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.
Naomi Ito, Research Assistant at the Fukushima Medical University, tells us how the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident impacted and continues to impact local residents
The health effects on local residents following a nuclear power plant accident are diverse, not only because of radiation exposure but also because of changes in lifestyle and social environment. It has also been indicated that various environmental changes that could emerge during the restoration process may affect residents in various ways over a long time.
What is the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant Accident?
On March 11, 2011, the Great East Japan Earthquake struck Japan with a magnitude of 9.0. Within an hour, a tsunami hit the shore. Three reactors at the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant (FDNPP, operated by Tokyo Electric Power Company) lost power. The reactors could not be cooled, and core meltdowns occurred, which resulted in an explosion due to hydrogen being generated at high temperatures. As a result, radioactive materials were released and scattered northwest from the power plant.
The Japanese Government declared a nuclear emergency and ordered residents within a 30km radius of the reactor to evacuate. In the Fukushima prefecture, more than 160,000 residents were forced to evacuate immediately due to the earthquake, tsunami, and explosion at the Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Subsequently, the evacuation order was gradually lifted. While some residents have returned under the national repatriation policy, many others have decided to continue living in the places they evacuated to.
Health Indicators Worsening
It has been reported that in areas where evacuation orders were issued after the nuclear power plant accident, the number of residents who are overweight has increased. Health indicators such as BMI, high blood pressure, and hyperglycaemia have generally deteriorated. Living in an evacuation site involves major changes in the social environment, which worsens various health parameters. At the same time, there was also an extremely high level of depression among residents who continued to evacuate and a sharp increase in the number of people using nursing care. Various health measures have been taken to address these problems.
What is happening in the area after the evacuation order was lifted has been a concern. The evacuation order for most of Katsurao Village, which initially had one thousand four hundred people, was lifted in 2016 (Figure 1). Seven years have passed since then, but the number of people who have returned to the village has yet to reach 30%, and the aging rate of those who have returned to the village is nearly 60%.
Urgent Long-Term Care Issues
Evacuated residents who remain outside the village are more likely to fall under the category of frailty regarding motor function than those who have returned. Early preventive intervention for residents would be important in the event of a disaster where long-term evacuations are expected (Figure 2).
Intention to Return and Health Issues
The number of residents in the village has remained constant at around four hundred for the past few years, and it is unlikely that many more will return. We found that there are a certain number of people who want to go back but are not able to do so. By interviewing them, we learned that they are staying at their evacuation destinations since they need medical treatments and/or nursing care or they started receiving new services there. We believe that intention to return and health issues are closely related. Enhancement of clinics and visiting services in the village, and improved access to medical institutions, are essential for rebuilding the lives of returning residents. (1)
Dual Life After Disaster
After the evacuation order was lifted, a fairly large number of people kept houses in their evacuation destination and the original one in the village, moving back and forth. Unlike natural disasters such as typhoons and tsunamis, this ‘double-base living (or dual life?)’ is considered a unique phenomenon of nuclear disasters, where the original houses remain intact. Still, there is a fear of invisible radiation. Above all, the prolonged evacuation has drastically changed people’s lives. The challenge would be how to respond to the health needs of people living new lifestyles. (2)
References
Ito, N.; Moriyama, N.; Furuyama, A.; Saito, H.; Sawano, T.; Amir, I.; Sato, M.; Kobashi, Y.; Zhao, T.; Yamamoto, C.; et al. Why Do They Not Come Home? Three Cases of Fukushima Nuclear Accident Evacuees. International journal of environmental research and public health 2023, 20.
Ito, N.; Amir, I.; Saito, H.; Moriyama, N.; Furuyama, A.; Singh, P.; Montesino, S.; Yamamoto, C.; Sato, M.; Abe, T.; et al. Multisite Lifestyle for Older People after the Fukushima Nuclear Disaster. Geriatrics (Basel, Switzerland) 2023, 8.
The Chances of Another Chernobyl Before 2050? 50%, Say Safety Specialists
And there’s a 50:50 chance of a Three Mile Island-scale disaster in the next 10 years, according to the largest statistical analysis of nuclear accidents ever undertaken. MIT Technology Review April 17, 2015Given that most countries with nuclear power intend to keep their reactors running and that many new reactors are planned, an important goal is to better understand the nature of risk in the nuclear industry. What, for example, is the likelihood of another Chernobyl in the next few years?
Today, we get an answer thanks to the work of Spencer Wheatley and Didier Sornette at ETH Zurich in Switzerland and Benjamin Sovacool at Aarhus University in Denmark. These guys have compiled the most comprehensive list of nuclear accidents ever created and used it to calculate the likelihood of other accidents in future.
Their worrying conclusion is that the chances are 50:50 that a major nuclear disaster will occur somewhere in the world before 2050. “There is a 50 per cent chance that a Chernobyl event (or larger) occurs in the next 27 years,” they conclude.
Ethnic cleansing or “transfer” is an intrinsic part of Zionism’s early history, and has remained an essential feature of Israeli political life. More recently, “transfer” has been mainstreamed by billing it as encouraging “voluntary emigration.”
SCHEERPOST, By Mouin Rabbani / Mondoweiss, December 29, 2023
Senior Israeli leaders, including Prime Minister Binyamin Netanyahu, are again publicly advocating the ethnic cleansing of the Gaza Strip. Their proposals are being presented as voluntary emigration schemes, in which Israel is merely playing the role of Good Samaritan, selflessly mediating with foreign governments to find new homes for destitute and desperate Palestinians. But it is ethnic cleansing all the same.
Alarm bells should have started ringing in early November when U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and other Western politicians began insisting there could be “no forcible displacement of Palestinians from Gaza.” Rather than rejecting any mass removal of Palestinians, Blinken and colleagues objected only to optically challenging expulsions at gunpoint. The option of “voluntary” displacement by leaving residents of the Gaza Strip with no choice but departure was pointedly left open.
Ethnic cleansing, or “transfer” as it is known in Israeli parlance, has a long pedigree that goes back to the late-nineteenth-century beginnings of the Zionist movement. While the early Zionists adopted the slogan, “A Land Without a People for a People Without a Land,” the evidence demonstrates that, from the very outset, their leaders knew better. More to the point, they clearly understood that the Palestinians formed the main obstacle to the establishment of a Jewish state in Palestine. This is for the simple reason that, to them, a “Jewish state” denotes one in which its Jewish population acquires and maintains unchallenged demographic, territorial, and political supremacy.
Enter “transfer.” As early as 1895, Theodor Herzl, the founder of the contemporary Zionist movement, identified the necessity of removing the inhabitants of Palestine in the following terms: “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.” David Ben-Gurion (née Grün), Chairman of the Executive Committee of the Jewish Agency for Palestine, and later Israel’s first prime minister, was more blunt. In a 1937 letter to his son, he wrote: “We must expel the Arabs and take their place.”
Writing in his diary in 1940, Yosef Weitz, a senior Jewish National Fund official who chaired the influential Transfer Committee before and during the Nakba (“Catastrophe”), and became known as the Architect of Transfer, put it thus: “The only solution is a Land of Israel devoid of Arabs. There is no room here for compromise. They must all be moved. Not one village, not one tribe, can remain. Only through this transfer of the Arabs living in the Land of Israel will redemption come.” His diaries are littered with similar sentiments.
The point of the above is not to demonstrate that individual Zionist leaders held such views, but that the senior leadership of the Zionist movement consistently considered the ethnic cleansing of Palestine an objective and priority. Initiatives such as the Transfer Committee, and Plan Dalet, initially formulated in 1944 and described by the pre-eminent Palestinian historian Walid Khalidi as the “Master Plan for the Conquest of Palestine,” additionally demonstrate that the Zionist movement actively planned for it.
The 1948 Nakba, during which more than four-fifths of Palestinians residing in territory that came under Israeli rule were ethnically cleansed, should, therefore, be seen as the fulfillment of a longstanding ambition and implementation of a key policy. A product of design, not of war (historical Christmas footnote: the Palestinian town of Nazareth was spared a similar fate only because the commander of Israeli forces that seized the city, a Canadian Jew named Ben Dunkelman, disobeyed orders to expel the population, and was relieved of his command the following day).
That the Nakba was a product of design is further substantiated by the Transfer Committee’s terms of reference. These comprised not only proposals for the expulsion of the Palestinians but, just as importantly, active measures to prevent their return, destroy their homes and villages, expropriate their property, and resettle those territories with Jewish immigrants. Weitz, together with fellow Committee members Eliahu Sassoon and Ezra Danin, on June 5, 1948, presented a three-page blueprint, entitled “Scheme for the Solution of the Arab Problem in the State of Israel,” to Prime Minister Ben-Gurion to achieve these goals. According to leading Israeli historian Benny Morris, “there is no doubt Ben-Gurion agreed to Weitz’s scheme,” which included “what amounted to an enormous project of destruction” that saw more than 450 Palestinian villages razed to the ground.
The understandable focus on the expulsions of 1948 often overlooks the fact that ethnic cleansing remains incomplete unless its victims are barred from returning to their homes by a combination of armed force and legislation, and thereafter replaced by others. It is Israel’s determination to make Palestinian dispossession permanent that distinguishes Palestinian refugees from many other war refugees.
After 1948, Israel put out a whole series of fabrications to shift responsibility for the transformation of the Palestinians into dispossessed and stateless refugees onto the Arab states and the refugees themselves. These included claims that the refugees voluntarily left (they were either expelled or fled in justified terror); that Arab radio broadcasts ordered the Palestinians to flee (in fact, they were encouraged to stay put); that Israel conducted a population exchange with Arab states (there was nothing of the sort); and the bizarre argument that because they’re Arabs, Palestinians had numerous other states while Jews have only Israel (by the same logic, Sikhs would be entitled to seize British Columbia and deport its population to either the rest of Canada or the United States). More importantly, even if uniformly substantiated, none of these pretexts entitles Israel to prohibit the right of Palestinian refugees to return to their homes at the conclusion of hostilities. It is, furthermore, a right that was consecrated in United Nations General Assembly resolution 194 of December 11, 1948, which has been reaffirmed repeatedly since.
Ethnic cleansing after 1967
In 1967, Israel seized the remaining 22 percent of Mandatory Palestine — the West Bank (including East Jerusalem) and the Gaza Strip. Depopulation in these territories operated differently than in 1948. Most importantly, Israel, in addition to prohibiting the return of Palestinians who fled hostilities during the 1967 June War, and encouraging others to leave (by, for example, providing a daily bus service from Gaza City to the Allenby Bridge connecting the West Bank to Jordan), conducted a census during the summer of 1967 . Any resident who was not present during the census was ineligible for an Israeli identity document and automatically lost their right of residency.
As a result, the population of these territories declined by more than twenty percent overnight. Many of those thus displaced were already refugees from 1948. Aqbat Jabr Refugee Camp near Jericho, for example — until 1967, the West Bank’s largest — became a virtual ghost town after almost all its inhabitants became refugees once again in Jordan. So many Palestinians from the Gaza Strip ended up in Jordan that a new refugee camp, Gaza Camp, was established on the outskirts of Jerash. The occupied Palestinian territories would not recover their 1967 population levels until the early 1980s.
Within the West Bank, there were also cases of mass expulsion………………………………………………….
Depopulation through administrative rule
In subsequent years, Israel employed all kinds of administrative shenanigans to further reduce the Palestinian population of the West Bank and Gaza Strip. Until the 1993 Oslo Accords, for example, an exit permit from Israel’s military government was required to leave the occupied territory. It was valid for only three years and thereafter renewable annually for a maximum of three additional years (for a fee) at an Israeli consulate. If a Palestinian lost an exit permit or failed to renew an exit permit prior to its expiration for any reason (including bureaucratic foot-dragging), or couldn’t pay the renewal fee, or failed to return to Palestine prior to its expiration, that Palestinian automatically lost residency rights………………………………………………..
………………………………………. the mass expulsion was, as always in such matters, approved by Israel’s High Court of Justice after minor modifications. It ruled, among other things, that this was not a collective deportation but rather a collection of individual deportations……………………………………………….
Israel’s strategies to ‘thin’ Gaza’s population
With the focus in recent years on the intensified campaigns of ethnic cleansing in the West Bank, it is often forgotten that, for decades, the primary target for depopulation was the Gaza Strip, particularly its refugee population, which accounts for approximately three-quarters of the territory’s residents. Even before it occupied Gaza in 1967, Israel regularly promoted initiatives to achieve the “thinning” of its refugee population, with destinations as far afield as Libya and Iraq………………………………………………………………………………….
‘Transfer’ and Gaza today
In the decades since, “transfer,” often presented as the encouragement of voluntary emigration either by providing material incentives or making the conditions of life impossible, has become increasingly mainstreamed in Israeli political life. In 2019, for example, a “senior government official,” quoted in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz, expressed a willingness to help Palestinians emigrate from the Gaza Strip.
Mass expulsion has been gaining its share of adherents as well, and it is a position that is today represented within Israel’s coalition government. As has the idea that “transfer” should include Palestinian citizens of Israel — Avigdor Lieberman, for example, who was Israel’s Minister of Defense several years ago, is an advocate of not only emptying the West Bank and Gaza Strip of Palestinians but of getting rid of Palestinian citizens of Israel as well. As one might expect from a minister who was in charge of the Israeli military, he is also an advocate of “beheading” disloyal Palestinian citizens of Israel with “an axe.”
Against this background, Israel saw the attacks of October 7 as not only a threat but also as an opportunity. Fortified with unconditional U.S. and European support, Israeli political and military leaders immediately began promoting the transfer of Gaza’s Palestinian population to the Sinai desert.
The proposal was enthusiastically embraced by the United States and by Secretary of State Antony Blinken in particular. As ever hopelessly out of his depth when it comes to the Middle East, he appears to have genuinely believed he could recruit or pressure Washington’s Arab client regimes to make Israel’s wish a reality. Given Egyptian strongman Abdel-Fatah al-Sisi’s economic troubles, the fallout of the Menendez scandal, and the looming Egyptian presidential elections, it was suggested to him by the Washington echo chamber that it would take only an IMF loan, debt relief, and a promise to file away Menendez to bring Cairo on board. As so often when it comes to the Middle East, Blinken, armed only with Israel’s latest wish list, didn’t have a clue his indecent proposal would be categorically rejected, first and foremost by Egypt.
‘Transfer’ as ‘voluntary immigration’
The fallback position is opposition to “forcible displacement” at the point of a gun, while anything else is fair game. This includes reducing the Gaza Strip to rubble in what may well be the most intensive bombing campaign in history; a genocidal assault on an entire society that has killed civilians at an unprecedentedly rapid pace; the deliberate destruction of an entire civilian infrastructure, including the targeted obliteration of its health and education sectors; the highest proportion of households in hunger crisis ever recorded globally and the real prospect of pre-meditated famine; severance of the water and electricity supply leading to acute thirst, widespread consumption of non-potable water, and termination of sewage treatment; and promotion of a sharp rise in infectious disease. …………………………………………………..
In other words, if desperate Palestinians seek to flee this seventh circle of hell to save their skins, that’s considered voluntary emigration — their choice……………………………………………………………….
As an editorial in the Israeli newspaper Ha’aretz put it on December 27: “Israeli lawmakers keep pushing for transfer under the guise of humanitarian aid.”………………………………………………
Not individual Gazans, but “the people of Gaza.” Notably, such proposals consistently take it as a given that those departing will never return. ………………………………………….
While ethnic cleansing has been intrinsic to Zionist/Israeli ideology and practice from the very outset, it also has a flip side: the 1948 expulsion of the Palestinians expanded what had been a conflict between the Zionist movement and the Palestinians into a regional, Arab-Israeli one. The second Nakba Israel is currently inflicting on the Gaza Strip similarly appears well on its way to instigating the renewal of hostilities across the Middle East.
As one of my first tasks early in the first Clinton Administration as the newly appointed Deputy Assistant Secretary for Policy, I conducted the first (and only) asset inventory of the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE). In carrying it out, we departed from the usual reliance on DOE contractors, and established a team of federal employees throughout the DOE complex to scour the system for data. In doing this we saved a lot of money and time that would otherwise be consumed by DOE contractors that had perfected the art of cost maximization.
After six months we briefed Energy Secretary O’Leary on what we found. With real estate holdings of more than 2.4 million acres–an area larger than Rhode Island and Delaware combined–the DOE was the largest government-owned industrial energy supply and research enterprise in the country, responsible for:
More than 20,700 specialized facilities and buildings, including 5,000 warehouses, 7,000 administrative buildings, 1,600 laboratories, 89 nuclear reactors, 208 particle accelerators, and 665 production and manufacturing facilities.
More than 130,000 metric tons of chemicals, a quantity roughly equivalent to the annual output of a large chemical manufacturer.
More than 270,000 metric tons of scrap metal—equivalent to more than two modern aircraft carriers in weight. (The dismantlement of three gaseous diffusion plants will generate about 1.4 million metric tons of additional scrap.)
More than 17,000 pieces of large industrial equipment.
More than 40,000 metric tons of base metals and more than 10,000 pounds of precious metals, such as gold, silver, and platinum.
About 700,000 metric tons of nuclear materials, mostly depleted uranium but also including weapons-grade and fuel-grade plutonium, thorium, and natural and enriched uranium.
About 320,000 metric tons of stockpiled fuel oil and coal for 67 power plants.
About 600 million barrels of crude oil stored at the Strategic Petroleum Reserve.
Electrical distribution systems for the Bonneville, Western Area, Southwestern, Southeastern, and Alaska power administrations.
If the Energy Department were a private concern with more than 100,000 employees, it would be one of the nation’s largest and most powerful corporations. And, we determined, if it were privately held, it would be filing for bankruptcy.
Major elements of Energy’s complex were closing down, leaving a huge unfunded and dangerous mess. After more than a half century of making nuclear weapons, the DOE possessed one of the world’s largest inventories of dangerous nuclear materials and it has created several of the most contaminated areas in the Western hemisphere.
We discovered that a significant percentage of overhead expenses at several shuttered sites were from hoarding fungible assets that were no longer needed. The challenge was to empty these warehouses and to generate an income for the U.S. government by selling off valuable excess materials.
Our first effort was aimed at the large amount of uncontaminated precious metals contained in nuclear weapons that would generate millions-of-dollars in revenue from warheads scheduled for dismantlement under the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). For the first time, nuclear disarmament would actually make money for the taxpayer.
We were astounded to find that for decades intact weapons components containing large amounts of precious metals were being disposed at great expense in a classified landfill under heavy guard. It took a direct order from the Secretary for DOE’s PANTEX weapons assembly and dismantlement facility near Amarillo, TX to obtain an industrial scale hydraulic hammer to smash non-nuclear components into little pieces so that the gold and other metals can be recovered without revealing design secrets.
Further complicating the process for dismantling weapons, the DOE had failed to properly maintain its system for assessing and evaluating each nuclear weapon for reliability, aging problems, and safe dismantlement. Known as configuration management (CM), this system is a fundamental element in the control of the nuclear stockpile and is based on careful documentation of “as built” drawings and product definitions made during the design, manufacture, assembly, and deployment of a nuclear weapons.
My staff discovered that DOE could not find nearly 60 percent of the “as built” drawings that document all changes made to active weapons selected for dismantlement. I threw a fit and reported it to the front office, which promptly took action.
Over the ensuing decade, we wound up sending about $50 million from the sale of precious metals extracted from dismantled weapons back to the treasury. As a side benefit, we also set up the DOE’s first electronic recycling center to recover fungible materials from DOE’s huge inventory of excess computers.
After receiving a Secretarial Gold Medal for our asset management program, I became increasingly isolated from the DOE front office, and spent most of my time involved with environment, safety and health problems afflicting the DOE nuclear weapons complex. As soon as Secretary O’Leary departed in late 1996, our asset inventory was buried and barred from public disclosure.
However, I drew the line when it came to the disposition of radiologically contaminated materials, such as the vast amount of scrap metal resulting from the decommissioning of nuclear weapons facilities.
In 1994, I blocked a deal that would have allowed some 10,000 tons of radiation-contaminated nickel from nuclear weapons operations to be recycled into the civilian metal supply, where some percentage of it would inevitably wind up in stainless steel items such as intrauterine devices, surgical tools, children’s orthodontic braces, kitchen sinks, zippers, and flatware. However, that confrontation was not to be the end of the scrap metal gambit.
The pressures to recycle 1.7 million metric tons of contaminated metal scrap (equivalent to 17 U.S. aircraft carriers in weight) at nuclear weapons facilities in Tennessee, Kentucky and Ohio were enormous.
I dug in my heels and opposed an effort, supported by Vice President Gore’s office, to release tens of thousands of tons of radiologically contaminated metals into commerce. By claiming cost savings associated with foregoing landfill disposal, DOE contractors would be able to pocket the profits from the sale of scrap. Going forward however, I was seen as obstructionist and was effectively shunned from decision-making circles.
After Hazel O’Leary left as Energy Secretary in late 1996, I lost my political “air cover” and was perceived in the words of a colleague by the incoming leadership of the agency (Secretary Frederico Pena’s team) as “too radioactive.”
Even though I was being excluded from policy decisions, I still persisted. As a former environmental activist, I had no compunctions about going outside of the Department to convince an old friend at the Natural Defense Resource Council to file a lawsuit to block the free release of the contaminated metal.
I knew that if DOE and its contractors got their way, this practice would lead to a major public backlash. Not to mention the market impacts the contaminated material would create for the U.S. steel industry, which was almost totally dependent on recycled metal for its feedstock. Steel makers had been burned before by errant radiation sources and the last thing they wanted was for the public to realize that the stainless-steel fork on the dinner table had some plutonium in it from a nuclear weapons plant. But consideration of these consequences could easily get overlooked in the DOE, where decisions were made in isolation and secrecy.
The lawsuit stopped the train temporarily. Judge Gladys Kessler, in a strongly worded opinion, stated: “It is . . . startling and worrisome that from an early point on, there has been no opportunity at all for public scrutiny or input in a matter of such grave importance.” Calling the recycling effort “entirely experimental at this stage,” she concluded, “The potential for environmental harm is great, especially given the unprecedented amount of hazardous materials which the defendants seek to recycle.”
In the summer of 1998, I received a call from the White House indicating that I was being fired within the next 30 days. This was the third time my detractors sought to end my tenure as a senior political appointee in DOE’s Policy office. This time, it seemed to be final.
A week before my departure, I was summoned to meet with Bill Richarson – the newly installed Secretary of Energy. He was slouched on the sofa and disheveled after a long day. “I don’t know why you got on the list. You must have pissed-off quite a few people,” he said with a devilish smile. “But you have a lot of folks that want to keep you around. When I visited DOE sites, members of Congress, union officials, Indian tribes, and environmental activists, would ask me about this Alvarez guy.”
He then pulled out a news clipping from the Seattle Times about a walk-out staged by the members of a DOE advisory panel at the Hanford facility in protest to my sacking. “You must be a fighter, I like fighters,” he said approvingly. Richardson reversed the White House decision and appointed me as his Senior Policy Advisor, where I was tasked among other things to end the “hot scrap” recycling scam.
A senior scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, Robert Alvarez served as senior policy adviser to the Energy Department’s secretary and deputy assistant secretary for national security and the environment from 1993 to 1999.
When it comes to love for the limelight and delusions of grandeur, Zelenskiy outstrips most politicians and not least of all Putin. Almost all politicians are egoistic, but Zelenskiy is narcissistic.
Zelenskiy’s inexperience and ego likely played pivotal roles in his disastrous decision-making.
Zelenskiy himself remained mired in personal corruption as the Pandora Papers demonstrated
Zelenskiy’s failures also have made him eminently expendable
Ukrainian President Volodomyr Zeleneksiy appears to be at the end of the line politically and perhaps biologically. Portraying himself as a fighter for peace, anti-corruption, and full democratization when he ran for and won the presidency in 2019, he proceeded to lead the country into war, further corruption, and de-republicanization (authoritarianization).
On both a personal and global level this is high tragedy. A superb comedian and actor stars in a television fictional series as the president of Ukraine, rises in popularity, wins the country’s presidency on a peace platform, and leads the country into a catastrophic, easily avoidable war that threatens the survival of his country and himself.
The unreality of Ukraine refracts in our century of simulacra and disinformation through this icon moved from the television screen to real life politics, and the tragedy of it all is sold as a heroic triumph on the road to universal democracy, peace, and brotherhood.
In the real world, however, there is a rub. The country is historically divided along every conceivable line (ethnic, linguistic, cultural, political, ideological, economic, and social), an almost accidental state cobbled together by communists but claimed by hapless republicans and determined ultra-nationalists. Thus, Zelenskiy becomes president of a fundamentally divided country further riven by schism as a result of two ‘revolutions’ – really revolts – and a civil war compounded by foreign (Russian) intervention.
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Zelenskiy’s emergence and victory are as surreal as the Maidan regime of which he assumed leadership.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased.
I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground.
BY ROBERT JACOBS 9 July 21, Bhaskar Sunkara’s recent opinion piece extoling the virtues of nuclear power and castigating its opponents as paranoid and ill-informed, is clearly motivated by his deep concerns over the dire impacts of global warming, which loom closer by the hour. Unfortunately, his arguments amount to little more than regurgitated industry talking points, in their traditional form of a Jeremiad.
First, Sunkara poses the decline of the nuclear industry in the West as an achievement of progressive political movements. Specifically, he cites the decline of nuclear power in Germany as attributable to a “Green party-spearheaded campaign.” This decline has been more reasonably ascribed to both market conditions and missteps by nuclear industry giants such as Westinghouse and AREVA. From its inception, nuclear power has been heavily dependent on government subsidies to appear economically viable (subsidies such as insurance and the disposal of waste largely configured as taxpayer burdens).
Rather than succumbing to its political opponents on the left, the industry has been sunk by its structural economic dysfunctions. In the US, this has sparked schemes to secure additional taxpayer subsidies in legislative fixes such as guaranteed returns for nuclear utilities, and outright bribery of legislators for taxpayer bailouts of failing companies.
The most simplistic recitation of nuclear industry talking points is when Sunkara dismisses concerns about nuclear waste, and extolls the mythic separation between “civilian” and “military” nuclear technologies. He asserts that most nuclear waste “can be recycled to generate more electricity,” an assertion that goes back more than half a century and has been ritualistically recited by an army of nuclear industry PR professionals before him…yet here we are 50 years later and very little spent nuclear fuel has actually been recycled. The most successful nuclear recycling nation is France which, nevertheless, is experiencing a “nuclear exit” and is unlikely to ever use this recycled fuel. AREVA, the French nuclear giant, has gone bankrupt. Reprocessing facilities like the Rokkasho plant here in Japan have never functioned properly, unless you consider their role enabling the stockpiling of plutonium by Japan to hedge against future weapon needs to be an elemental goal.
There is a difference between what can be done, and what actually happens. Rather than being recycled, hundreds of thousands of metric tons of spent nuclear fuel await “final disposal” in deep geological repositories. Some have been waiting for over 70 years. Just last week, a panel advising the EU on categorizing nuclear plant as “green” energy, and thus eligible to receive EU funding as a “sustainable investment,” concluded that the problems of nuclear waste preclude that designation.
I would point out that even though plastics manufacturers assure us that most plastic can be recycled, we still seem to be living a world with ever increasing amounts of plastic waste. Their greenwashing has not eventuated in a world full of plastics made from recycled materials. The market reality is that it is cheaper to manufacture new plastic than it is to manufacture plastic from recycled materials. Similarly, it is cheaper to discard spent nuclear fuel than it is to reprocess it.
Sunkara dismisses the irrevocable link between military and civilian nuclear technologies as imaginary. First, let’s consider the present imbrication. A 2019 Atlantic Council study places the value of the US civilian nuclear complex to the US national security apparatus at $26 billion annually simply in terms of the human capital assets: “In terms of nuclear technology innovation, export capacity, and geopolitics, a vibrant civilian nuclear energy sector is a critically important national security asset.”
However, the civilian operation of nuclear power plants also places future generations at military risk. I have written that, historically, nuclear reactors were “born violent.” That is to say, they were invented by the Manhattan Project in the early 1940s to manufacture plutonium for use in nuclear weapons, and were instrumental in killing almost 100,000 people in 1945. The “first” American commercial atomic plant in Shippingport, PA that went critical in 1958, was actually the 14th industrial nuclear reactor built in the United States, the other 13 only manufactured plutonium, which by then formed the fissile cores of thousands of nuclear weapons.
In nuclear reactors used to make electricity, this plutonium is not separated out for use in weapons. However, all nuclear power plants remain plutonium production factories. The fact that most of those tons of plutonium remain in the spent fuel rods does not mean they will stay there forever. Thousands of years from now, some government or military may dig up the spent fuel in our deep geological repositories and separate that plutonium out to build nuclear weaponry. All it would take is the technology (technology we currently possess) and the will. We continue to manufacture that plutonium—perhaps for them to weaponize. Every nuclear power plant that operates adds to that inventory; more than 99% of existing plutonium was manufactured in nuclear reactors. In 1962, the US successfully detonated a nuclear weapon assembled with just such “reactor-grade” plutonium. Our generation’s use of nuclear power silently stockpiles fissile material that will remain militarily viable for millennia.
I too wish that the things that the nuclear industry says about itself were true—I wish it was green and renewable. I wish that there weren’t multiple uranium mining sites around the world with thousands of tons of uranium tailings abandoned and open to the elements, continuing to harm the health of generations born long after mining ceased. I wish that it didn’t take immense, carbon-intensive mining projects to extract uranium from the Earth, and then again to “deposit” the spent nuclear fuel from reactors back half a kilometer underground. Estimates before construction began at Onkalo spent fuel repository in Finland were that the site would entail a “half-billion-euro construction project will generate some 2,500 person years of employment,” and would take 100 years to complete. That is just to contain the spent fuel from five nuclear power plants. The United States, by contrast, has 94 commercial nuclear power plants. There is still no actual plan for the astonishingly large and carbon-intensive site it will take to bury the more than 140,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel, with some hope of containing it for thousands of generations of future human beings. This doesn’t include the thousands of tons of spent nuclear fuel from the nuclear reactors operated by the US military to provide the fissile cores of more than 70,000 nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
The panic-inducing impacts of anthropic climate change spark a desperate need for immediate reassurance and calming: we want to fix it now. We long to turn some corner that will change the situation. It is unlikely that the same short-sighted military-industrial technophilia that brought us to this climate crisis will flip over and provide us the urgent path to its resolution. Technological evangelists have been auditioning for the part of Climate Change Savior to anyone who will listen. Some proffer a Reagan-era Star Wars pitch: they will fill the skies with material to block the enemy (in this case sunlight rather than Soviet ICBMs). These geoengineering quick-fix schemes are more likely to cause unplanned outcomes than to achieve their missions.
At one time nuclear weapon producers imagined they too could geoengineer the planet to shape it to human desires. They tested the use of nuclear weapons to sculpt harbors into coastlines, and to release natural gas trapped in rock formations. These experiments led to some of the most significant radiological distributions and contaminated sites in the wide panoply of nuclear testing. Still, hyper-capitalist techno utopians like Elon Musk envision the key to human habitation on Mars is the detonation of a massive arsenals of thermonuclear weapons to shape it to our needs.
The nuclear industry will ignore its market dilemmas as long as taxpayers continue to backstop its investors. However, to believe that this massive, for-profit, military-based industry has concern for the welfare of the Earth and its inhabitants is akin to believing the plastic industry is actually beavering away to make the plastic waste disappear. Repackaging their talking points out of a genuine concern for living creatures is a resource they will continue to tap so long as it flows freely. Sunkara would do better to advocate for the mass social movements that have shifted giant industries towards social welfare in the past rather than preaching that the industries themselves are saviors. Time is obviously short, wrong turns are catastrophic.
The humiliation of the U.S. government, which is actively complicit in providing the weaponry, funding, and UN vetoes backing the Israeli government’s attack on the civilian Palestinians/Arabs in tiny Gaza, is in plain view daily. All in the name of the unasked American people and taxpayers.
Earlier this week, at a House of Representatives’ hearing, Trump toady Rep. Elise Stefanik (R-NY) repeatedly assailed three University presidents with the question of would they discipline students calling for the genocide of Jews, without any evidence that this hateful speech is prevalent on campus.
Pursuing her fulminations, Stefanik was cruelly oblivious to the real ongoing genocide in Gaza with her support of unconditional shipment of American F-16s, 155mm. missiles and other weapons of mass destruction used to kill children, women and the elderly who had nothing to do with the preventable October 7th Hamas violence.
Meanwhile, a State Department spokesman continues to say that the Israeli government does not intentionally target civilians. With U.S. drones over Gaza daily, Secretary of State Antony Blinken has visual proof that the overwhelming bombing on civilian structures is killing innocent civilians.
The evidence is in the rubble of hospitals, health clinics, ambulances, schools, libraries, places of worship, marketplaces, water mains, homes, apartment buildings, and piles of unburied corpses being eaten by stray dogs. All this information is in the possession of bomber Biden’s regime.
The Bidenites and their bloodthirsty cohorts in Congress were forewarned when the Israeli Defense Minister Yoav Galant and other Israeli officials on October 8th shouted these chilling genocidal orders to their army: “No electricity, no food, no fuel, no water.… We are fighting human animals and will act accordingly.” (See, Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the Crime of Genocide). Add an already illegal 16-year Israeli blockade of 2.3 Palestinians suffering from dire poverty, with 40% of their children down with anemia.
Now, about half of Gaza’s population are children, 85% of the entire population is homeless, wandering helplessly into nowhere, afflicted with pending starvation, sickened by spreading infectious diseases and dirty drinking water. There is little or no medicines for diabetics and cancer patients. No surgery, no anesthesia, no emergency transport, no shelter from cold weather, only American-made bombs and missiles blowing up Palestinians into bits with Israeli snipers everywhere.
The Palestinians cannot flee from their open-air prison. They cannot surrender – the Israeli government wants them gone. Bear in mind, the population that is not yet blown up is sick and dying, denied needed outside humanitarian aid. Defying feeble Biden’s wishes, Netanyahu only allows a trickle of aid trucks to enter Gaza, and those that do enter can scarcely reach their destinations.
All this raises the issue of the gross undercount of casualties. The Hamas Health Authority has restricted its count to the names of the deceased and injured supplied by hospitals and morgues. These locations are now largely rubble or inoperative. Bodies under the rubble, many of them children, can’t be counted. Thousands of missing people cannot be counted. The Ministry’s suspended count is over 17,000 fatalities, plus 45,000 injuries. With the far larger carnage unable to be tabulated, the actual fatality toll may reach 100,000 soon.
Nonetheless, about two weeks ago, the New York Times reported the death undercount of children in Gaza in two months was ten times greater than the deaths of Ukrainian children in nearly two years of Russian bombings. One of its headlines – “Smoldering Gaza Becomes a Graveyard for Children.”
There are about 50,000 pregnant women in Gaza and about 5,500 of them are due to give birth. Where are they going to do that? How can they be cared for and be nurtured? These mothers are sick and starving. Add the babies to the terrorists toll.
Gaza’s area is about the size of Philadelphia. How many dead, injured, and dying people would there be if 20,000 bombs were dropped on civilians and civilian structures in Philadelphia? Philadelphians trapped without food, water, medicine or any escape route. Imagine 85% of 1.5 million residents homeless, wandering in the streets and alleys. And with virtually no humanitarian aid coming from outside the city. There wouldn’t be any fire trucks or water to extinguish spreading fires.
There are courageous Jewish groups (e.g., Jewish Voice for Peace and If Not Now) and rabbis calling for an end to the slaughter, demanding a ceasefire. There are protestors at all of Biden’s public events/trips reminding him of next November.
Veterans for Peace and other veteran groups are engaged in non-violent civil disobedience in front of the Scranton, Pennsylvania factory producing 155mm missiles for Israel. (Scranton is Biden’s hometown.) Public opinion is turning against the Biden/Israel war without limits on the Palestinians.
Biden wouldn’t want to poll the American people about his $14.3 billion genocide tax, charging American taxpayers to further prosperous Israel’s war of extermination in Gaza. They’ll likely tell Biden that poor children, unaffordable health facilities and other necessities in America need that money first.
There are some 30 Democratic Senators demanding that this Biden bill contain conditions and safeguards so that the money is not used to blow up more Palestinian children and women. But what else are these funds for other than to expand Israel’s military budget? The Israeli extremist ruling coalition under Netanyahu has made no secret of wanting to take over all of remaining Palestine as part of their “Greater Israel” mission to include what they call Judea and Samaria. As Israel’s Founder, David Ben-Gurion, frankly declared referring to the Palestinians, “We have taken their country.” (As quoted in The Jewish Paradox(1978) by Nahum Goldmann.)
It is a cruel irony of history that Israeli state terrorism is producing a Palestinian Holocaust. Netanyahu’s regime has killed over 60 journalists—three of them Israelis—120 United Nations relief workers and instituted total blackouts to keep the grisly events in Gaza out of the news in real time. Netanyahu, to shield his colossal failure to defend Israel on October 7thand to keep his job, is making sure that his country joins the world community of savage, slaughtering regimes, exemplified by the Bush/Cheney unlawful criminal destruction of Iraq and Afghanistan, followed by Hillary Clinton toppling Libya into permanent violence and chaos since 2011. (Obama later called his conceding to Hillary’s demands as his worst foreign policy decision).
Capitol Hill and the White House don’t wait for any blood-guilt to be recognized. That will surely come later with the judgment of history and the nightmarish visions of innocents being vaporized because of Washington’s unconditional backing of the Israeli blitzkrieg against what the Israeli newspaper Haaretz has repeatedly called the “totally defenseless people” of Gaza.
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now.
Note: This is part two of a two-part blog series on the impacts of climate change on nuclear power plants. Check out our first blog post on the impact of increasing ambient temperatures.
Climate action isn’t simply about reducing emissions—it’s also about addressing local environmental concerns and minimizing risks to human health and safety. With that in mind, if nuclear power is going to have a role in addressing climate change, stronger safety and environmental regulations will be needed.
Unfortunately, this approach is missing from the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which in January voted in a 3-to-2 decision to water down recommendations from its own staff to reevaluate seismic and flooding hazards at nuclear sites. “This decision is nonsensical,” Commissioner Jeff Baran wrote in his dissent, “Instead of requiring nuclear power plants to be prepared for the actual flooding and earthquake hazards that could occur at their sites, NRC will allow them to be prepared only for the old, outdated hazards typically calculated decades ago when the science of seismology and hydrology was far less advanced than it is today.”
The January ruling came almost eight years after staff scientists released a list of recommendations in direct response to the 2011 Fukushima nuclear meltdown. With the approval (and pending approvals) this year to rollback multiple safety regulations , the U.S. nuclear fleet, the oldest in the world, cannot afford to wait another decade to strengthen safety and environmental regulations in preparation of climate change–in this case, rising sea levels.
What are the Risks?
Nuclear power plants require huge amounts of water to prevent fission products in the core and spent nuclear fuel from overheating (incidentally making nuclear the most water intensive energy source in terms of consumption and withdrawal per unit of energy delivered). That’s why over 40 percent of the world’s nuclear plants are built along the coasts, with that number rising to 66 percent for just plants under construction. Unable to run on the electricity it generates itself to power the pumps that provide cooling water to the core and to the spent nuclear fuel stored onsite, a nuclear plant must rely on the grid or backup generators to ensure cooling water circulation. Any hazard that cuts off access to those sources of power restricts access to cooling water, ultimately risking a nuclear meltdown and off-site release of radiation, as happened during the flooding of Fukushima.
Flooding evaluations conducted by the NRC concluded that 55 of the 61 evaluated U.S. nuclear sites experienced flooding hazards beyond what they were designed to handle. Even more alarming, in 2014, the flood barriers at Florida Power & Light’s St. Lucie Nuclear Plant–one of the few plants reported to be prepared for disaster but which had been missing proper seals for decades–gave way to 50,000 gallons of water after heavy rainfall.
Storm surges like the one at St. Lucie Nuclear plant and extreme weather events, as witnessed in Fukushima, pose very real risks to both operational and decommissioned plants, almost all of which (in the US) will continue to store nuclear waste onsite for decades until a permanent storage solution is found. Coupled with increasingly rising sea-levels, these risks will continue to grow. Even under a very low scenario of 1°C warming by midcentury, the 2018 U.S. National Climate Assessment reports that the “frequency, depth, and extent of both high tide and more severe, damaging coastal flooding will increase rapidly in the coming decades.” And the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change concluded that 1.5°C of warming could be reached in as little as 11 years.
While all energy technologies will be impacted in some way by the increasing severity of natural disasters and sea level rise, the failure of nuclear power plants can result in irreversible health and environmental consequences on top of social and economic damages, including worst of all the release of radiation that can remain lethal for thousands of years. Under government estimates, the Fukushima meltdown resulted in the displacement of 165,000 people, cleanup and compensation costs of up to $200 billion, and a timeline of 30 to 40 years. Experts say, however, that true costs could reach $500 billion and decontamination timelines could be underestimated by decades.
Nuclear in East Asia
Despite initial vocal opposition from the public in many East Asian countries that have slowed down nuclear buildout after Fukushima, the direction of government policies for nuclear development in East Asia remain mostly unchanged, and have simply resulted in rather a more conservative, moderate pace. In fact, this pace has sustained much of nuclear development in East Asia, home to many countries that have found nuclear power as an attractive solution to addressing the dilemma between achieving energy security for an increasing population and decarbonizing to mitigate global climate change.
Of the 56 nuclear power plants currently in construction around the world, 33 of them are in Asia; 16 in China alone. As observed in the graph below, [on original] if all nuclear units that are currently under construction reach completion, East Asia is slated to become the region with the largest number of operating nuclear power plants, 93 percent of which will reside along the coast.
What is alarming is that East Asia and the Pacific region is uniquely vulnerable to sea-level rise. A 2015 report by Climate Central found that of the top 10 countries most likely to be affected sea level rise for 4°C warming, seven are in Asia. Similarly, in a study by the World Bank, China and Indonesia will be the most vulnerable to permanent inundation. Given the heightened flooding risks in Asia, strengthening the authority of regulatory structures that oversee the safety of nuclear build out will be increasingly important.
What’s the Plan?
Fukushima was a lesson to the global community that even one of the world’s most technologically advanced and experienced countries can fail to prevent a nuclear meltdown. To prepare for the realities of rising sea levels that pose unique risks to different nuclear plants, regulators must require climate adaptation plans and heightened safety oversight. Nonetheless, at the international scale, not much work is being done to address these sea-level rise concerns.
The Nuclear Energy Agency (NEA), in recognizing that the “world is ill-prepared for the risks from a changing climate,” conducted a study on the vulnerability of nuclear power plants to climate change, which is not yet available to the public. Since 2014, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has begun to include a section about the impacts of climate change on nuclear energy in its annual Climate and Nuclear Power Report. Yet even as these international organizations detail the many hazards changing climate poses to nuclear reactors, preventative and/or adaptation measures do not seem to be prioritized or encouraged, especially for existing nuclear plants.
“Outside of their Scope” at Home
Similar attitudes are held here in the U.S. Perched at the southern tip of Florida, the Turkey Point Nuclear Generating Station is seeking to be the first U.S. nuclear plant permitted to run for 80 years. Initially refusing to consider sea-level rise in the environmental review of the license extension, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) released a revised draft this year, only to come to the following conclusion: It’s outside of the scope of the agency.
If new information about changing environmental conditions (such as rising sea levels that threaten safe operating conditions or challenge compliance with the plant’s technical specifications) becomes available, the NRC will evaluate the new information to determine if any safety-related changes are needed at licensed nuclear power plants,” the NRC report said.
The report arrives at this conclusion by utilizing lower-bound sea level rise estimates from the 2018 U.S. Climate Change assessment, rationalizing that the report “assigns very high confidence to the lower bounds of these projections and medium confidence to the upper bounds.” As highlighted by this Bloomberg analysis released this year, nuclear plant operators are not only allowed to perform their own flood risk estimates but are also able to decide what assumptions are made, with review from the NRC.
The uncertainty that comes with sea-level rise projections obviously exists. In securing the safety of such critical infrastructure, however, using the highest sea-level rise estimates is the only way to ensure that all actions that can be taken against a potential threat are taken. On the other hand, relying on the lowest storm surge estimates is akin to receiving a warning about a potential threat, and taking the bare minimum actions to prepare for it.
Changing ambient temperatures are already posing serious risks to nuclear plants across the world. Nuclear regulators cannot wait until sea-level rise coupled with storm surges begin impacting operational safety of their plants—they must act now. With the world’s scientists calling attention to the climate crisis ahead of us, action must be taken to ensure nuclear plants are part of the solution, not the problem.
In the early 1950s, a huge hole was dug into the Cumbrian coast and lined with concrete. Roughly the length of three Olympic swimming pools and known as B30, it was built to hold skip loads of spent nuclear fuel.
Those highly radioactive rods came from the 26 Magnox nuclear reactors that helped keep Britain’s lights on between 1956 and 2015. When B30 was first put to work, it was designed to keep the fuel rods submerged for only three months before reprocessing work was carried out.
But when 1970s miners’ strikes shut down coal power stations and forced greater reliance on nuclear plants, more spent fuel than could be quickly reprocessed was generated. The silos and ponds, built to prevent airborne contamination if the fuel or radioactive sludge dried out, rapidly filled up. Meanwhile, the fuel corroded in the water, breaking down into radioactive sludge.
Debris from elsewhere within Sellafield was later added and the pond was abandoned when new facilities were built in 1986, clouding over and leaving workers on site with little idea what lay beneath its murky waters.
‘A nightmare job with no blueprint’
In 2014, photos of B30 and nearby B29 leaked via an anonymous source to the Ecologist led to concerns over the radioactive risk associated with the poor repair of the ponds.
The two facilities were used until the mid-1970s for short-term storage of spent fuel until it could be reprocessed and used for producing plutonium for the military.
The Ecologist pictures showed hundreds of highly radioactive fuel rods in ponds housed within cracked concrete overgrown with weeds, with seagulls bathing in the water. The images, taken over a period of seven years, led the nuclear safety expert John Large to warn that any breach of the wall would “give rise to a very big radioactive release”.
At the time, the Office for Nuclear Regulation (ONR), the nuclear safety regulator, said that while the old ponds bring “significant challenges”, their appearance “does not mean that operations and activities on those facilities are unsafe”.
It took 15 years and £1.5bn to bring B30 to a point where decommissioning could begin several years ago, with builders limited to working only half an hour a day close to the pool to prevent them from exceeding radiation exposure limits. Remotely operated vehicles, normally used to help with submarine rescues, were originally deployed but quickly failed, often within hours, because of the overpowering radiation. Newer models have since been used to vacuum up nuclear sludge, which is then moved to alternative long-term storage.
Sellafield hopes to have drained the pond by the early 2030s, and demolished it by the 2050s.
A new facility, the sludge packaging plant, has been built to receive radioactive sludge from B30. The nuclear watchdog said there have been some “regulatory challenges along the way … including noncompliance with fire regulations”.
But one former longstanding employee says that, despite the cracks, the contents of the ponds are gradually improving: “I have seen it at its worst. The water quality was horrendous; you could stand on the roof and look down and not see a single thing in there.
“In the control room, there are a group of lads using PlayStation-like controls for robots to pick up bits the size of a 50p piece and hoover up the sludge. It’s cutting edge.”
He adds: “[Decommissioning Sellafield] is the biggest job in nuclear and there is no blueprint. It’s a dream and a nightmare job. There has been real progress – every skip that comes out makes it safer and reduces the hazard risk.”
Toxic neighbours
B30 sits in a “separation zone” that requires greater security checks, and carries a higher risk of radiation, than the rest of the town-sized site. Although B30 is the most notorious crumbling building on Sellafield’s sprawling estate, it is far from the only problem child.
Nearby is B38, used to store highly radioactive cladding from reactor fuel rods. It was also used heavily during the miners’ strike of 1972, when nuclear plants were relied on to produce extra power, and it proved impossible to process all the waste that was being generated. Two years later, the public’s view of the nuclear industry was sharpened by the launch of the Protect and Survive advice on surviving a nuclear attack.
In B29 lie the toxic remains of Britain’s attempt to become an atomic superpower during the cold war.
Windscale, a former munitions factory, was selected to host the first atomic reactors, known as Pile 1 and Pile 2, after the second world war. They produced plutonium for nuclear weapons, and efforts were rushed through to allow Britain to explode its own atomic bombs by 1952.
There are also grave concerns over leaks from the Magnox swarf storage silo (MSSS), described as “one of the highest-hazard nuclear facilities in the UK”. It was constructed as a radioactive waste store in four stages between 1964 and 1983 and has not been in active use since the 1990s. The waste is stored under water to prevent ignition and to maintain constant temperatures.
The silo was first found to be leaking radioactive water into the ground in the 1970s and there are concerns that work to retrieve the waste, planned over the next three decades, has the “potential to reopen historic leak paths” and introduce new ones, according to the ONR.
Earlier this year, the ONR warned that a leak from the MSSS was likely to continue to 2050, with “potentially significant consequences” if it gathered pace.
The government’s long-term plan is to bury Britain’s nuclear waste deep underground in a geological disposal facility. The project, estimated to cost between £20bn and £53bn, would receive intermediate-level waste from nuclear facilities by 2050 and high-level waste and spent fuel from 2075.
It will echo similar projects in Sweden, France and Finland, which is nearing completion of its storage cave. A government body, Nuclear Waste Services, which is running the project, is in the process of engaging with different communities – two near Sellafield, and another near Mablethorpe on the east coast – in an attempt to win local approval for the plans.
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