Donald Trump’s suggestion the US will no longer apply NATO’s principle of collective defense should he become president again has sent shockwaves through Europe.
Ever since Donald Trump suggested that, as US president, he would not provide military assistance to NATO countries if they invested less than 2% of their GDP in their defense, German politicians have been discussing whether French and British nuclear weapons would suffice as a protective shield or whether Europe needs new nuclear weapons.
“The debate about European nuclear weapons is a very German debate that we don’t see in any other country,” political scientist Karl-Heinz Kamp from the German Council on Foreign Relations (DGAP) told DW — especially not in Eastern Europe, where there is a constant perceived threat from Russian President Vladimir Putin’s Russia.
Germany has a special history: Germany was “seen as an intrinsically aggressive country, that had started two world wars and could not be trusted with nuclear weapons,” said Kamp.
Germany-based nukes during the Cold War
In 1954, not long after the end of World War II, the first chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany, Konrad Adenauer, signed an agreement renouncing the production of its own nuclear, biological or chemical weapons on its territory. In return, the US included West Germany in its nuclear deterrence policy against the Soviet-led Warsaw Pact.
In 1958, the German parliament, the Bundestag, approved the deployment of US nuclear weapons, despite some pacifist protests among the population. In 1960, 1,500 US nuclear warheads were stored in West Germany and a further 1,500 in the rest of Western Europe.
The nuclear weapons were also available to the Bundeswehr for training and use in the “case of defense.” “There was never any discussion about Germany acquiring its own nuclear weapons,” said Kamp.
The West German and European peace movements grew. The protest against the “NATO Dual-Track Decision” in 1982 saw over a million people in West Germany take to the streets in protest against the planned stationing of new US medium-range missiles in the country.
Nevertheless, on November 22, 1983, a center-right majority in the Bundestag approved the stationing of the missiles in US bases shortly thereafter. At the time, the Greens were newly represented in the Bundestag and appealed to the Federal Constitutional Court against the storing and deployment of nuclear missiles on West German territory. This bid was rejected as unfounded in December 1984.
During the Cold War, East Germany, the communist German Democratic Republic (GDR), was part of the Warsaw Pact military alliance, and from 1958, nuclear missiles and warheads were stationed in Soviet military bases on GDR territory. Some were withdrawn in 1988 as part of the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty between the US and the Soviet Union.
After German reunification and the withdrawal of the Soviet military, the territory of the former GDR officially became free of nuclear weapons in 1991.
Post-Cold War Germany
After the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of the division between East and West Germany, the German position was once again cemented in the so-called “Two-Plus-Four Treaty”: No nuclear weapons! On September 12, 1990, the four victorious powers of World War II (the US, the Soviet Union, France and UK) stipulated that Germany East and West should be reunified and renounce nuclear weapons.
Kamp says this was hardly surprising, because “a German nuclear power would be something that would cause horror. For historical reasons alone.”
The US government withdrew many of these nuclear warheads after the collapse of the Soviet Union, though an estimated 180 US nuclear weapons are still stored in Europe, in Italy, Turkey, Belgium, the Netherlands and Germany.
Any debate about Germany acquiring its own nuclear weapons is completely unrealistic, says political scientist Peter Rudolf from the German Institute for International and Security Affairs. Nuclear bombs need to be stored so that they are not easy targets, he told the Frankfurter Allgemeine daily.
“Survivable nuclear weapons would have to be on nuclear-powered submarines that can remain underwater for a very long time, he said, pointing to equipment the Bundeswehr does not have. “So there are so many problems standing in the way of a German nuclear bomb that it has no relevance to current crises,” Rudolf concluded.
“Those who are now talking about a European defense dimension are not talking about German nuclear weapons, because Germany is a member of the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty and has made several binding commitments under international law to renounce the possession of weapons of mass destruction — including nuclear weapons,” agreed Kamp.
Defense Minister Pistorius, meanwhile, who made headlines not so long ago saying Germany should get “war-ready”, is now keen to brush the whole debate aside: He told ARD that “the majority of those in charge in the United States of America know exactly what they have in their transatlantic partners in Europe, what they have in NATO.”
And Kamp agrees: “Trump may be able to damage NATO considerably, but he cannot destroy it. You can’t destroy decades of transatlantic relations in one term of office.”
Recently the Centre for Strategic and International Studies, a thinktank in Washington, DC, did a survey asking U.S. and Taiwan Experts if China might use nuclear weapons in a conflict with or over Taiwan. The results were astonishing to most who read the study. Almost half of U.S. experts reported they thought China would. Only one quarter that number of Taiwan experts, 11 percent, so opined.
Different histories and variances in views of the world order explain this.
The US view
The United States was born out of war in the late 1700s. Americans call it a revolutionary war or a war of independence. It was the latter. (Social classes did not change.)
Growing from a small country on the East Coast to a two-ocean nation in a century was built on wars with the indigenous people (American Indians) that were reduced from 100 percent of the population to 2 percent today. The wars were vicious, including the use of germ weapons and deliberately starving the enemy. Essentially wars of annihilation.
In the late 1800s the Indians were defeated marked by a victory (some called a massacre) in the Battle of Wounded Knee. Thenceforth the U.S. became an external expansionist power: incorporating Hawaii, defeating Spain to colonise the Philippines, and taking some other Pacific Islands.
World War I and II enhanced America’s world power status: from being an important nation to being a preeminent world power (superpower). In 1991, the U.S. defeated the Soviet Union, the only other superpower, with an arms race that America won—to become the world’s sole superpower.
Four years ago, former President Jimmy Carter noted America had been at peace only 16 of the last 242 years and concluded the U.S. was the most warlike nation in history. By contrast, China had not been at war in the last 40 years.
Meanwhile, after World War II the U.S. built a new world order employing its superior national power and its view of what the world should be –a world of global trade and economic growth and dragooned democracy. It worked well for a while.
But America became overstretched from its role as a military giant, and in some ways soft or at least tired of its global responsibilities. After the fall of the Soviet Union, it was not ready to lead a unipolar world.
More important, it faced a growing challenge. Mao, China’s great leader, died in 1976 and two years later Deng Xiaoping reconstructed China, getting rid of Mao’s radical communism and replacing it with free-market capitalism, trade and a system that built on China’s education tradition. China boomed economically.
It even grew during the world recession of 2008 and the subsequent almost slowest U.S. recovery in recent history. China became the number one nation in the world economically based on purchasing power. It led the word in steel production and other measures of big power status. In made the UN’s poverty eradication project work by helping developing countries grow with its formidable Belt and Road Initiative that was heading toward spending a trillion dollars compared to America’s biggest, the Marshall Plan (costing a bit over 100 billion in today’s dollars). Meanwhile, China passed the U.S. in registering patents and publishing academic articles while building modern airports and fast trains (more than the rest of the world combined while American had none).
President Trump met the China challenge with a make America great again policy. He sought to bring important industries back and restore U.S. capitalism. However, he faced virtually impossible hurdles to do this: an inflated and powerful government bureaucracy, too many lawyers that impeded business, horribly expensive penal and welfare systems, high taxes and a burdensome debt. Plus, the intelligence agencies and the federal police (FBI), the mainstream media, and American academe all opposed him while the Democratic Party that was bigger than his party had more money.
President Biden sought to destroy Trump’s America. As a globalist he advocated the idea of the US as an exceptional country and a superpower. America was to be a nation organising a bloc of democracies facing off against the China-led authoritarian nations. But this failed. America’s democracy appeared to many to have evolved into partisan rule by the deep state. Europeans did not want to be led by the U.S. Europe and Japan did not wish to end important economic ties with China. The Biden administration engaged in a financial and technology war with China, which hurt the U.S. more than China. The developing countries of the world continued to admire China for its aid and investments.
Good luck competing with China…
Meanwhile, pundits were taken by an idea expressed in the ancient book by Thucydides, The Peloponnesian Wars, that competition and eventually war between a status quo power (Sparta) and a rising power (Athens) was the model for most major wars after that. The relationship between America and China fit the model well. Thus, war was coming.
Provoking a war by demonising China as an expansionist power and an abuser of human rights meant that the U.S. should to go to war soon—before China, experiencing a renaissance and rising in national power, might defeat the U.S. that was experiencing decline.
The Taiwanese view
Taiwan has a very different history and view of the world from America. It early on grew up in isolation. Then it was exposed to the world outside via trade handled by its merchants, pirates, and outsiders. Chinese migrated to Taiwan and subdued the indigenous population reducing it to 2 percent of residents as happened in America; but this did not make Taiwan a world power.
Instead, Taiwan was ruled by Westerners (the Netherlands) for a brief time that improved its economy and more. For two centuries it was then ruled by China that did not have much interest in Taiwan and eventually abandoned it. Forthwith, Taiwan became a colony of Japan, during which time it saw economic modernisation without political choice or democracy.
Then the United States defeated Japan in war and returned Taiwan to China according to wartime agreements made at Potsdam and Tehran. Taiwan was not given any choice in the matter.
But China was at war with itself–a civil war between Chiang Kai-shek’s Nationalists and Mao Tse-tung’s Communists. Four years later Chiang lost and retreated to Taiwan to regroup. Again, Taiwan had no voice.
Owing to the Korean War the United States viewed Mao as a confederate of the Soviet Union and therefore an enemy. America gave aid and protection to Chiang’s Republic of China based on Taiwan. But the U.S. did not want a war with China allied with the Soviet Union and the result was a stalemate.
Chiang shifted his attention to Taiwan’s economic development and succeeded beyond almost anyone’s expectations. Its gross national product grew at a pace that far exceeded Western countries or Japan at their halcyon growth days.
Peace made this possible. Economic growth produced prosperity. Prosperity begat a middle class. A middle class serve to create political change and democracy.
Taiwan became a model for economic development and political change. Something similar happened in China under Deng: a booming economy and some political liberalisation. China and Taiwan linked up with trade and investments such that it made for mutual understanding and the avoidance of war, the same conditions that made the European Community work.
Strategically, Taiwan aligned with the United States against China in the Cold War. Like before it had no choice. But it avoided developing a nuclear weapon believing Chinese leaders when they said they would not use its nukes against Taiwan as they would not consider killing their own people.
Taiwan believed this because China did not engage in a nuclear arms race with America even though in the last two or three decades it could afford to do so. China sought to deal with Taiwan with its economic prowess, though it pulled its punches in using pressure and Taiwan knew it.
Taiwan’s residents’ national identity made it favour its sovereignty and separation from China or independence. Yet they knew this was contingent on America’s protection, regarding which they had some doubts.
Washington’s policy was that there was one China and Taiwan was part of China. President Biden restated this in the presence of world leaders at an APEC meeting in San Francisco. Feelings grew in Taiwan that America regarded it a pawn. The Biden administration forced Taiwan to invest in producing top-of-the line computer chips in Arizona, thus disabling what President Tsai called Taiwan’s “silicon shield.” She and Taiwan’s population could also see that China was on the rise; the U.S. was not.
Opinion polls in Taiwan reflected this. While residents’ identity favoured Taiwan and they picked independence over unification, they fancied the status quo more, and perceived Taiwan would reunify with China in the long run. Most of all they wanted peace. War, even if the U.S. kept its promises and fought for Taiwan, would still mean Taiwan would suffer grievously.
Finally, they preferred China’s world order that was founded on financial and technological power, not America’s system which relied on military might that Henry Kissinger, among others, opined was in quick decay.
Hence, it is understandable why U.S. pundits see China attacking Taiwan even with nuclear weapons much more likely than Taiwan scholars.
Plan Dalet was the blueprint used by the ..Israeli army… to expel Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948. As…Israeli historian Benny Morris noted in his landmark book on the events of 1948, Plan Dalet was “a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders”… Today, this act of mass expulsion would be called ethnic cleansing.
It must be clear that there is no room in the country for both peoples…. If the Arabs leave it, the country will become wide and spacious for us…. The only solution is a Land of Israel…without Arabs. There is no room here for compromises… Yosef Weitz (1890-1972) former director of the Jewish National Fund’s Land Settlement Department.
The IDF’s recent airstrikes on civilian areas in Rafah mark the beginning of the final phase of Israel’s massive ethnic cleansing project. On Monday, Israel bombed a number of locations where Palestinian refugees were huddled in tents after fleeing Israel’s onslaught in the North. Videos of the destruction appeared on a number of Twitter-sites which showed a deeply-cratered wasteland in the middle of makeshift encampments. Not surprisingly, women and children made up the bulk of the casualties with no evidence of Hamas to be found anywhere. According to a witness at the site, body parts and carnage were strewn across the landscape. This is from an article at the World Socialist Web Site:
Israel launched a massive aerial bombardment of Rafah, the southernmost city in Gaza, on Sunday night into Monday morning, killing over 100 people. As the sun came up, the world was horrified by images of the mangled bodies of children, in a chilling demonstration of what is to come in the weeks ahead.
Over the weekend, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu pledged to carry out a full-scale military onslaught against the besieged city, declaring, “Our goal … is total victory.” For the Israeli regime, “total victory” means killing as many Palestinians as possible and driving the rest from their homes. With a green light from Biden, Israel commencing Rafah massacre, World Socialist Web Site.
Israeli spokesmen and members of the western media provided the perfunctory justification for Monday’s attacks by reiterating the fiction that Israel is trying to eradicate Hamas. What is obscured by this obvious deception is the fact that the basic plan for expelling the Arab population from their native land dates back to the origins of the Jewish state. Indeed, the founder of the modern Zionist movement, Theodor Herzl (1860-1904), wrote the following:
“We shall try to spirit the penniless population across the border by procuring employment for it in the transit countries, while denying it any employment in our own country… expropriation and the removal of the poor must be carried out discreetly and circumspectly.”
This same line of reasoning has persisted through the decades although today’s Zionists tend to express themselves more brashly and with less restraint. Take, for example, popular conservative pundit Ben Shapiro who presented his views in an article titled “Transfer is Not a Dirty Word”. Here’s what he said:
If you believe that the Jewish state has a right to exist, then you must allow Israel to transfer the Palestinians and the Israeli-Arabs from Judea, Samaria, Gaza and Israel proper. It’s an ugly solution, but it is the only solution. And it is far less ugly than the prospect of bloody conflict ad infinitum….
The Jews don’t realize that expelling a hostile population is a commonly used and generally effective way of preventing violent entanglements. There are no gas chambers here. It’s not genocide; it’s transfer….
It’s time to stop being squeamish. Jews are not Nazis. Transfer is not genocide. And anything else isn’t a solution. Transfer is Not a Dirty Word, Narkive
“Squeamish”? Shapiro thinks that anyone who recognizes the appalling moral horror of driving people off their land and forcing them into refugee camps is squeamish?
This is the essence of political Zionism and it dates back to the very beginning of the Jewish state. So, when critics claim that Netanyahu has assembled the “most right-wing government in Israel’s history”, don’t believe them. Netanyahu is no better or worse than his predecessors. The only Prime Minister who veered even slightly from this ‘iron law’ of Zionism, was Yitzhak Rabin who was (predictably) assassinated by an opponent of Oslo. What does that tell you?
It tells you there was never going to be a “two-state” solution; it was a charade from the get-go. And (as Netanyahu intimated recently) Israeli leaders merely played along with the hoax in order to buy-time to prepare for the solution that is being imposed today.
Have you ever wondered why so many Israelis support Netanyahu’s murderous rampage in Gaza?
Hint) It’s not because Israeli Jews are homicidal maniacs. No. It’s because they know what he is doing. They’re not taken-in by the “Hamas” diversion, that is merely propaganda pablum for the West. They know that Netanyahu is implementing a plan to seize all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea. And, in doing so, he is achieving the territorial ambitions of his Zionist ancestors. So, even though the majority of Israelis despise Netanyahu and think he should be prosecuted for corruption, they are willing to look the other way while he does their bidding.
What onlookers need to realize is that the current strategy is not new at all, in fact, it has a 75 year-long pedigree that aligns with the demographic objectives of the Zionist leadership.
None of this of course has anything to do with Hamas which is merely the pretext for the eradication of the indigenous people. What we are seeing is the actualization of the Zionist dream, the modern version of Plan Dalet, the original roadmap for ethnic cleaning that was drawn up in 1948.
So, what is Plan Dalet?
Plan Dalet was the blueprint used by the ..Israeli army… to expel Palestinians from their homeland during Israel’s establishment in 1948. As…Israeli historian Benny Morris noted in his landmark book on the events of 1948, Plan Dalet was “a strategic-ideological anchor and basis for expulsions by front, district, brigade and battalion commanders”… Today, this act of mass expulsion would be called ethnic cleansing.
Officially adopted on March 10, 1948, Plan Dalet specified which Palestinian cities and towns would be targeted and gave instructions for how to drive out their inhabitants and destroy their communities. It called for:
“Destruction of villages… especially those population centers which are difficult to control continuously… the population must be expelled outside the borders of the state.”
Three quarters of all Palestinians, about 750,000 people, were forced from their homes and made refugees during Israel’s establishment. Their homes, land, and other belongings were systematically destroyed or taken over by Israelis, while they were denied the right to return or any sort of compensation. More than 400 Palestinian towns and villages, including vibrant urban centers, were destroyed or repopulated with Jewish Israelis.” Plan Dalet & The Ethnic Cleansing of Palestine,IMEU
So, what have we seen over the last four months?
We’ve seen the terrorizing of an entire population that has experienced relentless bombing, destruction of vital infrastructure, a full blockade of food, water and medical supplies, and a mass exodus to the southernmost city in Gaza at gunpoint.
Is this not Plan Dalet?
It is. It’s a modern version of the original plan. That is why the IDF is bombing tent cities full of unarmed civilians who pose no threat to Israeli security. It’s not to fight Hamas but to terrorize the population into fleeing the city. That’s the goal. Israel knows that if they bomb the refugees, they will storm the border, breach the wall, and stream into Egypt en masse. That’s the plan in a nutshell.
And the plan appears to be succeeding. In fact, Netanyahu might be just days-away from finishing the work that was begun by Ben-Gurion. He has already started to increase the airstrikes on Rafah while a full-blown ground assault could be launched at any time. As the humanitarian crisis intensifies, the desperation and fear will grow eventually triggering a massive stampede for the Egyptian border. Once the Palestinians leave Gaza, they will fall under the guardianship of representatives of the international community who will transfer them to nations around the world. This is how Netanyahu intends to seize the land he will incorporate into a Greater Israel, by driving unarmed civilians out of their homes and into the desert.
The expulsion of the Palestinians shows that –behind the moral pontificating about human rights and ‘the rule of law’– the United States and Israel are capable of the most barbarous cruelty imaginable. It is truly shocking that the two nations can execute a filthy plan like this in broad daylight while the rest of the world sits on their hands.
Ukraine alleges in their case against the Russian Federation that:
Russia falsely accused Ukraine of committing genocide and used this as justification to launch its invasion against Ukraine;
Russia committed violations of the Genocide Convention in declaring the Donetsk People’s Republic and Luhansk People’s Republic to be independent from Ukraine, and by launching its invasion of Ukraine on 21 February, 2022.
The Russian Federation argued that the ICJ did not have jurisdiction to consider the allegations and that they were inadmissible.
In its judgment, the ICJ concluded that it had jurisdiction to consider the first allegation of Ukraine and that this was admissible, but that it does not have jurisdiction under the Genocide Convention to consider the second allegation of Ukraine and that this was inadmissible. See Summary of the Judgment.
In turning down the second allegation of Ukraine, the ICJ explained that in this case they are constrained by the obligations under the Genocide convention, and cannot apply law extrinsic to the Convention, including law governing the use of force.
This demonstrates one of the key differences between ICJ cases based on jurisdiction found in treaties, where the Court can only consider the obligations under the treaty concerned, and jurisdiction found under the Declarations of Acceptance of ICJ Jurisdiction (under Article 36 of the ICJ Statute). In the latter case, the ICJ is generally able to apply all law relevant to a dispute between the parties. This is one of the reasons why the primary goal of the LAW not War campaign is to work for the acceptance by all States of ICJ jurisdiction under Article 36.
The entire logic that has been built up for small modular reactors is with the background of climate change emergency. That’s the big problem we have………………… Climate change emergency contains the notion of urgency. And so we are talking about something where the time factor needs to kick in………………….. And if we are talking about SMRs picking up any kind of substantial amounts of generating capacity in the current market, if ever, we’re talking about the 2040s at the very earliest.
Now, we’re talking of tens of $billions that are going into subsidizing nuclear energy, especially as I said existing nuclear power plants.
The pledge was worded as a commitment “to work together to advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050″………… “This pledge is completely, utterly unrealistic.”…………………….“It’s like Trumpism enters energy policy.”
Last week, a group of independent energy consultants and analysts released the much-anticipated 2023 edition of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2023 (WNISR). In over 500 pages, the report provides a detailed assessment of the status and trends of the international nuclear industry, covering more than 40 countries. Now in its 18th edition, the report is known for its fact-based approach providing details on operation, construction, and decommissioning of the world’s nuclear reactors. Although it regularly points out failings of the nuclear industry, it has become a landmark study, widely read within the industry. Its release last week was covered by major energy and business news media, including Reuters (twice) and Bloomberg.
On December 2, the United States and 21 other countries pledged to triple the global nuclear energy capacity by 2050. The declaration, made during the UN climate summit of the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai, United Arab Emirates, sought to recognize “the key role of nuclear energy in achieving global net-zero greenhouse gas emissions-carbon neutrality by or around mid-century and in keeping a 1.5-degree Celsius limit on temperature rise within reach.” The pledge was worded as a commitment “to work together to advance a global aspirational goal of tripling nuclear energy capacity from 2020 by 2050.” It was aspirational—and ambitious.
To discuss this pledge against the nuclear industry’s current trends and status, I sat down with Mycle Schneider, lead author of the World Nuclear Industry Status Report.
………… Diaz-Maurin: It’s undoubtedly a landmark report. With over 500 pages, it’s also massive. In a nutshell, what should our readers know about the main developments in the world nuclear industry over the past year?
Schneider: It really depends on from which angle you approach the issue. I think, overall, the mind-boggling fact is that the statistical outcome of this analysis is dramatically different from the perception that you can get when you open the newspapers or any kind of media reporting on nuclear power. Everybody gets the impression that this is kind of a blooming industry and people get the idea that there are nuclear power plants popping up all over the world.
But what we’ve seen is that some of the key indicators are showing a dramatic decline. In fact, the share of nuclear power in the world commercial electricity mix has been dropping by almost half since the middle of the 1990s. And the drop in 2022 was by 0.6 percentage points, which is the largest drop in a decade, since the post-Fukushima year 2012.
We have seen a four percent drop in electricity generation by nuclear power in 2022, which, if you take into account that China increased by three percent and if you look at the world, means that the drop was five percent outside China. So it’s significantly different from the perception you can get, and we can dig into some of the additional indicators. For example, constructions [of new reactors] give you an idea what the trends are and what the dynamic is in the industry. And so, when you look at constructions you realize that, since the construction start of Hinkley Point C in the United Kingdom in late 2019 until the middle of 2023, there were 28 construction starts of nuclear reactors in the world. Of these, 17 were in China and all 11 others were carried out by the Russian nuclear industry in various countries. There was no other construction start worldwide.
………………………………………………………………………………..The point is that we have had actually an increasing capacity that generates less. And, for obvious reasons, the most dramatic drop was in France. The French reactor performance has been in decline since 2015. That is, to me, one of the really remarkable outcomes in recent years. If you compare the year 2010 to 2022, in France, the drop [in electricity generated] was 129 terawatt hours. What happened is basically that, from 2015 onward, the trend line was toward a reducing electricity generation due to an accumulation of events, which are important to understand.
It’s not so much the stress corrosion cracking [in reactor vessels] that everybody has been talking about or another technical phenomenon that hit the French nuclear power plants worst, although it’s true it had a significant impact and was totally unexpected. So, it’s not an aging effect, although you do have aging effects on top of it because a lot of reactors are reaching 40 years and need to pass inspections and require refurbishment, etc. But you had climate effects in France too. And strikes also hit nuclear power plants. You don’t have that in other countries. So, it’s the accumulation of effects that explain the decline in electricity generation. This unplanned and chaotic drop in nuclear power generation in France compares with the loss of nuclear generation in Germany of 106 terawatt hours between 2010 and 2022, but in this case due to a planned and coordinated nuclear phaseout.
Diaz-Maurin: That is an interesting way to look at the data. What is the biggest risk of keeping existing reactors operating up to 80 years, as some suggest, or even more?
Schneider: Well, nobody knows. This has never been done. It’s like: “What’s the risk of keeping a car on the street for 50 years?” I don’t know. It’s not the way you do things, usually. First, I should say that we’re not looking at risk in that Status Report. This is not the subject of the report. But the lifetime extension of reactors raises the questions of nuclear safety—and security, which has always been a topic for the Bulletin.
If you have a reactor that has been designed in the 1970s, at the time nobody was talking or even thinking about drones or hacking, for example. People think of drones in general as a means to attack a nuclear power plant by X Y, Z. But in fact, what we’ve seen in the past are numerous drone flights over nuclear facilities. And so, there is the danger of sucking up information during those overflights. This raises security risks in another way. So, this idea of modernizing nuclear facilities continuously is obviously only possible to some degree. You can replace everything in a car, except for the body of the car. At some point, it’s not the same facility anymore. But you can’t do that with a nuclear power plant.
Diaz-Maurin: Talking about old facilities, Holtec International—the US-based company that specializes in nuclear waste management—say they want to restart the shutdown Palisades generating station in Michigan. Is it good news?
Schneider: To my knowledge, the only time that a closed nuclear power plant has been restarted was in Armenia, after the two units had been closed [in 1989] after a massive earthquake. We don’t have precise knowledge of the conditions of that restart, so I’m not so sure that this would be a good reference case. One has to understand that when a nuclear reactor is closed, it’s for some reason. It is not closed because [the utility] doesn’t like to do this anymore. In general, the most prominent reason [for closing reactors] over the past few years was poor economics.
This is, by the way, one of the key issues we’ve been looking at in the 2023 report: These entirely new massive subsidy programs in the US in particular didn’t exist [a year ago]. There were some limited programs on state level. Now these state support programs have been increased significantly and they are coupled in with federal programs, because the reactors are not competitive. So we’re talking really about a mechanism to keep these reactors online. That Palisades would restart is unique, in Western countries at least. For a plant that has been set to be decommissioned to restart, this has never been done. And, by the way, Holtec is not a nuclear operator. It is a firm that has specialized in nuclear decommissioning.
Now, that companies like Holtec can actually buy closed nuclear power plants and access their decommissioning funds with the promise to dismantle faster than would have been done otherwise, this is an entirely recent approach with absolutely no guarantee that it works. Under this scheme, there is no precedent where this has been done from A to Z. And obviously, there is the risk of financial default. For instance, it is unclear what happens if Holtec exhausts the funds before the decommissioning work is complete. Holtec’s level of liability is unclear to me prior to the taxpayer picking up the bill.
Diaz-Maurin: At Palisades, Holtec’s plan is to build two small modular reactors.
Schneider: Holtec is not a company that has any experience in operating—even less constructing—a nuclear power plant. So having no experience is not a good sign to begin with. Now, when it comes to SMRs—I call them “small miraculous reactors”—they are not existing in the Western world. One must be very clear about that. There are, worldwide, four [SMR] units that are in operation: two in China and two in Russia. And the actual construction history [for these reactors] is exactly the opposite to what was promised. The idea of small modular reactors was essentially to say: “We can build those fast. They are easy to build. They are cheap. It’s a modular production. They will be basically built in a factory and then assembled on site like Lego bricks.” That was the promise.
For the Russian project, the plant was planned for 3.7 years of construction. The reality was 12.7 years. In China, it took 10 years instead of five. And it’s not even only about delays. If you look at the load factors that were published by the Russian industry on the Power Reactor Information System (PRIS) of the IAEA, these SMRs have ridiculously low load factors, and we don’t understand the reasons why they don’t produce much. We know nothing about the Chinese operational record.
Diaz-Maurin: Last month, NuScale, the US-based company that develops America’s flagship SMR, lost its only customer, the Utah Associated Municipal Power System, a conglomerate of municipalities and utilities. This happened allegedly after a financial advisory firm reported on NuScale’s problems of financial viability. Have you followed this demise?
Schneider: Yes, of course. What happened there is that NuScale had promised in 2008 that it would start generating power by 2015. We are now in 2023 and they haven’t started construction of a single reactor. They have not even actually a certification license for the model that they’ve been promoting in the Utah municipal conglomerate. That’s because they have increased [the capacity of each module] from originally 40 megawatts to 77 megawatts.
Diaz-Maurin: Why is that? Is it a matter of economy of scale?
Schneider: Yes, of course. You need to build many modules if you want to get into economies of scale by number, if you don’t get into it by size. This is actually the entire history of nuclear power. So NuScale sought to increase the unit size in Utah. But then the deal with the municipalities collapsed after the new cost assessment in early 2023 showed that the six-module facility NuScale had planned would cost $9.3 billion, a huge increase over earlier estimates. It’s about $20,000 per kilowatt installed—almost twice as expensive as the most expensive [large-scale] EPR reactors in Europe.
Diaz-Maurin: Is it the same with the waste generated? Some analysts looking at the waste streams of SMRs conclude that smaller reactors will produce more radioactive materials per unit of kilowatt hour generated compared to larger reactors.
Schneider: That’s the MacFarlane and colleagues’ paper, which is pretty logical if you think about it. If you have a small quantity of nuclear material that irradiates other materials, then it’s proportionally more per installed megawatt than for a large reactor in which there is a larger core.
,………………Schneider: many technologies have been supported under the Inflation Reduction Act and many others will continue to receive significant support. But the problem here is different. The entire logic that has been built up for small modular reactors is with the background of climate change emergency. That’s the big problem we have.
Diaz-Maurin: Can you explain this?
Schneider: Climate change emergency contains the notion of urgency. And so we are talking about something where the time factor needs to kick in. If we look at how other reactor technologies have been introduced, a lot of them were supported by government funding, like the EPR in Europe or Westinghouse’s AP-1000 in the United States. Comparatively, the current status of SMR development—whether it’s NuScale, which is the most advanced, or others—corresponds to that of the middle of the 1990s [of the large light-water reactors]. The first EPR started electricity generation in 2022 and commercial operation only in 2023. And it’s the same with the AP-1000. By the way, both reactor types are not operating smoothly; they are still having some issues. So, considering the status of development, we’re not going to see any SMR generating power before the 2030s. It’s very clear: none. And if we are talking about SMRs picking up any kind of substantial amounts of generating capacity in the current market, if ever, we’re talking about the 2040s at the very earliest.
Diaz-Maurin: And that’s exactly where I want to turn the discussion now: nuclear and climate. At the COP28 last week in Dubai, 22 countries pledged to triple the global nuclear energy capacity of 2020 by 2050. What do these countries have in common when it comes to nuclear energy? In other words, why these 22 countries and not others?
Schneider: Most of them are countries that are already operating nuclear power plants and have their own interest in trying to drag money support, most of which by the way would go into their current fleets. Take EDF [France’s state-owned utility company], for example. Through the French government, EDF is lobbying like mad to get support from the European Union—European taxpayers’ money—for its current fleet. It’s not even for new construction, because the French know that they won’t do much until 2040 anyway. There is also another aspect that is related and that illustrates how this pledge is completely, utterly unrealistic.
The pledge to triple nuclear energy capacity is not to be discussed first in terms of pros or cons, but from the point of view of feasibility. And from this point of view, just looking at the numbers, it’s impossible. We are talking about a target date of 2050, which is 27 years from now. In terms of nuclear development, that’s tomorrow morning. If we look at what happened in the industry over the past 20 years since 2003, there have been 103 new nuclear reactors starting operation. But there have been also 110 that closed operation up until mid 2023. Overall, it’s a slightly negative balance. It’s not even positive. Now if you consider the fact that 50 of those new reactors that were connected to the grid were in China alone and that China closed none, the world outside China experienced a negative balance of 57 reactors over the past 20 years.
………………………………………….Now, if we look forward 27 years, if all the reactors that have lifetime extension licenses (or have other schemes that define longer operation) were to operate until the end of their license, 270 reactors will still be closed by 2050. This is very unlikely anyway because, empirically, reactors close much earlier: The average closing age over the past five years is approximately 43 years, and hardly any reactor reached the end of its license period. But even if they did, it would be 270 reactors closed in 27 years.
You don’t have to do math studies to know that it’s 10 per year. At some point it’s over. Just to replace those closing reactors, you’d have to start building, operating, grid connecting 10 reactors per year, starting next year. In the past two decades, the construction rate has been of five per year on average. So, you would need to double that construction rate only to maintain the status quo. Now, tripling again that rate, excuse me, there is just no sign there. I am not forecasting the future, but what the industry has been demonstrating yesterday and what is it is demonstrating today shows that it’s simply impossible, from an industrial point of view, to put this pledge into reality. To me, this pledge is very close to absurd, compared to what the industry has shown.
Diaz-Maurin: Based on your report, just to replace the closures, the nuclear industry would need to build and start operating one new reactor of an average size of 700-megawatt per month. And tripling the global capacity would require an additional 2.5 new reactors per month.
Schneider: Exactly; it’s a little less if you talk in terms of capacity. The capacity to be replaced by 2050 of those 270 units would be 230 gigawatts. Now, if small modular reactors were to be a significant contributor to this pledge, hundreds or even thousands of these things would need to be built to come anywhere near that objective. It’s impossible. We should come back to reality and discuss what’s actually feasible. Only then can we discuss what would be the pros and cons of a pledge.
But there was another pledge at the COP28, which is to triple the output of renewable energies by 2030. That’s seven years from now. To me, this pledge on renewable energy, if implemented, is the final nail in the coffin of the pledge on nuclear energy. It is very ambitious. Don’t underestimate that. Tripling renewables in seven years is phenomenally ambitious.
Diaz-Maurin: Is it feasible?
Schneider: Very difficult to say. But one important thing is that it’s not 22 countries. It’s over 100 countries that have already pledged their commitment to this objective. Also, a key player—if not the key player—is China. An important finding of our Status Report is that China generated for the first time in 2022 more power with solar energy than with nuclear energy. And this happened despite China being the only country to have been building [nuclear capacity] massively over the past 20 years. But still, the country is now generating more power with solar than with nuclear. The good news for the [renewable] pledge is that China is more or less on track with that tripling target. The rest of the world would have to speed up on renewables in a dramatic way to achieve this pledge. But at least China’s example shows that it’s feasible. That’s the interesting part. Because, on the contrary, there is no country—not even China—demonstrating that the nuclear pledge is possible.
Diaz-Maurin: If it’s not feasible, does the nuclear pledge impede other climate actions that are urgently needed then?
Schneider: That’s a good question. I think it’s a terrible signal, indeed. It’s like Trumpism enters energy policy: It’s a pledge that has nothing to do with reality, and it doesn’t matter. It is giving you the impression that it is feasible, that it is possible. And all that completely dilutes the attention and capital that are urgently needed to put schemes into place that work. And it doesn’t start with renewables, that’s very important to stress. It starts with sufficiency, efficiency, storage, and demand response. Only later comes renewable energy.
But these options are all on the table. They’re all demonstrated to be economic and competitive. That’s not the case with nuclear energy. It’s a pledge that has no realistic foundation that is taking away significant funding and focus. It used to be negligible funding. Up until a few years back, we were talking at most tens of millions of dollars. Now, we’re talking of tens of billions that are going into subsidizing nuclear energy, especially as I said existing nuclear power plants………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Schneider: What really has motivated most of my work over the past decades is that I can’t stand what you would call today “fake news.” All my work since the 1980s has been actually driven by the attempt to increase the level of information in—and having some kind of impact on—the decision-making process. To offer a service to civil society so it can take decisions based on facts, not beliefs. When I see what happens in terms of misinformation around nuclear power, it’s scary.
I think, today, the Status Report is probably more important than ever. Because there’s such an unbelievable amount of hype out there. It’s almost becoming an issue for psychologists. It has less and less to do with rationality because the numbers are clear. They are utterly clear: The cost figures are clear; the development is clear; the trend analysis is clear. So it is clear, but it doesn’t matter. It’s like the claim of stolen elections of Trump supporters. All court cases have shown that this was not the case. But, for half of the US population, it doesn’t matter. And I find this absolutely scary. When it comes to issues like nuclear power, it’s fundamental that decisions are made on the basis of facts.
Diaz-Maurin: Why is that?
Schneider: Because the stakes are incredibly high. First because of the capital involved. Researchers studying corruption cases know that the size of large projects’ contracts is a key driver for corruption. And the nuclear industry has been struggling with all kinds of mechanisms that are fraud yields. Financial corruption is only one issue.
Another is falsification. For a long time, we thought Japan Steel Works [JSW] was the absolute exemplary industry. Japanese factories used to build high quality and highly reliable key forged parts for nuclear power plants. It turns out, they have been falsifying quality-control documentation in hundreds of cases for decades. Corruption and falsification are two of the issues affecting the nuclear industry.
And, of course, the Bulletin has had a long focus on military issues related to nuclear energy. When we are talking about issues like SMRs, the key issue is not whether they are going to be safer or not, because there are not going to be many around anyway. So, safety is not the primary issue. But once you start signing cooperation agreements, it opens the valves to the proliferation of nuclear knowledge. And that is a big problem, because this knowledge can always be used in two ways: One is military for nuclear explosives, and the other is civilian for nuclear electricity and medical applications. Opening these valves on the basis of hype or false promise is a disaster. And the ones most actively opening these valves are the Russians. They are educating thousands of people from all around the world in nuclear materials and nuclear technology. In the United States, part of the thinking appears to say: “Oh, for God’s sake, better we train these people.” https://thebulletin.org/2023/12/nuclear-expert-mycle-schneider-on-the-cop28-pledge-to-triple-nuclear-energy-production-trumpism-enters-energy-policy/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter12182023&utm_content=NuclearRisk_TripleNuclear_11182023
There was never any possibility that the Israeli government would agree to a pause in the fighting proposed by Secretary of State Antony Blinken, much less a ceasefire. Israel is on the verge of delivering the coup de grâce in its war on Palestinians in Gaza – mass starvation. When Israeli leaders use the term “absolute victory,” they mean total decimation, total elimination. The Nazis in 1942 systematically starved the 500,000 men, women and children in the Warsaw Ghetto. This is a number Israel intends to exceed.
Israel, and its chief patron the United States, by attempting to shut down the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees in the Near East (UNRWA), which provides food and aid to Gaza, is not only committing a war crime, but is in flagrant defiance of the International Court of Justice (ICJ). The court found the charges of genocide brought by South Africa, which included statements and facts gathered by UNWRA, plausible. It ordered Israel to abide by six provisional measures to prevent genocide and alleviate the humanitarian catastrophe. The fourth provisional measure calls on Israel to secure immediate and effective steps to provide humanitarian assistance and essential services in Gaza.
UNRWA’s reports on conditions in Gaza, which I covered as a reporter for seven years, and its documentation of indiscriminate Israeli attacks illustrate that, as UNRWA said, “unilaterally declared ‘safe zones’ are not safe at all. Nowhere in Gaza is safe.”
UNRWA’s role in documenting the genocide, as well as providing food and aid to the Palestinians, infuriates the Israeli government. Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu accused UNRWA after the ruling of providing false information to the ICJ. Already an Israeli target for decades, Israel decided that UNRWA, which supports 5.9 million Palestinian refugees across the Middle East with clinics, schools and food, had to be eliminated. Israel’s destruction of UNRWA serves a political as well as material objective.
The evidence-free Israeli accusations against UNRWA that a dozen of the 13,000 employees had links to those who carried out the attacks in Israel on Oct. 7, which saw some 1,200 Israelis killed, did the trick. It led 16 major donors, including the United States, the U.K., Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Austria, Switzerland, Finland, Australia, Canada, Sweden, Estonia and Japan, to suspend financial support for the relief agency on which nearly every Palestinian in Gaza depends for food. Israel has killed 152 UNRWA workers and damaged 147 UNRWA installations since Oct. 7. Israel has also bombed UNRWA relief trucks.
More than 27,708 Palestinians have been killed in Gaza, some 67,000 have been wounded and at least 7,000 are missing, most likely dead and buried under the rubble.
More than half a million Palestinians – one in four – are starving in Gaza, according to the U.N. Starvation will soon be ubiquitous. Palestinians in Gaza, at least 1.9 million of whom have been internally displaced, lack not only sufficient food, but clean water, shelter and medicine. There are few fruits or vegetables. There is little flour to make bread. Pasta, along with meat, cheese and eggs, have disappeared. Black market prices for dry goods such as lentils and beans have increased 25 times from pre-war prices. A bag of flour on the black market has risen from $8.00 to $200 dollars. The healthcare system in Gaza, with only three of Gaza’s 36 hospitals left partially functioning, has largely collapsed. Some 1.3 million displaced Palestinians live on the streets of the southern city of Rafah, which Israel designated a “safe zone,” but has begun to bomb. Families shiver in the winter rains under flimsy tarps amid pools of raw sewage. An estimated 90 percent of Gaza’s 2.3 million people have been driven from their homes.
“There is no instance since the Second World War in which an entire population has been reduced to extreme hunger and destitution with such speed,” writes Alex de Waal, executive director of the World Peace Foundation at Tufts University and the author of “Mass Starvation: The History and Future of Famine,” in the Guardian. “And there’s no case in which the international obligation to stop it has been so clear.”
The United States, formerly UNRWA’s largest contributor, provided $422 million to the agency in 2023. The severance of funds ensures that UNRWA food deliveries, already in very short supply because of blockages by Israel, will largely come to a halt by the end of February or the beginning of March.
Israel has given the Palestinians in Gaza two choices. Leave or die.
I covered the famine in Sudan in 1988 that took 250,000 lives. There are streaks in my lungs, scars from standing amid hundreds of Sudanese who were dying of tuberculosis. I was strong and healthy and fought off the contagion. They were weak and emaciated and did not. The international community, as in Gaza, did little to intervene.
The precursor to starvation – undernourishment – already affects most Palestinians in Gaza. Those who starve lack enough calories to sustain themselves. In desperation people begin to eat animal fodder, grass, leaves, insects, rodents, even dirt. They suffer from diarrhea and respiratory infections. They rip up tiny bits of food, often spoiled, and ration it.
Soon, lacking enough iron to produce hemoglobin, a protein in red blood cells that carries oxygen from the lungs to the body, and myoglobin, a protein that provides oxygen to muscles, coupled with a lack of vitamin B1, they become anemic. The body feeds on itself. Tissue and muscle waste away. It is impossible to regulate body temperature. Kidneys shut down. Immune systems crash. Vital organs – brain, heart, lungs, ovaries and testes — atrophy. Blood circulation slows. The volume of blood decreases. Infectious diseases such as typhoid, tuberculosis and cholera become an epidemic, killing people by the thousands.
It is impossible to concentrate. Emaciated victims succumb to mental and emotional withdrawal and apathy. They do not want to be touched or moved. The heart muscle is weakened. Victims, even at rest, are in a state of virtual heart failure. Wounds do not heal. Vision is impaired with cataracts, even among the young. Finally, wracked by convulsions and hallucinations, the heart stops. This process can last up to 40 days for an adult. Children, the elderly and the sick expire at faster rates.
I saw hundreds of skeletal figures, specters of human beings, moving forlornly at a glacial pace across the barren Sudanese landscape. Hyenas, accustomed to eating human flesh, routinely picked off small children. I stood over clusters of bleached human bones on the outskirts of villages where dozens of people, too weak to walk, had laid down in a group and never gotten up. Many were the remains of entire families.
In the abandoned town of Mayen Abun bats dangled from the rafters of the gutted Italian mission church. The streets were overgrown with tussocks of grass. The dirt airstrip was flanked by hundreds of human bones, skulls and the remnants of iron bracelets, colored beads, baskets and tattered strips of clothing. The palm trees had been cut in half. People had eaten the leaves and the pulp inside. There had been a rumor that food would be delivered by plane. People had walked for days to the airstrip. They waited and waited and waited. No plane arrived. No one buried the dead.
Now, from a distance, I watch this happen in another land in another time. I know the indifference that doomed the Sudanese, mostly Dinkas, and today dooms the Palestinians. The poor, especially when they are of color, do not count. They can be killed like flies. The starvation in Gaza is not a natural disaster. It is Israel’s masterplan.
There will be scholars and historians who will write of this genocide, falsely believing that we can learn from the past, that we are different, that history can prevent us from being, once again, barbarians. They will hold academic conferences. They will say “Never again!” They will praise themselves for being more humane and civilized. But when it comes time to speak out with each new genocide, fearful of losing their status or academic positions, they will scurry like rats into their holes. Human history is one long atrocity for the world’s poor and vulnerable. Gaza is another chapter.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.
There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.
The funding cut – which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland – was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.
The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff – out of 13,000 – are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region – in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.
According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
Israel’s creature
The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
1 The agency was created in 1949 – decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza – to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948. That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
Prison camp
3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.
That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.
There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:
By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks – or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”. The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.
At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.
Mask ripped off
4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept – one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless. Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before. Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba – Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 – never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”
Divide and rule
But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.
In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return – a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.
Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA. Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide. The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides. Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action – and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.
by Thierry Meyssan, VOLTAIRE NETWORK | PARIS (FRANCE) | 30 JANUARY 2024, Translation Roger Lagassé
The International Court of Justice has just taken provisional measures to protect the Gazan population from possible genocide. This decision is nothing new, but provides legal support for the political position of the United States. This decision in no way prejudges the judgment on the merits, which would condemn Israel if it were made, but probably never will be. International justice is still in its infancy, and is still struggling to apply the law.
The International Court of Justice, presided over by former U.S. State Department official Joan Donoghue, has issued a protective order in the case between South Africa and Israel. Unsurprisingly, the Court took exactly the same decision as the United States: Israel must do everything in its power to prevent genocide, while continuing its war against Hamas.
INTERNATIONAL JUSTICE IS STILL IN ITS INFANCY
The Court is an embryo of international justice within the United Nations. It replaces the Permanent Court of International Justice, which was created in 1922 within the League of Nations. The system is only a century old. Its aim is to ensure that each State applies the commitments it has entered into. However, since 1942, the Anglo-Saxons, who accepted this court in 1945, have been seeking not to apply international law, but to establish their governance over the world. When they signed the Atlantic Charter, British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and US President Franklin D. Roosevelt asserted, in the name of their states, that they alone should decide disputes between states in the post-war world. This was the original cause of the Cold War and today’s conflicts.
Consequently, contrary to the image we have of it, the International Court of Justice is not a finished court, but a battlefield where the Anglo-Saxon unipolar project of the world confronts the multipolar project of most other states. This is how we should interpret the Gaza massacre order. The only means of pressure on governments available to the Court is not an army, but public opinion in each country. No government accepts the idea of being presented to its people as a criminal. It is therefore particularly important to understand the Court’s decisions.
MAGISTRATES HAVE TO SAY WHAT’S RIGHT, BUT THEY’RE NOT ALL THAT INDEPENDENT
The Court’s fifteen permanent magistrates are nominated by their own governments and elected by all. They must use legal reasoning to justify their decisions. However, their decisions generally reflect their national prejudices. It is very rare for judges chosen by their own government to rule against it. Two additional magistrates are appointed by the two parties to the conflict. They come to defend their country and look for legal arguments to back up their case……………………………………………………………………………………………………….
First of all, no one has asked the Court to judge the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, and international law has nothing to do with politics. Secondly, South Africa was careful not to accuse Israel of genocidal intent, but it did cite enough genocidal statements by Israeli leaders to call for provisional measures, an argument which the Israeli judge considered valid. Finally, let’s come to the last point: the absence of Hamas from the proceedings cannot authorize Israel to allow genocide to be perpetrated…………………………………………………….
The Court did not rule on South Africa’s other demands, which could not be dealt with as a matter of urgency, but exclusively on the merits: reparation measures for Palestinian victims and the condemnation by Israel of individuals guilty of genocide. Above all, it did not say that “the Israeli State must immediately suspend its military operations in and against Gaza”……………………………………………………………
PROVISIONAL ORDER DOES NOT PREJUDGE JUDGMENT ON THE MERITS
The Court’s order is binding not only on Israel and South Africa, but also on the 151 other States that have signed the Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide. Depending on their situation, each of them is obliged to associate itself with the provisional measures. Some could interpret this as justifying an embargo on all armaments, or prohibiting their dual nationals from taking part in this potentially genocidal war.
………………………………………… there is already a case in the Northern California District Court between Defense for Children International and Joe Biden, Antony Blinken and Lloyd Austin, and another in London between Global Legal Action Network and the British government. Both are based on the premise that supplying arms to Israel at this time is participation in the massacre in Gaza. They now have a chance to succeed.
It could also be brought before the International Criminal Court, which could be called upon to judge certain Israeli leaders. Several countries have already referred the case to the Court.
Moreover, this order is only precautionary until the Court has ruled on the merits of the case. However, we must not dream: the Court may shy away and declare itself incompetent. In that case, there will never be a ruling on the merits of the case, and the protective measures will lapse.
This is the most likely outcome. Yet the Court itself has already dismissed the argument that South Africa’s previous approaches to Israel would not have given it time to respond. It could still nitpick over “genocidal intent”. In the event of the complaint being deemed inadmissible. The massacre could resume.
We must not delude ourselves about the International Court of Justice. It represents a major step towards international law, but is still a long way off. https://www.voltairenet.org/article220359.html
This summer, the New York City Emergency Management department released a new public service announcement on nuclear preparedness, instructing New Yorkers about what to do during a nuclear attack. The 90-second video starts with a woman nonchalantly announcing the catastrophic news: “So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.” Then the PSA video advises New Yorkers on what to do in case of a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned to media and governmental updates.
But nuclear preparedness works better if you are not in the blast radius of a nuclear attack. Otherwise, there’s no going into your house and closing your doors because the house will be gone. Now imagine there have been hundreds of those “big ones.” That’s what even a “small” nuclear war would include. If you are lucky not to be within the blast radius of one of those, it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.
Effects of a single nuclear explosion
Any nuclear explosion creates radiation, heat, and blast effects that will result in many quick fatalities.
Direct radiation is the most immediate effect of the detonation of a nuclear weapon. It is produced by the nuclear reactions inside the bomb and comes mainly in the form of gamma rays and neutrons.
Direct radiation lasts less than a second, but its lethal level can extend over a mile in all directions from the detonation point of a modern-day nuclear weapon with an explosive yield equal to the effect of several hundred kilotons of TNT.
Microseconds into the explosion of a nuclear weapon, energy released in the form of X-rays heats the surrounding environment, forming a fireball of superheated air. Inside the fireball, the temperature and pressure are so extreme that all matter is rendered into a hot plasma of bare nuclei and subatomic particles, as is the case in the Sun’s multi-million-degree core.
The fireball following the airburst explosion of a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon—like the W87 thermonuclear warhead deployed on the Minuteman III missiles currently in service in the US nuclear arsenal—can grow to more than 600 meters (2,000 feet) in diameter and stays blindingly luminous for several seconds, before its surface cools.
The light radiated by the fireball’s heat—accounting for more than one-third of the thermonuclear weapon’s explosive energy—will be so intense that it ignites fires and causes severe burns at great distances. The thermal flash from a 300-kiloton nuclear weapon could cause first-degree burns as far as 13 kilometers (8 miles) from ground zero.
Then comes the blast wave.
The blast wave—which accounts for about half the bomb’s explosive energy—travels initially faster than the speed of sound but slows rapidly as it loses energy by passing through the atmosphere
Because the radiation superheats the atmosphere around the fireball, air in the surroundings expands and is pushed rapidly outward, creating a shockwave that pushes against anything along its path and has great destructive power.
The destructive power of the blast wave depends on the weapon’s explosive yield and the burst altitude.
An airburst of a 300-kiloton explosion would produce a blast with an overpressure of over 5 pounds per square inch (or 0.3 atmospheres) up to 4.7 kilometers (2.9 miles) from the target. This is enough pressure to destroy most houses, gut skyscrapers, and cause widespread fatalities less than 10 seconds after the explosion.
Radioactive fallout
Shortly after the nuclear detonation has released most of its energy in the direct radiation, heat, and blast, the fireball begins to cool and rise, becoming the head of the familiar mushroom cloud. Within it is a highly-radioactive brew of split atoms, which will eventually begin to drop out of the cloud as it is blown by the wind. Radioactive fallout, a form of delayed radioactivity, will expose post-war survivors to near-lethal doses of ionizing radiation.
As for the blast, the severity of the fallout contamination depends on the fission yield of the bomb and its height of burst. For weapons in the hundreds of kilotons, the area of immediate danger can encompass thousands of square kilometers downwind of the detonation site. Radiation levels will be initially dominated by isotopes of short half-lives, which are the most energetic and so most dangerous to biological systems. The acutely lethal effects from the fallout will last from days to weeks, which is why authorities recommend staying inside for at least 48 hours, to allow radiation levels to decrease.
Because its effects are relatively delayed, estimating casualties from the fallout is difficult; the number of deaths and injuries will depend very much on what actions people take after an explosion. But in the vicinity of an explosion, buildings will be completely collapsed, and survivors will not be able to shelter. Survivors finding themselves less than 460 meters (1,500 feet) from a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion will receive an ionizing radiation dose of 500 Roentgen equivalent man (rem). “It is generally believed that humans exposed to about 500 rem of radiation all at once will likely die without medical treatment,” the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission says.
But at a distance so close to ground zero, a 300-kiloton nuclear explosion would almost certainly burn and crush to death any human being. The higher the nuclear weapon’s yield, the smaller the acute radiation zone is relative to its other immediate effects.
One detonation of a modern-day, 300-kiloton nuclear warhead—that is, a warhead nearly 10 times the power of the atomic bombs detonated at Hiroshima and Nagasaki combined—on a city like New York would lead to over one million people dead and about twice as many people with serious injuries in the first 24 hours after the explosion. There would be almost no survivors within a radius of several kilometers from the explosion site.
1,000,000 deaths after 24 hours
Immediate effects of nuclear war
In a nuclear war, hundreds or thousands of detonations would occur within minutes of each other.
Regional nuclear war between India and Pakistan that involved about 100 15-kiloton nuclear weapons launched at urban areas would result in 27 million direct deaths.
27,000,000 deaths from regional war
A global all-out nuclear war between the United States and Russia with over four thousand 100-kiloton nuclear warheads would lead, at minimum, to 360 million quick deaths.* That’s about 30 million people more than the entire US population.
360,000,000 deaths from global war
This estimate is based on a scenario of an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States involving 4,400 100-kiloton weapons under the 2002 Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty (SORT) limits, where each country can deploy up to 2,200 strategic warheads. The 2010 New START Treaty further limits the US- and Russian-deployed long-range nuclear forces down to 1,550 warheads. But as the average yield of today’s strategic nuclear forces of Russia and the United States far exceeds 100 kilotons, a full nuclear exchange between the two countries involving around 3,000 weapons likely would result in similar direct casualties and soot emissions.
In an all-out nuclear war between Russia and the United States, the two countries would not limit to shooting nuclear missiles at each other’s homeland but would target some of their weapons at other countries, including ones with nuclear weapons. These countries could launch some or all their weapons in retaliation.
Together, the United Kingdom, China, France, Israel, India, Pakistan, and North Korea currently have an estimated total of over 1,200 nuclear warheads.
As horrific as those statistics are, the tens to hundreds of millions of people dead and injured within the first few days of a nuclear conflict would only be the beginnings of a catastrophe that eventually will encompass the whole world.
Global climatic changes, widespread radioactive contamination, and societal collapse virtually everywhere could be the reality that survivors of a nuclear war would contend with for many decades.
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.
The nuclear renaissance of the late-2000s was a bust due to the Fukushima disaster and catastrophic cost overruns with reactor projects. The latest renaissance is heading the same way, i.e. nowhere. Nuclear power went backwards last year.
Due to the ageing of the reactor fleet, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) anticipates the closure of 10 reactors (10 GW) per year from 2018 to 2050.
Thus the industry needs an annual average of 10 reactor construction starts, and 10 reactor startups (grid connections), just to maintain its current output. Over the past decade (2014-23), construction starts have averaged 6.1 and reactor startups have averaged 6.7.
The number of operable power reactors is 407 to 413 depending on the definition of operability, well down from the 2002 peak of 438.
Nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation has fallen to 9.2 percent, its lowest share in four decades and little more than half of its peak of 17.5 percent in 1996.
Over the two decades 2004-2023, there were 102 power reactor startups and 104 closures worldwide: 49 startups in China with no closures; and a net decline of 51 reactors in the rest of the world.
In China, there were five reactor construction starts in 2023 and just one reactor startup. Put another way, there was just one reactor construction start outside China in 2023. So much for the hype about a new nuclear renaissance.
Small modular reactors and ‘advanced’ nuclear power
Small modular reactors (SMRs) are the subject of endless hype but there were no SMR construction starts or startups last year. The biggest SMR news in 2023 was NuScale Power’s decision to abandon its flagship project in Idaho despite securing astronomical subsidies amounting to around US$4 billion (A$6.1 billion) from the US government.
The pro-nuclear Breakthrough Institute noted in a November 2023 article that efforts to commercialise a new generation of ‘advanced’ nuclear reactors “are simply not on track” and it warned nuclear advocates not to “whistle past this graveyard”:
It wrote:
“The NuScale announcement follows several other setbacks for advanced reactors. Last month, X-Energy, another promising SMR company, announced that it was canceling plans to go public. This week, it was forced to lay off about 100 staff.
“In early 2022, Oklo’s first license application was summarily rejected by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission before the agency had even commenced a technical review of Oklo’s Aurora reactor.
The nuclear renaissance of the late-2000s was a bust due to the Fukushima disaster and catastrophic cost overruns with reactor projects. The latest renaissance is heading the same way, i.e. nowhere. Nuclear power went backwards last year.
Due to the ageing of the reactor fleet, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) anticipates the closure of 10 reactors (10 GW) per year from 2018 to 2050.
Thus the industry needs an annual average of 10 reactor construction starts, and 10 reactor startups (grid connections), just to maintain its current output. Over the past decade (2014-23), construction starts have averaged 6.1 and reactor startups have averaged 6.7.
The number of operable power reactors is 407 to 413 depending on the definition of operability, well down from the 2002 peak of 438.
Nuclear power’s share of global electricity generation has fallen to 9.2 percent, its lowest share in four decades and little more than half of its peak of 17.5 percent in 1996.
Over the two decades 2004-2023, there were 102 power reactor startups and 104 closures worldwide: 49 startups in China with no closures; and a net decline of 51 reactors in the rest of the world.
In China, there were five reactor construction starts in 2023 and just one reactor startup. Put another way, there was just one reactor construction start outside China in 2023. So much for the hype about a new nuclear renaissance.
Nuclear decline vs. record renewables growth
The International Energy Agency (IEA) has just released its ‘Renewables 2023’ report and it makes for a striking contrast with the nuclear industry’s malaise.
Nuclear power suffered a net loss of 1.7 GW capacity in 2023, whereas renewable capacity additions amounted to a record 507 GW, almost 50 percent higher than 2022. This is the 22nd year in a row that renewable capacity additions set a new record, the IEA states. Solar PV alone accounted for three-quarters of renewable capacity additions worldwide in 2023.
Nuclear power accounts for a declining share of share of global electricity generation (currently 9.2 percent) whereas renewables have grown to 30.2 percent. The IEA expects renewables to reach 42 percent by 2028 thanks to a projected 3,700 GW of new capacity over the next five years in the IEA’s ‘main case’.
The IEA states that the world is on course to add more renewable capacity in the next five years than has been installed since the first commercial renewable energy power plant was built more than 100 years ago.
Solar and wind combined have already surpassed nuclear power generation and the IEA notes that over the next five years, several other milestones will likely be achieved:
— In 2025, renewables surpass coal-fired electricity generation to become the largest source of electricity generation
— In 2025, wind surpasses nuclear electricity generation
— In 2026, solar PV surpasses nuclear electricity generation
— In 2028, renewable energy sources account for over 42 percent of global electricity generation, with the share of wind and solar PV doubling to 25 percent
Tripling renewables
The IEA states in its ‘Renewables 2023’ report that:
“Prior to the COP28 climate change conference in Dubai, the International Energy Agency (IEA) urged governments to support five pillars for action by 2030, among them the goal of tripling global renewable power capacity. Several of the IEA priorities were reflected in the Global Stocktake text agreed by the 198 governments at COP28, including the goals of tripling renewables and doubling the annual rate of energy efficiency improvements every year to 2030. Tripling global renewable capacity in the power sector from 2022 levels by 2030 would take it above 11 000 GW, in line with IEA’s Net Zero Emissions by 2050 (NZE) Scenario.
“Under existing policies and market conditions, global renewable capacity is forecast to reach 7300 GW by 2028. This growth trajectory would see global capacity increase to 2.5 times its current level by 2030, falling short of the tripling goal.”
In the IEA’s ‘accelerated case’, 4,500 GW of new renewable capacity will be added over the next five years (compared to 3,700 GW in the ‘main case’), nearing the tripling goal.
Tripling nuclear?
The goal of tripling renewables by 2030 is a stretch but it is not impossible. Conversely, the ‘pledge’ signed by just 22 nations at COP28 to triple nuclear power by 2050 appears absurd.
The Labor federal government signed Australia up to the renewables pledge but not the nuclear pledge. The Coalition wants to do the opposite, and also opposes the Labor government’s target of 82 per cent renewable power supply by 2030.
One of the lies being peddled by the Coalition is that nuclear power capacity could increase by 80 percent over the next 30 years. That is based on a ‘high case’ scenario from the IAEA. However the IAEA’s ‘low case’ scenario — ignored by the Coalition — is for another 30 years of stagnation.
So should we go with the IAEA’s high or low scenarios, or split the difference perhaps?
According to a report by the IAEA itself, the Agency’s ‘high’ forecasts have consistently proven to be ridiculous and even its ‘low’ forecasts are too high — by 13 percent on average.
Nuclear power won’t increase by 80 percent by 2050 and it certainly won’t triple; indeed it will struggle to maintain current output given the ageing of the reactor fleet and recent experience with construction projects.
Comparing nuclear and renewables in China
China’s nuclear program added only 1.2 GW capacity in 2023 while wind and solar combined added 278 GW. Michael Barnard noted in CleanTechnica that allowing for capacity factors, the nuclear additions amount to about 7 terrawatt-hours (TWh) of new low carbon generation per year, while wind and solar between them will contribute about 427 TWh annually, over 60 times more than nuclear.
“One of the things that western nuclear proponents claim is that governments have over-regulated nuclear compared to wind and solar, and China’s regulatory regime for nuclear is clearly not the USA’s or the UK’s. They claim that fears of radiation have created massive and unfair headwinds, and China has a very different balancing act on public health and public health perceptions than the west. They claim that environmentalists have stopped nuclear development in the west, and while there are vastly more protests in China than most westerners realize, governmental strategic programs are much less susceptible to public hostility.
“And finally, western nuclear proponents complain that NIMBYs block nuclear expansion, and public sentiment and NIMBYism is much less powerful in China with its Confucian, much more top down governance system.
“China’s central government has a 30 year track record of building massive infrastructure programs, so it’s not like it is missing any skills there. China has a nuclear weapons program, so the alignment of commercial nuclear generation with military strategic aims is in hand too. China has a strong willingness to finance strategic infrastructure with long-running state debt, so there are no headwinds there either.
“Yet China can’t scale its nuclear program at all. It peaked in 2018 with 7 reactors with a capacity of 8.2 GW. For the five years since then then it’s been averaging 2.3 GW of new nuclear capacity, and last year only added 1.2 GW …”
As a secular Jew raised in a fiercely anti-Zionist family, I grew up viewing the State of Israel as an unfortunate fait accompli and accepting that the two-state solution was probably the best that could be hoped for.
Since then, I have come to the conclusion that the creation of a Jewish state was a catastrophic mistake and that Zionist Israel has relinquished its right to exist.
What good could possibly have come from a project that handed a group of Jewish Europeans a land that for countless centuries was inhabited by Arab Palestinians?
Not only did Palestinians have no say in the creation of a Jewish state on their homeland, but just at the time when other developing countries around the world were finally breaking free from the yoke of colonial rule Palestinians, like Native Americans and Australia’s First Nations people before them, became the victims of European settler colonialism — this time endorsed by a U.N. resolution that neither the Palestinians nor any of the Arab states agreed to or voted for.
The driving force behind both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that called for a Jewish homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. Partition Plan that established a Jewish State, was Zionism, a religious, political and cultural movement that began in the late 19th century to claim Palestine as the God-given homeland of the Jewish people.
Contrary to official mythology, however, the Zionist fervour was not shared by the majority of Jews.
The socialist Jewish Labour Bund in Eastern Europe, for instance, believed that Jewish culture should be preserved right at home in the shtetls (villages) as opposed to running off to Palestine and thought that the notion of Jews colonising Palestine was farcical. They even wrote a mocking Yiddish song for the Zionists – “Oy, Ir Narishe Tsionistn” (“You Foolish Little Zionist”).
Meanwhile Jews, Christians and Muslims had been living aside each other in historic Palestine in relative peace for centuries. It was only after the rapid influx of European Jewish refugees fleeing the pogroms in Eastern Europe following World War I, and in the wake of the Holocaust, that the conflicts in Palestine escalated and the bloodshed on both sides began.
By the time of the U.N. partition plan, Israeli Defence Force brigades had already launched a bloody campaign of burning villages and killing men, women and children to drive Palestinians off their land. In all, 750,000 Palestinians were expelled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab countries.
This was the beginning of the Nakba (the catastrophe) that continues today – most strikingly in Gaza — as Zionist zealots insist Israel has a rightful claim to all the land between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea.
In their view, all of Palestine belongs to Jews because in the words of Likud Party Knesset Member Danny Danon, the Bible is “our deed to the land.”
For Zionists like Danon, expelling Palestinians is an existential necessity, a view that echoed in 1956 by Moshe Dayan, military commander of the Jerusalem Front in 1948, who proclaimed:
“We are a generation of settlers, and without the steel helmet and the cannon we cannot plant a tree and build a home… This is the fate of our generation, and the choice of our life – to be prepared and armed, strong and tough – or otherwise, the sword will slip from our fist, and our life will be snuffed out.
What cause have we to complain about their fierce hatred to us? For eight years now, they sit in their refugee camps in Gaza, and before their eyes we turn into our homestead the land and villages in which they and their forefathers have lived.
Let us not be afraid to see the hatred that accompanies and consumes the lives of hundreds of thousands of Arabs who sit all around us and wait for the moment when their hands will be able to reach our blood.”
Next Uprising Would Dwarf Oct.7
As Dayan knew then, Israel would never be safe. In Gaza now, Israel is creating the next generation of Palestinian resistance fighters who have witnessed their families slaughtered, guaranteeing that the next uprising will dwarf the Hamas invasion of Oct. 7.
Whatever legitimacy Israel might have claimed as a haven for Jewish refugees who were abandoned in the West after the Holocaust, their right to a state of their own has long since been forfeited.
Both the 1917 Balfour Declaration that promised Jews a homeland in the British Mandate of Palestine and the 1948 U.N. partition plan creating the State of Israel stipulated that the rights of Palestinians had to be safeguarded and, following the expulsion of hundreds of thousands of Palestinians in 1948, U.N. General Assembly Resolution 194 of that year specifically said the refugees’ had the right to return “at the earliest practicable date.”
On all counts, Israel has completely failed to live up to its obligations to protect the most basic rights of the Palestinian people.
Today, Palestinians living inside Israel remain second-class citizens without equal rights to own property or even use their own language. On the West Bank, Palestinians are dispossessed and murdered daily by Jewish settlers with the backing of the IDF.
In Gaza, even before Israel’s invasion following Oct. 7, Palestinians have lived under a brutal state of siege in an open air prison. The millions of Palestinians who were exiled into refugee camps in neighbouring Arab states are still denied the right to return.
Indeed, the Zionists have brought to Palestine the very scourge they fled in Europe — murdering, expelling and ethnically cleansing an entire population, mirroring the behaviour of their Nazi oppressors.
In the documentary film Tantura about the 1948 massacre of almost 300 Palestinians in the Palestinian village of Tantura, former Israeli soldiers, now in their 90s, retell the story of the slaughter unashamedly.
One brigade member laughs as he recalls, “Of course we killed them, without remorse… If you killed, you did a good thing.” An old woman says matter-of-factly, “Let them remember (what we did to them) like we remember what happened in Europe (the Holocaust). If they did it, we can also.”
Yet, despite the evidence of Israeli war crimes, Zionists have continued to deny Israel’s atrocities while claiming their own superiority. Professor emeritus at Haifa University, Ilan Pappe, says of the mindset:
“I think the self-image of Israel as a moral society is something I haven’t seen anywhere else in the world. We are the ‘Chosen People’ (in the Old Testament Jews were chosen by God as his special people). This is part of the Israeli self-identification…(But) basically, the project of Zionism has a problem… You cannot create a safe haven by creating a catastrophe for other people.”
Today, complicit Western leaders and their media proxies wring their hands about the regrettable loss of civilian lives in Gaza while hypocritically calling for a two-state solution they know is virtually impossible since Israel has reduced the amount of Palestinian land from 45 percent at the time of partition to 15 percent today.
Craig Mokhiber, who recently resigned as New York director for the U.N. High Commissioner for Human Rights over the U.N.’s failure to act on war crimes in Gaza, said in his resignation letter:
“The mantra of the ‘two-state solution’ has become an open joke in the corridors of the U.N., both for its utter impossibility in fact, and for its total failure to account for the inalienable human rights of the Palestinian people.”
Writing On Wall For Two-State Solution
After 75 years of Israel’s colonial oppression of the Palestinian people, it has become glaringly obvious that any notion of a two-state solution has become little more than a fig leaf for Israel’s apartheid regime and the only way forward is one secular democratic state that safeguards the fundamental rights and equality for all of its citizens.
Obviously, it won’t happen overnight or without conflict – Israel will aggressively defend its perceived right to exist as a Jewish state with the massive backing of the Western powers. Palestinians will never abandon their yearning for a homeland as it was before the arrival of European Jewish settlers — but the writing is on the wall.
Almost two decades ago the late Palestinian-American academic Edward Said wrote that:
“The beginning (of one democratic state) is to develop something entirely missing from both Israeli and Palestinian realities today: the idea and practice of citizenship, not of ethnic or racial community, as the main vehicle of coexistence.”
More recently, Palestinian academic and physician Ghada Karmi has cautioned:
“The U.N. that made Israel and must now unmake it, not by expulsion and displacement as in 1948, but by converting its bleak legacy into a future of hope for both peoples in one state.”
But if the U.N. fails to act, Karmi sees a more apocalyptic path to the end of the Zionist state. In her recent book One State: The Only Democratic Future for Palestine, she writes:
“Israel will fiercely reject the shared state, but will be powerless to prevent it from happening. … It will not happen solely as a result of a one-state campaign and solidarity movements. … but rather through people’s natural resistance to relentless oppression leading to the ultimate overthrow of the oppressors.”
If that can happen without cataclysmic global repercussions, possibly bringing the U.S. and Europe to the brink of the next world war, perhaps a new secular democratic state for both Jews and Palestinians will evolve from the struggle.
In any event, it is time to acknowledge that the Zionist project has been a spectacular failure and the status quo can no longer be maintained. Israel has become a pariah state in the eyes of most of the world and the winds of change are now howling across the region.
Stefan Moore is an American-Australian documentary filmmaker. His documentaries have received four Emmys and other awards. In the U.S., he was co-director of TVG Productions in New York, a series producer at WNET and a producer for the prime time CBS News magazine program 48 HOURS. In the U.K. he worked as a series producer at the BBC, and in Australia he was an executive producer for Film Australia and the ABC.
Public hearings on South Africa’s request for provisional measures will take place on January 11 and 12 at the ICJ which is located in the Peace Palace in The Hague, Netherlands. The hearings will be livestreamed from 4:00-6:00 a.m. Eastern/1:00-3:00 a.m. Pacific on the Court’s website and on UN Web TV. The court could order provisional measures within a week after the hearings.
Other States Parties to the Genocide Convention Can Join South Africa’s Case
South Africa, a party to the Genocide Convention, charged Israel with genocide in the International Court of Justice.
For nearly three months, Israel has enjoyed virtual impunity for its atrocious crimes against the Palestinian people. That changed on December 29 when South Africa, a state party to the Genocide Convention, filed an 84-page application in the International Court of Justice (ICJ, or World Court) alleging that Israel is committing genocide in Gaza.
South Africa’s well-documented application alleges that “acts and omissions by Israel … are genocidal in character, as they are committed with the requisite specific intent … to destroy Palestinians in Gaza as a part of the broader Palestinian national, racial and ethnical group” and that “the conduct of Israel — through its State organs, State agents, and other persons and entities acting on its instructions or under its direction, control or influence — in relation to Palestinians in Gaza, is in violation of its obligations under the Genocide Convention.”
Israel is mounting a full-court press to prevent an ICJ finding that it’s committing genocide in Gaza. On January 4, the Israeli Foreign Ministry instructed its embassies to pressure politicians and diplomats in their host countries to make statements opposing South Africa’s case at the ICJ.
In its application, South Africa cited eight allegations to support its contention that Israel is perpetrating genocide in Gaza. They include:
(1) Killing Palestinians in Gaza, including a large proportion of women and children (approximately 70 percent) of the more than 21,110 fatalities and some appear to have been subjected to summary execution;
(2) Causing serious mental and bodily harm to Palestinians in Gaza, including maiming, psychological trauma, and inhuman and degrading treatment;
(3) Causing the forced evacuation and displacement of about 85 percent of Palestinians in Gaza — including children, the elderly and infirm, and the sick and wounded. Israel is also causing the massive destruction of Palestinian homes, villages, towns, refugee camps and entire areas, which precludes the return of a significant proportion of the Palestinian people to their homes;
(4) Causing widespread hunger, starvation and dehydration to the besieged Palestinians in Gaza by impeding sufficient humanitarian assistance, cutting off sufficient food, water, fuel and electricity, and destroying bakeries, mills, agricultural lands and other means of production and sustenance;
(5) Failing to provide and restricting the provision of adequate clothing, shelter, hygiene and sanitation to Palestinians in Gaza, including 1.9 million internally displaced persons. This has compelled them to live in dangerous situations of squalor, in conjunction with routine targeting and destruction of places of shelter and killing and wounding of persons who are sheltering, including women, children, the elderly and the disabled;
(6) Failing to provide for or ensure the provision of medical care to Palestinians in Gaza, including those medical needs created by other genocidal acts that are causing serious bodily harm. This is occurring by direct attacks on Palestinian hospitals, ambulances and other healthcare facilities, the killing of Palestinian doctors, medics and nurses (including the most qualified medics in Gaza) and the destruction and disabling of Gaza’s medical system;
(7) Destroying Palestinian life in Gaza, by destroying its infrastructure, schools, universities, courts, public buildings, public records, libraries, stores, churches, mosques, roads, utilities and other facilities necessary to sustain the lives of Palestinians as a group. Israel is killing whole families, erasing entire oral histories and killing prominent and distinguished members of society;
(8) Imposing measures intended to prevent Palestinian births in Gaza, including through reproductive violence inflicted on Palestinian women, newborns, infants and children.
South Africa cited myriad statements by Israeli officials that constitute direct evidence of an intent to commit genocide:
“Gaza won’t return to what it was before. We will eliminate everything,” Israel’s Defense Minister Yoav Gallant said. “If it doesn’t take one day, it will take a week. It will take weeks or even months, we will reach all places.”
Avi Dichter, Israel’s Minister of Agriculture, declared, “We are now actually rolling out the Gaza Nakba,” a reference to the 1948 ethnic cleansing of Palestinians to create the state of Israel.
“Now we all have one common goal — erasing the Gaza Strip from the face of the earth,” Nissim Vaturi, the Deputy Speaker of the Knesset and Member of the Foreign Affairs and Security Committee proclaimed.
Israel’s Strategy to Defeat South Africa’s Case at the ICJ
The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War, war costs were covered almost entirely by debt. There were no wartime tax increases or cuts in spending. Quite the reverse
a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon.
the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.
Prior to 2001, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different.
The post-9/11 wars in Iraq and Afghanistan were enabled by a historically unprecedented combination of budgetary procedures and financing methods. Unlike all previous U.S. wars, the post-9/11 wars were funded without higher taxes or non-war budget cuts, and through a separate budget. This set of circumstances – one that I have termed the “Ghost Budget” – enabled successive administrations to prosecute the wars with limited congressional oversight and minimal transparency and public debate. I adopted the name “Ghost Budget” because the term “ghost” appeared frequently in post-9/11 government reports in reference to funds allocated to people, places, or projects that turned out to be phantoms.
The Ghost Budget was the result of an interplay between changes in the U.S. budgetary process, a more assertive military establishment, and the conditions in global capital markets. It has had far-reaching implications for the conduct and course of the post-9/11 wars and for defense policy today.
Funding the Post-9/11 Wars
The “Ghost Budget” was the biggest budgetary anomaly in U.S. history. Prior to 9/11, U.S. wars were financed through a mixture of higher taxes and budget cuts, and funded mostly through the regular defense budget. One third of the costs of World War I and half the costs of World War II were met through higher taxes. During World War II, President Franklin D. Roosevelt described paying taxes as a “patriotic duty” as he raised taxes on business, imposed a “wealth tax,” raised inheritance taxes, and expanded the number of income taxpayers to roughly 80 percent of the workforce by 1945. Wars in Korea and Vietnam largely followed a similar pattern, with President Harry Truman pledging to make the country “pay as you go” for the Korean War. War funding was also a central issue in the Vietnam War, which ended when Congress refused to appropriate money for the South Vietnamese military.
The post-9/11 war funding pattern was completely different. For the first time since the American Revolutionary War, war costs were covered almost entirely by debt. There were no wartime tax increases or cuts in spending. Quite the reverse: far from demanding sacrifices, President George W. Bush slashed federal taxes in 2001 and again in 2003, just as the United States invaded Iraq. President Donald Trump reduced taxes further in 2017. Overall, federal taxes declined from 18.8 percent of GDP in 2001 to 16.2 percent by the start of 2020. In the same period, outstanding federal debt held by the public rose from $3.5 trillion to $20 trillion. War spending contributed at least $2.2 trillion to this increase.
Not only was the financing strategy unprecedented, but the budgetary mechanism used to approve the vast post-9/11 wartime spending also diverged radically from the past. In all previous conflicts, the United States paid for wars as part of its regular defense appropriations (the defense “base budget”), after the initial period (1-2 years) of supplemental “emergency” funding bills. By contrast, for the entire decade from FY 2001 to FY 2011, Congress paid for the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan as “emergencies,” devoid of serious legislative or executive oversight.
By statute, emergency spending is defined as “unanticipated…sudden…urgent…unforeseen…and temporary” and is typically reserved for one-off crises such as floods and hurricanes. Such emergency spending measures are exempt from regular procedural rules in Congress because the intent is to disburse money quickly in situations where delay would be harmful.
Congress continued to enact “emergency supplemental” funding even as the war effort expanded. The United States sent 130,000 military personnel into Iraq in 2003 (alongside troops from more than 30 countries). By 2009, there were 187,200 U.S. “boots on the ground” in Iraq and Afghanistan, supported by a similar number of military contractors, with nearly 500 U.S. military bases set up across Iraq, but the conflict was still being paid for as an “emergency.” In FY 2012, President Obama renamed the “Global War on Terror” as “Overseas Contingency Operations” (OCO) but the war continued to be funded using money that – although not designated as “emergency” – was explicitly exempted from regular spending limits on other government spending programs.
How We Got Here
There were three primary drivers of the Ghost Budget: unusual economic conditions, congressional budget dysfunction, and military assertiveness.
Economic Conditions: Unlike earlier wars, the post 9/11 conflicts took place in an era of free-flowing international capital markets. That provided the U.S. Treasury with access to a deep and global pool of capital, making it easy to borrow large amounts without negatively affecting the cost. It was also a period of historically low interest rates. Real interest rates (nominal rate minus inflation) on 10-year Treasury bonds fell from 3.4% at the start of 2001 to negative (-0.4%) by early 2021 — a 40-year low. Consequently, the Treasury was able to borrow trillions of dollars to pay for the wars, and simultaneously finance the tax cuts of 2001 and 2003 without having any material effect on the amount of debt service being repaid through the annual budget. By FY 2017, total public debt had more than tripled, but debt service payments as a percentage of annual budget outlays had decreased to 6.6 percent, compared to 8.5 percent of federal budget outlays in FY 2002. In terms of cash outlays, this meant that the United States paid only slightly more in interest payments in FY 2017 than it had in FY 2002 ($268 billion versus $232 billion in 2018 dollars). Borrowing seemed virtually painless.
Budget Dysfunction: For several decades, the federal budget process has become increasingly dysfunctional. This breakdown may be traced to the post-Watergate budget reforms enacted in 1974, which shifted power away from the President and to the Congress. Most budget experts from both parties agree that the reforms made the budget process weaker, less predictable, less capable of reconciling competing demands, and more prone to fiscal crises. Prior to 1974, the federal government had never ceased operations for lack of funding. Since then, it has “shut down” 22 times, completely or partially. There have been only four years in which Congress passed its annual appropriations bills on time, and a series of near-defaults and other fiscal crises. In the absence of reliable budgets, Congress has enacted hundreds of short-term stopgap “continuing resolutions” to pay the bills. In this context, it was convenient for all the stakeholders to fund the wars as an “emergency” outside the regular process. The President was able to exclude war funding from his annual defense budget request to Congress, thus presenting an artificially low number for the federal budget deficit. This helped the Bush administration sustain the pretense that the wars would be short, while pursuing its political agenda of cutting taxes. Meanwhile, Congress was freed from the need to find politically painful spending cuts elsewhere to pay for the war, and the Pentagon was able to prosecute the wars without worrying about whether Congress would pass the defense appropriations bills on time.
Military Assertiveness: In 2001, the Pentagon was actively seeking to increase its budget after a decade of post-cold war budget cuts. The Afghanistan and Iraq conflict not only reversed the downward trend in military spending, but opened the floodgates to a spending bonanza due to the nature of emergency and OCO appropriations. Unlike the regular defense base budget, the wartime supplemental money was easier to secure, had few restrictions on how it could be spent, and avoided the lengthy internal Planning, Programming, Budgeting & Execution Process (PPBE) budget justification process. Consequently, the Defense Department was able to shift war funding into other categories to obtain items on its long-time “wish list” that were only tangentially (or not at all) related to the wars in Iraq or Afghanistan. Former Defense Secretary Robert Gates termed this a “culture of endless money” inside the Pentagon.
By 2009, war spending accounted for almost one quarter of the total military budget; the Pentagon budget had grown to its highest level since the Second World War, and military spending had rebounded from 2.9% of GDP in FY 2001 to above 4% of GDP, where it remained through FY 2019. The OCO budget had evolved into a second defense budget that was largely untethered from the wars, and protected the military from congressional budget volatility.
Implications for Perpetual War
The Ghost Budget provided the ability to keep borrowing and spending in an almost unconstrained manner for more than two decades. The absence of new taxes insulated the public from the mounting cost of the wars and broke the expectation that wars would inevitably involve higher taxes. The OCO budget extended far beyond the immediate operational needs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perpetuating military actions throughout the region. As Immanuel Kant predicted in Perpetual Peace (1795), the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.
Implications for Perpetual War
The Ghost Budget provided the ability to keep borrowing and spending in an almost unconstrained manner for more than two decades. The absence of new taxes insulated the public from the mounting cost of the wars and broke the expectation that wars would inevitably involve higher taxes. The OCO budget extended far beyond the immediate operational needs of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, perpetuating military actions throughout the region. As Immanuel Kant predicted in Perpetual Peace (1795), the ability to keep borrowing and spending with minimal oversight allowed the United States to keep fighting indefinitely.
The legacy of the Ghost Budget is that money is no longer a serious deterrent to war. To date, 99% of US assistance to Ukraine has been funded by supplemental emergency funds – which means that this spending is in addition to the $840 billion regular defense budget. The Biden administration has asked Congress to approve another $106 billion in emergency funding for the Middle East, Ukraine, and other regions. Regardless of the merits of any particular endeavor, the use of Ghost Budgets makes it far easier to prolong the fighting at any cost.
The policy seeks to at least begin to deal with the huge stocks of plutonium Japan has amassed
According to a recent Reuters report, Japan Nuclear Fuel Ltd (JNFL) still hopes to finish construction of Japan’s long-delayed Rokkasho reprocessing plant in the first half of the 2024 fiscal year (i.e. during April-September 2024). The plant—which would reprocess spent nuclear fuel from existing power plants, separating plutonium for use as reactor fuel—is already more than 25 years behind schedule, and there are reasons to believe that this new announcement is just another wishful plan that will end with another postponement.
One indication of further possible delays: On September 28, 2023, Naohiro Masuda, president of JNFL, stated that the safety review of the reprocessing plant by Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority will be difficult to complete by the end of 2023. He nevertheless insisted that the company could still meet completion target date in 2024.
Here is a partial history of past key developments that make completion in 2024 seem unlikely:
1993: Construction starts.
1997: Initial target for completion.
2006-2008: Hot tests conducted, revealing technical problems with the vitrification process for dealing with waste produced during reprocessing.
2011: Fukushima Dai-ichi nuclear plant accident.
2012: New safety regulation standards introduced.
2022: Completion target date postponed to June 2024)
The 2022 postponement was the 26th of the Rokkasho project.
Why so many postponements? There seem to be at least five underlying reasons for the postponements for the Rokkasho plant. First, JNFL lacks relevant expertise to manage such a technologically complex and hazardous project, which is owned by nine nuclear utilities plus all other major companies associated with nuclear power in Japan. Most of the firm’s senior executives are from shareholding companies (especially utility companies) and are not necessarily experts in the field of reprocessing spent nuclear fuel.
Second, the technologies in the plant came from different companies and institutions. The management of the project is therefore technically complex.
Third, the post-Fukushima-accident nuclear facility safety licensing review process is much more stringent than what existed before the accident. For example, the Nuclear Regulation Authority told JNFL at their November 25, 2023 meeting: “JNFL should immediately make improvements because it is clear that JNFL does not understand the contents of the permit well enough to confirm the adequacy of the design of the facilities on site and has not visited the site.”
Fourth, the financial costs to JNFL of postponement are covered by the utilities’ customers, because the utilities must pay a “reprocessing fee” every year, based on the spent fuel generated during that year, whether or not the reprocessing plant operates. The system by which the Nuclear Reprocessing Organization of Japan decides the reprocessing fee is not transparent.
Fifth, the project lacks independent oversight. Even though JNFL’s estimate of the cost of building and operating the Rokkasho plant has increased several-fold, no independent analysis has been done by a third party. One reason is that some of the shareholders are themselves contractors working on the plant and have no incentive to scrutinize the reasons for the cost increases or the indefinite extension of the construction project.
After so many postponements, there is reason to wonder whether the plant will ever operate, but the government and utilities continue to insist that the plant will open soon. Even if Rokkasho were to operate, it may suffer from the same kinds of problems that marked Britain’s light-water reactor spent fuel reprocessing experience, as described in Endless Trouble: Britain’s Thermal Oxide Reprocessing Plant (THORP).
Why does Japan’s commitment to reprocessing continue?
Despite the serious and longstanding problems the Rokkasho plant has faced (and continues to face), Japanese regulators and nuclear operators have doggedly pursued the project. There are four reasons:
Spent fuel management.Currently, most of Japan’s spent nuclear fuel is stored in nuclear power plant cooling pools. But the pool capacities are limited, and the 3,000-ton-capacity Rokkasho spent fuel pool is also almost full. The nuclear utilities must therefore start operating the Rokkasho plant unless they can create additional spent fuel storage capacity, either on- or off-site. The Mutsu spent fuel storage facility is a candidate for additional capacity, but due to the concern that spent fuel could stay there forever, Mutsu city refuses to accept spent fuel unless the Rokkasho reprocessing plant begins to operate. The Rokkasho plant design capacity is 800 tons of spent fuel per year.
Legal and institutional commitments. Under Japan’s nuclear regulations, utilities must specify a “final disposal method” for spent fuel. The law on regulation of nuclear materials and nuclear reactors states that “when applying for reactor licensing, operators must specify the final disposal method of spent fuel” (Article 23.2.8). In addition, there was a clause that “disposal method” should be consistent with implementation of the government policy, which specified reprocessing as the disposal method. Although that clause was deleted in the 2012 revision of the law after the Fukushima accident, the Law on Final Disposal of High-Level Radioactive Waste still bans direct disposal of spent fuel. In addition, the 2016 Law on Reprocessing Fees legally requires utilities to submit reprocessing fees for all spent fuel generated every year since they stated in their applications that “final disposal method” for their spent fuel would be reprocessing.
Commitments to hosting communities. The nuclear utilities committed—albeit tacitly—to the communities hosting nuclear power plants that they would remove the spent fuel to reprocessing plants, since that was the national policy. Separately, JNFL signed an agreement with Rokkasho village and Aomori prefecture that says that if the Rokkasho reprocessing plant faces “severe difficulties,” other measures will be considered—including the return of spent fuel stored at Rokkasho to the nuclear power plants.
Local governments hosting nuclear power plants were not involved in this deal, however. They could therefore just refuse to receive spent fuel from Aomori.
In fact, after the Fukushima accident, when the government was considering amending the nuclear fuel cycle policy to include a “direct disposal option” for spent fuel in a deep underground repository, the Rokkasho village parliament (at the behind the scenes suggestion by the then JNFL president, Yoshihiko Kawai), issued a strong statement asking for “maintenance of the current nuclear fuel cycle policy.”
The statement continued that, if Japan’s fuel cycle policy changed, Rokkasho would: refuse to accept further waste from the reprocessing of Japan’s spent fuel in the UK and France; require the removal of reprocessing waste and spent fuel stored in Rokkasho; no longer accept spent fuel; and seek compensation for the damages caused by the change of the policy.
Institutional and bureaucratic inertia. In Japan, bureaucrats rotate to new positions every two or three years and are reluctant to take the risk of changing existing policies. They therefore tend to stick with past commitments. Institutional inertia becomes stronger as a project becomes bigger. The Rokkasho reprocessing project is one of the largest projects ever in Japan. Changing the project is therefore very difficult.
Will Japan’s new plutonium capping policy have any real impact? In 2018, Japan’s Atomic Energy Commission announced a new policy on “Basic Principles on Utilization of Plutonium” (see also this post). Under the new policy, the commission proposed that Japan would reduce its stockpile of separated plutonium, starting with a commitment not to increase it, and that reprocessing would take place only when a credible plan to use the separated plutonium existed.
The policy seeks to at least begin to deal with the huge stocks of plutonium Japan has amassed, both in European separation facilities (some 36.7 tons) and in Japan (10.5 tons), in anticipation of using the plutonium widely to fuel nuclear reactors—which so far has not materialized. In conjunction with the new Reprocessing Fee Law, the new plutonium policy gives the government legal authority to control the pace of reprocessing.
But it is not clear how the “capping policy” will be implemented. It is not a legally binding document, and no regulation has been introduced to control reprocessing. Utilities must submit specific plans for plutonium use to the Atomic Energy Commission for its review before reprocessing of their fuel begins. But the commission can only give advice to the government about the credibility of these plans, giving rise to questions about whether the policy will lead to sustained changes in reprocessing activity. A similar “paper rule” on plutonium has existed since 2003.
A way out. Japan could extricate itself from its reprocessing and plutonium problems in several ways. All involve significant changes in policy that would:
Find additional spent fuel storage capacity, on- or off-site. Local communities may be more willing to accept on-site dry cask storage of spent fuel if they are told that it is safer than spent fuel pool storage. For example, Saga Prefecture and Genkai-town, which host Kyushu Electric’s Genkai Nuclear Power Plant, have agreed to host dry cask storage starting in 2027. Host communities may want guarantees that spent fuel will be removed after a specified storage period. Such a guarantee could be given by the central government.
Amend the law on final disposal of high-level radioactive waste. An amendment could allow direct disposal of spent nuclear fuel in a deep underground repository. This would provide more flexibility in spent fuel management and make it easier for communities to host interim spent fuel storage.
Amend the Reprocessing Fee Law and shut down Rokkasho. An amendment to the law on reprocessing fees could allow the government to use reprocessing funds to implement a shutdown of the Rokkasho reprocessing plant. Such a plan could include payment of the debt JNFL has incurred while pursuing the Rokkasho project and funds for dry cask interim storage. This would enable the government to finally end the problem-plagued Rokkasho reprocessing plant project.
reactors https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/00963402.2018.1507791, Lindsay Krall &Allison Macfarlane, 31 Aug 18
nuclear-news 