reactors with air and water and degrades concrete, and the opaqueness of the liquid sodium coolant complicates in-service inspections and maintenance.
Thank goodness for the “Long grace period for corrective actions, if needed.” That and the fact that SFRs only operate in cyberspace where the primary threat is carpal tunnel syndrome
Nuclear Plant Accidents: Fermi Unit 1, Union of Concerned Scientists Dave Lochbaum, director, Nuclear Safety Project | July 12, 2016, Disaster by Design
Jorge Agustin Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, also known as George Santayana, wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Continue reading
Outlaw Trump Must Be Dumbfounded by His Opponents – Ralph Nader
By Ralph Nader, September 4, 2026
What must Tyrant Trump be thinking about his opponents’ feeble, weak, cowardly responses to his daily torrent of serious, impeachable offenses? Even his egomaniacal narcissism cannot fully explain his amazing good luck.
Start with the House’s two impeachments of Trump, while Nancy Pelosi was Speaker, in 2019 and 2021. The first was over Trump’s trying to bribe or extort Ukraine into going after Hunter Biden—an investor and Board member of a Ukrainian business. Pelosi knew there was no chance of getting the required two-thirds vote required for Senate conviction, but went for the House vote anyway. At the same time, Pelosi declined to pursue numerous other ‘slam dunk’ kitchen table impeachable offenses we and others presented to her. (See Congressional Record, December 18, 2019).
In 2021, after the Jan. 6th Trump-incited violent insurrection involving attack on the Capitol and Trump’s effort to overturn the 2020 election, Pelosi did the same thing: impeached Trump in the House. Unfortunately, the Senate fell short of the two-thirds vote required to convict and remove him from office because most Senate Republicans cowardly failed to hold Trump accountable for these treacherous actions.
Come the Second Trump term, after criminal indictments, a felony conviction, and civil litigation brought by women accusing him of sexual misconduct, on Day One, January 20, 2025, Trump began issuing illegal executive orders. Many of them were impeachable offenses as he boastfully implemented them, with the aid of Elon Musk’s criminal enterprise – DOGE.
Trump probably anticipated a much more vigorous impeachment drive by the Democrats, even though they were in the minority in the House. His luck continued. The Democratic Party’s so-called leadership decided against this excellent galvanizing get-out-the-vote initiative for their voters, 90% of whom wanted Impeachment yesterday. Rep. Hakeem Jeffries’ staffers told inquirers that they didn’t know how it would play out.
Jeffries himself told a reporter that “he didn’t want to get ahead of that discussion.” What? Ahead of 90% of his Party’s voters!!?
Trump, who called for the execution of six Congressional Democrats for reminding soldiers of their obligation not to obey an illegal order that is contrary to the Constitution or the laws of the United States (as in described in the Army Manual for Courts-Martial [MCM] along with international law) must be privately dumbfounded. The more violently extreme and erratic he gets, the less interested the Democratic Party is in an Impeachment Drive. (See “Statement from Medical Professionals” in the April 30, 2026 Congressional Record.)
Rep. Al Green (D-Texas) introduced H. Res. 537 on June 24, 2025. It was treated as a privileged impeachment resolution and Rep. Al Green took to the floor for debate and a prompt vote to educate the public about the necessity of ordering Trump, “You’re Fired.” Jeffries and his cohorts opposed it! Trump must have been stunned.
After all, people and their children are feeling, seeing, and hurting in the tens of millions from Trump’s wrecking, endangering, and weakening America. (See my column last week, “Open Letter to Representative Hakeem Jeffries.”)
Under the Jeffries and Schumer anti-impeachment bans, thus agreeing with Trump, the news media has little activity to cover in Washington, D.C. Also, it’s not keeping up with the civic activity around the country demanding Impeachment. (See nader.org/impeachment.)
More puzzling is the refusal of editorial writers to urge impeachment. They regularly make the Impeachment case against Trump but decline to tell their readers the obvious conclusion: that the House should begin an impeachment inquiry and approve articles of impeachment. Congress also has an important role under Section 4 of the Twenty-Fifth Amendment. Congress, by statute, may appoint itself—in lieu of the principal officers of the Executive Branch—to determine whether the president is disabled and should be temporarily removed until the disability lapses.
Despite the many detailed editorials in the New York Times, such as one showing how Trump is harming the health of the American people and another “Autocracy Index” titled “Trump’s Election Meddling Erodes Our Democracy,” the editorial writers limped off their pages without answering the alarmed readers’ question, “What do you want done about this?”
The Times Sunday columnist Jamelle Bouie relentlessly documents Trump’s impeachable crimes, but not once has he moved to recommend this Republic-saving mechanism given to us by our Founding Fathers. Same for other Timescolumnists, Michelle Goldberg and EJ Dionne.
The Times’ reluctance to employ the “I” word is typical of the mass media. What about the independent progressive media? The Nation, In These Times, Progressive Magazine, and The Washington Monthly have all mentioned impeachment, but few have made a sustained, prominent editorial demand for an impeachment drive. Also, they do not report on the rising citizen activities behind Impeachment around the country.
Meanwhile, Trump continues to commit “high crimes and misdemeanors,” brazenly, taunting the so-called leaders of the Democrats by saying, “This is just the beginning.” He provides the Democrats with daily evidence to that should prompt SHADOW CONGRESSIONAL HEARINGS organized by Democratic members of Congress and designed to build a public factual record. Such hearings could attract substantial media attention, particularly if they focused on specific alleged abuses and featured affected witnesses, legal experts, and former public officials. Nonetheless, Jeffries and Schumer block any shadow hearings by dissenting House members.
What explains this historic cowardice? Is it fear of Trump retaliating? Is it smugness over Trump’s low polls, and a belief they can win in November by lying low, raising AIPAC and corporate campaign money, mumbling about affordability, and avoiding heavily poll-favored Pledges or Contracts for the American people showing specifically what they stand for? (See, Compact for American Workers and Robert Reich’s 10-Point Plan To Make America Affordable.) Or is it just trying to avoid Trump accusing the Democrats of having done similar things when they controlled the White House, such as starting or backing unconstitutional wars?
Whatever explains their inhibitions, the result is to signal to Trump that he has two-plus unchallenged years to ravage the lives and livelihoods of millions of people here and abroad, oppose preparedness for climate and pandemic catastrophes, to suppress renewable energy and favor omnicidal fossil-fuel combustion, invade our cities with his stormtroopers, and treat children with unsurpassed cruelty. It also leaves unanswered serious questions about his personal financial enrichment while in office – estimated to be $1.1 million per working hour. All this invites the demand that they resign. The people need fresh, stand-up leaders to take over the Democratic leadership and its party committees. (See RootsAction: “Tell Democrats in Congress to Insist That Schumer and Jeffries Step Aside”.)
The Democrats and electorally frightened Republicans pushed Richard Nixon out in 1974 for far, far lesser transgressions than those committed by Trump in a week.
How the Media Sells Genocide
Joy to the World – by Mr. Fish
Chris Hedges ScheerPost, August 25, 2026, https://scheerpost.com/2026/08/25/how-the-media-sells-genocide/
Western media, by employing double standards, censorship, deceptive language, amplifying Israeli lies and dehumanizing Palestinians, facilitates the genocide in Gaza.
Chris Hedges ScheerPost
The Western media manufactures consent for genocide. It normalizes Israel’s decades-long military occupation and apartheid. It erases Israel’s flagrant violations of international law. It perpetuates the fallacy of Israeli victimhood. It betrays, discredits and demonizes the work of Palestinian journalists and media workers in Gaza, at least 220 of whom have been killed by Israel between Oct. 7, 2023, and August 2025. It supinely accepts draconian Israeli censorship. It acquiesces with tepid letters of protest at Israel’s refusal to allow foreign reporters in Gaza — an effort by Israel to mask its war crimes. It amplifies Israeli lies, from beheaded babies to widespread sexual assault of Israeli women on Oct. 7, to obfuscate the truth.
When writing about Gaza, verbs are in the passive tense. There is no subject. No one is accountable. Genocide, it seems, is an act of God. No different from an earthquake or tsunami. Clichés and opaque adjectives such as the “cycle of violence” or “clashes” distort and falsify reality.
“If thought corrupts language, language can also corrupt thought,” George Orwell warned.
Terms such as “genocide,” “atrocity,” “ethnic cleansing” and “occupied territories” magically disappear from media reports on Palestinians, whose resistance is routinely described as “savage” and “barbaric.” New York Times reporters are instructed by editors to avoid terms such as “Palestine,” “genocide,” “carnage,” “refugee camp,” “slaughter” and “massacre,” when referencing Palestinians.
The media slavishly regurgitates what Israel feeds it. Saturation bombing becomes “surgical air strikes.” Israel’s weaponization of famine becomes a “food shortage.” The killing of unarmed civilians — including children — becomes “clashes.” The hilltop fortress-like compounds of Jewish colonists becomes “neighborhoods.” Extrajudicial assassination of a journalist or a doctor becomes “died.”
Genocide, referred to as the “Israel-Hamas war” is justified as “self-defense,” part of the mantra of Israel’s “right to defend itself.” When schools, hospitals, clinics, ambulances, mosques, churches and other civilian targets are obliterated, they are labeled “Hamas command centers” or targeted because Hamas is “using civilians as human shields” — something Israel does routinely, when the army binds detained Palestinians and forces them to enter potentially booby-trapped buildings and tunnels ahead of Israeli troops.
When Israelis are held by Hamas, they are “hostages,” even if they serve in the military. When Palestinians — including children — are held without charges or trial and disappeared into Israeli detention centers, where torture is “widespread” and “systematic,” they are “prisoners.”
Missile attacks on tent cities or hospitals are blamed on Palestinian armed groups firing errant rockets. If Israel acknowledges the attacks — which very rarely happens — they are described as a “tragic mistake.”
Civil institutions in Gaza are characterized as “Hamas-run” to cast doubt on the veracity of what they report. The New York Times routinely qualifies announcements from the Gaza Health Ministry by noting it “does not distinguish between civilians and combatants,” masking the slaughter of tens of thousands of civilians.
The result is some of the most convoluted writing in the history of journalism, including the Nov. 5, 2023 New York Times headline that reads: “Explosions Gazans Say Was Airstrike Leaves Many Casualties in Dense Neighborhood.”
“When Middle East Eye journalists Mohamed Salama and Ahmed Abu Aziz, along with Reuters photojournalist Hussam al-Masri, and freelancers Moaz Abu Taha, and Mariam Dagga — who had worked with several media outlets, including the Associated Press — were killed in a “double tap” strike — designed to kill first responders arriving to treat casualties from initial strikes — at Nasser Medical Complex, how did Western news agencies respond?” I asked in my column The Betrayal of Palestinian Journalists.
“Israeli military says strikes on Gaza hospital targeted what it says was a Hamas camera,” the Associated Press reported.
“IDF claims hospital strike was aimed at Hamas camera,” announced CNN.
The camera belonged to Reuters, which said Israel was “fully aware” the news agency was filming from the hospital.
“When Al Jazeera correspondent Anas Al Sharif and three other journalists were killed on Aug. 10 in their media tent near Al Shifa Hospital, how was it reported in the Western press?” I asked.
“Israel Kills Al Jazeera Journalist It Says Was Hamas Leader,” Reuters titled its story, despite the fact al-Sharif was part of a Reuters team that won a 2024 Pulitzer Prize.
The German newspaper Bild, published a front page story headlined: “Terrorist disguised as a journalist killed in Gaza.”
“The linguistic gymnastics employed by the media went as far as redefining words, making them meaningless,” writes Assal Rad in “Don’t Say Palestine: How the Media Manufactured Consent for Genocide:”
‘Mainstream media failed to describe Israel’s repeated breaches of the ceasefire with the language of violation. Instead, the coverage followed the same patterns of rationalizing Israel’s attacks and uncritically parroting Israel’s claims to justify its actions. As Palestinians continued to be killed — during a ‘ceasefire’ — and the flow of aid did not reach the level of need or what was agreed to, Western media framed these flagrant violations as ‘tests’ or ‘challenges’ to a ‘shaky ceasefire.’ As leading human rights organizations like Amnesty International warned that the genocide was, in fact, not over, legacy media continued to frame it as a war with a ‘fragile ceasefire.’
Words matter. Words justify actions. If there is no genocide, if Israel is defending itself in a war, the U.S. and Israel’s European allies have the right to provide tens of billions of dollars in military aid. If this is a war begun by Hamas on Oct. 7 then it is possible to lament the obliteration of Gaza and mass slaughter by Israel as the regrettable result of the Hamas attack.
This corruption of language is designed, as Orwell noted, to defend the indefensible:
“Things like the continuance of British rule in India, the Russian purges and deportations, the dropping of the atom bombs on Japan, can indeed be defended, but only by arguments which are too brutal for most people to face, and which do not square with the professed aims of political parties. Thus political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness. Defenseless villages are bombarded from the air, the inhabitants driven out into the countryside, the cattle machine-gunned, the huts set on fire with incendiary bullets: this is called pacification. Millions of peasants are robbed of their farms and sent trudging along the roads with no more than they can carry: this is called transfer of population or rectification of frontiers. People are imprisoned for years without trial, or shot in the back of the neck or sent to die of scurvy in Arctic lumber camps: this is called elimination of unreliable elements.“
Adam Johnson in “How to Sell a Genocide: The Media’s Complicity in the Destruction of Gaza,” examined over 12,000 articles from The New York Times, The Washington Post, CNN.com, Politico, Axios, USA Today, and The Associated Press, along with 5,000 TV segments aired on CNN and MSNBC. His carefully researched book is a damning indictment of the “liberal” media’s justification of the genocide.“
CNN and The New York Times instructed their editors and journalists that attacks could only be attributed to Israel after confirmation from the IDF and GPS coordinates. Johnson quotes a source at CNN:
Whether it’s in the newsroom or in the field, we couldn’t credit anything to Israel unless we were held to this impossibly high bar of having to call it an “explosion,” until we geolocated the site of the explosion, sent the coordinates to the Israelis and asked them for comment.
You can see an interview with Johnson about his book at The Electronic Intifada here.
CNN journalists reporting on Israel and Palestine must submit their work for review to the network’s Jerusalem bureau prior to airing. The CNN bureau, like all news bureaus in Israel, is required to abide by restrictions imposed by Israeli military censors.
The very few Palestinians who appear on CNN and other legacy media outlets, are routinely asked — usually before they are even permitted on air — if they “condemn” Hamas. Guests who express even tepid criticism of Israel are asked whether Israel “has a right to exist.”
No one is ever asked if they condemn Zionism, apartheid, ethnic cleansing, genocide or Israel’s 100 year war on Palestine. Nor are they asked if the Palestinians have a right to defend themselves — which under international law they do, including with weapons.
Our domesticated journalists and news organizations are, as Robert Fisk pointed out, “prisoners of the language of power.” They dutifully parrot the official lexicon. This makes them not only propagandists, but accomplices to genocide.
Those who protest the genocide, including students on university campuses — many of whom are Jewish — are smeared as “Hamas supporters” and “antisemites.” Journalists ferret out Zionist students, usually found esconced in campus Hillel houses, who claim to be “fearful for their safety,” because of the protests. The media pays little attention to the rise in anti-Muslim bigotry or the repression meted out to student protestors, which includes not only police brutality and 3,000 detainments and arrests, but suspensions, probations, expulsions, withholding of diplomas and the firing of sympathetic faculty.
Slogans which call for Palestinian liberation — including “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” — along with the Palestinian flag, have been criminalized.
The message is clear: Jewish lives matter. Palestinian lives do not.
“The reports of UN agencies, of respected human rights monitors, of medical journals, and of professional medical personnel, are generally treated with respect and given prominence in the mainstream media,” writes the historian Rashid Khalidi in the introduction to Robin Anderson’s book, “The Complicit Lens: US Media Coverage of Israel’s Genocide in Gaza:”
“Not in this war: instead, if such sources are cited at all, equal media treatment is given to the outrageous slanders and calumnies against these organizations and individuals, smears that are produced in profusion by Israel’s legion of professional propagandists and its myriad of defenders in the US. Besides smearing critics of Israel’s genocide as supporters of Hamas or terrorist sympathizers, the main weapon in their arsenal of defamation is their systematic and outrageous misuse of the deadly accusation of antisemitism.”
The massive defections of readers and viewers from mainstream media to social media platforms that do not filter news through the Israel lobby, the U.S. government or corporations, are a stark indicator of the media’s bankruptcy. The response to these defections has been “platformicide” — the use of algorithms, shadow banning, restriction of live streaming capabilities and the closing of accounts by social media giants such as Facebook, Instagram, X, YouTube and TikTok, to dramatically reduce the reach of reporting on Palestine.
This censorship is part of a coordinated effort to hide the horror of the genocide from the public.
By constantly referencing Oct. 7, the Western media decontextualizes the genocide. It ignores Israel’s 19-year siege of Gaza. Oct. 7 is characterized in the Western media as “unprovoked.” Israel’s massacres of unarmed Palestinians in Gaza in the winter of 2008 and 2009, along with its attacks on Gaza in 2012, 2014 and during the Great March of Return in 2018 and 2019 are ignored.
The 1948 Nakba — when European Zionists seized more than 78 percent of historic Palestine, violently expelled 750,000 Palestinians, destroyed more than 530 Palestinian villages and killed 15,000 Palestinians — is rarely referenced. Seventy percent of those driven from their homes in 1948 were forced into Gaza.
The Zionist project is predicated on fostering historical amnesia.
“Once Hamas was established as a brutal, terrorist group whose members gleefully tortured, dismembered, and beheaded babies without conscience, no further explanation was needed,” writes Anderson in her book. “The media simply avoided reporting Israel’s history of violence and as a result, establishment media also avoided the conditions of everyday life for Palestinians.”
The fiction that there is currently a ceasefire in Gaza — Israel has killed at least 1,286 Palestinians and injured 4,257 since it supposedly went into effect — has become the excuse used by Western media to turn its back on Gaza. This genocide denial has characterized the coverage since its inception. It masks not only Israel’s crimes, but Israel’s stated intention to ethnically cleanse all Palestinians from Gaza. It effectively neuters international law. And it makes a mockery of the profession of journalism.
When the last act of ethnic cleansing happens, Western media will, I am sure, continue to bombard us with Israeli agitprop, euphemisms and clichés.
It will justify the genocide until the end.
Nuclear power: molten salt reactors and sodium-cooled fast reactors make the radioactive waste problem WORSE
reactors https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1507791, Lindsay Krall &Allison Macfarlane, 31 Aug 18ABSTRACT
Nuclear energy-producing nations are almost universally experiencing delays in the commissioning of the geologic repositories needed for the long-term isolation of spent fuel and other high-level wastes from the human environment. Despite these problems, expert panels have repeatedly determined that geologic disposal is necessary, regardless of whether advanced reactors to support a “closed” nuclear fuel cycle become available. Still, advanced reactor developers are receiving substantial funding on the pretense that extraordinary waste management benefits can be reaped through adoption of these technologies.
Here, the authors describe why molten salt reactors and sodium-cooled fast reactors – due to the unusual chemical compositions of their fuels – will actually exacerbate spent fuel storage and disposal issues. Before these reactors are licensed, policymakers must determine the implications of metal- and salt-based fuels vis a vis the Nuclear Waste Policy Act and the Continued Storage Rule.
Heat, water shortages, jellyfish: nuclear energy is becoming uncontrollable
while a reactor needs water to dissipate its heat, it cannot turn rivers into scalding baths.
What technological advancements are needed to secure water supplies when a river runs dry ?
What will the state of the Danube be in 2050, 2070, or even 2100 ?
Heatwaves, droughts, rivers that are too hot or too low: since June, European nuclear power plants have been experiencing numerous power reductions and shutdowns. One question is becoming increasingly difficult to avoid: is nuclear power still manageable in a warming world ?
By
Laure Noualhat, August 14, 2026 , https://reporterre.net/Le-climat-met-le-nucleaire-europeen-a-sec-Le-nucleaire-rattrape-par-la-question-du
On August 12, shortly before 10 a.m., a fifth of France’s nuclear power plants were offline. Exactly 20.4 % of their production capacity was unavailable due to ”
environmental constraints “ or ” external environmental causes , “ a record since 2015, calculated by AFP using data from EDF .
Thirteen reactors were affected: eight completely shut down, and five operating at reduced capacity. On one hand, rivers were either too hot or too low after five heat waves ; on the other, at Gravelines (Nord), several tons of jellyfish had clogged the water intakes of Western Europe’s largest nuclear power plant. Nuclear power can be controlled, certainly, but it still needs to be cooled.
In Golfech, on the banks of a sweltering Garonne River, the situation has taken on the air of a summer ritual. On August 8, at 9 p.m.,
EDF once again shut down reactor number 2. The Garonne threatened to reach 28°C the following day, the threshold beyond which the power plant must reduce its production or shut down to comply with environmental regulations and avoid harming aquatic life. Since reactor number 1 was already undergoing maintenance, the plant was no longer producing any electricity. The same scenario, to varying degrees, played out at Bugey (Ain), Saint-Alban (Isère), and Tricastin (Drôme), where the Rhône River’s waters, having become too warm, led EDF to adjust its production.
Because while a reactor needs water to dissipate its heat, it cannot turn rivers into scalding baths. Discharges from power plants are regulated by the Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection Authority (
ASNR ), which sets, for each site, limits on the temperature increase of the watercourse between upstream and downstream, as well as a maximum temperature that must not be exceeded.
What uses will be prioritized as droughts occur ?
This summer, the Bugey nuclear power plant
was the only French plant to request a temporary modification of its thermal regulations , the ASNR ( French Nuclear Safety Authority) told Reporterre . The Rhône River was already very hot upstream, while RTE (the Frenchelectricity transmission network operator) demanded that a minimum power output be maintained to guarantee grid security. The Authority therefore agreed to temporarily raise certain limits, but only between July
10 and 20. This compromise aptly summarizes the dilemma ahead: protecting a river already suffering from the heatwave while preventing the electrical grid from overheating as well.
In Chooz, in the Ardennes region, the problem isn’t the temperature but the amount of water. The Meuse River’s flow rate dropped drastically at the beginning of August. The two reactors were shut down, not because there wasn’t enough water to safely cool the facilities, but to comply with the Franco-Belgian agreement guaranteeing a minimum flow for the various river users. Thus, nuclear power is confronted with a question already familiar to farmers, industrialists, and river conservationists: who has the right to water when it becomes scarce ? Which uses will be prioritized as droughts continue to occur ?
Controllable… but not climate-insensitive
Taken separately, each of these episodes seems almost commonplace.
EDF has long adjusted its power plants’ output during heat waves. In 2003, the utility even sprayed the Fessenheim reactor building with water jets!
But their repetition, and especially their simultaneity, changes the landscape. Up to 7.3 gigawatts of French nuclear power were unavailable on August 12 or constrained by the heat and low flow rates. ” This is a record peak in environmental unavailability ,
“ according to AFP . At the same time, there was a lack of wind in Germany, and air conditioners were running more frequently, which drove up electricity prices.
However, it would be wrong to claim that the nuclear fleet is faltering; it’s simply overheating. It’s actually producing significantly more than during the major crisis of 2022 when 32 reactors were unavailable due to stress corrosion cracking. The real issue lies elsewhere. A nuclear power plant is an enormous thermal machine that must dissipate some of its heat. It can produce electricity without wind or sun, but not without cold water. And this resource, too, is caught up in the whirlwind of climate change.
The Danube is offering a much more stark demonstration this summer. In Hungary, the Paks power plant, which supplies nearly half of the country’s electricity, saw
its production plummet in early August due to the river’s exceptionally low water level.
“A temporary rise in water levels then allowed for the recovery of some production, but the government has announced its intention to re-examine the cooling requirements of the Paks
II project ,” explains András Kéri of the climate policy institute Energiaklub. ”
A power plant built today will only be operating at full capacity in the second half of this century…
“ What will the state of the Danube be in 2050, 2070, or even 2100 ?
It’s difficult to say.
Further downstream, Romania faces an even more critical situation. The country will shut down its only nuclear power plant on August 13th, for the first time since the 2003 drought, as the Danube’s flow has dropped too low. As early as July 28th, the operator of the Cernavodă site shut down Unit 1 due to a Danube level described as ” very low and unprecedented” .
The intake canal had to be dredged and the riprap blasted to redirect the flow. When the river needs to be reshaped locally to maintain electricity production, climate adaptation is no longer just a chapter in an annual report. Switzerland also experienced this very real future firsthand by reducing the two reactors at Beznau to 50% of their capacity when the Aare River reached the critical temperature of 25°C.
In France and Switzerland, most of these power reductions do not signal a loss of safety and are precisely intended to comply with environmental regulations. In Hungary and Romania, the extreme low water level of the Danube more directly impacts operating conditions. But for the electrical grid, the result is comparable: megawatts considered readily available on demand become slightly less so at the very moment when heat increases certain needs.
And as the Anthropocene knows how to keep things interesting, the Gravelines nuclear power plant has added jellyfish to the mix. On August 10, their massive arrival in the water intakes triggered the automatic shutdown of 3 of the 6 reactors. EDF insisted there was no safety issue . And besides, is this becoming a regular occurrence ? A similar incident had already happened in August 2025 .
European nuclear power is therefore not collapsing under the heatwave. But this summer is challenging a simplistic way of speaking: ” controllable “ nuclear power does not mean ” insensitive to climate . “ It depends on it, like everything else.
What about EPR2s
The issue becomes considerably more serious when we look at the reactors currently in the design phase. EDF asserts that it has sized the future EPR2 reactors ” with regard to heatwave risks “ by taking into account the IPCC climate scenarios for 2070 and 2100, ASNR told Reporterre . EDF has allocated €8.7 billion by 2040 to adapt its nuclear, hydroelectric, and island activities to climate change , notably through the Adapt project, which aims to assess, plant by plant, their vulnerability to rising temperatures, droughts, and changes in water resources.
In 2023, the Court of Auditors still estimated investments directly attributable to climate adaptation of the nuclear fleet at around €600 million for the following fifteen years. Going from €600 million to €8.7 billion in three years is a gigantic leap !
The ASNR (French National Agency for Radioactive Waste Management) emphasizes the need to maintain ” margins , “ as tomorrow’s climate may diverge fromprojections. Every ten years,” safety standards must therefore be reassessed,
“ and facilities may need to be adapted to higher temperatures. But how, specifically ?
What technological advancements are needed to secure water supplies when a river runs dry ?
No one is saying.
To date, nuclear power plants evaporate 833 million cubic meters
of fresh water per year. While this water is reintroduced into the water cycle, it remains unavailable for other needs (domestic consumption, agriculture, industry, etc.). With the future EPR2 reactors —particularly those located along rivers—this will increase the amount of water drawn from rivers to
1,232 million cubic meters per year and from the seas to 575 million cubic meters
per year, according to figures from Global Chance.
If you’re already afraid, just wait until you hear about Manhattan Project 2.0.
The nuclear startups receiving special dispensation from the DOE are part of a pilot program established under Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.” The DOE selected Oklo Inc. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright formerly served on its board of directors), Aalo Atomics Inc., Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc. and Valar Atomics Inc. as the companies whose experimental reactor designs will be tested at locations in Texas, Kansas, Utah and Tennessee (Oak Ridge). In another attempt to dodge NRC oversight, these companies are considered DOE contractors whose reactors are subject to DOE rules no matter their location
Analysis, Kristen Thomason | August 10, 2026, https://baptistnews.com/article/if-youre-already-afraid-just-wait-until-you-hear-about-manhattan-project-2-0/
Summers spent at my grandparents’ house in Tennessee were hot and humid. With enough cousins piled into the porch swing, you could stir up a bit of a breeze. But when that was no longer effective, we would retreat to the air-conditioned splendor of the American Museum of Science and Energy in Oak Ridge and stroll through exhibits like “Wildcatting for Oil” and “Atoms for Autos.”
Among these varied installations, however, pride of place was given to documenting Oak Ridge’s role as the secret headquarters for the Manhattan Project and source of the Hiroshima bomb’s enriched uranium. Most of the 30,000 covert workers on that project only discovered the truth of what they had been helping to build on Aug. 6, 1945, when they awoke to the headline “Oak Ridge Attacks Japan.”
Eighty years later, on May 23, 2025, President Donald Trump signed a series of executive orders to further the Department of Energy’s “Manhattan Project 2.0.” And just like the original, the second iteration of the Manhattan Project has plenty of secrets of its own.
The executive orders came at the behest of tech giants like Amazon, Meta, Google and Microsoft, who want cheap, abundant nuclear power to run their AI data centers. And according to the United Nations, these data centers will have doubled their voracious consumption of electricity and water by 2030.
Benefiting from a second Atomic Age
Nuclear industry executives who stand to benefit from a second atomic age had advance access and offered edits to the executive orders, which maximize risk-taking and profit-making over the safety of nuclear employees and the public. They stood behind Trump as he signed Executive Order 14299, “Deploying Advanced Nuclear Reactor Technologies for National Security,” which paves the way for private companies to construct commercially owned and operated experimental nuclear reactors on Department of Defense properties and at the DOE’s national laboratories.
The original Manhattan Project granted the military sweeping authority to bypass regulations and red tape when developing the atom bomb. Likewise, situating these new reactors on federal land allows companies to skip environmental requirements and skirt the authority of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the independent bipartisan body charged with granting licenses and regulating the safety of commercial nuclear reactors.
However, to achieve their goal of mass-producing portable nuclear reactors they can deploy via semi-truck to datacenters, hospitals and industrial facilities, they’ll eventually need to pass the NRC’s stringent public safety and environmental standards. That is why Trump next signed Executive Order 14300, “Ordering the Reform of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” to overhaul the “structure, personnel, regulations and basic operations” of the NRC.
In 1974, Congress, weary of the Atomic Energy Commission’s reckless experimentation with atomic power at the expense of public safety, divided it into the DOE, which promotes nuclear power, and the NRC, which regulates it. Scientists at Oak Ridge National Laboratory were thus forced to abandon a plan to carve a second canal through Panama using 250 Hiroshima-sized atomic bombs. Executive Order 14300 is a return to the wild pre-1974 days.
The order first directs the NRC to rubber stamp approval for those reactors developed under the auspices of the DOE and DOD without any additional testing. It then reduces the responsibilities and size of the Advisory Committee on Reactor Safeguards, an independent group that once provided technical guidance about reactor safety to the NRC but now can only voice concerns when specifically asked. The president also replaced Democrat and NRC Chair Christopher Hanson and installed a steering board staffed by DOE officials to oversee the NRC reforms.
Next, Executive Order 14300 loosens radiation exposure restrictions for nuclear workers and the general public. To implement this order, on July 1, the NRC proposed a series of changes including limiting use of the linear no-threshold model, which affirms there is no threshold below which radiation is safe. The public has 45 days to comment on the changes.
Raising doubts about the dangers
The linear no-threshold model is the industry gold standard and guiding principle for radiation safety around the world. However, in a move akin to its approach to vaccines, the administration raises doubts about the science behind the model despite the myriad studies and decades’ worth of radiation data on nuclear workers that undergird it.
The 2023 International Nuclear Workers Study examined the dosimeters worn by 309,932 nuclear workers in France, the United Kingdom and the U.S. and tracked their incidents of cancer for an average of 35 years. Scientists confirmed that the greater the exposure to ionizing radiation from nuclear fission, even at low occupational levels, the greater the likelihood of death from a cancerous tumor, which often only appeared decades after exposure.
UNC Chapel Hill conducted a similar study focusing on the 22,000 workers hired at the ORNL from the early days of the Manhattan Project through the mid-1980s and found results similar to INWORKS for salaried workers and even higher rates of cancer for hourly workers. These men worked construction, laundered radioactive uniforms or, like my grandfather, laid railroad track to allow for the removal of “legacy waste” from the Manhattan Project without any protection or knowledge that they were being exposed.
Therefore, when it comes to ionizing radiation, which is invisible and difficult to measure accurately, the ethical approach is to keep the exposure level “as low as reasonably achievable,” or what is known as the ALARA standard. This might mean minimizing the time employees spend with radioactive materials, requiring protective gear or, in the case of the public, keeping radioactive emissions below legal limits.
However, protecting people doesn’t fit with the “move fast and break things” methods of tech moguls who want nuclear energy ASAP to power their AI databases. So, in its new proposed rules, the NRC is acknowledging linear no-threshold but dispensing with the ALARA standard in favor of a graded approach where safety is determined by situation with little accountability. Nuclear investors and Trump donors Peter Thiel and Mark Andreessen have been lobbying for the abolition of ALARA from the NRC, also a recommendation of Project 2025.
More DOE changes
The DOE began secretly eliminating ALARA from its own radiation protection framework in August 2025 without officially informing employees or the public until January 2026, although it did notify nuclear executives. To justify the end of ALARA, the DOE cited a report they themselves commissioned from the Idaho National Laboratory. That report said that to reduce “unnecessary economic burdens,” companies could now expose workers to five REM a year.
Roentgen Equivalent Man measures the biological effect and risk of radiation exposure to human tissue. According to the National Academies of Sciences, an exposure of five REM a year could cause cancer in one out of five career nuclear employees. The INL report proposes a future increase to 10 REM a year, which would raise the cancer rate to four out of five.
New DOE rules also double the radiation exposure level that would trigger an official investigation from two times to four times the legal limit. When Seth Cohen, the DOGE employee tasked with removing government “barriers” for nuclear companies, was asked if they should establish a fund for such workplace accidents, he said, “When SpaceX started building rockets, they sort of expected the first ones to blow up.” Andreessen called Cohen “An American hero” on X.
In addition, nuclear contractors for the DOE, including the start-up companies, now can ignore what’s known as Appendix A to Part 851 on Worker Safety and Health Functional Areas. As a result, precautions such as informing employees of possible hazards, procedures regarding possible carcinogens, requiring respiratory protection equipment or providing “comprehensive occupational medicine services” are no longer mandatory. This rule change does not apply to contractors working with other forms of energy.
Without occupational medical services to track and document radiation exposure and any subsequent disease, it will be difficult for employees to later obtain the care and compensation they’re owed in the event of an accident or overexposure. Such was the case for victims of the partial meltdown of Three Mile Island, who had no way to prove in a court of law that they had received excessive doses of radiation.
The nuclear startups receiving special dispensation from the DOE are part of a pilot program established under Executive Order 14301, “Reforming Nuclear Reactor Testing at the Department of Energy.” The DOE selected Oklo Inc. (Energy Secretary Chris Wright formerly served on its board of directors), Aalo Atomics Inc., Antares Nuclear Inc., Atomic Alchemy Inc., Deep Fission Inc., Last Energy Inc., Natura Resources LLC, Radiant Industries Inc., Terrestrial Energy Inc. and Valar Atomics Inc. as the companies whose experimental reactor designs will be tested at locations in Texas, Kansas, Utah and Tennessee (Oak Ridge). In another attempt to dodge NRC oversight, these companies are considered DOE contractors whose reactors are subject to DOE rules no matter their location.
Participants in the Reactor Pilot Program will be testing Small Modular Reactor prototypes and experimenting with new sources of fuel which, without the necessary regulations, have the potential to jeopardize public safety. The most expensive element to build in a nuclear power plant is the lead-and-concrete containment shield designed to keep radioactive vapors from escaping in the event of a nuclear meltdown. Shielding is what failed 40 years ago during the 1986 Chernobyl Unit 4 power plant disaster in Ukraine and what held when Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island suffered a partial meltdown in 1979.
Supporters of SMR say their new high-assay, low-enriched uranium fuel called TRISO is so safe that physical containment isn’t necessary. But X-energy, a nuclear reactor and fuel company funded by Amazon, released an accident analysis that said TRISO could exceed safe temperatures by several hundred degrees Celsius.
“The problem is that, with new reactors, they introduce new safety concerns and new technical issues,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “Every design I have looked at has potential safety and security vulnerabilities, which are not being addressed to the extent that they need to be.” The DOE also has jettisoned the requirement to have a cognizant system engineer monitoring each of the reactor’s safety systems, calling it an “unnecessary burden.”
Yet, new types of fuel produce new types of nuclear waste. Every few years, a traditional nuclear power plant removes the highly radioactive spent fuel rods, which are now a mixture of uranium and plutonium, and leaves them to cool in pools of water before they’re sealed in concrete casks for what is supposed to be interim storage. Today, 100,000 metric tons of spent fuel are sitting in limbo because the federal government has failed to find a permanent storage solution for high-level nuclear waste.
Unbeknownst to most, fully one third of all Americans live within 50 miles of nuclear waste storage.
The waste problem
SMRs face the same long-term waste disposal conundrum, only they produce a more chemically and physically reactive waste and two to 30 times more of it than traditional reactors. This waste is not compatible with current nuclear waste disposal technologies, so engineers are experimenting with ways to manage the output and radiation. In response, the DOE replaced its former 59-page waste removal manual with 25 pages of bullet points.
Entirely missing from the abridged version are the sections on waste packaging and monitoring. Last July, Trump dismissed all but one member of the Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board, an independent federal agency charged with reviewing the science behind the DOE actions regarding spent nuclear fuel and high-level nuclear waste.
Executive Order 14301 also orders the DOE to “reform its rules” regarding the National Environmental Policy Act by excluding SMRs from a full environmental assessment or environmental impact statement. Previously, nuclear reactors had to address their potential impact on water, air and ecosystems at specific locations.
Now, in a possible violation of the Clean Water Act, the DOE says the release of radioactive water and steam into the environment should be “avoided” but is not strictly prohibited. Companies no longer “must” protect groundwater from radioactive contamination. “Avoiding” or “minimizing” is sufficient. Monitoring for contamination is optional.
But because cleaning up radioactive spills is expensive, the INL report also recommends abandoning the ALARA standard for the public. Both the NRC and the DOE are following this directive. However, the NRC has decided not to change the .1 REM public exposure limit, while the DOE is raising the limit from .1 REM to .5 REM.
This is in addition to the average .62 REM of “background radiation” Americans receive from sources like the sun and air travel. The DOE increase will be the equivalent of 50 X-rays a year per person, which will result in one in 57 people who live near a DOE nuclear facility developing a fatal cancer. Women and children, especially girls, will feel the effects even more severely.
When exposed to radiation within the current legal limit, women are 50% more likely to die of radiation-induced cancer than men, and girls are seven times as likely as men and twice as likely as boys of the same age to develop cancer. The DOE also has cut the Office of Environment, Health, Safety and Security, the agency’s internal team of health experts who study radiation safety, so it’s unclear who would monitor for this potential danger.
And yet another danger
Executive Order 14302, “Reinvigorating the Nuclear Industrial Base”, further endangers the safety of nuclear workers and the wider public by providing the nuclear industry with Cold War-era plutonium-239 harvested from dismantled nuclear warheads. Because the U.S. doesn’t currently have enough uranium for Manhattan Project 2.0, Oklo, Standard Nuclear, Exodys Energy, SHINE Technologies and Flibe Energy plan to convert plutonium into SMR fuel.
Plutonium is highly toxic if inhaled and requires special ventilation to handle. Other countries that have attempted to use plutonium have found converting it not worth the expense. It’s also highly sought after for bomb-making and requires heightened security measures. With a half-life of more than 24,000 years, managing plutonium is not a short-term commitment. And yet, because companies complained about the cost of security, the DOE jettisoned hundreds of pages of security regulations for reactors, including specifications for storage and requirements for firearms training and emergency drills.
Instead, Executive Order14302 encourages the reprocessing of nuclear waste, a practice discontinued during the Carter administration because it produces excess plutonium. In February, the Trump administration awarded $19 million to five companies that will experiment with nuclear fuel “recycling,” which is a misleading moniker. The reprocessing of spent fuel creates its own high-level radioactive waste, albeit with a half-life of a thousand years rather than tens of thousands of years.
Enabling these changes to the country’s nuclear regulations is Executive Order 14303 “Restoring Gold Standard Science,” which is less about rigorous science than it is about “doubt science,” the strategy utilized by the tobacco industry to raise doubts about the dangers of smoking and dodge regulation. MAGA officials and DOGE staffers are cherry-picking data that supports their agenda and discarding evidence that does not.
They are quite fond of citing fringe scientist Edward Calabrese, who, from his work with fruit flies, thinks a little radiation might be beneficial for people. My great, great, great grandfather said something similar while hawking “Dr. Kister’s Radium Charged Water” in the 1900s, until the government ordered him to cease and desist.
Who should we trust?
Industry executives promise their new SMR technology is safe, but Trump has disbanded the independent boards that might hold them accountable. Furthermore, given the disregard Amazon has shown to warehouse worker safety in the name of profit, why would anyone believe that Amazon-owned X-energy would be any more considerate to its nuclear employees or the general public?
The DOE also has a horrific history when it comes to protecting people and the environment from nuclear waste and ionizing radiation. In 2005, radioactive contaminants from deteriorating waste disposal facilities at the Oak Ridge nuclear plant infiltrated the Clinch River, a source of drinking water in East Tennessee.
Summer in Tennessee is demonstrably hotter than it was 40 years ago. Even folks who deny the reality of climate change can’t ignore that tomato planting time is earlier than ever. Some experts say nuclear energy must be a part of America’s renewable energy portfolio if we are to cut carbon emissions and reduce global warming. China, our stated AI nemesis in the Manhattan Project 2.0, also has developed SMR but is relying heavily on solar and wind farms to power its data centers.
The Biden administration also had a plan in place to triple nuclear energy capacity by 2050, which called for adding staff to the NRC to speed up licensing, rather than repealing safety regulations. Following the lead of Canada and Finland, they sought to build trust with local communities through a multi-year consent-based process.
In contrast, Trump vows to quadruple the country’s nuclear capacity, enticing states to volunteer sites as “Nuclear Lifecycle Innovation Campuses.” Selected cities will enrich uranium, create fuel, generate nuclear power, reprocess spent fuel and store nuclear waste all in one location, although without the local buy-in, trust building or necessary geological prescreening present in the Biden plan.
Gov. Bill Lee of Tennessee applied to make Oak Ridge one of these nuclear campuses, although with 230 nuclear lifecycle companies operating between Oak Ridge and Knoxville, plus ORNL and the secretive Y-12 National Security Complex, it’s practically one already.
One of the joys of those summer visits to Tennessee as a child was seeing my uncle who worked at Y-12 as a chemist. When asked about his latest classified projects, he would sigh, fold his hands across the bib of his overalls and say, “Well, if I told ya, I’d have to kill ya,” and we kids would laugh. But the serious, sobering truth is the total impact of the radiation from these facilities is itself a secret. It’s been called the “perfect crime” because low doses of ionizing radiation can inflict cell damage and cause cancer decades after exposure.
Remnants of the original Manhattan Project are still around in Oak Ridge, whispering about its secret past. The impact of ionizing radiation lingers like the abandoned guard towers at the edge of town. Residents of Oak Ridge and the surrounding rural towns have more incidents of cancer than the national average due to exposure from this radiation.
On July 4, four of the pilot program SMRs had achieved nuclear criticality. No doubt the relaxation of safety and environmental regulations helped make this possible. This achievement marks a significant milestone in the Manhattan Project 2.0’s quest for cheap electricity to power Silicon Valley’s data centers.
However, just like the original Manhattan Project, America won’t know the full cost for at least another generation. Thanks to Trump’s deregulation spree, that cost to the health and well-being of Americans could be high indeed.
Kristen Thomason is a freelance writer and journalist living outside Edinburgh in the United Kingdom. She has produced educational and promotional media for national and international religious organizations and public television. Kristen also worked with local churches in Metro D.C. and Toronto, Canada. With a master’s degree in communication and undergraduate degrees in media studies and classics, she is interested in the intersection of politics, religion, history and the arts.
The political implications of Hiroshima’s scarred “maidens”
Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein | Article, Feature | August 6, 2026
On May 7, 1955, 25 young Japanese women arrived by airplane at Travis Airfield in California. They had flown there from Iwakuni Airbase in Tokyo a few days prior, with a layover in Honolulu. In California, a crowd greeted their arrival by showering them with flowers—and four women who, to the discomfort of many involved, used the opportunity to give a speech about the dangers of the hydrogen bomb.1
All of the women had been schoolchildren in Hiroshima on the morning of August 6, 1945, when the United States detonated an atomic bomb over the city. Many of them had been at work building firebreaks at the time of the bombing, and had all been severely burned by the attack. They were known in the press as the “Hiroshima Maidens,” and they were part of a trip, organized by a Japanese reverend and an American journalist, and with the hesitant blessing of the US State Department, to bring the women to the United States, so their scars might be healed through the power of American plastic surgery. The primary intent was to ease their individual suffering, but the trip was understood by all involved to be more than that: the wounds being healed were not just physical, but political.
Keloid scars are raised, thick, and irregular slabs of collagen. They can form after any injury, and can appear long after the injury itself. They generally do not hurt, but they can itch. They can also constrain muscle movement, decreasing mobility dramatically, depending on where they have formed. And they are disfiguring. For reasons that are apparently still not well-understood, such scars are more prone to develop in people of Asian, African, and Hispanic descent than in other peoples, and their heighted incidence among survivors of the atomic bombs has suggested that radiation exposure may increase the chances of their forming.
Photographs of the scarred bodies of atomic bomb victims are a common, if still controversial, accompaniment to discussions of the atomic attacks today. But in the immediate years after the end of World War II, they were much rarer. While an October 1945 story in LIFE magazine did feature two photographs of atomic victims, nearly all other popular photographs of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the 1940s featured only photographs of the ruined buildings, not ruined bodies.
Less popularly, the bodies of victims were visible in official, technical publications on the “medical effects” of the bombs, with photographs of the victims months or even years after the bombings. These photographs were meant to display, cleanly and clinically, the effects of atomic bombs. They were not intended to provoke a sense of guilt, or even empathy, except as relates to how their audience might be interested in “effects data” for planning for the possible use of atomic bombs against themselves in the future.
Information about the survivors was tightly controlled within Japan by the occupation authorities, who feared that widespread discussion of the atomic bomb could lead to anti-American and pro-Communist sentiment.2
John Hersey’s Hiroshima, published as a full-issue of The New Yorker in August 1946, was the first publication to really give international audiences a view of what the atomic bombings were like from the perspective of the bombed. One of the six survivors that Hersey profiled was an American-educated Methodist reverend, Kiyoshi Tanimoto. Tanimoto’s account is gripping, and prominently features his inability to render the help to others that he wished that he could:
After crossing Koi Bridge and Kannon Bridge, having run the whole way, Mr. Tanimoto saw, as he approached the center, that all the houses had been crushed and many were afire. Here the trees were bare and their trunks were charred. He tried at several points to penetrate the ruins, but the flames always stopped him. Under many houses, people screamed for help, but no one helped; in general, survivors that day assisted only their relatives or immediate neighbors, for they could not comprehend or tolerate a wider circle of misery. The wounded limped past the screams, and Mr. Tanimoto ran past them.
Hersey’s account showed Tanimoto trying to help whom he could, but the magnitude of the disaster was overwhelming. Tanimoto himself suffered from a bout of radiation sickness, but recovered.
At the time of Hersey’s book, there was no agreed-upon term to use for those people who were at Hiroshima and Nagasaki at the time of the bombings but who had not died. The term “survivor” was common in English usage, but the Japanese have tended to shy away from their equivalent (seizonshai), apparently finding it to contain a bit of guilt or blame in its focus on those who did not die. Conversely, the term “victim” appears to have been used more commonly in Japanese (higaisha) than in English, perhaps again because of its apparent connotation that the violence done to the Japanese was unjust. It is not clear exactly when the term hibakusha—“explosion-affected person”—became the preferred term; it seems like it was used in Japan by the mid-to-late 1950s, and became well-known in English only in the early 1960s.3
In the months after the bombing, his church destroyed, Tanimoto worked as a street preacher in Hiroshima. His message was both theological and political: Looking for someone to blame for the atomic bombing—whether the Americans who had dropped the bomb, or the Japanese military leaders who had started the war—was futile. Seek salvation through God alone. With parishioners, he began the work of rebuilding the church building, but the work was slow, for there was no money and few resources available. In 1948, he traveled to the United States to meet with an old classmate of his, in an effort to raise funds for a new church. While on the ship to San Francisco, he had an idea: He could dedicate his life to peace, and the rebuilding of his ruined Hiroshima would be the focal point for that. Without consulting anyone back home, he began to give sermons around the United States, taking up a collection for Hiroshima’s rebirth. By the end of 1949, he had visited over 250 American cities, and raised about $10,000 for the church.4
Tanimoto ultimately made a connection with the editor of the Saturday Review, Norman Cousins, who enthusiastically supported his plea, and ran an editorial proposing the creation of a World Peace Center in Hiroshima. Although the article claimed to be in the name of the inhabitants of Hiroshima, no one but Tanimoto was ever consulted. A Hiroshima Peace Center Foundation was set up in New York by Cousins, in order to receive American donations.5
A few years later, as part of his peace center efforts, Tanimoto began a Bible study class for a group of women that he apparently called his “Keloid girls.” He had offered other classes to victims of the bombing; the Keloid girls were special because their deformity and their sex was seen to demand a level of social exclusion that went beyond that of other Hiroshima victims. He would eventually petition the Hiroshima government for funds to give them plastic surgery, but was rejected. He then went to the Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, the American-run effort to study the medical effects of the atomic bombings, but he was told that this was outside the commission’s scope. The commission was not in the business of “treatment,” and keloids were not unique radiation effects.6
Eventually, Tanimoto received some funding for surgery on the Keloid Girls within Japan, bringing a group of them to Tokyo in the spring of 1952, just after the end of the American occupation. There was also one male victim in the group, Kiyoshi Kikkawa. The Japanese press, to the surprise of Kikkawa, became completely focused on the women, dubbing them the Genbaku Otome: “Atomic Bomb Maidens.” The women were attractive because of their symbolism of peaceful Japanese resilience. Kikkawa quickly felt it was going too far: At one point in their trip, the “maidens” were taken to tour a prison that held Japanese war criminals, and two of the “maidens” chosen as delegates proclaimed that while they had once held grudges against the Japanese militarists, they now saw them as being in the same situation as the survivors.7
The surgeries were at least somewhat successful. Tanimoto had been in touch with Cousins about the “maidens” ideas, and with this pilot project completed—and its publicity value proven in at least the Japanese context—Cousins was ready to push for an American side of it. This would be larger and grander: more “maidens” (no men, this time), and the surgeries would be done in the United States, where plastic surgery was state-of-the-art. Cousins is credited for transforming their name: Having changed from “Keloid Girls” to “Atomic Bomb Maidens,” they were now the “Hiroshima Maidens.”8
For six months, Cousins sought funding for the project from foundations. It would be expensive: the transportation and lodging alone would cost tens of thousands of dollars, and the operations would drive the cost into the hundreds of thousands. He saw little success, apparently because the foundations blanched at the possible negative publicity that might attach to the project.9………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………. , the actual surgeries began. Over the next year, a team of surgeons at Mount Sinai, led by Barsky, performed over 140 operations on the women. When not in surgery, the women lived with host families. The operations were difficult. In some cases, there were dramatic improvements in mobility and appearance. One of the women, Tomako Nakabayashi, age 26, died of a heart attack during her third operation—a point that American newspapers made little of, but led Japanese newspapers to accuse the Americans of treating the women as guinea pigs.17
By the June 1956, 10 of the women were deemed ready to return home. The rest returned in late October 1956. The surgeries involving the women who survived were considered successful, although the reactions of people seeing them for the first time would often be to focus on the scarring that was still visible. But the women appear to have found the physical transformations a great boon, even if, as one later said, “there are lingering wounds in our hearts that have not healed.”18
The story of the “Hiroshima Maidens,” which has been told many times over the years, comes in two distinct modes. The “original” mode is optimistic and, perhaps, a bit naïve. It is the version of the story pushed by Tanimoto and Cousins and most of the press who eagerly covered the women once they arrived in the United States in May 1955. This version is one of rebirth: just as Hiroshima, the city, was in the process of rebuilding after the atomic bomb, so could Hiroshima’s inhabitants rebuild their lives, even their very flesh.
City organizers in Hiroshima embraced their own version of the narrative of the city’s rebirth. Starting in the 1940s, and accelerating in the 1950s and 1960s, they emphasized that the destruction at Hiroshima would be not its end, but its new beginning. There was a tactical element to this: They needed to attract resources for development and rebuilding, and leveraging their status and fame was a potent part of this appeal. It was not an approach that denied that the past destruction had occurred, obviously, for this could not be denied. The “rebirth” narrative would be a way to lean into that story and change its trajectory. Among the hibakusha, there were understandably mixed feelings about the approach. The famous “Atomic Bomb Dome”—the ruin of the former industrial exhibition hall near ground zero—ended up being the only preserved “monument” to the destruction, serving a focal point for Hiroshima’s peaceful rebirth activities, but its preservation was contentious.19
There is a more cynical read on the “Hiroshima Maidens” and the rebirth mode of talking about the bombings. For one, this version of the story almost exclusively focuses on Hiroshima, at the expense Nagasaki, even though the case for the use of the second atomic bomb, only three days after the first, has always seemed much weaker than the case for the use of the first.
The focus on “maidens” also creates additional places for critique. There were married and divorced hibakusha who were rejected from Tanimoto’s project, and after the pilot project’s single male hibakusha, the rest were all women. The exact reasons for this have not been articulated by the players involved, but it seems that Cousins and Tanimoto felt the maidens made for more sympathetic figures and gave the project more of an apolitical appearance.20 As Robert Jacobs has put it, the “Hiroshima Maidens” were:
…generally depicted as childlike, innocent and grateful. They were uniformly spoken of as being “almost pathologically shy,” and then “blossoming in the warmth they shared in the homes of American ‘parents.’” […] The use of the term “maiden” reveals the focus on the lack of romantic prospects for the women while reinforcing the image of their innocence and childlike nature. […] The Japanese women were all students when they suffered the atomic attack, thus sparing them of any complicity in the Japanese war effort, and casting them as victims themselves of Japanese military aggression.21
While the “Hiroshima Maidens” project was being planned, the discourse about the atomic bombings in Japan radically shifted. In early March 1954, the United States tested its first deliverable thermonuclear weapon at the Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands. The detonation resulted in a massive plume of radioactive fallout that contaminated thousands of square miles of ocean and islands downwind of the test site and exposed a Japanese fishing boat, the Lucky Dragon No. 5, which had inadvertently strayed close to the test site. After they returned to Tokyo, the crew began showing the symptoms of radiation sickness, but not before their tuna catch was offloaded in Tokyo fish markets. Thus followed a tuna boycott and massive global attention to the issue of nuclear fallout. One of the crew would eventually die. Within Japan, this Bravo test became a major focal point for an emerging anti-nuclear political activism and generally led to an opening up of long-suppressed public discourse about Japan’s status as a “nuclear victim.”22
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23…………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The “Hiroshima Maidens” project, however, was not part of this political movement. Tanimoto’s politics were far more conservative, more pro-American, and definitely not anti-nuclear. His was a politics of restoration and “moving on,” and, if anything more specific than that, about suppressing the anti-H-bomb sentiment of the Japanese that was being used to fuel protests against American military presence in Japan.23
After their surgeries, few of the “maidens” sought additional attention. In the 1980s, Shigeko Sasamori lent her voice and authority as a hibakusha to a growing anti-nuclear movement. But most appear to have sought privacy after their period having their bodies and identities subjected to extreme focus, both positive and negative.27
The hibakusha, as the psychologist Robert Lifton observed in his in-depth study of them, have a complicated relationship with their status as victims. It is a no-win situation: If their victimhood is remarked upon or treated as special, they fear that any assistance rendered is inauthentic and confirms that they carry a stigma. If, on the other hand, they are ignored, they feel abandoned.28
Barsky, the plastic surgeon, continued his own kind of ministry. In 1969, he organized a clinic in Vietnam to operate on Vietnamese and Cambodian children who had been horribly burned by American munitions. The clinic operated on over a thousand children, including Kim Phuc, the famous “napalm girl.” After American surgeons fled during the fall of Saigon, the hospital was kept running, and still operates to this day.29
Scars are a sort of archive of a body’s experiences. They fade, and they can sometimes be healed. Scars in the mind are harder to see. But the scars of history, as played out in politics and attitudes and cultural creations, can outlive the people who experienced them firsthand. What does it mean to remove scars, or to preserve them? What story do the scars of history tell?
Most of the “Hiroshima Maidens” seem to have truly desired to be apolitical, which in this case seems primarily to mean non-controversial. This desire was, of course, impossible to fulfill. Their bodies were, by virtue of where they had been on the morning of August 6, 1945, inherently political. Plastic surgery could hide some of the scars. But being hibakusha appears to have thrust survivors of the bombings into a political position: One’s existence is some kind of statement about power, and so an object for others to use in making their own kinds of political statements. To gaze upon the body of a hibakusha is a political act—but so, also, is looking away.
Notes,………………………………………………………………………………………………………….https://thebulletin.org/2026/08/the-political-implications-of-hiroshimas-scarred-maidens/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=The%20%22Hiroshima%20maidens%22&utm_campaign=20260806%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Climate Change Is Rewriting Europe’s Nuclear Cooling Assumptions
Romania used explosives to clear the way for redirecting Danube water toward Cernavodă as heat and drought cut nuclear output when cooling demand peaked.
Michael Barnard, Aug 04, 2026,
https://briefing.tfie.io/p/climate-change-europe-nuclear-cooling
On 3 August, Romanian naval engineers used 180 kilograms of explosives to remove a rock outcrop in the Bala Canal, a branch of the Danube. The controlled blast cleared the way for construction of a temporary dam intended to direct more water into the river channel serving the Cernavodă nuclear plant. One of Romania’s two reactors had already stopped as Danube flow fell to about 1,500 cubic metres per second, less than one-third of the normal July level, leaving the country trying to preserve the remaining unit through emergency river engineering.
The intervention made a normally hidden dependency visible. Nuclear reactors produce heat continuously and require somewhere to reject the larger quantity of waste heat that does not become electricity. Fuel supply may be largely insulated from weather, but the cooling systems, intake structures and environmental permits of river-cooled plants are tied to local hydrology. Much of Europe’s existing nuclear fleet was designed around historical ranges of water temperature and flow that are becoming less dependable.
The national consequences are much larger than a Europe-wide fleet percentage suggests. The most severe documented exposure is in Hungary, where the four-reactor Paks plant normally supplies 45.2% of national generation. By the morning of 4 August, the plant had been reduced from 1,916 MW to one 240 MW turbine, leaving nuclear capacity equivalent to approximately 39.5% of Hungary’s normal annual generation unavailable. A complete stop would expose the full 45.2% nuclear share.
Romania’s loss of one 650 MW Cernavodă unit represented about 10.3% of normal national generation on the same annual-equivalent basis. France reached a similar national figure through a much larger absolute reduction in July, when heat constrained more than 9 GW across 12 of its 57 reactors. The reduction was 14.6% of French nuclear capacity, equivalent to about 10% of normal national generation given France’s 68.1% nuclear share. Both Beznau units in Switzerland were shut during the July heatwave when the Aare reached 25°C, representing approximately 6.7% of normal Swiss generation.
Those figures [on table on original] are comparison indicators, not synchronized measurements of electricity actually lost. Hungary and Romania reflect conditions on 3–4 August, while France and Switzerland reflect their July peaks. Each value multiplies the country’s 2025 nuclear generation share by the proportion of nuclear capacity constrained at that snapshot. The method is intentionally simple, but it shows why a moderate continental effect can become a national emergency when a country depends heavily on one plant or river.
Two mechanisms are operating. France and Switzerland primarily faced hot-water constraints. Cooling water returned to an already warm river can push downstream temperatures above environmental limits, so plant operators reduce output or stop reactors to protect river ecosystems. Axpo reduced and subsequently shut the Beznau units when the Aare reached 25°C, while French plants along several rivers reduced production as temperatures crossed site-specific limits.
Hungary and Romania faced insufficient river flow as well as heat. Paks and Cernavodă require adequate water level and flow at their intake systems to operate at power. Record-low Danube levels forced Paks down to just over 10% of capacity and removed half of Cernavodă’s nuclear fleet. The reactors were shut or reduced safely; the power-system problem was that safe operation still removed large blocks of electricity during peak cooling demand.
Human-caused warming is clearly present in the heat component. World Weather Attribution found that the June western European heatwave was about 3.5°C hotter during the day than the same circulation pattern would have produced in the 1976 climate, and about 2°C hotter than a comparable event in 2003. No attribution study has calculated exactly how many megawatt-hours of the French or Swiss nuclear reductions would have remained available without climate change, but the water-temperature thresholds were being crossed in a heat regime substantially intensified by fossil-fuel emissions.
Attribution of the Danube’s low flow is less direct. Eastern Europe entered 2026 with persistent rainfall deficits, but the observed six-month precipitation trend was not statistically robust enough to assign the missing rainfall primarily to climate change. Warming had a much clearer influence on the rate at which the atmosphere pulled moisture from vegetation and soils. The January-to-June eastern European soil-moisture drought became about 11 times more probable because of human-induced climate change, while the extreme potential evapotranspiration became about 40 times more likely and about 8% more intense. Conditions of similar rarity in a climate 1.4°C cooler would have produced moderate rather than extreme drought in eastern Europe.
The defensible interpretation is that natural variability contributed much of the initial rainfall deficit while climate change materially deepened the resulting drought. That does not establish an anthropogenic percentage of the Danube’s missing cubic metres. It does establish that a dry period now loses more water to heat, reaches severe soil-moisture deficits more readily and is more likely to push river-dependent infrastructure across operating thresholds.
The electricity-system problem is the correlation among impacts. Extreme heat raises demand for air conditioning while warming cooling water, increasing evaporation and reducing river flow. Hydropower production falls with depleted rivers, gas turbines lose some output in hotter air, and persistent high-pressure weather can bring weak wind. Reuters reported European summer electricity prices reaching levels usually associated with winter stress as cooling demand increased and French nuclear output was reduced by more than 9 GW.
Air conditioning cannot be treated as a uniformly disposable load during a severe heatwave. Hospitals, care homes, cooling centres and vulnerable households require reliable electricity precisely because the heat is dangerous. The more useful flexibility is found first in industrial production, commercial loads that can be rescheduled, storage, imports and safe thermostat adjustments. Hungary’s voluntary conservation effort reduced demand by 700 MW on 2 August, nearly three times the output of the final Paks turbine, demonstrating that contracted or coordinated demand reduction can provide more immediate capacity than the reactor output still being defended.
Nuclear generation is not uniquely exposed to climate change. Hydroelectric, gas, coal, biomass, transmission and renewable generation all have different weather and climate dependencies. Nuclear’s exposure is unusually consequential because individual units are large and some national systems concentrate much of their electricity production at a single site. Its high historical capacity factors remain valuable, but they do not remove the need to plan for correlated periods of high temperature, low water and high demand.
This matters directly for reactor life extensions. Evaluations that add another 20 or 30 years of operation should use forward projections of river temperature, seasonal flow and extreme low-water events rather than treating the historical record as stationary. The engineering options include modified intakes, additional pumping, cooling towers, hybrid or dry cooling, and revised operating limits, each with costs and efficiency penalties that should be included in the life-extension case.
The grid response is broader than plant adaptation. Stronger interconnection reduces dependence on one national fleet, batteries and demand response cover the evening period when cooling demand remains high and solar production falls, and additional solar generation supplies electricity during many of the hottest daytime hours without depending on river flow. Planning also has to recognize that nuclear and hydro constraints can occur together across the same watershed rather than treating each generator’s risk independently.
Romania’s river intervention does not show that nuclear power has ceased to be a useful low-carbon resource. It shows that a reactor can be technically sound while its inherited cooling assumptions become less reliable. Climate resilience for legacy nuclear generation now belongs inside capacity planning, life-extension economics and grid design, not in an environmental appendix written after the major investment decisions have already been made.
Climate change exacerbates nuclear risks in the Arctic. And we are not ready
The Arctic under a nuclear umbrella. A main source of increased nuclear dangers in the Arctic is the intensified geopolitical competition among interested nuclear-armed powers. Increased cooperation between Beijing and Moscow and the expansion of NATO to encompass seven of the eight Arctic states have reshaped Arctic geopolitics around growing competition between Russia and, increasingly, China on one side, and the United States and NATO on the other. This happens as the entire Arctic region now finds itself under a nuclear umbrella.
These strategic changes in the Arctic extend beyond deterrence calculus and into an urgent need for regional cooperation.
By Nikita Gryazin, Iren Marinova | Analysis | July 29, 2026, https://thebulletin.org/2026/07/climate-change-exacerbates-nuclear-risks-in-the-arctic-and-we-are-not-ready/?utm_source=ActiveCampaign&utm_medium=email&utm_content=Nuclear%20risks%20in%20the%20Arctic&utm_campaign=20260730%20Thursday%20Newsletter
Editor’s note: This article is published as part of a continuing collaboration between the European Leadership Network and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists.
Climate change is transforming the Arctic: Melting sea ice, thawing permafrost, and changing maritime accessibility are opening new territories, resources, and shipping routes while reshaping the region’s strategic landscape. These changes have placed the Arctic at the center of a geopolitical competition between Russia, NATO states, and increasingly China. But the significance of these developments extends beyond economic interests and regional rivalry.
The Arctic hosts critical military infrastructure, strategic nuclear assets, and key pathways for power projection, making it a geopolitical magnifying glass in the evolving global security environment. But while climate change is widely recognized as a threat multiplier in the Arctic, regional governance has not yet adapted to this new reality. Climate change, geopolitical competition, and nuclear risk are typically treated as separate policy challenges, managed by separate institutions with different mandates. The global climate governance institutions approach the Arctic primarily through a focus on climate change effects and environmental management, while the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT), the bedrock of the global nuclear order, addresses nuclear risk through the traditional pillars of non-proliferation, disarmament, and peaceful uses of nuclear energy. At the regional level, the Arctic Council, the leading intergovernmental forum for Arctic governance and cooperation, explicitly excludes military security from its mandate. The result is a growing governance gap that no longer reflects the magnitude and complexity of issues in the Arctic.
The governance of the Arctic remains organized around institutional silos that treat climate, security, and nuclear issues as separate rather than mutually reinforcing threats. This disconnect leaves policymakers ill-prepared to manage the security consequences of a rapidly changing Arctic as global tensions are rising and the nuclear order is already under strain. Addressing the governance deficiency in the Arctic is now both a regional and a nuclear risk-reduction imperative. It requires a complementary risk-reduction dialogue—potentially structured as a Track 1.5 mechanism—alongside Arctic-specific planning within NATO, greater attention to regional risks through the NPT process, and renewed bilateral risk-reduction channels.
The Arctic under a nuclear umbrella. A main source of increased nuclear dangers in the Arctic is the intensified geopolitical competition among interested nuclear-armed powers. Increased cooperation between Beijing and Moscow and the expansion of NATO to encompass seven of the eight Arctic states have reshaped Arctic geopolitics around growing competition between Russia and, increasingly, China on one side, and the United States and NATO on the other. This happens as the entire Arctic region now finds itself under a nuclear umbrella.
This strategic competition carries important nuclear dimensions.
The Arctic remains central to Russia’s second-strike nuclear deterrent, hosts critical military infrastructure, including early-warning systems and two-thirds of its sea-based nuclear forces. The region also serves as a key operating environment for Russia’s strategic submarines, which have historically relied on Arctic ice cover for concealment from NATO anti-submarine warfare assets, using the region’s unique acoustic environment and under-ice operating conditions to reduce detectability. Climate change has begun to erode the very geography underpinning this strategy. At the same time, China has expanded its economic, scientific, and military footprint in the region through closer cooperation with Russia and growing interest in Arctic shipping routes and resource development.
For the United States, the Arctic is central to homeland defense and nuclear deterrence, serving as a key theater for missile warning, strategic surveillance, and submarine operations. In response to Russia’s growing Arctic posture, NATO has significantly expanded its own presence through exercises, deployments, and anti-submarine warfare activities.
Finland and Sweden, by joining NATO in 2023 and 2024, respectively, have altered deterrence dynamics and the broader nuclear balance in the Arctic. Their accession has changed the Nordic region from being a peripheral space of nuclear restraint to becoming a strategically integrated frontline of the alliance’s deterrence posture. For decades, both Nordic countries remained non-aligned and staunch promoters of non-proliferation, and even NATO members Denmark and Norway maintained cautious policies on the peacetime stationing of nuclear weapons on their territories. The extension of NATO’s nuclear umbrella resulting from their accession has marked a critical strategic shift in the Arctic. While nuclear stationing in the region remains politically sensitive, NATO’s expansion across the European Arctic increases the strategic significance of the High North and heightens the potential for escalation surrounding Russia’s Arctic-based nuclear assets.
In early 2026, the US administration’s coercive rhetoric over Greenland generated significant political tensions across the North Atlantic. But the Greenland crisis, combined with general shifts in US foreign policy towards Europe in the last year, has raised serious concerns among European allies over the long-term credibility of the US nuclear umbrella. The Nordic interest in complementary European deterrence arrangements involving France and the United Kingdom has also intensified as a result.
Nuclear dangers in the Arctic. A less predictable Arctic means a less predictable deterrence environment. Melting ice and increased maritime access raise the likelihood of submarine detection, close military encounters, and miscalculation between nuclear-armed powers operating in increasingly contested waters. These strategic changes in the Arctic extend beyond deterrence calculus and into an urgent need for regional cooperation.
Novaya Zemlya, the archipelago hosting Russia’s nuclear test infrastructure, sits atop a far older problem. Between 1955 and 1990, the Soviet Union conducted 224 nuclear detonations there, releasing a total of around 265 megatons of explosive energy, and scuttled more than 100 decommissioned nuclear submarines in the surrounding Barents and Kara seas. Plutonium and cesium from both sources are detectable in regional sea sediments and soil beneath glaciers. Permafrost, which used to keep much of this contamination stable, is now thawing. Researchers showed that the Arctic’s Cold War nuclear legacy is one of the least-understood consequences of global warming, as radioactive isotopes locked in frozen soil for decades are now finding new pathways in the environment. Novaya Zemlya remains largely closed to independent researchers, and Russia has offered minimal transparency about current contamination levels at the test site.
The Arctic is also increasingly becoming a theater for nuclear signaling. Russia has repeatedly invoked its nuclear capabilities in the context of confrontation with NATO, embracing more aggressive forms of signaling and appearing more willing to blur the thresholds surrounding potential nuclear use. The result is a region where climate disruption, military competition, and nuclear deterrence are becoming mutually reinforcing pressures.
A fragmented governance system frozen in place. Existing governance institutions have not yet adapted to the rapidly evolving nature of these multifaceted threats in the Arctic. The region’s governance remains reliant on a fragmented and complex ecosystem of international treaties, UN bodies, and regional forums that primarily dictate shipping, resource management, and environmental protection. But the unique complexity of challenges in the Arctic and the rising geopolitical tensions require a more integrated approach.
Geopolitical tensions have removed many of the mechanisms that historically helped manage Arctic issues. Since Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the Arctic Council has been largely paralyzed, scientific cooperation has deteriorated, and global arms control structures have continued to erode. No treaty governs nuclear activities in the region, and the collapse of US-Russia arms control frameworks has left few institutional safeguards in place.
These overlapping gaps compound one another: Regional governance relies on multiple different institutional arrangements; the Arctic Council cannot discuss military activity; and the NPT review process does not address region-specific escalation risks. This results in a structural blind spot that leaves states without agreed rules of the road at precisely the moment when the risk of miscalculation is rising. The absence of any dedicated forum that brings together climate scientists, arms control experts, and defense officials means that the linkages between environmental change and nuclear risk remain invisible to policymakers until a crisis makes them undeniable.
Closing the governance gap.
Read more: Climate change exacerbates nuclear risks in the Arctic. And we are not readyThe disconnect between siloed governance bodies and self-reinforcing risks in the Arctic demands concrete responses across several institutional levels. Despite its current constraints, the Arctic Council remains the region’s most successful institutional forum for circumpolar cooperation. Institutional bridges should be built around it as a cornerstone. But cooperation through the Arctic Council has been resilient precisely because its mandate explicitly excludes military security and instead focuses on scientific cooperation, sustainable development, and participation of indigenous populations.
Rather than expanding the Arctic Council’s mandate to encompass military security, the Arctic states should instead focus on closing the governance gap between climate change, geopolitical competition, and nuclear risks. This could be achieved through a complementary Arctic risk-reduction dialogue, potentially structured as a Track 1.5 mechanism, that operates alongside the Arctic Council and brings together foreign ministers, defense officials, coast guards, scientific experts, and representatives of indigenous communities. It could potentially be convened by an Arctic state with a strong record of regional diplomacy, such as Norway or Iceland, or a UN-affiliated body. The purpose would be to bring together experts in different areas to discuss the changing and multi-faceted threat environment in the Arctic.
Initially, such a forum could focus on practical areas of shared concern, including maritime incidents, search and rescue, environmental problems, critical infrastructure, and nuclear risk mitigation. Creating formal channels of communication would provide a venue for identifying and managing the increasingly interconnected climate, geopolitical, and nuclear threats emerging in the Arctic.
Complementary institutional responses should be established above the immediate regional level as well. Building on the Strategic Concept’s recognition of climate change as a threat multiplier, NATO should translate this commitment into Arctic-specific planning by incorporating climate-driven deterrence instability into its strategic planning and pursue dedicated Arctic incident-prevention protocols, including direct communication channels modelled on existing incidents-at-sea agreements, to reduce the risk of miscalculation.
At the multilateral level, the NPT review process should give greater attention to the interconnected nuclear risks in the Arctic by encouraging voluntary transparency, expert assessment, and reporting on climate-related vulnerabilities, radioactive contamination and nuclear legacies in the region, including at sites such as Novaya Zemlya. Finally, even amid the current political environment, the United States and Russia should prioritize the Arctic by pursuing or renewing Arctic risk-reduction channels, including incidents-at-sea arrangements and joint environmental monitoring of thawing contaminated sites. While these are minimal confidence-building measures that do not require broader arms control consensus, they could meaningfully reduce the risk of miscalculation and escalation.
Rapid warming in the Arctic has opened the door to intense geopolitical competition in the High North at the same time that the region is being placed under a broader nuclear umbrella. In the Arctic, these issues can no longer be addressed as separate concerns but rather as reinforcing one another and heightening regional and global insecurity. Existing governance institutions in the region must adapt to these new security challenges.
Fukushima nuke plant struggles to clear radioactive waste debris
By TOMOYUKI SUZUKI/ Staff Writer, July 25, 2026 https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/16663961
Fifteen years after the nation’s worst nuclear accident, the upper floors of the No. 1 reactor at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant remain littered with wreckage from a hydrogen explosion.
Just clearing all the radioactive waste, a significant step toward decommissioning, remains a mountain to climb at the crippled plant, which suffered triple meltdowns.
The huge amount of debris must be cleared before the plant operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co., proceeds with the removal of spent nuclear fuel assemblies stored in the water-filled cooling pool located on the upper portions of the No. 1 reactor building.
But the long-overdue clearance would require TEPCO to construct new interim storage facilities in a race against time to keep up with the increasing waste volume in what is likened to a “cat and mouse game.”
Experts on nuclear decommissioning say TEPCO and other stakeholders should tackle reducing the radioactive waste as an urgent priority in tandem with the greatest challenge of removing the melted nuclear fuel.
The No. 1 reactor building holds 392 spent fuel assemblies in the cooling pool, apart from the melted nuclear fuel.
A new crane installed on the upper floor is expected to load debris from the hydrogen explosion into containers for the transfer to an on-site solid waste storage facility. The clearing work began on June 22.
The hydrogen explosion at the No. 1 reactor building occurred on March 12, 2011, the day after the magnitude-9.0 Great East Japan Earthquake and tsunami struck Japan’s eastern Tohoku region, resulting in the loss of power at the facility to cool the reactors.
The blast blew off the structure’s upper floors, scattering numerous pieces of the roof and the overhead crane.
Today, the No. 1 reactor building is shielded with a giant retractable cover, which measures 56 meters by 66 meters. The cover, together with a new crane, weighs about 7,900 tons, the equivalent of two Tokyo Towers.
The cover was installed in January to prevent radioactive dust from escaping into the air and rainwater from seeping inside during the spent nuclear fuel recovery, which is scheduled to begin between fiscal 2027 and 2028.
TEPCO has been conducting checks of the upper floors for potential large cracks. It has been moving some debris through a remote-controlled demolition system.
Containers holding the waste from the clearance work will be stored temporarily in a solid waste storage facility at the plant.
Known as the No. 10 storage facility, it consists of A, B and C buildings. Buildings A and B have been in use since 2024. The newest one, building C, is 50 meters by 180 meters and 20 meters in height.
Inside building C, containers are neatly stacked. Receptacles with readings of high levels of radiation are sited in the center of the building and surrounded by ones with lower readings, which serve as shields to lower air dose rates in the surrounding area.
In contrast, the grounds outdoors appeared jumbled. Trees chopped down to create space for tanks and working space for operators were left lying on some parts of the grounds while waste containers were piled up in the open.
In addition, TEPCO still relies on makeshift storage in areas along the coast that stores waste on an impermeable liner spread underground and covered with soil.
The company intends to house all the radioactive waste in the indoor facilities by fiscal 2028 to safeguard the containers from fire risks and corrosion.
Before the nuclear disaster, the nuclear plant had eight waste storage facilities. The No. 9 and No. 10 facilities were added after the 2011 accident. Construction of the No. 11 facility is underway for the planned opening for May 2028.
If everything goes as planned, the nuclear plant’s capacity for waste storage would rise to 216,000 cubic meters by the end of fiscal 2028, sufficient for an estimated 207,000 cubic meters of waste to be produced by the time.
It is clear, however, that TEPCO may need additional storage space. The company is considering constructing a No. 12 facility, given that the plant’s storage capacity is projected to be full by fiscal 2035.
The entire situation is even more concerning as little progress has been made in the discussion of the final disposal of the vast amount of radioactive waste.
Moreover, waste produced from the treatment of contaminated water, such as slurry and sorbents, is not included in the materials bound for these storage facilities.
TEPCO will transport parts of such waste into the No. 1 large-scale waste storage facility during the current fiscal year. The storage area, which measures 23 meters by 186 meters and 17 meters in height, underwent seismic retrofitting recently and is ready for use.
The big question is the total amount of radioactive waste that will be generated.
The utility estimates that there will be around 800,000 cubic meters of waste by the end of fiscal 2036. But it has not provided a figure for the overall amount during the decommissioning process.
An Atomic Energy Society of Japan committee advising on the decommissioning of the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant estimates there will be about 5.6 million cubic meters of radioactive waste–equivalent to 4.5 Tokyo Domes–unless reduction measures are taken.
TEPCO plans to sort waste by radiation level for interim storage. Of the projected 800,000 cubic meters of waste, 70 percent is eligible to be held in solid waste storage facilities.
While the company aims to halve the volume of this waste, it is set to recycle the remaining 30 percent.
Scrap metal or concrete waste with a dose of 0.005 millisievert per hour or more will be cut or partially crushed to reduce the size. For waste with a dose of less than 0.005 millisievert per hour, TEPCO will consider having it melted for recycling.
But the facility for melting metal will likely be completed between fiscal 2032 and 2034, three years behind schedule, due to a design review.
The amount of melted nuclear fuel, or fuel debris, is estimated at 880 tons at the No. 1 through No. 3 reactors where the meltdowns occurred.
TEPCO plans to eventually retrieve all the fuel debris, but it has yet to determine the final disposal method.
Satoshi Yanagihara, a guest professor for nuclear decommissioning at the University of Fukui, called on TEPCO to more aggressively reduce the waste volume.
“Since utilities’ primary focus is on operating power plants, they tend to invest less in the management of nuclear waste in terms of money and human resources,” he said. “Recovering melted fuel is certainly a daunting challenge, but TEPCO should also grapple with how to lessen the waste volume simultaneously.”
Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on Russia
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war: Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal. – Ukraine is dying at American hands.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security
Jeffrey D. Sachs, Sybil Fares July 22, 2026, https://www.commondreams.org/opinion/us-proxy-war-in-ukraine
In his farewell address of January 1961, Dwight Eisenhower warned Americans against the “acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military-industrial complex,” and the danger that “public policy could itself become the captive of a scientific-technological elite.” Sixty-five years on, Eisenhower’s warnings have been repeatedly and tragically vindicated. American democracy hangs by a thread, while the military-industrial complex, now including Silicon Valley, runs American foreign policy over the objections of the American people.
The aim is American primacy, meaning the unchallenged wealth, power, and prerogatives of American elites, unchecked by any other nation or group of nations. What this means in practice is that Wall Street, military contractors, Silicon Valley, and Big Oil control American foreign policy to maximize elite wealth and access to global resources, supply chains, and strategic choke points. The rest of the world is to fall in line.
The military-industrial complex deploys a toolkit that we summarize as “regime control,” directed at subordinating the rest of the world’s governments to the United States. The instruments used for regime control include the imposition or removal of trade barriers; the access to or denial of technologies; the introduction or removal of economic sanctions; the ownership and manipulation of foreign media; electoral interference of varying extent; political assassinations, color revolutions, CIA-backed coups; the instigation of overseas bank runs and the supply of emergency loans when states submit; the freezing and unfreezing of foreign assets; the targeting of foreign officials with corruption claims, extradition, or kidnapping; and, when none of these suffice for regime control, outright war. The US wars of choice (really, wars for regime control) are perpetual, and lucrative for the war industries, though the deep state typically prefers that other governments cave in without a fight.
Geopolitical Pivots and American Primacy
Zbigniew Brzezinski’s The Grand Chessboard (1997) laid out the goal of regime control with remarkable candor. Eurasia is the board on which America’s global primacy must be secured. To succeed, America should dominate “geopolitical pivots,” meaning states that are unimportant to America per se but useful for weakening another major power. Brzezinski named key geopolitical pivots, the most important of which was Ukraine. He repeatedly proclaimed that Russia without Ukraine ceases to be a great power. He identified Iran as another pivot. Control over Iran secures America’s hold on the Persian Gulf, Mideast oil, and the Caspian region. It is no surprise that US wars rage in both places.
The US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing.
This is important to understand the decisions of six seemingly different presidents, who all pursued one consistent Ukraine policy. Bill Clinton set out to enlarge NATO to Ukraine and other border states of Russia, counting on Russia being too weak to object. He and subsequent presidents assumed that Russia would ultimately accept its diminished global status, accept the reality of NATO on its borders, and settle into a subordinate role of supplying raw materials to the West within an American-ordered Eurasia.
Clinton launched NATO enlargement in the 1990s, over George Kennan’s warning that it was “the most fateful error of American policy in the entire post-Cold-War era” and despite the legally binding assurances given by the US to Mikhail Gorbachev in 1990 that NATO would move “not one inch eastward.” George W. Bush withdrew from the ABM Treaty and, at Bucharest in 2008, committed NATO to membership for Ukraine and Georgia, crossing what William Burns, then ambassador in Moscow and later CIA director, privately called “the brightest of all redlines” for the entire Russian elite.
Read more: Ukraine: America’s Enduring Proxy War on RussiaBarack Obama’s administration backed the 2014 Maidan overthrow of Ukraine’s elected, neutral government (we know this through Victoria Nuland’s intercepted call where she discusses choosing the next prime minister), and then supported the new regime’s bid to join NATO. Donald Trump, in his first term, sent Javelin systems to the US-backed regime in Kyiv to fight the breakaway, Russian-speaking Donbas. Joe Biden brushed aside Russia’s December 2021 draft security treaties without negotiating and scuttled the near-agreement between Russia and Ukraine at Istanbul in the spring of 2022, which would have ended the war. And so the war continues to this day.
Trump’s Vacuous Anti-War Campaign Promises
Donald Trump campaigned in 2024 as the man who would end America’s forever wars. This turned out to be far from the truth.
The year 2025 opened with theater including the Oval Office humiliation of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy in February, the taunt that Ukraine had “no cards,” and in March a week-long suspension of US intelligence sharing with Kyiv. That week proved two things. First, this is an American war: Deprived of US intelligence for only a few days, Ukraine’s deep-strike capacity and battlefield awareness visibly degraded. Second, the White House pressure was aimed not at peace with Moscow but at obedience from Kyiv. The US military spigot was reopened, and what followed, behind a proscenium of summits and phone calls, was the most systematic escalation of the American military role since 2022.
In June 2025, Trump signed Executive Order 14307, “Unleashing American Drone Dominance,” directing the rebuilding of the American drone industrial base and instructing that the Pentagon “must be able to procure, integrate, and train using low-cost, high-performing drones.” In July, Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth staged a drone demonstration at the Pentagon and stripped away procurement restrictions to “unleash” military drone dominance; the same month, on a call with Zelenskyy, Trump asked, according to the Financial Times’ later reporting, whether Ukraine could strike Moscow if given longer-range weapons.
From midsummer 2025, the US supplied the intelligence for Ukraine’s long-range drone campaign against Russian refineries, pipelines, and power stations, shaping route planning, altitude, timing, and mission decisions; by some officials’ account, setting the target priorities itself. In August came the Alaska summit, suggesting diplomacy, yet at the same time the sale of Extended Range Attack Munitions for Ukraine, with European allies paying. By October, Trump had formally authorized the Pentagon and the intelligence agencies to hand Ukraine targeting data for strikes on Russian energy infrastructure deep inside Russia, a step the Biden administration itself had refused as too escalatory, while Washington pressed NATO allies to do the same and openly debated Tomahawks with the range to reach Moscow. Through it all, CIA Director John Ratcliffe kept the agency’s presence in Ukraine at its highest level, increased funding for its programs there, coordinated Ukrainian strikes on Russian refineries by sharing intelligence on infrastructure vulnerabilities, and patiently guided Trump toward blessing the campaign. The United States, it emerged, had spent billions building Ukraine’s drone program from the start, in an effort backed by the CIA throughout.
Trump lies constantly, and much of it is the improvisation of a vain and careless man. But the consequential lying is systematic, and in one direction: in the service of the military-industrial complex.
The Laboratory
Eisenhower’s warning that US policy would be captured by a scientific-technological elite supplies a specific reason the US sustains the Ukraine war. Ukraine has become a unique, live-fire laboratory for AI warfare at scale: millions of drone sorties, a continuous adaptation race against a peer adversary’s electronic warfare, and thousands of hours of combat data that constitute the most valuable military AI asset on Earth.
At the center of this sits Palantir, born of CIA seed money, running the Pentagon’s Maven targeting enterprise, and threaded through the British security establishment via a revolving door that includes a former MI6 chief among more than 30 UK officials hired or contracted by the company. Its chief executive openly boasts that Palantir software performs “most of the targeting” done by Ukraine. In January 2026 Ukraine’s defense ministry announced that Palantir was building the “Brave1 Dataroom” to feed real battlefield data into the AI brains of interceptor drones; by May, minister and CEO were discussing expanded cooperation in battlefield analysis and military planning, the ministry promising to “transfer the war onto Russian territory.”
Nor is Iran a separate story from the Ukraine saga. Recall that in Brzezinski’s geography the arc from the Persian Gulf through the Caspian is the second great prize, with Iran as its keystone pivot. Ukrainian interceptor teams have deployed to Jordan against Iranian drones; the counter-drone systems proven against Russia are marketed to the Gulf. Two geopolitical pivots, one chessboard, and one ultimate source of these two wars of choice: the military-industrial complex.
Kissinger’s Admonition to Friends of the US
Henry Kissinger is famously credited with telling the truth to nations that the US would use and discard: To be an enemy of the United States may be dangerous, but to be a friend is fatal.
Ukraine is dying at American hands. Thirty years since Brzezinski pointed to Ukraine as the key geopolitical pivot for American primacy, Ukraine has been demographically hollowed and territorially truncated, with its energy grid pounded, its elections suspended, and its politics reduced to corrupted palace intrigues. This month’s rupture in Kyiv shows that in the midst of what Western coverage calls Ukraine’s great comeback, Zelenskyy dissolved his government for the fourth time in the war; dispatched his prime minister toward the Washington embassy to manage the “key partner;” and summarily sacked Mykhailo Fedorov, the popular minister celebrated as the architect of the drone ecosystem. A country truly winning its war does not behave this way.
The deepest cruelty is that Russia sought, repeatedly and for 30 years, a security arrangement with the US in which both countries and their neighborhoods would live in peace, mutual respect, and indivisible security. Yet the US does not want security with mutual respect. It wants primacy, which is an altogether different thing. In the process, it sacrifices Ukraine and Iran to its hubris. Peace in Ukraine requires only that the US relinquish the hubris it has maintained for decades that Russia can be pressured into surrender, and instead accept Ukraine as a neutral bridge between Europe and Russia rather than a geopolitical pivot to be used against Russia. Eisenhower foresaw why acceptance of peace would be so hard: The military-industrial complex does not merely influence policy; it defines it. Until the American people reclaim the democracy from Palantir, BlackRock, SpaceX, Chevron, and their ilk, the battlefield “laboratories” will stay open, and Ukraine will pay the fatal price for American “friendship.”
A Seat Cushion Triggered One Of History’s Strangest Nuclear Accidents And A Geopolitical Scandal That Lasted Decades
A cushion, a crash, and a Cold War cover-up.
Tom Hale,19 July 26, https://www.iflscience.com/a-seat-cushion-triggered-one-of-historys-strangest-nuclear-accidents-and-a-geopolitical-scandal-that-lasted-decades-84141
There have been 32 known incidents where the US has accidentally detonated, misfired, or lost nuclear warheads (at least those that the public is allowed to know about). Just one of these accidents, however, became an international scandal and environmental disaster thanks to a cozy seat cushion for someone’s ass.
The incident unfolded in early 1968, a time when The Beatles were blasting on the radio, the Vietnam War was raging, and the threat of full-blown nuclear war between the US and the USSR was still very much on the cards.
Ever paranoid about the atomic threat, the US had launched an airborne patrol of up to 12 nuclear-armed bombers to constantly patrol the skies. Known as Operation Chrome Dome, the fleet of planes flew 24/7, non-stop from 1961 to 1968.
The operation’s routes regularly shifted to keep the USSR on its toes, but many of the flights cruised around the upper reaches of the Northern Hemisphere, a nice vantage point from which the US could hop over the Soviet Union and casually obliterate a few million people.
The incident unfolds, then explodes
On the morning of January 21, 1968, a B-52 bomber loaded with four B28FI thermonuclear bombs flew out of Plattsburgh Air Force Base in New York to take up its shift policing the skies.
It was mid-winter and temperatures were achingly low as the giant plane headed northeastwards into the Arctic Circle by mid-afternoon. In a struggle to keep warm, some of the crew had reportedly covered parts of the cabin with cushions. Unbeknownst to them, they had been placed over a heating vent that was blasting hot air from the overheating engine. The cushions turned into a smoldering tinder, and flames slowly engulfed the aircraft.
As the plane headed near the US Thule Air Base in Greenland, the crew bailed. Six of the seven successfully parachuted to safety, but one crew member, co-pilot Leonard Svitenko, attempted to escape through the lower hatch and sustained a fatal head injury.
They drifted down to the ice-covered expanse below, watching the plane turn into a fireball as it nosedived towards Wolstenholme Fjord. The plane exploded on impact, rupturing the nuclear warheads and spreading radioactive debris for miles around like a dirty bomb.
It was about to become a very long day for the US State Department, to say the least. First, they had to find the bombs and the nuclear debris, then they had to consider how they were going to clean up the mess. To make matters even more complicated, nukes weren’t technically allowed in Greenland, a territory under Danish control, and Denmark was keen to maintain its reputation as a nuclear-free zone (at least in public).
“Aircraft carried four repeat four nuclear weapons,” reads a telegram between the State Department and the US Embassy in Denmark. “Wreckage covers five mile area. Difficult climate conditions and lack of daylight hampering search operations. Special USAF team being sent.”
What followed was a nine-month cleanup operation, one of the largest and strangest in Cold War history. Hundreds of US airmen and Danish workers spent the sunless Arctic winter traveling via dog sleds and scraping contaminated ice, snow, and wreckage off the fjord by hand. Greenlandic Inuit people reportedly joined the charge, building a village of igloos to shelter the crews when the wind and chills became too much to bear.
Eventually, some 600 containers of contaminated snow had been gathered and were shipped to the US. Three of the nuclear bombs were accounted for, but the fourth was never fully recovered, presumably buried somewhere in ice.
“Thulegate”
Dealing with the contamination was one thing, but the political fallout was just as tricky to traverse. Publicly, the US and Denmark claimed the B-52 had been diverted over Greenland because of an unexpected in-flight emergency. But both governments were lying.
In the 1990s, declassified documents and journalistic investigations revealed that nuclear-armed bombers had been routinely flying over Greenland throughout the 1960s, unbeknownst to the Danish public. It became a political scandal dubbed “Thulegate” that deepened when it was revealed the Danish government had secretly signed a deal with the US to hold 50 nuclear weapons at the Thule base between 1958 and 1965.
Almost six decades later, Washington’s interest in Greenland hasn’t cooled with President Trump’s repeated demands to acquire the territory, one way or another.
Hopefully, a chilly pilot won’t threaten to turn tempers nuclear once again.
Thirteen films that are essential to understanding the nuclear age
Bulletin, By Alex Wellerstein | July 16, 2026
Nuclear films are both reflections of the zeitgeist in which they are made and shapers of it. They feed off of both popular and expert anxieties, while also helping to solidify the terms on which these anxieties are engaged. While some themes are apparently universal (how many ways are there to blunder into nuclear war), some feel very much of their particular time and place…………………………………………………………………………………………..
This list has a strong Anglophone bias, and with a few notable exceptions approaches the topic from largely American points of view. This is a reflection of its author’s limitations and the film’s relative accessibility to an American. Undoubtedly lists could (and should) be created from different cultural and national perspectives. The list is presented chronologically and can be thought of as an unfolding of the nuclear perspective from the early nuclear age to the present.
Godzilla
1954, Toho. Directed by Ishirō Honda. Released in the USA as Godzilla, King of the Monsters, in 1956. Inspired in part by the 1954 Castle Bravo fallout disaster, which killed a Japanese fisherman and led to a boycott on tuna in Japan, Godzilla (Gojira in the Japanese original) is a more complicated film than just “radioactive monster attacks Tokyo.”…………………………….
On the Beach
United Artists, 1959. Directed by Stanley Kramer. The premise of On the Beach, adapted from the 1957 novel by the British author Nevil Shute, is that a future global nuclear war using cobalt bombs has both eradicated most of human civilization and created a massive, deadly cloud of fallout that is gradually circulating the globe, killing all in its path. Those in the southern hemisphere are momentarily safe, but the cloud is coming……………..
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb
1964, Columbia Pictures. Directed by Stanley Kubrick. Stanley Kubrick’s dark comedy about the risk of unauthorized and accidental nuclear war fundamentally altered the lexicon with which we talk about nuclear weapons…………………… . When Daniel Ellsberg, then still at RAND and having just completed a classified study into the command and control problems central to the plot, saw the film in theatres, he was amazed — it was, he wrote later, “essentially, a documentary.”
Fail Safe
1964, Columbia. Directed by Sidney Lumet. Fail Safe might be remembered as the film of mid-1960s nuclear anxiety had it not come out the same year as Dr. Strangelove and overlapped so significantly with its themes………… its management of tension has led to its retrospective status as a critical success.
The China Syndrome
1979, Columbia Pictures. Directed by James Bridges.The sole film specifically about nuclear power on this list, The China Syndrome is a taut thriller that was elevated into something even more by its historical moment. ………………………..The film would work on its own merits, but the fact that the film premiered less than two weeks before the Three Mile Island accident catapulted it to the position of prophecy—for better and for worse.
Barefoot Gen (Hadashi no Gen)
1983, Kyodo Eiga. Directed by Mori Masaki. Barefoot Gen, first a manga (Japanese comic book) published in 1976, is a fictionalized version of writer and illustrator Keiji Nakazawa’s experiences of being a six-year-old boy growing up in Hiroshima before, during, and after the atomic bombing.
The Day After
1983, ABC. Directed by Nicholas Meyer. This classic made-for-television movie about the run-up to nuclear war and its immediate aftermath ……………… The film is sometimes cited as a factor in Reagan’s willingness to initiate talks with the Soviet Union and initiate “the golden era of arms control.”
Testament
Paramount, 1983. Directed by Lynne Littman. Among the crowded field of “the day after nuclear war” films of the early 1980s, Testament stands out for its relative quiet, reasonableness, and lack of sensationalism. ………………………………..
WarGames
1983, MGM. Directed by John Badham. WarGames is simultaneously a very ridiculous film and a very intelligent one. A teenage computer hacker infiltrates a government mainframe that, unbeknownst to him, is actually an advanced supercomputer at NORAD run by a highly capable-but-flawed artificial intelligence. ………………with nuclear war, “the only winning move is not to play.”
Threads
BBC, 1984. Directed by Mick Jackson. Widely regarded as the darkest and most dismal of the “day after” genre,………………………………………………………..
When the Wind Blows
Recorded Releasing, 1986. Directed by Jimmy T. Murakami. This distinctly British animated film, adapted from a 1982 graphic novel of the same name by Raymond Briggs, follows an aging couple living in rural Sussex before, during, and after a nuclear war. Stereotypically British stiff upper lips, enhanced by blundering ignorance, keeps them in largely non-complaining good humor even as the world collapses around them. ………………………….
Oppenheimer
2023, Universal. Directed by Christopher Nolan. There have been several attempts to represent the complicated life of J. Robert Oppenheimer on film. Nolan’s is the most stylized and artistic, and it’s based on the best source material ………………………
A House of Dynamite
2025, Netflix. Directed by Kathryn Bigelow. This recent nuclear thriller depicts the 20 minutes between the detection of an unattributed missile launch heading towards the United States, and its arrival at its target……………….
Honorable mentions
There are many other films one might want to include in such a list. Those that did not make the cut, but came close to it for me, included the suppressed British nuclear aftermath pseudo-documentary The War Game (1966); the ruminative Soviet post-apocalyptic Dead Man’s Letters [Pisma myortvogo cheloveka] (1986); the impending nuclear attack cult-classic Miracle Mile (1988); the Japanese Hiroshima family retrospective Black Rain [Kuroi ame] (1989); the late-Cold War Tom Clancy submarine defection thriller The Hunt for Red October (1990); the Cuban Missile Crisis dramatization Thirteen Days (2000); and the post-Cold War Tom Clancy nuclear terrorism thriller The Sum of All Fears (2002). https://thebulletin.org/premium/2026-07/thirteen-films-that-are-essential-to-understanding-the-nuclear-age/
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