How Ukraine’s Jewish president Zelensky made peace with neo-Nazi paramilitaries on front lines of war with Russia
In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.
But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.
The Grayzone, ALEXANDER RUBINSTEIN AND MAX BLUMENTHAL·MARCH 4, 2022
While Western media deploys Volodymyr Zelensky’s Jewish heritage to refute accusations of Nazi influence in Ukraine, the president has ceded to neo-Nazi forces and now depends on them as front line fighters.
Back in October 2019, as the war in eastern Ukraine dragged on, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky traveled to Zolote, a town situated firmly in the “gray zone” of Donbas, where over 14,000 had been killed, mostly on the pro-Russian side. There, the president encountered the hardened veterans of extreme right paramilitary units keeping up the fight against separatists just a few miles away.
Elected on a platform of de-escalation of hostilities with Russia, Zelensky was determined to enforce the so-called Steinmeier Formula conceived by then-German Foreign Minister Walter Steinmeier which called for elections in the Russian-speaking regions of Donetsk and Lugansk.
In a face-to-face confrontation with militants from the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion who had launched a campaign to sabotage the peace initiative called “No to Capitulation,” Zelensky encountered a wall of obstinacy.
With appeals for disengagement from the frontlines firmly rejected, Zelensky melted down on camera. “I’m the president of this country. I’m 41 years old. I’m not a loser. I came to you and told you: remove the weapons,” Zelensky implored the fighters.
Once video of the stormy confrontation spread across Ukrainian social media channels, Zelensky became the target of an angry backlash.
Andriy Biletsky, the proudly fascist Azov Battalion leader who once pledged to “lead the white races of the world in a final crusade…against Semite-led Untermenschen”, vowed to bring thousands of fighters to Zolote if Zelensky pressed any further. Meanwhile, a parliamentarian from the party of former Ukrainian President Petro Poroshenko openly fantasized about Zelensky being blown to bits by a militant’s grenade.
Though Zelensky achieved a minor disengagement, the neo-Nazi paramilitaries escalated their “No Capitulation” campaign. And within months, fighting began to heat up again in Zolote, sparking a new cycle of violations of the Minsk Agreement.
By this point, Azov had been formally incorporated into the Ukrainian military and its street vigilante wing, known as the National Corps, was deployed across the country under the watch of the Ukrainian Interior Ministry, and alongside the National Police. In December 2021, Zelensky would be seen delivering a “Hero of Ukraine” award to a leader of the fascistic Right Sector in a ceremony in Ukraine’s parliament.
A full-scale conflict with Russia was approaching, and the distance between Zelensky and the extremist paramilitaries was closing fast.
This February 24, when Russian President Vladimir Putin sent troops into Ukrainian territory on a stated mission to “demilitarize and denazify” the country, US media embarked on a mission of its own: to deny the power of neo-Nazi paramilitaries over the country’s military and political sphere. As the US government-funded National Public Radio insisted, “Putin’s language [about denazification] is offensive and factually wrong.”
In its bid to deflect from the influence of Nazism in contemporary Ukraine, US media has found its most effective PR tool in the figure of Zelensky, a former TV star and comedian from a Jewish background. It is a role the actor-turned-politician has eagerly assumed.
But as we will see, Zelensky has not only ceded ground to the neo-Nazis in his midst, he has entrusted them with a front line role in his country’s war against pro-Russian and Russian forces.
The president’s Jewishness as Western media PR device
Hours before President Putin’s February 24 speech declaring denazification as the goal of Russian operations, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky “asked how a people who lost eight million of its citizens fighting Nazis could support Nazism,” according to the BBC.
Raised in a non-religious Jewish family in the Soviet Union during the 1980’s, Zelensky has downplayed his heritage in the past. “The fact that I am Jewish barely makes 20 in my long list of faults,” he joked during a 2019 interview in which he declined to go into further detail about his religious background.
Today, as Russian troops bear down on cities like Mariupol, which is effectively under the control of the Azov Battalion, Zelensky is no longer ashamed to broadcast his Jewishness. “How could I be a Nazi?” he wondered aloud during a public address. For a US media engaged in an all-out information war against Russia, the president’s Jewish background has become an essential public relations tool.
A few examples of the US media’s deployment of Zelensky as a shield against allegations of rampant Nazism in Ukraine are below (see mash-up above [on original] for video ): ………………………………….
Behind the corporate media spin lies the complex and increasingly close relationship Zelensky’s administration has enjoyed with the neo-Nazi forces invested with key military and political posts by the Ukrainian state, and the power these open fascists have enjoyed since Washington installed a Western-aligned regime through a coup in 2014.
In fact, Zelensky’s top financial backer, the Ukrainian Jewish oligarch Igor Kolomoisky, has been a key benefactor of the neo-Nazi Azov Battalion and other extremists militias.
Backed by Zelensky’s top financier, neo-Nazi militants unleash a wave of intimidation
Incorporated into the Ukrainian National Guard, the Azov Battalion is considered the most ideologically zealous and militarily motivated unit fighting pro-Russian separatists in the eastern Donbass region.
With Nazi-inspired Wolfsangel insignia on the uniforms of its fighters, who have been photographed with Nazi SS symbols on their helmets, Azov “is known for its association with neo-Nazi ideology…[and] is believed to have participated in training and radicalizing US-based white supremacy organizations,” according to an FBI indictment of several US white nationalists that traveled to Kiev to train with Azov.
Igor Kolomoisky, a Ukrainian energy baron of Jewish heritage, has been a top funder of Azov since it was formed in 2014. He has also bankrolled private militias like the Dnipro and Aidar Battalions, and has deployed them as a personal thug squad to protect his financial interests.
In 2019, Kolomoisky emerged as the top backer of Zelensky’s presidential bid. Though Zelensky made anti-corruption the signature issue of his campaign, the Pandora Papers exposed him and members of his inner circle stashing large payments from Kolomoisky in a shadowy web of offshore accounts.
When Zelensky took office in May 2019, the Azov Battalion maintained de facto control of the strategic southeastern port city of Mariupol and its surrounding villages. As Open Democracy noted, “Azov has certainly established political control of the streets in Mariupol. To maintain this control, they have to react violently, even if not officially, to any public event which diverges sufficiently from their political agenda.”
Attacks by Azov in Mariupol have included assaults on “feminists and liberals” marching on International Women’s Day among other incidents……………………………
Zelensky failed to rein in neo-Nazis, wound up collaborating with them
Following his failed attempt to demobilize neo-Nazi militants in the town of Zolote in October 2019, Zelensky called the fighters to the table, telling reporters “I met with veterans yesterday. Everyone was there – the National Corps, Azov, and everyone else.”
A few seats away from the Jewish president was Yehven Karas, the leader of the neo-Nazi C14 gang.
During the Maidan “Revolution of Dignity” that ousted Ukraine’s elected president in 2014, C14 activists took over Kiev’s city hall and plastered its walls with neo-Nazi insignia before taking shelter in the Canadian embassy.
As the former youth wing of the ultra-nationalist Svoboda Party, C14 appears to draw its name from the infamous 14 words of US neo-Nazi leader David Lane: “We must secure the existence of our people and a future for white children.”………………………………………………..
Throughout 2019, Zelensky and his administration deepened their ties with ultra-nationalist elements across Ukraine…………………………………………………………
In November 2021, one of Ukraine’s most prominent ultra-nationalist militiamen, Dmytro Yarosh, announced that he had been appointed as an advisor to the Commander-in-Chief of the Armed Forces of Ukraine. Yarosh is an avowed follower of the Nazi collaborator Bandera who led Right Sector from 2013 to 2015, vowing to lead the “de-Russification” of Ukraine…………………………………….
Ukrainian state-backed neo-Nazi leader flaunts influence on the eve of war with Russia
On February 5, 2022, only days before full-scale war with Russia erupted, Yevhen Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 delivered a stem-winding public address in Kiev intended to highlight the influence his organization and others like it enjoyed over Ukrainian politics………………………………….
“If we get killed…we died fighting a holy war”
…………………………………… With fighting underway, Azov’s National Corps gathered hundreds of ordinary civilians, including grandmothers and children, to train in public squares and warehouses from Kharviv to Kiev to Lviv.
On February 27, the official Twitter account of the National Guard of Ukraine posted video of “Azov Fighters” greasing their bullets with pig fat to humiliate Russian Muslim fighters from Chechnya.
…………………… Besides authorizing the release of hardcore criminals to join the battle against Russia, Zelensky has ordered all males of fighting age to remain in the country. Azov militants have proceeded to enforce the policy by brutalizing civilians attempting to flee from the fighting around Mariupol.
According to one Greek resident in Mariupol recently interviewed by a Greek news station, “When you try to leave you run the risk of running into a patrol of the Ukrainian fascists, the Azov Battalion,” he said, adding “they would kill me and are responsible for everything.”
Footage posted online appears to show uniformed members of a fascist Ukrainian militia in Mariupol violently pulling fleeing residents out of their vehicles at gunpoint.
Other video filmed at checkpoints around Mariupol showed Azov fighters shooting and killing civilians attempting to flee.
On March 1, Zelensky replaced the regional administrator of Odessa with Maksym Marchenko, a former commander of the extreme right Aidar Battalion, which has been accused of an array of war crimes in the Donbass region.
Meanwhile, as a massive convoy of Russian armored vehicles bore down on Kiev, Yehven Karas of the neo-Nazi C14 posted a video on YouTube from inside a vehicle presumably transporting fighters.
“If we get killed, it’s fucking great because it means we died fighting a holy war,” Karas exclaimed. ”If we survive, it’s going to be even fucking better! That’s why I don’t see a downside to this, only upside!”
https://thegrayzone.com/2022/03/04/nazis-ukrainian-war-russia/
Despite the hype, we shouldn’t bank on nuclear fusion to save the world from climate catastrophe
Robin McKie, https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/dec/17/dont-bank-on-nuclear-fusion-to-save-the-world-from-a-climate-catastrophe-i-have-seen-it-all-before
Last week’s experiment in the US is promising, but it’s not a magic bullet for our energy needs
“…….. For almost half a century, I have reported on scientific issues and no decade has been complete without two or three announcements by scientists claiming their work would soon allow science to recreate the processes that drive the sun. The end result would be the generation of clean, cheap nuclear fusion that would transform our lives.
Such announcements have been rare recently, so it gave me a warm glow to realise that standards may be returning to normal. By deploying a set of 192 lasers to bombard pellets of the hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium, researchers at the US National Ignition Facility (NIF) in Livermore, California, were able to generate temperatures only found in stars and thermonuclear bombs. The isotopes then fused into helium, releasing excess energy, they reported.
It was a milestone event but not a major one, although this did not stop the US government and swaths of the world’s media indulging in a widespread hyping jamboree over the laboratory’s accomplishment. Researchers had “overcome a major barrier” to reaching fusion, the BBC gushed, while the Wall Street Journal described the achievement as a breakthrough that could herald an era of clean, cheap energy.
It is certainly true that nuclear fusion would have a beneficial impact on our planet by liberating vast amounts of energy without generating high levels of carbon emissions and would be an undoubted boost in the battle against climate change.
The trouble is that we have been presented with such visions many times before. In 1958, Sir John Cockcroft claimed his Zeta fusion project would supply the world with “an inexhaustible supply of fuel”. It didn’t. In 1989, Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons announced they had achieved fusion using simple laboratory equipment, work that made global headlines but which has never been replicated.
To this list you can also add the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (Iter), a huge facility being built in Saint-Paul-lès-Durance in Provence, France, that was supposed to achieve fusion by 2023 but which is over 10 years behind schedule and tens of billions of dollars over budget.
In each case, it was predicted that the construction of the first commercially viable nuclear fusion plants was only a decade or two away and would transform our lives. Those hopes never materialised and have led to a weary cynicism spreading among hacks and scientists. As they now joke: “Fusion is 30 years away – and always will be.”
It was odd for Jennifer Granholm, the US energy secretary, to argue that the NIF’s achievement was “one of the most impressive scientific feats of the 21st century”. This is a hard claim to justify for a century that has already witnessed the discovery of the Higgs boson, the creation of Covid-19 vaccines, the launch of the James Webb telescope and the unravelling of the human genome. By comparison, the ignition event at the NIF is second-division stuff.
Most scientists have been careful in their responses to the over-hyping of the NIF “breakthrough”. They accept that a key step has been taking towards commercial fusion power but insist such plants remain distant goals. They should not be seen as likely saviours that will extract us from the desperate energy crisis we now face – despite all the claims that were made last week.
Humanity has brought itself to a point where its terrible dependence on fossil fuels threatens to trigger a 2C jump in global temperatures compared with our pre-industrial past. The consequences will include flooding, fires, worsening storms, rising sea levels, spreading diseases and melting ice caps.
Here, scientists are clear. Fusion power will not arrive in time to save the world. “We are still a way off commercial fusion and it cannot help us with the climate crisis now,” said Aneeqa Khan, a research fellow in nuclear fusion at Manchester University. This view was backed by Tony Roulstone, a nuclear energy researcher at Cambridge University. “This result from NIF is a success for science, but it is still a long way from providing useful, abundant clean energy.”
At present, there are two main routes to nuclear fusion. One involves confining searing hot plasma in a powerful magnetic field. The Iter reactor follows such an approach. The other – adopted at the NIF facility – uses lasers to blast deuterium-tritium pellets causing them to collapse and fuse into helium. In both cases, reactions occur at more than 100 million C and involve major technological headaches in controlling them.
Fusion therefore remains a long-term technology, although many new investors and entrepreneurs – including Bill Gates and Jeff Bezos – have recently turned their attention to the field, raising hopes that a fresh commercial impetus could reinvigorate the development of commercial plants.
This input is to be welcomed but we should be emphatic: fusion will not arrive in time to save the planet from climate change. Electricity plants powered by renewable sources or nuclear fission offer the only short-term alternatives to those that burn fossil fuels. We need to pin our hopes on these power sources. Fusion may earn its place later in the century but it would be highly irresponsible to rely on an energy source that will take at least a further two decades to materialise – at best.
America’s complicated problem of disposing of tons of plutonium bomb cores, as the government to spend $1.7 billion on more plutonium bomb cores
The nuclear security agency’s draft statement comes as the Senate approved a military spending bill that seeks to funnel $1.7 billion to the lab’s pit operations, an unprecedented funding amount.
Weehler said the government should hold off on producing pits, which will generate more waste, until it has figured out a safe and effective way to dispose of the radioactive material it already has.
LANL would aid in diluting plutonium in controversial disposal plan
https://www.santafenewmexican.com/news/local_news/lanl-would-aid-in-diluting-plutonium-in-controversial-disposal-plan/article_e6cb6380-6d26-11ed-9a6c-731a070c9235.html By Scott Wyland swyland@sfnewmexican.com, Dec 17, 2022
The federal government has released a draft environmental impact statement on its plans to dilute and dispose of surplus plutonium, plans that worry some activists, residents and state officials because the radioactive material would be trucked at least twice through New Mexico, including the southern edge of Santa Fe.
The U.S. Energy Department’s nuclear security agency placed a notice of the 412-page draft in the Federal Register on Friday, providing details on the plutonium disposal it first announced two years ago but had kept mostly silent about.
Agencies want to get rid of 34 metric tons of plutonium bomb cores, or pits, that are left over from the Cold War and being kept at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo, Texas.
Plans call for shipping the material to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where it would be converted to oxidized powder, then transported to Savannah River Site in South Carolina so crews can add an adulterant to make it unusable for weapons.
From there, it would go to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground disposal site in Carlsbad. This “downblending” is required because WIPP only takes waste below a certain radioactive level.
The public will have a chance to weigh in, both with written comments and at several public hearings scheduled for early next year.
Critics have spoke out against the plan for more than a year, arguing it puts communities along the trucking routes at risk and should be reconsidered.
Cindy Weehler, who co-chairs the watchdog group 285 ALL, said the environmental review confirms her concerns about the region becoming a hub for material that is more radioactive than the transuranic waste — contaminated gloves, equipment, clothing, soil and other materials — the lab now ships to WIPP.
“The preferred option is still to do this 3,300-hundred-mile road trip and have the two operations occur at two different labs,” Weehler said.
The impact statement offers possible alternatives, such as doing all the downblending at the lab or Savannah River to reduce transportation, but it makes clear the original plan is the preferred method.
The National Nuclear Security Administration has been quiet about the dilute-and-dispose plans, other than to acknowledge an environmental impact statement was underway.
This silence has frustrated residents, state and local officials and community advocates like Weehler.
If all the downblending is done at the lab, it would keep the plutonium from being hauled through a dozen states, so that would be better for many neighborhoods across the country, Weehler said.
However, dangerous radioactive substances would still go through Los Alamos and Santa Fe counties twice, she said.
Whether the oxidized powder leaves the lab in pure form or is adulterated, it would be hazardous to breathe in if the containers were breached in an accident, she said.
The draft statement said the powder would go into a steel canister, which would be placed into a reinforced 55-gallon drum known as a “criticality control container.” As many as 14 control containers can be put into a heavily fortified Trupact shipping container.
The lab has an operation known as ARIES for oxidizing plutonium on a small scale. Boosting the quantity would require installing more glove boxes — the sealed compartments that allow workers to handle radioactive materials — and other equipment to the plutonium facility, the statement said. The additions would expand the facility to 6,800 feet from 5,200 feet.
Structures would have to be built to accommodate the work, including a logistical support center, an office building, a warehouse, a security portal and a weather enclosure for the plutonium facility’s loading dock, the statement says.
The idea of doing away with surplus plutonium began after the Cold War. In 2000, the U.S. and Russia agreed to each eliminate 34 metric tons of the plutonium so it could no longer be used in nuclear weapons.
Russia reportedly withdrew from the pact later, but the U.S. decided to stick with its commitment.
The Energy Department originally sought to build a Savannah River facility that could turn Cold War plutonium into a mixed oxide fuel for commercial nuclear plants. But after billions of dollars in cost overruns and years of delays, the Trump administration scrapped the project in 2018 and decided to go with diluting and disposing of the waste.
One nuclear waste watchdog questioned why the leftover pits must be removed from Pantex at all.
That facility should be able to continue storing the plutonium safely, just as it has since the 1990s, said Don Hancock, director of nuclear waste safety for the nonprofit Southwest Research and Information Center.
“If it’s not safe to be at Pantex, then that raises some severe questions about the safety of the Pantex plant for its assembly and disassembly mission” for nuclear weapons, Hancock said.
Hancock said he opposes the government using WIPP as the sole disposal site for the diluted plutonium and other nuclear waste.
The nuclear security agency’s draft statement comes as the Senate approved a military spending bill that seeks to funnel $1.7 billion to the lab’s pit operations, an unprecedented funding amount.
Weehler said the government should hold off on producing pits, which will generate more waste, until it has figured out a safe and effective way to dispose of the radioactive material it already has.
“This is just a commonsense thing,” she said. “We have the weaponry we need.”
Fusion. Really?
BY KARL GROSSMAN, https://www.counterpunch.org/2022/12/16/fusion-really/— 16 Dec 22
There was great hoopla—largely unquestioned by media—with the announcement this week by the U.S. Department of Energy of a “major scientific breakthrough” in the development of fusion energy.
“This is a landmark achievement,” declared Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm. Her department’s press release said the experiment at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory in California “produced more energy from fusion than the laser energy used to drive it” and will “provide invaluable insights into the prospects of clean fusion energy.”
“Nuclear fusion technology has been around since the creation of the hydrogen bomb,” noted a CBS News article covering the announcement. “Nuclear fusion has been considered the holy grail of energy creation.” And “now fusion’s moment appears to be finally here,” said the CBS piece
But, as Dr. Daniel Jassby, for 25 years principal research physicist at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab working on fusion energy research and development, concluded in a 2017 article in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, fusion power “is something to be shunned.”
His article was headed “Fusion reactor: Not what they’re cracked up to be.”
“Fusion reactors have long been touted as the ‘perfect’ energy source,” he wrote. And “humanity is moving much closer” to “achieving that breakthrough moment when the amount of energy coming out of a fusion reactor will sustainably exceed the amount going in, producing net energy.”
“As we move closer to our goal, however,” continued Jassby, “it is time to ask: Is fusion really a ‘perfect’ energy source?” After having worked on nuclear fusion experiments for 25 years at the Princeton Plasma Physics Lab, I began to look at the fusion enterprise more dispassionately in my retirement. I concluded that a fusion reactor would be far from perfect, and in some ways close to the opposite.”
“Unlike what happens” when fusion occurs on the sun, “which uses ordinary hydrogen at enormous density and temperature,” on Earth “fusion reactors that burn neutron-rich isotopes have byproducts that are anything but harmless,” he said.
A key radioactive substance in the fusion process on Earth would be tritium, a radioactive variant of hydrogen.
Thus there would be “four regrettable problems”—“radiation damage to structures; radioactive waste; the need for biological shielding; and the potential for the production of weapons-grade plutonium 239—thus adding to the threat of nuclear weapons proliferation, not lessening it, as fusion proponents would have it,” wrote Jassby.
“In addition, if fusion reactors are indeed feasible…they would share some of the other serious problems that plague fission reactors, including tritium release, daunting coolant demands, and high operating costs. There will also be additional drawbacks that are unique to fusion devices: the use of a fuel (tritium) that is not found in nature and must be replenished by the reactor itself; and unavoidable on-site power drains that drastically reduce the electric power available for sale.”
“The main source of tritium is fission nuclear reactors,” he went on. Tritium is produced as a waste product in conventional nuclear power plants. They are based on the splitting of atoms, fission, while fusion involves fusing of atoms.
“If adopted, deuterium-tritium based fusion would be the only source of electrical power that does not exploit a naturally occurring fuel or convert a natural energy supply such as solar radiation, wind, falling water, or geothermal. Uniquely, the tritium component of fusion fuel must be generated in the fusion reactor itself,” said Jassby.
About nuclear weapons proliferation, “The open or clandestine production of plutonium 239 is possible in a fusion reactor simply by placing natural or depleted uranium oxide at any location where neutrons of any energy are flying about. The ocean of slowing-down neutrons that results from scattering of the streaming fusion neutrons on the reaction vessel permeates every nook and cranny of the reactor interior, including appendages to the reaction vessel.”
As to “additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors,” in a fusion reactor: “Tritium will be dispersed on the surfaces of the reaction vessel, particle injectors, pumping ducts, and other appendages. Corrosion in the heat exchange system, or a breach in the reactor vacuum ducts could result in the release of radioactive tritium into the atmosphere or local water resources. Tritium exchanges with hydrogen to produce tritiated water, which is biologically hazardous.”
“In addition, there are the problems of coolant demands and poor water efficiency,” he went on. “A fusion reactor is a thermal power plant that would place immense demands on water resources for the secondary cooling loop that generates steam, as well as for removing heat from other reactor subsystems such as cryogenic refrigerators and pumps….In fact, a fusion reactor would have the lowest water efficiency of any type of thermal power plant, whether fossil or nuclear. With drought conditions intensifying in sundry regions of the world, many countries could not physically sustain large fusion reactors.”
“And all of the above means that any fusion reactor will face outsized operating costs,” he wrote.
Fusion reactor operation will require personnel whose expertise has previously been required only for work in fission plants—such as security experts for monitoring safeguard issues and specialty workers to dispose of radioactive waste. Additional skilled personnel will be required to operate a fusion reactor’s more complex subsystems including cryogenics, tritium processing, plasma heating equipment, and elaborate diagnostics. Fission reactors in the United States typically require at least 500 permanent employees over four weekly shifts, and fusion reactors will require closer to 1,000. In contrast, only a handful of people are required to operate hydroelectric plants, natural-gas burning plants, wind turbines, solar power plants, and other power sources,” he wrote.
“Multiple recurring expenses include the replacement of radiation-damaged and plasma-eroded components in magnetic confinement fusion, and the fabrication of millions of fuel capsules for each inertial confinement fusion reactor annually. And any type of nuclear plant must allocate funding for end-of-life decommissioning as well as the periodic disposal of radioactive wastes.”
“It is inconceivable that the total operating costs of a fusion reactor would be less than that of a fission reactor, and therefore the capital cost of a viable fusion reactor must be close to zero (or heavily subsidized) in places where the operating costs alone of fission reactors are not competitive with the cost of electricity produced by non-nuclear power, and have resulted in the shutdown of nuclear power plants,” said Jassby.
“To sum up, fusion reactors face some unique problems: a lack of a natural fuel supply (tritium), and large and irreducible electrical energy drains….These impediments—together with the colossal capital outlay and several additional disadvantages shared with fission reactors—will make fusion reactors more demanding to construct and operate, or reach economic practicality, than any other type of electrical energy generator.”
“The harsh realities of fusion belie the claims of its proponents of ‘unlimited, clean, safe and cheap energy.’ Terrestrial fusion energy is not the ideal energy source extolled by its boosters,” declared Jassby.
Earlier this year, raising the issue of a shortage of tritium fuel for fusion reactors, Science, a publication of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, ran an article headed: “OUT OF GAS, A shortage of tritium fuel may leave fusion energy with an empty tank.” This piece, in June, cited the high cost of “rare radioactive isotope tritium…At $30,000 per gram, it’s almost as precious as a diamond, but for fusion researchers the price is worth paying. When tritium is combined at high temperatures with its sibling deuterium, the two gases can burn like the Sun.”
Then there’s regulation of fusion reactors. An article last year in MIT Science Policy Review noted: “Fusion energy has long been touted as an energy source capable of producing large amounts of clean energy…Despite this promise, fusion energy has not come to fruition after six decades of research and development due to continuing scientific and technical challenges. Significant private investment in commercial fusion start-ups signals a renewed interest in the prospects of near-term development of fusion technology. Successfully development of fusion energy, however, will require an appropriate regulatory framework to ensure public safety and economic viability.”
“Risk-informed regulations incorporate risk information from probabilistic safety analyses to ensure that regulation are appropriate for the actual risk of an activity,” said the article. “Despite the benefits of adopting a risk-informed framework for a mature fission industry, use of risk-informed regulations for the licensing of first-generation commercial fusion technology could be detrimental to the goal of economic near-term deployment of fusion. Commercial fusion technology has an insufficient operational and regulatory experience base to support the rapid and effective use of risk-informed regulations.”
Despite the widespread cheerleading by media about last week’s fusion announcement, there were some measured comments in media. Arianna Skibell of Politico wrote a piece headed “Here’s a reality check for nuclear fusion.” She said “there are daunting scientific and engineering hurdles to developing this discovery into machinery that can affordably turn a fusion reaction into electricity for the grid. That puts fusion squarely in the category of ‘maybe one day.’”
“Here are some reasons for tempering expectations that this breakthrough will yield any quick progress in addressing the climate emergency,” said Skibell. “First and foremost, as climate scientists have warned, the world does not have decades to wait until the technology is potentially viable to zero out greenhouse gas emissions.” She quoted University of Pennsylvania climate scientist Michael Mann commenting: “I’d be more excited about an announcement that U.S. is ending fossil fuel subsidies.”
Henry Fountain in his New York Times online column “Climate Forward,” wrote how “the world needs to sharply cut [carbon] emissions soon…So even if fusion power plants become a reality, it likely would not happen in time to help stave off the near-term worsening effects of climate change. It’s far better, many climate scientists and policymakers say, to focus on currently available renewable energy technologies like solar and wind power to help reach these emissions targets.”
“So if fusion isn’t a quick climate fix, could it be a more long-term solution to the world’s energy needs?” he went on. “Perhaps, but cost may be an issue. The National Ignition Facility at Livermore, where the experiment was conducted, was built for $3.5 billion.”
The Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory has a long history with fusion. It is where, under nuclear physicist Edward Teller, who became its director, the hydrogen bomb was developed. Indeed, he has long been described as “the father of the hydrogen bomb.” The hydrogen bomb utilizes fusion while the atomic bomb, which Teller earlier worked on at Los Alamos National Laboratory, utilizes fission. The development of atomic bombs at Los Alamos led to a nuclear offshoot: nuclear power plants utilizing fission.
Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.
Fusion “breakthrough” is largely irrelevant to the climate crisis
Gordon Edwards 15 Dec 22
Just a short commentary on the “fusion breakthrough” this week.
The experiment took place at the Lawrence Radiation Lab, a pre-eminent weapons Laboratory in California once directed by Edward Teller.
Jubilation is felt because, for the first time in over 60 years of effort costing many billions of dollars, a greater amount of energy came out of an extremely short-lived fusion reaction than the amount of energy needed to trigger it in the first place. The net energy gain was about 50 percent.
It all happened very quickly. “The energy production took less time than it takes light to travel one inch,” said Dr Marvin Adams, at the NNSA. (NNSA = National Nuclear Security Administration)
Here are a few details –
1) In an earlier email (www.ccnr.org/fission_fusion_and_efficiency_2022.pdf )I described the “magnetic confinement” concept, whereby an electromagnetic force field holds a very hot plasma of hydrogen gases inside a doughnut-shaped torus (typical of the Tokamak and its close relatives). In this case, “very hot”. Means about 150 million degrees C.
But the breakthrough that is being bally-hooed now, since Tuesday December 13, is a different kind of process altogether, using a concept called “inertial confinement”.
The experiment involved a small pellet about the size of a peppercorn. This pellet contained, in its interior, a mixture of deuterium and tritium gases, two rare hydrogen isotopes. In the experiment, the pellet’s exterior was blasted by x-rays triggered by a battery of 192 very powerful lasers, all targeted on the inner walls of a cylinder made of gold. The lasers generated x-rays on contact with the goldatoms, and those x-rays were focussed by the curving cylinder walls on the little peppercorn-sized pellet in the middle of the gold cylinder.
The x-rays heated the outer shell of the pellet to more than three million degrees, making the exterior of the pellet explode outwards, and (by Newtons “action-reaction” principle) causing the inner gases to be compressed to a very high density at an extremely high temperature, presumably to over 100 million degrees. It is a high-energy kind of implosion, causing fusion to occur in the very centre. The peppercorn “pops”.
2) The experimenters input 2.05 megajoules of energy to the target, and the result was 3.15 megajoules of fusion energy output – that is over 50% more energy than was put in (for a net gain of 1.1 megajoules). This suggests that the fusion reaction inside the pellet may have triggered other fusion reactions.
How much energy is that? Well, a typical household uses about 100,000 megajoules of energy per year, or an average of 273 megajoules per day. So 1.1 megajoules is not much. But it is greater than the input energy.
The Tokamak project now under construction in France for the ITER project, using magnetic confinement, is hoping to have a net energy gain factorof 10 or more (i.e. 10 times as much energy output as energy input).
Earlier this year, in February 2022, the UK JET laboratory announced thatthey had managed to have a fusion reaction last for five seconds. Thereaction produced 59 megajoules of energy, but without a net gain in energy.
3) Most of the news stories about this event state, erroneously, that fusionreactors will not produce any radioactive wastes. This is untrue.
It is true that fusion reactors will not produce high-level; nuclear waste(irradated nuclear fuel), but It is expected that fusion reactors will release an enormous amount of tritium (radioactive hydrogen) to the environment— far more than is currently released by CANDU reactors, which in turn release 30 to 100 times more tritium than light water fission reactors.
Moreover, because of neutron irradiation, the structural materials in a fusion reactor will beome very radioactive. The decommissioning wastes will remain dangerously radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years.
4) Many experts believe it will take at least 20-30 years to have a prototype fusion reactor in operation, even if things go quite well, and more decades will be required to scale it up to a commercial level. Thus fusion energy will be largely irrelevant to the climate emergency we are now facing as all of the critical decision points will have passed before fusion is available.
And, of course, there are no guarantees even then. As one commentator sardonically remarked, fusion energy is 20 years away,it always has been, and perhaps it always will be.
The ‘Demon Core,’ The 14-Pound Plutonium Sphere That Killed Two Scientists
By Kaleena Fraga | Checked By Erik Hawkins https://allthatsinteresting.com/demon-core December 10, 2022
Physicists Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin both suffered agonizing deaths after making minor slips of the hand while working on the plutonium orb known as the “demon core” at Los Alamos Laboratory in New Mexico.
To survivors of the nuclear attacks in Hiroshima and Nagasaki during World War II, the nuclear explosions seemed like hell on earth. And though a third plutonium core — meant for use if Japan didn’t surrender — was never dropped, it still managed to kill two scientists. The odd circumstances of their deaths led the core to be nicknamed “demon core.”
Retired to the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico following the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagaski, demon core killed two scientists exactly nine months apart. Both were conducting similar experiments on the core, and both made eerily similar mistakes that proved fatal.
Before the experiments, scientists had called the core “Rufus.” After the deaths of their colleagues, the core was nicknamed “demon core.” So what exactly happened to the two scientists who died while handling it?
The Heart Of A Nuclear Bomb
In the waning days of World War II, the United States dropped two nuclear bombs on Japan. One fell on Hiroshima on Aug. 6, 1945, and one fell on Nagasaki on August 9. In case Japan didn’t surrender, the U.S. was prepared to drop a third bomb, powered by the plutonium core later called “demon core.”
The core was codenamed “Rufus.” It weighed almost 14 pounds and stretched about 3.5 inches in diameter. And when Japan announced its intention to surrender on August 15, scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory were allowed to keep the core for experiments.
As Atlas Obscura explains, the scientists wanted to test the limits of nuclear material. They knew that a nuclear bomb’s core went critical during a nuclear explosion, and wanted to better understand the limit between subcritical material and the much more dangerous radioactive critical state.
But such criticality experiments were dangerous — so dangerous that a physicist named Richard Feynman compared them to provoking a dangerous beast. He quipped in 1944 that the experiments were “like tickling the tail of a sleeping dragon.”
And like an angry dragon roused from slumber, demon core would soon kill two scientists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory when they got too close.
How Demon Core Killed Two Scientists
On Aug. 21, 1945, about a week after Japan expressed its intention to surrender, Los Alamos physicist Harry Daghlian conducted a criticality experiment on demon core that would cost him his life. According to Science Alert, he ignored safety protocols and entered the lab alone — accompanied only by a security guard — and got to work.
Daghlian’s experiment involved surrounding the demon core with bricks made of tungsten carbide, which created a sort of boomerang effect for the neutrons shed by the core itself. Daghlian brought the demon core right to the edge of supercriticality but as he tried to remove one of the bricks, he accidentally dropped it on the plutonium sphere. It went supercritical and blasted him with neutron radiation.
Daghlian died 25 days later. Before his death, the physicist suffered from a burnt and blistered hand, nausea, and pain. He eventually fell into a coma and passed away at the age of 24.
Exactly nine months later, on May 21, 1946, demon core struck again. This time, Canadian physicist Louis Slotin was conducting a similar experiment in which he lowered a beryllium dome over the core to push it toward supercriticality. To ensure that the dome never entirely covered the core, Slotin used a screwdriver to maintain a small opening though, Slotin had been warned about his method before.
But just like the tungsten carbide brick that had slipped out of Daghlian’s hand, Slotin’s screwdriver slipped out of his grip. The dome dropped and as the neutrons bounced back and forth, demon core went supercritical. Blue light and heat consumed Slotin and the seven other people in the lab.
“The blue flash was clearly visible in the room although it (the room) was well illuminated from the windows and possibly the overhead lights,” one of Slotin colleagues, Raemer Schreiber, recalled to the New Yorker. “The total duration of the flash could not have been more than a few tenths of a second. Slotin reacted very quickly in flipping the tamper piece off.”
Slotin may have reacted quickly, but he’d seen what happened to Daghlian. “Well,” he said, according to Schreiber, “that does it.”
Though the other people in the lab survived, Slotin had been doused with a fatal dose of radiation. The physicist’s hand turned blue and blistered, his white blood count plummeted, he suffered from nausea and abdominal pain, and internal radiation burns, and gradually become mentally confused. Nine days later, Slotin died at the age of 35.
Eerily, the core had killed both Daghlian and Slotin in similar ways. Both fatal incidences took place on a Tuesday, on the 21st of a month. Daghlian and Slotin even died in the same hospital room. Thus the core, previously codenamed “Rufus,” was nicknamed “demon core.”
What Happened To Demon Core?
Harry Daghlian and Louis Slotin’s deaths would forever change how scientists interacted with radioactive material. “Hands-on” experiments like the physicists had conducted were promptly banned. From that point on, researchers would handle radioactive material from a distance with remote controls.
So what happened to demon core, the unused heart of the third atomic bomb?
Researchers at Los Alamos National Laboratory had planned to send it to Bikini Atoll, in the Marshall Islands, where it would have been publicly detonated. But the core needed time to cool off after Slotin’s experiment, and when the third test at Bikini Atoll was canceled, plans for demon core changed.
After that, in the summer of 1946, the plutonium core was melted down to be used in the U.S. nuclear stockpile. Since the United States hasn’t, to date, dropped any more nuclear weapons, demon core remains unused.
But it retains a harrowing legacy. Not only was demon core meant to power a third nuclear weapon — a weapon destined to rain destruction and death on Japan — but it also killed two scientists who handled it in similar ways.
Plutonium’s Fatal Attraction
In February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces took over the Chornobyl Zone of Alienation, an exclusion zone surrounding the plant created in the weeks after the Chornobyl accident. A month later, the Russian Army occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, and since then, the plant has been repeatedly under fire. At the start of the invasion, the world seemingly received an education in nuclear power. News reporting illuminated that containment vessels protecting nuclear reactors had been stress-tested for tornadoes, tsunamis, and planes landing on them, but not for something so banal and human as a conventional war.
The public also came to understand that nuclear reactor complexes require a steady supply of electricity to keep running and to prevent overheating, and also that nuclear power plants hold years of highly-radioactive spent nuclear fuel—chock full of plutonium, among other harmful isotopes—which are not protected by containment buildings.
e-flux Architecture, Kate Brown, Half-Life, December 2022
Think of the earth. At its core is fire, an inferno around which biological life emerged. With fire in our planetary loins, no wonder humans have trouble staying away from it; that they delight in reproducing it in fiction, movies, fireworks, war games, and in technologies.
Perhaps that is why, decades after radioactive toxins saturated the Earth’s surface and at a time when threatened reactors in war-torn Ukraine are at risk of blowing again, many people are still enchanted by nuclear reactors. They are burning cores, sources of other-worldly heat and energy. If you can harness plutonium, the element at the heart of the nuclear inferno, then you can magnify human power to a super-hero level. In tandem, plutonium has the power to re-map territories, produce new borders—not just between people, but between humans and the environment. By extension, plutonium spatializes power.
In 1940, Glenn Seaborg first synthesized plutonium in a cyclotron in Berkeley, California. With these initial micrograms, plutonium became the first human-produced element on the periodic table. Plutonium has a half-life of 24,000 years, which means that Seaborg’s plutonium will linger on earth for over 240,000 years. Like all good offspring, plutonium promises to outlast humans on Earth.
Plutonium is also beautiful, sensual, and kaleidoscopic. It is a heavy metal that self-heats, warming a person’s hands like a small animal. In metallic form, plutonium is yellow or olive green. Shine a UV light on it, and it glows red. When it comes in contact with other radioactive isotopes plutonium sends out a dazzling blue light, a light show designed and powered by what appears to be an inert, inanimate metal. But it is not.
In 1943, the DuPont Corporation built a massive factory for the Manhattan Project to produce the world’s first industrial supplies of plutonium in the eastern reaches of Washington State. As engineers drew up plans for nuclear reactors and radio-chemical processing plants necessary for production, Dupont officials learned something alarming: “the most extreme health hazard is the product itself.”1 “It is now estimated,” DuPont executive Roger Williams wrote to the US Army Corps of Engineers overseeing the project, “that five micrograms (0.000005 grams) of the product [plutonium] entering the body through the mouth or nose will constitute a lethal dose.” A Manhattan Project medical officer wrote on the margins of this sentence: “Wrong!” With the first birthing pains of plutonium, a debate was born over the lethality and consequent liabilities inherent in nuclear industries.
Plutonium is a monumental invention, akin to harnessing fire. Upscaling the Pu chemical extraction process meant separating plutonium from about a hundred thousand curies of fission fragment radiation every single day. This was an incredibly dangerous undertaking. Plant operators worked with robotic arms and protective gear behind massive concrete walls and thick lead-glass windows in ship-sized “canyons.” They worked toward a final product that had extraordinary properties. Seaborg described element 94:
Plutonium is so unusual as to approach the unbelievable. Under some conditions it can be nearly as hard and brittle as glass; under others, as soft and plastic as lead. It will burn and crumble quickly to powder when heated in air, or slowly disintegrate when kept at room temperature. It undergoes no less than five phase transitions between room temperature and its melting point… It is unique among all of the chemical elements. And it is fiendishly toxic, even in small amounts.
Plutonium made not only a novel weapon of war, but its special existence inspired people to use it to create new technologies, and it gave birth to an elaborate security apparatus to safeguard the “super-poisonous” product, and later, new border zones to protect regions spoiled by the spillage of plutonium and other radioactive byproducts after accidents. As workers over subsequent decades produced more and more plutonium, the new mineral transformed landscapes, science, energy production, and human society around the world. Plutonium militarized, segregated, and compartmentalized large parts of the Earth, leaving a profound shadow that reaches into the twenty-first century.
Plutonium Landscapes
At the Hanford Plutonium Plant in Richland, Washington, DuPont engineers initially dedicated minimal resources to the management of growing volumes of radioactive waste. They had chosen a sparsely populated site and removed several towns and a settlement of the Wanapum nation from the newly designated “federal reservation” in case of accidents and the leakage of radioactive waste. They often repeated the platitude: “diffusion is the solution.” With a good bit of distance and privacy won with an elaborate security apparatus, DuPont and Army Corps engineers set up waste facilities for non-radioactive debris according to existing, standard practices. They drilled holes, called “reverse wells,” for dumping liquid radioactive waste. They bulldozed trenches and ponds, pouring in radioactive liquid and debris. Cooling ponds attached to reactors held hot, radioactive water for short periods before flushing it into the Columbia River. Smokestacks above processing plants issued radioactive particles in gaseous form. High-level waste—terrifically radioactive—went into large, single-walled steel coffins buried underground. Engineers designed these chambers for temporary, ten-year storage with the knowledge that the waste would corrode even thick steel walls.
DuPont leaders were nervous about these waste management procedures. The corporation had experience polluting rivers and landscapes with chemical toxins near their factories, and insisted that the Army Corp pay for environmental assays to learn what happened to the dumped radioactive waste. At Hanford in the 1940s, Dupont set up a soil study, a meteorological station, and a fish lab to monitor the health of valuable salmon migrations in the Columbia River. The studies showed that while it took large hits of external gamma rays to kill fish, much smaller ingested doses weakened and killed fish and other experimental animals. Weather studies showed that radioactive gases either traveled considerable distances in strong winds or hovered for long periods over the Columbia Basin when caught in an inversion. Researchers found, in short, that radioactive waste did not spread in a diffuse pattern, but collected in random hot spots of radioactivity. Soil scientists discovered that plants drank up radioactive isotopes readily from the soil and that aquifers became contaminated with radioactive liquids. Ichthyologists learned that fish concentrated radioactivity in their bodies at levels at least sixty times greater than the water in which they swam. Generally, researchers found that radioactive isotopes attached to living organisms readily made their way up the food chain.
Despite this troubling news, even after September 1946 when General Electric took over the running of the plant, no major changes were made to waste management methods for thirty years. In the course of forty-four years, Hanford rolled out the plutonium content for 60,000 nuclear weapons.4 The environmental footprint of that military production, however, is immeasurable. Indeed, it is intrinsically shape-shifting.
Rushing to develop their own bomb and encouraged by the example of the United States, Soviet leaders followed American practices in the years following World War II. Soviet generals commanded Mayak, a site in the southern Russian Urals that became known as “Post Box 40.” Engineers at Mayak dumped radioactive waste into the atmosphere, ground, and local water sources. High-level waste was contained temporarily in underground tanks similar to those built at Hanford. Unlike the high-volume, rocky Columbia River, the nearby Techa River flowed slowly, flooding frequently and bogging down in swamps and marshes. After just two years of operation of the Mayak Plutonium Plant, its director deemed the Techa River “exceedingly polluted.”5 By 1949, when the first Soviet nuclear bomb was tested, the plant’s underground containers for high-level waste were overflowing. Rather than shutting down production while new containers were built, plant directors decided to dump the high-level waste in the turgid Techa River.6 Each day, four thousand three hundred curies of waste? flowed down the river. From 1949 to 1951, when dumping ended, plant effluent comprised a full twenty percent of the river. A total of 3.2 million curies of waste clouded the river along which 124,000 people lived.7 Radioactivity became a new contour that outlined human activity and new communities of people who shared in dangerous exposures.
Rushing to develop their own bomb and encouraged by the example of the United States, Soviet leaders followed American practices in the years following World War II. Soviet generals commanded Mayak, a site in the southern Russian Urals that became known as “Post Box 40.” Engineers at Mayak dumped radioactive waste into the atmosphere, ground, and local water sources. High-level waste was contained temporarily in underground tanks similar to those built at Hanford. Unlike the high-volume, rocky Columbia River, the nearby Techa River flowed slowly, flooding frequently and bogging down in swamps and marshes. After just two years of operation of the Mayak Plutonium Plant, its director deemed the Techa River “exceedingly polluted.”5 By 1949, when the first Soviet nuclear bomb was tested, the plant’s underground containers for high-level waste were overflowing. Rather than shutting down production while new containers were built, plant directors decided to dump the high-level waste in the turgid Techa River.6 Each day, four thousand three hundred curies of waste? flowed down the river. From 1949 to 1951, when dumping ended, plant effluent comprised a full twenty percent of the river. A total of 3.2 million curies of waste clouded the river along which 124,000 people lived.7 Radioactivity became a new contour that outlined human activity and new communities of people who shared in dangerous exposures.
Villagers used the river for drinking, bathing, cooking, and watering crops and livestock. Soviet medical personnel investigated the riverside settlements in 1951 and found most every object and body contaminated with Mayak waste. Blood samples showed internal doses of uranium fission products, including cesium-137, ruthenium-106, strontium-90, and iodine-131. Villagers complained of pains in joints and bones, digestive tract illnesses, strange allergies, weight loss, heart murmurs, and increased hypertension.8 Further tests showed that blood counts were low and immune systems weak. Soviet army soldiers carried out an incomplete evacuation of riverside villages over the next ten years. Twenty-eight thousand people, however, remained in the largest village, Muslumovo. They became subjects of a large, four-generation medical study. In subsequent years, prison laborers created a network of canals and dams to corral radioactive waste streams into Lake Karachai, now capped with crumbling cement and considered the most radioactive body of water on earth.
Radioactive waste redraws the spatial relationships between humans and environment on the ground and by air. On September 29, 1957, an underground waste storage tank exploded at the Mayak plutonium plant in the southern Urals. The explosion sent a column of radioactive dust and gas rocketing skyward a half mile. Twenty million curies of radioactive fallout spread over a territory four miles wide and thirty miles long. An estimated 7,500 to 25,000 soldiers, students, and workers cleaned up radioactive waste ejected from the tank. Witnesses described hospital beds fully occupied and the death of young recruits, but the fate of 92% of the accident clean-up crew is unknown. Following the radioactive trace, soldiers evacuated seven of the eighty-seven contaminated villages downwind from the explosion. Residents of the villages that remained were told not to eat their agricultural products or drink well water, an impossible request as there were few alternatives. In 1960, soldiers resettled twenty-three more villages. In 1958, the depopulated trace became a research station for radio-ecology.
Plutopia
In the postwar era, the social consequences of the production and dispersal of large volumes of invisible, insensible radioactive toxins were profound, manifesting in sophisticated spatial planning and infrastructure that appropriated and exploited existing inequities. Plant managers in the US and USSR created special residential communities—“nuclear villages” in the US and “closed cities” in the USSR—to both manage and control the movement of workers and radioactive isotopes. In exchange for the risks, workers in plutonium plants were paid well and lived like their professional class bosses. As part of the bargain, they signed security oaths and agreed to surveillance of their personal and medical lives. They remained silent about accidents, spills, and intentional daily dumping of radioactive waste into the environment. Free health care and a show of monitoring employees and the nuclear towns led workers to believe they were safe.
To protect full-time employees, much of the dirty work of dealing with radioactive waste and accidents fell to temporary, precarious labor in the form of prisoners, soldiers, and migrant workers, often of ethnic minorities (Muslims in the USSR, Latinos and Blacks in the USA). Segregating space by race to disaggregate “safe” places—or what I call plutopias—and sacrifice zones became a larger pattern in Soviet and American Cold War landscapes.
Soviet and American plutonium communities surfed on a wave of federal subsidies in company towns in isolated regions where there were no other industries and few alternative sources of employment for plant workers. Leaders found it politically difficult to shut off the good life they had created for their plutopias. In Richland, Washington, when the supply of plutonium had been satiated, city leaders campaigned to keep their plants going nonetheless, resulting in an overwhelming excess.11 By the 1980s, the US had produced fifty percent more plutonium than that which was deployed in nuclear warheads.
American officials explored other uses for plutonium. In 1953, President Dwight Eisenhower announced a new international program, Atoms for Peace. At the time, this was largely a propaganda slogan to counter Soviet officials who frequently pointed out that the US was the only nation to use nuclear weapons to kill.
In the next decade, engineers and physicists devised new, non-military uses for plutonium and its radioactive by-products. Turbines attached to reactors began to produce plutonium for (very expensive) generation of electricity. Scientific experiments tested plutonium in cancer research, as a power source for pacemakers, and even for instruments for espionage.12 It seemed there was no end to the uses of plutonium and its radioactive by-products. In the 1950s and 1960s, American radioactive isotopes were shipped abroad under the Atoms for Peace logo in great quantities, dispersing and propagating nuclear technologies across the globe. This trade was both open and clandestine.13 In the name of “peace,” US not only gave other nations the possibility to build nuclear weapons, but also to expose civilian populations as well.
One of the most critical technologies that US agencies exported were “civilian” nuclear power plants. Advocates for nuclear power have long carefully drawn boundaries between nuclear weapons and nuclear power generation. But the existence of nuclear power reactors opened the door for the production of plutonium at the core of nuclear missiles and nuclear accidents. In the late 1960s, both the US and USSR created so-called “dual-purpose reactors” that erased the already-questionable boundaries between peaceful and martial nuclear technologies. These reactors were designed to produce either electricity to power a grid or plutonium for the core of a nuclear missile.
American engineers created the N-reactor at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Richland, Washington, while Soviet engineers designed the RBMK-1000 reactor, a standardized model that was built over a dozen times in the USSR. In contrast to the US, Soviet leaders were worried that the RBMK-1000’s plutonium-generating capabilities could be abused if their technology was shipped abroad.
………………………………………………………… Geopolitics could not reconcile the way that nuclear contaminants did not respect borders. For most officials in the USSR and abroad, the solution was silence and suppression. To admit in the 1990s to the ongoing public health disaster in Ukraine and Belarus would mean acknowledging the damage done to populations around the globe exposed to Cold War nuclear experimentation, weapons production, nuclear testing, and future nuclear accidents. But underestimating and obscuring the effects of Chornobyl has left humans unprepared for the next disaster.
In the years after 1986, commentators repeated that a tragedy like Chornobyl could never occur in a developed, industrial country. This claim was dispelled, however, in 2011, when a tsunami crashed into the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant. Japanese business and political leaders responded in ways eerily similar to Soviet leaders twenty-five years earlier. They grossly understated the magnitude of the disaster (a meltdown of three reactors), sent in firefighters unprotected from the high fields of radioactivity, raised the acceptable level of radiation exposure for the public twenty-fold, and dismissed a recorded increase in pediatric thyroid cancers.
In February 2022, on the first day of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, Russian forces took over the Chornobyl Zone of Alienation, an exclusion zone surrounding the plant created in the weeks after the Chornobyl accident. A month later, the Russian Army occupied the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant in southern Ukraine, and since then, the plant has been repeatedly under fire.
At the start of the invasion, the world seemingly received an education in nuclear power. News reporting illuminated that containment vessels protecting nuclear reactors had been stress-tested for tornadoes, tsunamis, and planes landing on them, but not for something so banal and human as a conventional war. The public also came to understand that nuclear reactor complexes require a steady supply of electricity to keep running and to prevent overheating, and also that nuclear power plants hold years of highly-radioactive spent nuclear fuel—chock full of plutonium, among other harmful isotopes—which are not protected by containment buildings.
The ongoing war in Ukraine has shown how vulnerable electric power grids are in times of war and, one can presume, in scenarios of extreme weather, triggered by climate change. The grounded sites of nuclear events, whether on the high plains of Eastern Washington, the birch-pine forests of the Russian Urals, the swampy stretches of Northern Ukraine, or in coastal Japan, have a global reach. The impact of the invention of plutonium, a new element on the periodic chart, reshaped landscapes, reconfigured spatial and security regimes, and remade what we understand to be human bodies, which have all incorporated radioactive isotopes. Watching the crisis in Ukraine unfold in real-time, a global audience has learned that humanity’s attraction to fire continues to be a fatal one.
Notes………………. https://www.e-flux.com/architecture/half-life/507133/plutonium-s-fatal-attraction/
Large Multinational Study Shows Link Between CT Radiation Exposure and Brain Cancer in Children and Young Adults
https://www.diagnosticimaging.com/view/clinical-histories-in-radiology-could-they-get-worse-
December 9, 2022, Jeff Hall
In a new study based on five- to six-year follow-up data from over 650,000 children and young adults who had at least one computed tomography (CT) exam prior to the age of 22, researchers found a “strong dose-response relationship” between increased CT radiation exposure and brain cancer.
Increased cumulative exposure to radiation from computed tomography (CT) exams led to elevated risks for developing gliomas and other forms of brain cancer in children and young adults, according to the findings of a large multinational study of data from over 650,000 patients.
In the study, recently published in the Lancet Oncology, researchers reviewed pooled data from nine European countries and a total of 658,752 patients. All study participants had at least one CT exam prior to the age of 22 with no prior cancer or benign brain tumor, according to the study. Examining follow-up data at a median of 5.6 years, the study authors noted 165 brain cancers (including 121 gliomas). They also found that the overall mean cumulative brain radiation dose, lagged by five years, was 47.4 mGy for the study cohort in comparison to a mean cumulative brain radiation dose of 76.0 mGy for those with brain cancer.
“First results of (the study) after a median follow-up of 5.6 years show a strong dose-response relationship between the brain radiation dose and the relative risk of all brain cancers combined and glioma separately; a finding that remains consistent for doses substantially lower than 100 mGy,” wrote lead study author Michael Hauptmann, Ph.D., a professor of Biometry and Registry Research at the Brandenburg Medical School Theodor-Fontane in Neuruppin, Germany, and colleagues.
For head and neck CT exams, the researchers noted a “significant positive association” between the cumulative number of these procedures and elevated brain cancer risk. Employing linear dose-response modelling, the researchers found a 1.27 excess relative risk (ERR) per 100 mGy of brain radiation dosing for all brain cancers, a 1.1 ERR for gliomas and a 2.13 ERR for brain cancers excluding gliomas, according to the study.
Hauptmann and colleagues acknowledged that the risk estimates in the study translate to one out of 10,000 children experiencing a radiation-induced brain cancer five to 15 years after a head CT exam. However, the researchers also emphasized appropriate caution, pointing out annual estimates of pediatric head CT exams surpassing one million in the European Union and five million in the United States.
“These figures emphasize the need to adhere to the basic radiological protection principles in medicine, namely justification (procedures are appropriate and comply with guidelines) and optimization (doses are as low as reasonably achievable),” added Hauptmann and colleagues.
Study limitations included the potential for confounding indications with the study authors noting the inclusion of studies with some patients having congenital syndromes that may be predisposing factors for brain tumor development. However, Hauptmann and colleagues noted that exclusion of those patients and adjustments for those conditions saw no significant effect on the assessment of ERR.
The study authors also noted a lack of information on other imaging, such as nuclear medicine studies and X-rays, that may have been performed in the study population. However, they suggested the contribution of radiation dosing from these exams “is probably minor” in comparison to higher frequencies and dosing seen with pediatric head CT exams.
No country has the solution to nuclear waste. Nuclear is no preventer of global heating – in fact, it’s quite the reverse.
- uranium mining and
- milling,
- conversion of ore to uranium hexafluoride
- construction and
- decommissioning
- fuel reprocessing
- waste management
- rehabilitation of mining sites
- transport throughout all stages.
In the words of Shaun Burnie of Greenpeace Germany, “not a single country can claim that it has the solution to manage the most dangerous radioactive wastes.”
Several storage facilities, the NGO argues, are on the verge of saturation, and spent fuel sitting in the power plants is at risk of overheating, sometimes without emergency generators for cooling. Deep geological disposal is not a credible option for Greenpeace.
The World Nuclear Waste Report agrees that, apart from the current construction of a permanent repository in Finland (see box), there is still no real solution for the waste. It points out that it is even difficult to quantify global nuclear waste, as various countries apply different definitions.
But waste is not the only objection of some experts to this new “nuclear gold rush.” Although electricity production itself does not emit GHGs, the rest of the associated processes do. According to the list compiled by sustainability expert Manfred Lenzen of the University of Sydney, GHGs are emitted in all the stages of the nuclear power cycle: uranium mining and
milling, conversion of ore to uranium hexafluoride, enrichment, fuel fabrication, reactor construction and decommissioning, fuel reprocessing, waste management, rehabilitation of mining sites, and transport throughout all stages.
Other experts point to an additional risk caused by climate change itself. According to energy expert Paul Dorfman of University College London, two out of five power plants operate on the coast because of the need for cooling water, and at least a hundred are only a few metres above sea level. As the oceans rise due to global warming, their safety could be compromised; although the Fukushima disaster was caused by an
earthquake, it was a good illustration of what happens when a nuclear power plant is flooded.
Inland power plants are also at risk, in this case because of the opposite, the risk of drought in the watercourses that provide cooling water. Perhaps science and technology will eventually solve the major hurdles of nuclear power (see box), but they will hardly put an end to a controversy that continues to rage.
Open Mind 15th Nov 2022
Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?
Do Western enthusiasts for the Ukrainian government have any idea of the history behind this war?
Regretfully, I have mutilated this historical article below, because it’s long and complex.
So – I have just selected extracts – in my effort to outline this history of the Ukrainian nationalists
Voltaire Network Thierry Meyssa Translation Roger Lagassé 16 Nov 22
Who knows the history of the Ukrainian “integral nationalists”, “Nazis” according to the terminology of the Kremlin? It begins during the First World War, continues during the Second, the Cold War and continues today in modern Ukraine.
Many documents have been destroyed and modern Ukraine forbids under penalty of imprisonment to mention their crimes. The fact remains that these people massacred at least four million of their compatriots and conceived the architecture of the Final Solution, that is, the murder of millions of people because of their real or supposed membership in the Jewish or Gypsy communities of Europe.
Like most Western political analysts and commentators, I was unaware of the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis until 2014. When the president-elect was overthrown, I was living in Syria at the time and thought they were violent groupings that had burst onto the public scene to assist pro-European elements. However, since the Russian military intervention, I have gradually discovered a lot of documents and information on this political movement which, in 2021, represented one third of the Ukrainian armed forces. This article presents a synthesis of it.
At the very beginning of this story, that is to say before the First World War, Ukraine was a large plain which had always been tossed between German and Russian influences. At the time, it was not an independent state, but a province of the tsarist empire. It was populated by Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Czechs, Tatars and a very large Jewish minority supposedly descended from the ancient Khazar people.
A young poet, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, believing that they would help his country to escape from its social backwardness. ……….. When the Great War broke out, he became an agent of the German secret service.
……….. In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution turned the tables. Dontsov’s friends supported the Russian revolution, but he remained pro-German. In the anarchy that followed, Ukraine was divided de facto by three different regimes: the nationalists of Symon Petliura (who imposed themselves in the area held today by the Zelensky administration), the anarchists of Nestor Makhno (who organized themselves in Novorosssia, the land that had been developed by Prince Potemkin and that had never known serfdom), and the Bolsheviks (especially in the Donbass). The war cry of Petliura’s followers was “Death to the Jews and Bolsheviks”. They perpetrated numerous murderous pogroms.
……………Dmytro Dontsov helped Petliura to ally with Poland to crush the anarchists and Bolsheviks. ……………………………………………..
Dmytro Dontsov published literary magazines that fascinated the youth. He continued to promote a Central Europe dominated by Germany and became closer to Nazism as it rose…………………………………………
The expression “integral nationalism” is still claimed today by Dontov’s followers, who, after the fall of the Third Reich, are careful to refute the term “Nazism” with which the Russians describe it, not without reason………………………………….
Dontsov became an unconditional admirer of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. . His followers had founded, in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) around Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets called Dontsov “the spiritual dictator of the youth of Galicia”. However, a quarrel arose between Dontsov and another intellectual about his extremism that led to war against all, when Konovalets was suddenly murdered. The OUN (financed by the German secret service) then split in two. The “integral nationalists” reserved for themselves the OUN-B, named after Dontsov’s favorite disciple, Stepan Bandera…………………………………………
In 1934, Bandera organized, as a member of the Nazi secret service and head of the OUN-B, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki………………………………………………..
From the beginning of the Second World War, under the guidance of Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN-B fought alongside the Nazi armies against the Jews and the Soviets.
The collaboration between the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” and the Nazis continued with constant massacres of the majority of the Ukrainian population, accused of being Jews or Communists, until the “liberation” of Ukraine by the Third Reich in the summer of 1941 to the cry of “Slava Ukraїni!” (Glory to Ukraine), the war cry used today by the Zelensky administration and the US Democrats. At that time, the “integral nationalists” proclaimed “independence” from the Soviet Union in the presence of Nazi representatives and Greek Orthodox clergy, not in Kiev, but in Lviv, on the model of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and the Ustasha in Croatia.
They formed a government under the leadership of Providnyk (guide) Stepan Bandera, whose friend Yaroslav Stetsko was Prime Minister. Their support in Ukraine is estimated at 1.5 million people. That is, the “integral nationalists” have always been in the minority.
…………………………………….in September 1941 The OUN-B was reorganized under German command.. all Ukrainian nationalists took the following oath:”……………….. I believe in Adolf Hitler as the leader and supreme commander …………”
The Nazis announced that many bodies had been discovered in the prisons, victims of “Bolshevik Jews. So the “integral nationalists” celebrated their “independence” by murdering more than 30,000 Jews and actively participating in the roundup of Jews from Kiev to Babi Yar, where 33,771 of them were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen of SS Reinhard Heydrich.
In this tumult, Dmytro Dontsov disappeared. In reality, he had gone to Prague and placed himself at the service of the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, who had just been appointed vice-governor of Bohemia-Moravia. Heydrich organized the Wannsee Conference, which planned the “Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Questions” [4]. He then created the Reinard Heydrich Institute in Prague to coordinate the systematic extermination of all these populations in Europe. The Ukrainian Dontsov, who now lived in Prague in great luxury, immediately became its administrator. He was one of the main architects of the largest massacre in history. Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, but Dontsov retained his functions and privileges.
…………………… 1944, as the Reich army retreated ……… Bandera and Stetsko resumed the armed struggle, among the Nazis, against the Jews and the Bolsheviks.
But it was already too late. The Reich collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons got Dontsov, Bandera and Stetsko. The theorist of integral nationalism was transferred to Canada, while the two practitioners of mass murder were transferred to Germany. MI6 and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) rewrote their biographies, making their Nazi involvement and responsibility for the “Final Solution” disappear.
[Ed not: from here, the story becomes very complex. with ,in the 1950s, the involvement of the CIA, the Muslim Brotherhood, Radio Free Europe, and prominent political and media leaders…….Chiang Kai-shek and the World Anti-Communist League , going on to Slava Stetsko in 1986]
………………………………………..Slava Stetsko, took over the leadership of these organizations. She too travelled the world to support any fight against the “communists”, or rather, if we refer to Dontsov’s writings, against the Russians and the Chinese. When the USSR was dissolved, Mrs. Stetsko simply changed the title of the League to the World League for Freedom and Democracy, a name it still has today. She then devoted herself to regaining a foothold in Ukraine.
………in 1994 she brought the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, to the CIA offices in Munich and dictated parts of the new constitution to him. Even today, Article 16 of the new constitution states: “Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state. Thus, Nazi racial discrimination is still proclaimed by modern Ukraine as in the worst moments of World War II.
………………………………….. On May 8, 2007, in Ternopol, on the initiative of the CIA, the “integral nationalists” of the Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense and Islamists created an anti-Russian “Anti-Imperialist Front”………………………………
The pro-US president, Viktor Yushchenko, created a Dmytro Dontsov Institute, following the “Orange Revolution”. Yushchenko is an example of Anglo-Saxon whitewashing. He has always claimed to have no connection with the mainstream nationalists, but his father, Andrei, was a guard in a Nazi extermination camp [8]. The Dmytro Dontsov Institute would be closed in 2010, and then reopened after the 2014 coup.
President Viktor Yushchenko, shortly before the end of his term of office, elevated the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera to the title of “Hero of the Nation”.
In 2011, the mainstream nationalists succeeded in passing a law banning the commemoration of the end of World War II because it was won by the Soviets and lost by the Banderists……………………………
In 2014, Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbass refused to recognize the coup government. Crimea, which had declared itself independent before the rest of Ukraine, reaffirmed its independence a second time and joined the Russian Federation. The Donbass sought a compromise. The “Ukrainian nationalists,” led by President Petro Poroshenko, stopped providing public services there and bombed its population. In eight years, they murdered at least 16,000 of their fellow citizens in general indifference.
It was also from the 2014 coup that the full nationalist militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In their internal regulations, they enjoin each fighter to read the works of Dmytro Dontsov, including his master book, Націоналізм (Nationalism).
In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada declared members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “independence fighters.” The law was enacted, in December 2018, by President Poroshenko. Former Waffen SS were retrospectively entitled to a pension and all sorts of benefits. The same law criminalized any claim that OUN militants and UPA fighters collaborated with the Nazis and practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Published in Ukraine, this article would send me to jail for writing it and you for reading it.
On July 1, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenski enacted the Law “On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” which places them under the protection of Human Rights. By default, citizens of Russian origin can no longer invoke them in court.
In February 2022, the “full nationalist” militias, which made up one-third of the country’s armed forces, planned a coordinated invasion of Crimea and the Donbass. They were stopped by the Russian military operation to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 to end the suffering of the people of Donbass.
In March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, breaking with the “revisionist Zionism” of Benjamin Netanyahu (the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary), suggested to President Volodymyr Zelensky that he should agree with Russian demands and denazify his country …………………………………
Main sources:
Ukrainian Nationalism in the age of extremes. An intllectual biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Trevor Erlacher, Harvard University Press (2021).
Stepan Bandera, The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Ibidem (2014). https://www.voltairenet.org/article218395.html
The entire article is below
Read more: Who are the Ukrainian integral nationalists ?
Like most Western political analysts and commentators, I was unaware of the existence of Ukrainian neo-Nazis until 2014. When the president-elect was overthrown, I was living in Syria at the time and thought they were violent groupings that had burst onto the public scene to assist pro-European elements. However, since the Russian military intervention, I have gradually discovered a lot of documents and information on this political movement which, in 2021, represented one third of the Ukrainian armed forces. This article presents a synthesis of it.
At the very beginning of this story, that is to say before the First World War, Ukraine was a large plain which had always been tossed between German and Russian influences. At the time, it was not an independent state, but a province of the tsarist empire. It was populated by Germans, Bulgarians, Greeks, Poles, Rumanians, Russians, Czechs, Tatars and a very large Jewish minority supposedly descended from the ancient Khazar people.
A young poet, Dmytro Dontsov, was fascinated by the avant-garde artistic movements, believing that they would help his country to escape from its social backwardness. Since the Tsarist Empire had been immobile since the death of Catherine the Great, while the German Empire was the scientific center of the West, Dontsov chose Berlin over Moscow.
When the Great War broke out, he became an agent of the German secret service. He emigrated to Switzerland, where he published, on behalf of his masters, the Bulletin of the Nationalities of Russia in several languages, calling for the uprising of the ethnic minorities of the Tsarist Empire in order to bring about its defeat. This model was chosen by the Western secret services to organize the “Forum of Free Peoples of Russia” this summer in Prague [1].
In 1917, the Bolshevik revolution turned the tables. Dontsov’s friends supported the Russian revolution, but he remained pro-German. In the anarchy that followed, Ukraine was divided de facto by three different regimes: the nationalists of Symon Petliura (who imposed themselves in the area held today by the Zelensky administration), the anarchists of Nestor Makhno (who organized themselves in Novorosssia, the land that had been developed by Prince Potemkin and that had never known serfdom), and the Bolsheviks (especially in the Donbass). The war cry of Petliura’s followers was “Death to the Jews and Bolsheviks”. They perpetrated numerous murderous pogroms.
Dmytro Dontsov returned to Ukraine before the German defeat and became the protégé of Symon Petliura. He participated briefly in the Paris peace conference but, for some unknown reason, did not remain in his delegation. In Ukraine, he helped Petliura to ally with Poland to crush the anarchists and Bolsheviks. After the capture of Kiev by the Bolsheviks, Petliura and Dontsov negotiated the Treaty of Warsaw (April 22, 1920): the Polish army undertook to push back the Bolsheviks and to liberate Ukraine in exchange for Galicia and Volhynia (exactly as the Zelensky administration is negotiating today the entry of Poland into the war against the same lands [2]). This new war was a fiasco.
To strengthen his side, Petliura secretly negotiated with the founder of the Jewish battalions in the British army (the “Jewish Legion”) and now administrator of the World Zionist Organization (WZO), Vladimir Jabotinsky. In September 1921, the two men agreed to unite against the Bolsheviks in exchange for Petliura’s commitment to forbid his troops to continue their pogroms. The Jewish Legion was to become the “Jewish Gendarmerie. However, despite his efforts, Petliura did not succeed in pacifying his troops, especially as his close collaborator Dontsov was still encouraging the massacre of Jews. Finally, when the agreement was revealed, the World Zionist Organization rebelled against the Petliura regime. On January 17, 1923, the WZO set up a commission to investigate Jabotinsky’s activities. Jabotinsky refused to come and explain himself and resigned from his position.
Petliura fled to Poland and then to France, where he was murdered by a Jewish anarchist from Bessarabia (now Transnistria). During the trial, the latter assumed his crime and pleaded to have avenged the hundreds of thousands of Jews murdered by the troops of Petliura and Dontsov. The trial had a great impact. The court acquitted the murderer. The League against Pogroms, later Licra (International League against Racism and Anti-Semitism), was founded on this occasion.
Not only were the nationalists defeated, but the anarchists as well. Everywhere the Bolsheviks triumphed and chose, not without debate, to join the Soviet Union.
Dmytro Dontsov published literary magazines that fascinated the youth. He continued to promote a Central Europe dominated by Germany and became closer to Nazism as it rose. He soon referred to his doctrine as Ukrainian “integral nationalism “. In doing so, he referred to the French poet, Charles Maurras. Indeed, the logic of both men was initially identical: they sought in their own culture the means to affirm a modern nationalism. However, Maurras was a Germanophobe, while Dontsov was a Germanophile. The expression “integral nationalism” is still claimed today by Dontov’s followers, who, after the fall of the Third Reich, are careful to refute the term “Nazism” with which the Russians describe it, not without reason.
According to him, “Ukrainian nationalism” is characterized by:
“the affirmation of the will to live, power, expansion” (it promotes “The right of strong races to organize peoples and nations to strengthen the existing culture and civilization”)
“the desire to fight and the awareness of its extremity” (he praises the “creative violence of the initiative minority”).
Its qualities are:
“fanaticism” ;
” immorality”.
Finally, turning his back on his past, Dontsov became an unconditional admirer of the Führer, Adolf Hitler. His followers had founded, in 1929, the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) around Colonel Yevhen Konovalets. Konovalets called Dontsov “the spiritual dictator of the youth of Galicia”. However, a quarrel arose between Dontsov and another intellectual about his extremism that led to war against all, when Konovalets was suddenly murdered. The OUN (financed by the German secret service) then split in two. The “integral nationalists” reserved for themselves the OUN-B, named after Dontsov’s favorite disciple, Stepan Bandera.
In 1932-33, the Bolshevik political commissars, who were mostly Jewish, levied a tax on crops, as in other regions of the Soviet Union. Combined with significant and unpredictable climatic hazards, this policy caused a huge famine in several regions of the USSR, including the Ukraine. It is known as “Holodomor”. Contrary to what the nationalist historian Lev Dobrianski says, it was not a plan for the extermination of Ukrainians by the Russians, since other Soviet regions suffered, but an inadequate management of public resources in times of climate change. Lev Dobrianski’s daughter, Paula Dobrianski, became one of President George W. Bush’s aides. She led a merciless struggle to have historians who did not adhere to her father’s propaganda excluded from Western universities [3].
In 1934, Bandera organized, as a member of the Nazi secret service and head of the OUN-B, the assassination of the Polish Minister of the Interior, Bronisław Pieracki.
From 1939, members of the OUN-B, forming a military organization, the UPA, were trained in Germany by the German army, and then still in Germany, but by their Japanese allies. Stepan Bandera offered Dmytro Dontsov to become the leader of their organization, but the intellectual refused, preferring to play the role of a leader rather than an operational commander.
The “integral nationalists” admired the invasion of Poland, in application of the German-Soviet pact. As Henry Kissinger, who could not be suspected of pro-Sovietism, demonstrated, it was not a question of the USSR annexing Poland, but of neutralizing part of it in order to prepare for the confrontation with the Reich. On the contrary, for Chancellor Hitler, it was a question of beginning the conquest of a “vital space” in Central Europe.
From the beginning of the Second World War, under the guidance of Dmytro Dontsov, the OUN-B fought alongside the Nazi armies against the Jews and the Soviets.
The collaboration between the Ukrainian “integral nationalists” and the Nazis continued with constant massacres of the majority of the Ukrainian population, accused of being Jews or Communists, until the “liberation” of Ukraine by the Third Reich in the summer of 1941 to the cry of “Slava Ukraїni!” (Glory to Ukraine), the war cry used today by the Zelensky administration and the US Democrats. At that time, the “integral nationalists” proclaimed “independence” from the Soviet Union in the presence of Nazi representatives and Greek Orthodox clergy, not in Kiev, but in Lviv, on the model of the Hlinka Guard in Slovakia and the Ustasha in Croatia. They formed a government under the leadership of Providnyk (guide) Stepan Bandera, whose friend Yaroslav Stetsko was Prime Minister. Their support in Ukraine is estimated at 1.5 million people. That is, the “integral nationalists” have always been in the minority.
The Nazis were divided between the Reich Commissioner for the Ukraine, Erich Koch, for whom the Ukrainians were subhuman, and the Minister for the Occupied Eastern Territories, Alfred Rosenberg, for whom the “integral nationalists” were true allies. Finally, on July 5, 1941, Bandera was deported to Berlin and placed under Ehrenhaft (honorable captivity), i.e., under house arrest as a high-ranking official. However, after the members of OUN-B murdered the leaders of the rival faction, OUN-M, the Nazis sanctioned Stepan Bandera and his organization on September 13, 1941. 48 of their leaders were deported to a prison camp in Auschwitz (which was not yet an extermination camp, but only a prison). The OUN-B was reorganized under German command. At that time all Ukrainian nationalists took the following oath: “Faithful son of my Fatherland, I voluntarily join the ranks of the Ukrainian Liberation Army, and with joy I swear that I will faithfully fight Bolshevism for the honor of the people. This fight we are waging together with Germany and its allies against a common enemy. With loyalty and unconditional submission I believe in Adolf Hitler as the leader and supreme commander of the Liberation Army. At any time I am prepared to give my life for the truth.
The Nazis announced that many bodies had been discovered in the prisons, victims of “Bolshevik Jews. So the “integral nationalists” celebrated their “independence” by murdering more than 30,000 Jews and actively participating in the roundup of Jews from Kiev to Babi Yar, where 33,771 of them were shot in two days, on September 29 and 30, 1941, by the Einsatzgruppen of SS Reinhard Heydrich.
In this tumult, Dmytro Dontsov disappeared. In reality, he had gone to Prague and placed himself at the service of the architect of the Final Solution, Reinhard Heydrich, who had just been appointed vice-governor of Bohemia-Moravia. Heydrich organized the Wannsee Conference, which planned the “Final Solution of the Jewish and Gypsy Questions” [4]. He then created the Reinard Heydrich Institute in Prague to coordinate the systematic extermination of all these populations in Europe. The Ukrainian Dontsov, who now lived in Prague in great luxury, immediately became its administrator. He was one of the main architects of the largest massacre in history. Heydrich was assassinated in June 1942, but Dontsov retained his functions and privileges.
Stepan Bandera and his deputy Yaroslav Stetsko were placed under house arrest at the headquarters of the General Inspectorate of Concentration Camps in Oranienburg-Sachsenhausen (30 km from Berlin). They wrote letters to their supporters and to the Reich leadership in complete freedom and were not deprived of anything. In September 1944, as the Reich army retreated and Bandera’s followers began to rebel against it, the two leaders were released by the Nazis and reinstated in their previous positions. Bandera and Stetsko resumed the armed struggle, among the Nazis, against the Jews and the Bolsheviks.
Centuria Integral Nationalist Order Ceremony. According to George Washington University, by 2021 it had already penetrated the main NATO armies.
But it was already too late. The Reich collapsed. The Anglo-Saxons got Dontsov, Bandera and Stetsko. The theorist of integral nationalism was transferred to Canada, while the two practitioners of mass murder were transferred to Germany. MI6 and the OSS (predecessor of the CIA) rewrote their biographies, making their Nazi involvement and responsibility for the “Final Solution” disappear.
Bandera and Stetsko were installed in Munich to organize the Anglo-Saxon stay-behind networks in the Soviet Union. From 1950 onwards, they had an important radio station, Radio Free Europe, which they shared with the Muslim Brotherhood of Said Ramadan (the father of Tariq Ramadan). The radio station was sponsored by the National Committee for a Free Europe, a CIA offshoot of which its director Alan Dulles was a member, as well as future president Dwight Eisenhower, newspaper magnate Henry Luce and film director Cecil B. DeMilles. Psychological warfare specialist and future patron of the Straussians, Charles D. Jackson, was chairman.
Vladimir Jabotinsky, for his part, after living in Palestine, took refuge in New York. He was joined by Benzion Netanyahu (the father of the current Israeli Prime Minister). The two men wrote the doctrinal texts of “revisionist Zionism” and the Jewish Encyclopedia.
Bandera and Stetsko moved around a lot. They organized sabotage operations throughout the Soviet Union, particularly in the Ukraine, and parachuted leaflets. For this purpose, they created the Anti-Bolshevik Bloc of Nations (ABN), which brought together their Central European counterparts [5]. The British double agent, Kim Philby, informed the Soviets in advance about the actions of the Bandera. Bandera met with Dontsov in Canada and asked him to take the lead in the struggle. Once again, the intellectual refused, preferring to devote himself to his writing. He then drifted into a mystical delirium inspired by Viking myths. He announced the final battle of the Ukrainian knights against the Russian dragon. As for Bandera, he allied himself with the Chinese leader Chiang Kai-shek whom he met in 1958. But he was assassinated the following year by the KGB in Munich.
Yaroslav Stetsko continued the struggle through Radio Free Europe and the ABN. He went to the United States to testify before Senator Joseph MacCarthy’s Commission on Un-American Activities. In 1967, he and Chiang Kai-shek founded the World Anti-Communist League [6]. The League included many pro-US dictators from around the world and two schools of torture, in Panama and Taiwan. Klaus Barbie, who assassinated Jean Moulin in France and Che Guevara in Bolivia, was a member. In 1983, Stetsko was received at the White House by President Ronald Reagan and participated, along with Vice President George Bush Sr., in Lev Dobrianski’s “Captive Nations” (i.e., peoples occupied by the Soviets) ceremonies. He finally died in 1986.
But the story does not end there. His wife, Slava Stetsko, took over the leadership of these organizations. She too travelled the world to support any fight against the “communists”, or rather, if we refer to Dontsov’s writings, against the Russians and the Chinese. When the USSR was dissolved, Mrs. Stetsko simply changed the title of the League to the World League for Freedom and Democracy, a name it still has today. She then devoted herself to regaining a foothold in Ukraine.
Slava Stetsko ran in the first elections of the independent Ukraine in 1994. She was elected to the Verkhovna Rada, but having been stripped of her nationality by the Soviets, she could not sit. However, she brought the Ukrainian president, Leonid Kuchma, to the CIA offices in Munich and dictated parts of the new constitution to him. Even today, Article 16 of the new constitution states: “Preserving the genetic heritage of the Ukrainian people is the responsibility of the state. Thus, Nazi racial discrimination is still proclaimed by modern Ukraine as in the worst moments of World War II.
Slava Stetsko was re-elected at the next two sessions. She solemnly presided over the opening sessions on March 19, 1998 and on May 14, 2002.
In 2000, Lev Dobriansky organized a large symposium in Washington with many Ukrainian officials. He invited Straussian Paul Wolfowitz (a former collaborator of Charles D. Jackson). During this meeting, the “integral nationalists” put themselves at the service of the Straussians to destroy Russia [7].
On May 8, 2007, in Ternopol, on the initiative of the CIA, the “integral nationalists” of the Ukrainian People’s Self-Defense and Islamists created an anti-Russian “Anti-Imperialist Front” under the joint chairmanship of the Emir of Itchkeria, Dokka Umarov, and Dmytro Yarosh (the current special adviser to the head of the Ukrainian army). The meeting was attended by organizations from Lithuania, Poland, Ukraine and Russia, including Islamist separatists from Crimea, Adygea, Dagestan, Ingushetia, Kabardino-Balkaria, Karachaevo-Cherkessia, Ossetia and Chechnya. Dokka Umarov, who was unable to go there due to international sanctions, had his contribution read out. In retrospect, the Crimean Tatars are unable to explain their presence at this meeting, if not their past service to the CIA against the Soviets.
The pro-US president, Viktor Yushchenko, created a Dmytro Dontsov Institute, following the “Orange Revolution”. Yushchenko is an example of Anglo-Saxon whitewashing. He has always claimed to have no connection with the mainstream nationalists, but his father, Andrei, was a guard in a Nazi extermination camp [8]. The Dmytro Dontsov Institute would be closed in 2010, and then reopened after the 2014 coup.
President Viktor Yushchenko, shortly before the end of his term of office, elevated the criminal against humanity Stepan Bandera to the title of “Hero of the Nation”.
In 2011, the mainstream nationalists succeeded in passing a law banning the commemoration of the end of World War II because it was won by the Soviets and lost by the Banderists. But President Viktor Yanukovych refused to enact it. Enraged, the “integral nationalists” attacked the procession of Red Army veterans, beating up old men. Two years later, the cities of Lviv and Ivano-Frankivsk abolished the Victory Day ceremonies and banned all manifestations of joy.
In 2014, Ukrainians in Crimea and Donbass refused to recognize the coup government. Crimea, which had declared itself independent before the rest of Ukraine, reaffirmed its independence a second time and joined the Russian Federation. The Donbass sought a compromise. The “Ukrainian nationalists,” led by President Petro Poroshenko, stopped providing public services there and bombed its population. In eight years, they murdered at least 16,000 of their fellow citizens in general indifference.
It was also from the 2014 coup that the full nationalist militias were incorporated into the Ukrainian Armed Forces. In their internal regulations, they enjoin each fighter to read the works of Dmytro Dontsov, including his master book, Націоналізм (Nationalism).
In April 2015, the Verkhovna Rada declared members of the Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) “independence fighters.” The law was enacted, in December 2018, by President Poroshenko. Former Waffen SS were retrospectively entitled to a pension and all sorts of benefits. The same law criminalized any claim that OUN militants and UPA fighters collaborated with the Nazis and practiced ethnic cleansing of Jews and Poles. Published in Ukraine, this article would send me to jail for writing it and you for reading it.
On July 1, 2021, President Volodymyr Zelenski enacted the Law “On Indigenous Peoples of Ukraine” which places them under the protection of Human Rights. By default, citizens of Russian origin can no longer invoke them in court.
In February 2022, the “full nationalist” militias, which made up one-third of the country’s armed forces, planned a coordinated invasion of Crimea and the Donbass. They were stopped by the Russian military operation to implement UN Security Council Resolution 2202 to end the suffering of the people of Donbass.
In March 2022, Israeli Prime Minister Nafatali Bennett, breaking with the “revisionist Zionism” of Benjamin Netanyahu (the son of Jabotinsky’s secretary), suggested to President Volodymyr Zelensky that he should agree with Russian demands and denazify his country [8]. Emboldened by this unexpected support, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov dared to mention the case of the Jewish Ukrainian president, saying: “The Jewish people in their wisdom have said that the most ardent anti-Semites are usually Jews. Every family has its black sheep, as they say.” This was too much for the Israelis, who always worry when someone tries to divide them. His counterpart at the time, Yair Lapid, recalled that the Jews themselves never organized the Holocaust of which they were victims. Caught between its conscience and its alliances, the Hebrew state repeated its support for Ukraine, but refused to send it any weapons. In the end, the General Staff decided and the Minister of Defense, Benny Gantz, closed any possibility of support to the successors of the mass murderers of Jews.
Ukrainians are the only nationalists who are not fighting for their people or their land, but for one idea: to annihilate the Jews and the Russians.
Main sources:
Ukrainian Nationalism in the age of extremes. An intllectual biography of Dmytro Dontsov, Trevor Erlacher, Harvard University Press (2021).
Stepan Bandera, The Life and Afterlife of a Ukrainian Nationalist. Fascism, Genocide, and Cult, Grzegorz Rossoliński-Liebe, Ibidem (2014).
[1] “The Western strategy to dismantle the Russian Federation”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 17 August 2022.
[2] “Poland and Ukraine”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 14 June 2022.
[3] “The Holodomor, new avatar of “European” anti-communism” (excerpt from Le Choix of defeat), Annie Lacroix-Riz (2010).
[4] «The Wannsee Conference in 1942 and the National Socialist living space dystopia», Gerhard Wolf, Journal of Genocide Research, Vol 17 N°2 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2015.1027074
[5] [Bulletins of the Anti-Bolshevik Nations Block are available in the Voltaire Network Library. ABN Korrespondenz (auf Deutsch), ABN Correspondence (in english).
[6] “The World Anti-Communist League: the Internationale of Crime”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Anoosha Boralessa, Voltaire Network, 12 May 2004.
[7] “Ukraine : the Second World War continues”, by Thierry Meyssan, Translation Roger Lagassé, Voltaire Network, 26 April 2022.
Why molten salt nuclear reactors really can’t succeed
Beyond Nuclear By M.V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery 14 Nov 22
………………………………………………………….Technical Problems
Let us start with the problems with the molten chloride fast reactor. As its name suggests, the reactor uses nuclear materials dissolved in molten chemical salts.
Salt is corrosive — just ask anyone who lives on the coast. So the inside of the reactor will be a chemically corrosive and highly radioactive environment.
No material can perform satisfactorily in such an environment. After reviewing the available studies, all that the U.S. Idaho National Laboratory — a nuclear power booster — could recommend was that “a systematic development program be initiated.”
TerraPower has three different nuclear reactor designs on the books: the Natrium reactor; the molten chloride fast reactor; and the traveling wave reactor.
Given his emphasis on novelty and innovation, one would expect Gates to put his money on reactor designs that are new and likely to succeed. None of these designs have that merit. All of these reactors are based on two old reactor designs vexed with major problems.
Other leading research laboratories like France’s Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN) and the U.K.’s Nuclear Innovation and Research Office, have concluded that molten salt reactors are problematic. As IRSN put it, “numerous technological challenges remain to be overcome before the construction of an MSR can be considered.”
The historical experience with molten salt reactors has been pretty bleak, to put it mildly. The last one to be built was the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment in Oakridge, Tennessee. It operated intermittently from 1965 to 1969, and operations were interrupted 225 times in those four years; of these interruptions, only 58 were planned.
But it’s not just a matter of molten salt reactors being unreliable or technologically challenged. As Edwin Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists has documented at length, the “use of liquid fuel instead of a solid fuel” in molten salt reactors “has significant safety implications for both normal operation and accidents.”
Specifically, the molten nature of the fuel makes it easier for radioactive materials to escape into the atmosphere and be dispersed.
Terrapower’s other two reactor designs are not much better. Both the Travelling Wave Reactor and the Natrium use molten sodium. Another problematic material, molten sodium is used to transport the intense heat produced by the nuclear fission reactions. Again, such reactors have been constructed since the dawn of the nuclear age and with similarly dismal results.
To start with, such reactors have had numerous accidents. The record starts on November 29, 1955 when the Experimental Breeder Reactor (EBR-1) in Idaho had a partial core meltdown.
A decade later, in October 1966, the Fermi-1 demonstration fast reactor in Michigan suffered a partial core meltdown. The shock made its way into the cultural mainstream in the form of a book called We Almost Lost Detroit and a song with the same name by Gil Scott Heron.
In Japan, the Monju reactor suffered a series of accidents and produced almost no electricity, after an expenditure of at least $8.5 billion
The use of molten sodium makes such reactors susceptible to serious fires, because the material burns if exposed to air. Almost all sodium-cooled reactors constructed around the world have experienced sodium leaks, likely because of chemical interactions between sodium and the stainless steel used in various components of the reactor.
Finally, the use of sodium also makes it difficult to maintain and carry out repairs on fast reactors, which then become susceptible to long shutdowns. Having to deal with all these volatile properties and safety concerns naturally drives up the construction costs of fast reactors, rendering them substantially more expensive than common thermal reactors.
Sodium-cooled reactors are also unreliable, operating at dismally low rates compared to standard reactors. The load factor (the ratio of the amount of electrical energy a power plant has produced to the amount of energy it would have produced had it operated at full capacity) for the Prototype Fast Reactor in the United Kingdom was 27%; France’s Superphenix reactor managed a mere 7.9%.
The typical U.S. reactor operates with a load factor of more than 90%. Sodium- cooled reactors would have to sell their power at higher prices to compensate for the fewer units of electrical energy generated.
“Without innovation, we will not solve climate change,” chanted Gates. But no amount of innovation will change the laws of chemistry or physics. How sodium behaves when it interacts with air or water won’t be affected, even if the sodium is inside a nuclear reactor backed by one of America’s oligarchs.
Innovation will not change the fact that the radioactive wastes produced by the Natrium reactor will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years……………………………………………….. more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/11/13/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/
Bill Gates and techno-fix delusions
When elites try to change the world, it’s not usually for the better for the rest of us
Beyond Nuclear By M.V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery 14 Nov 22
Bill Gates, the businessman, made one of the world’s biggest fortunes by designing, selling and marketing computer technology. It shouldn’t come as a surprise that when it comes to climate change, he’s pushing more technology.
When wealthy people push something, the world pays attention. Practically all major media outlets covered his recent book, How to Avoid a Climate Disaster, and Gates has been interviewed dozens of times. All this pushing came with the pre-emptive caveat expressed in his book that the “world is not exactly lacking in rich men with big ideas about what other people should do, or who think technology can fix any problem.”
In his account of how elites try to “change the world,” journalist Anand Giridharadas explained: “All around us, the winners in our highly inequitable status quo declare themselves partisans of change. They know the problem, and they want to be part of the solution. Actually, they want to lead the search for solutions…the attempts naturally reflect their biases.
Gates is no exception to the rule; his bias favors maintaining the current economic and political system that has made him into one of the richest people in the world. The same bias also underpinned his stance on preserving intellectual property rights over Covid-19 vaccines, even at the cost of impeding access to these vaccines in much of the world.
Just as the pandemic was accentuated by insisting on the rights to continued profits for pharmaceutical companies, climate change is exacerbated by the current economic system that is predicated on unending growth.
A focus on technical solutions without fixing the underlying driver of climate change will not help. What is worse, some of the proposed technologies are positively dangerous.
Exhibit A: untested nuclear reactors like the ones that Gates is developing and endorsing.
Puzzling Choices
In an interview with CNBC following the publication of his book, Bill Gates announced: “There’s a new generation of nuclear power that solves the economics, which has been the big, big problem.”
To understand the economic problem, consider the only two nuclear reactors being built in the United States. These are in the state of Georgia, and the cost of constructing these has ballooned from an initial estimate of $14 billion to over $30 billion.
Even worse was the case of the V. C. Summer project in South Carolina, where over $9 billion was spent, only for the project to be abandoned because cost overruns led to Westinghouse, one of the leading nuclear reactor companies in the world, filing for bankruptcy protection.
These high construction costs naturally result in high electricity costs. In 2021, Lazard, the Wall Street firm, estimated the average cost of electricity from new nuclear plants to be between $131 and $204 per megawatt hour, whereas it estimated that newly constructed utility-scale solar and wind plants produce electricity at somewhere between $26 and $50 per megawatt-hour.
Likewise, in June 2022 NextEra, a large electricity utility, estimated that wind and solar energy, with four hours of electricity storage to allow for generation even when the sun is not shining or the wind is not blowing, ranged between $25 and $37 per megawatt-hour. Electricity from renewables is thus far cheaper than nuclear power, a difference only growing as solar and wind continue to become cheaper.
Many reactors have been shut down because they are unprofitable. In 2018, Bloomberg New Energy Finance concluded that more than a quarter of U.S. nuclear plants don’t make enough money to cover their operating costs.
That year, NextEra decided to shut down the Duane Arnold nuclear reactor in Iowa, because it was cheaper to take advantage of the lower costs of renewables, primarily wind power. The decision, NextEra estimated, will “save customers nearly $300 million in energy costs, on a net present value basis.”
It is this economic conundrum that Gates is claiming to address through new nuclear reactor designs. He is not alone. A number of other investors have backed “new” nuclear technology, and dozens of companies have received funding to design “advanced” or “small modular” reactors.
But these nuclear reactors of the future are no less problematic than traditional reactors. Besides unfavourable economics, there are at least three other well-known “unresolved problems” with nuclear power.
First, the acquisition of nuclear power technology increases the capacity of a country to make nuclear weapons, and thus increases the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation.
Second, despite assurances about safety, all nuclear reactors can undergo major accidents, albeit infrequently. Chernobyl and Fukushima are the best-known examples, but not the only ones.
Third, the multiple forms of radioactive waste produced during the nuclear energy generation process pose a seemingly intractable management problem. Exposure to these wastes will be harmful to people and other living organisms for hundreds of thousands of years.
Wastes must therefore be isolated for millennia from human contact. The storage and disposal of these wastes often take place in poor, disadvantaged communities, typically far away from the gated homes of people like Gates.
It is not possible to simultaneously address all of these four challenges — cost, safety, waste, and proliferation — facing nuclear power. To a greater or lesser extent, all these problems will afflict the reactors being developed by TerraPower, the nuclear power company backed by Gates………………………………………………………………………….more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/11/13/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/
How Bill Gates’ TerraPower rips off the American taxpayers
government support adds up to nearly as much as private investments and almost certainly more than Gates has personally invested. In other words, taxpayers have already paid tens of millions of dollars, and could pay far more in the future, for this technology
Beyond Nuclear By M.V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery 14 Nov 22…………………………………………………………………………. Bill Gates and TerraPower
TerraPower was founded in 2006 and Gates continues to serve as Chairman of the Board. The company has funded the development of three different nuclear reactor designs through a mix of venture capitalist investments from fellow billionaires, engineering and manufacturing corporations in the energy and defense sector, and government.
The company has research and development partnerships with several major institutions, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, both of which design and test nuclear weapons.
TerraPower is well-funded. In 2010, the company received $35 million in seed money from venture capital firms to develop the first of its nuclear power plant designs, the “traveling wave” reactor. It has also received an undisclosed amount of funding from Breakthrough Energy Ventures, an investment firm co-founded and co-chaired by Gates.
According to a 2015 TerraPower promotional video, Gates pledged to invest $2 billion into emerging energy technologies, including nuclear technologies produced by TerraPower. And a few years back, Gates promised to invest $1 billion from his personal coffers and raise another $1 billion in private capital to fund TerraPower directly.
Despite these announcements, the exact financial figure Gates has personally invested into TerraPower is not known. In 2019, he declined interview requests by the Washington Post about his investment in the company. TerraPower’s financial records are not publicly available.
But investments by Gates and his friends are not the only source of funding for TerraPower. In 2016, TerraPower received a $40 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), followed by another $80 million in 2020, and $8.5 million in 2022.
In 2021, under the Bipartisan Infrastructure Act, the U.S. Department of Energy’s Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations has set aside $2.5 billion for nuclear projects and some of this funding will subsidize the TerraPower nuclear project slated for development in Wyoming.
As far as we can tell from publicly available data, government support adds up to nearly as much as private investments and almost certainly more than Gates has personally invested. In other words, taxpayers have already paid tens of millions of dollars, and could pay far more in the future, for this technology.
The U.S. taxpayer isn’t the only source of public funding that Bill Gates has tried to leverage. The 1.4 billion people of China came close to ponying up their tax dollars (or renminbis). After a series of visits by Gates to the Middle Kingdom, TerraPower reached an agreement with state-owned China National Nuclear Corporation in 2017 to build an experimental nuclear reactor south of Beijing.
That project would have likely gone forward but was stopped by America’s waning diplomatic and trade relationship with China…………………………….more https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2022/11/13/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/
America’s Abandoned Nuclear Power Projects (includes Interactive Map)
THE BIG PICTURE: Abandoned Nuclear Power Projects (Interactive Map), Power, by Sonal Patel Increasing uncertainties concerning low forecasted load; construction financing constraints and reversals; state certification hurdles; and challenges to nuclear profitability posed by the growing share of coal plants beset the nuclear industry in the early 1970s. The nuclear suffered a renewed economic meltdown and fierce public pushback in the aftermath of the Three Mile Island accident in 1979. By 1983, these factors prompted the delay or cancellation of 100 nuclear units—nearly 45% of total commercial capacity previously ordered. An estimated $10 billion (in mid-1982 dollars) had been spent on the scrapped projects. Mounting public opposition from Chernobyl and new safety rules required after Fukushima also affected a number of later projects.
POWER in April 2020 published an infographic showing construction timeframes of completed nuclear reactors: THE BIG PICTURE (Infographic): U.S. Nuclear Lifetimes
A supplement to POWER‘s February 2018 THE BIG PICTURE print infographic, this interactive map offers a sampling of nuclear plant projects that have been abandoned. Double click on the map to activate the zoom function. Click on “Map Overview” to zoom out. Scroll down for an overview. Note: All dollar figures are from the corresponding year. Source: NRC
—Copy, artwork, and interactive feature by Sonal Patel, a POWER senior associate editor (@sonalcpatel, @POWERmagazine)
………………………… A Brief History of Abandoned U.S. Nuclear Projects
1974: Tyrone 2 (1.2 GW)—Wisconsin regulators denied certification of the project being built by Northern States Power (now Xcel Energy) owing to insufficient demand growth and public opposition. Abandonment cost the company $103 million. The Wisconsin Public Utility Commission ordered the company to study a substitute coal-fired plant.
1974: Vogtle 3 and 4 (each 1,113 MW)— While Georgia Power gave this project new life 2013 as AP1000s—and they remain the only two reactors under construction in the U.S.—the company canceled two reactors under construction at the Vogtle site in 1974, citing citizen opposition and regulatory changes, which contributed to rising costs and construction delays. Critics, however, pointed to management issues for the project’s failure.
1977: Surry 3 and 4 (each 882 MW)—Power demand fell dramatically from 1972, when Surry 3 and 4 were planned by Virginia Electric & Power Co. (VEPCO) northwest of Newport News, Virginia, through March 1977, when the units were canceled. VEPCO, which also cited construction delays caused by labor problems, intervention of environmentalists, and tighter NRC controls, said the company had invested $53 million in the projects and had contracts for another $93 million (1977 dollars).
1980: North Anna 4 (907 MW)—In the wake of Three Mile Island, VEPCO abandoned the project when it was only 4% complete. Abandonment of Unit 4 cost it $155 million (1980 dollars). The company had reportedly spent $485 million to build Unit 3 (abandoned two years later) and 4 at North Anna at the time. In 1982, when it scrapped Unit 3 because of a sharp increase in construction costs, VEPCO sought rate increases to cover an estimated $540 million write-off.
1980: Sterling (1.2 GW)—The New York Public Service Commission unequivocally allowed Rochester Gas & Electric Corp. full recovery of costs of the Sterling plant, which had just kicked off construction, estimated at about $129 million.
1980: Jamesport 1 and 2 (1.2 GW)—Long Island Lighting, which had also just entered construction, also recovered abandonment costs of about $120 million.
1980: Forked River 1 (1.1 GW)—Jersey Central Power & Light halted construction at this project in 1974 owing to financial cutbacks and protests, but it resumed construction only to abandon the project which was 5.6% complete owing to “financial difficulties” stemming from the Three Mile Island accidents, and also, uncertainty about whether the NRC would grant a license or put in place costly regulations.
1981: Callaway 2 (1.2 GW)—Construction had barely begun when Union Electric Co. halted the project, citing financial risks to investors posed by uncertainties afflicting the sector.
1981: Hope Creek 2 (1.1 GW)— Public Service Electric & Gas scrapped the unit when it was about 19% complete, but pressed on with Hope Creek 1. The $3.79 billion Hope Creek 1 was already plagued with soaring cost overruns, up from $600 million initially estimated for both units.
1981: Bailly 1 (645 MW)—The U.S. Supreme Court halted Northern Indiana Public Service’s $1.8 billion boiling water reactor (BWR) project owing to questions regarding pilings for the plant. Faced with longer delays for the project already seven years into construction, the company abandoned it.
1981: Shearon Harris 3 and 4 (900 MW each)—Costly safety upgrades and weakening power demand prompted Carolina Power & Light to abandon two of four planned Westinghouse 3 loop reactors under construction. The third 900-MW reactor, Shearon Harris 2, was abandoned in 1983.
1982: Washington Nuclear 4 and 5 (1.2 GW each)—Unit 4 was 25% complete and Unit 5 17% complete when Energy Northwest’s predecessor Washington Public Power Supply System halted construction at the two units after it failed to sell enough bonds to complete five reactors needed to meet projected power in the Pacific Northwest. Abandonment of the two units alone led to the company’s
defaulting on $2.2 billion in municipal bonds. Total costs for all five units planned at the site was estimated to exceed $24 billion.
1982: Phipps Bend 1 and 2 (1.2 GW each)—The Tennessee Valley Authority’s (TVA’s) board voted to stall construction of Unit 1, which was 29% complete, and Unit 2, 5% complete owing to slacker power demand as aluminum plants in the South closed down. Abandoning the project cost the TVA about $1.2 billion. The site in 2017 became home to a 1-MW solar farm.
1982: Hartsville B1 and B2 (1.2 GW each)—TVA also slowed work at Hartsville, B1 and B2, which were 17% and 7% complete, finally moving to scrap them. The decision cost $718 million.
1982: Cherokee 2 and 3 (1.3 GW)—Economic troubles also prompted Duke Power to abandon two of three reactors it was building in South Carolina. In 1983, Duke Power also scrapped the 1.3-GW Unit 1.
1984: Yellow Creek 1 and 2 (1.3 GW each)—About 30% of the two System 80 pressurized water reactors (PWRs) near Iuka, Mississippi, were complete when TVA moved to abandon them, citing lower power demand and dramatically higher construction costs. TVA estimated Yellow Creek would have cost $10 billion to build.
1984: Hartsville A1 and A2 (1.2 GW each)—On the same day it abandoned Yellow Creek, TVA also scrapped the two remaining Hartsville reactors near Nashville, Tennessee. Completing the Hartsville reactors would have cost $6.5 billion, it said.
1984: Zimmer 1 (810 MW)—When Cincinnati Gas & Electric Co. announced cancellation of the project to convert it to a coal plant, it was 97% complete and had so far cost $1.6 billion—up from a the $240 million originally estimated. The decision to scrap the project was rooted in estimates that completing the project would cost an additional $1.5 billion and two more years of construction to satisfy new requirements from the NRC. Just months before, the federal regulatory body repudiated its own probe into a pipe-weld problem at Zimmer, alleging “incompetence” after a whistleblower—29-year-old Thomas Applegate, a private investigator hired by the utility to check possible time-card padding at the plant—brought to light that the NRC’s regional office of inspection and enforcement had never inspected the defective welds in safety-related systems. While Applegate alleged a cover up by the NRC, the NRC rejected its own overall finding, deeming the investigation “unsatisfactory.” Ultimately, it halted construction on several parts of the plant after finding fault with project management and for safety violations. Fallout from the Zimmer project struck the nuclear industry widely—specifically for utilities looking to sell bonds to finance new nuclear—as no company had walked away from a costly nuclear project so close to completion.
1986: Midland 1 (818 MW) and 2 (492 MW)—After 17 years of sporadic construction, hearing and protests, and after project partner Dow Chemical pulled out of the project, Consumers Powers Co.’s board of directors voted to abandon the two reactors in Michigan—even though the project was 85% complete. At the time, the board cited changing safety rules, which it blamed for costly delays, and a refusal by some of Michigan’s major industrial consumers to agree to rate increases. Some critics also alleged project mismanagement. Consumers had spent $4 billion on the two reactors when it abandoned the project. In 1987, it began converting the plant to a natural gas–fired cogeneration facility, and in 2009, after years of high natural gas prices, the company sold its stake in the Midland Cogeneration Venture to New York–based Fortistar.
1988: Bellefonte 1 and 2 (1.2 GW each)—TVA’s board suspended the project when Unit 1 was 88% complete and Unit 2, 58% complete, after a combined $6 billion investment. TVA considered completing the project in 2010, but it ultimately sold the site in November 2016 to Nuclear Development LLC, a firm that has sought federal loan guarantees to complete the project.
1988: Seabrook 2 (1.2 GW)— Public Service Co. of New Hampshire canceled plans for the second of two reactors planned at Seabrook. Unit 2 was 25% complete and the utility had spent $800 million on the project. Unit 1 was completed in 1986.
1989: Shoreham (820 MW)—The Shoreham Long Island Lighting Co. (LILCO) fully completed this GE BWR in 1984, but considerable public opposition after Three Mile Island prompted Suffolk County officials in New York to determine that the county could not be safely evacuated in the event of a serious nuclear accident at the plant. Even though the company received federal permission for low power tests in 1985, the states declined a company-sponsored evacuation plan, effectively barring it from ever opening. In 1992, the Long Island Power Authority bough the plant from LILCO (for $1), and it was fully decommissioned in 1994. In 1965 when LILCO first announced plans for the plant, it said it could be completed by 1973 at a cost of $75 million; by the late 1970s, after LILCO decided to increase the size of Shoreham from 540 MW to 820 MW, costs soared to $2 billion; and by the 1990s, ratepayers were saddled with an enormous price tag of $6 billion for the project, which never produced commercial power.
1990: Grand Gulf 2 (1.3 GW)—Though planned in the 1970s when regional demand for power was rising sharply every year, in 1986, Middle South Utilities—Entergy’s predecessor— suspended construction of the project where work had begun in 1975 after state regulators denied the company’s request for rate increases to pay for the project. Citing a massive debt load and political imbroglio, and though the project was 66% complete and one unit at the plant had been placed in commercial operation in 1985, the company scrapped the project in 1990.
1995: Washington Nuclear 1 (1.3 GW) and Washington Nuclear 3 (1.2 GW)—Only one of five reactors planned by the Washington Public Power Supply System was completed (Columbia Generating Station, in 1984) but the remaining unfinished plants were mothballed against the possibility that construction would be resumed. In 1995, the projects were formally terminated. The company, renamed as Energy Northwest, asked the NRC to extend the construction permit for Unit 1 to 2001, but in 2005, it determined again that the construction permit was no longer needed.
2017: V.C. Summer 3 and 4 (each 1.1 GW)—SCANA Corp. and its partner Santee Cooper scrapped two AP1000 reactors that were 64% complete, claiming completion would cost $9.8 billion. The project, whose construction began in 2013, was dogged by costly delays stemming in part due to new safety rules implemented in the wake of the 2011 Fukushima disaster. In early 2017, delays at the project and two other AP1000s under construction in Georgia forced contractor Westinghouse to declare bankruptcy. The partners spent $9 billion on the project they estimated could cost up to $24 billion to complete. https://www.powermag.com/interactive-map-abandoned-nuclear-power-projects/#.Y2Sprx1KxHA.twitter
Carbon-14: Another underestimated danger from nuclear power reactors
https://beyondnuclear.org/carbon-14-another-underestimated-danger-from-nuclear-power-reactors/ 1 Nov 22,
There are a number of radionuclides released from nuclear energy facilities. This paper highlights carbon-14 for a number of reasons:
- Carbon-14 is radioactive and is released into air as methane and carbon dioxide.
- Before 2010, carbon-14 releases from nuclear reactors were virtually ignored in the United States. Today only estimates are required and only under certain restrictive circumstances.
- There is no good accounting of releases to date, so its impact on our health, our children’s health, and that of our environment remains unknown, yet environmental measurement is possible, but can be challenging under certain conditions.
- Carbon-14 has a half-life of over 5700 years and the element carbon is a basic building block for life on earth. Therefore, “it constitutes a potential health hazard, whose additional production by anthropogenic sources of today will result in an increased radiation exposure to many future generations.”
- Like tritium, it can collect in the tissues of the fetus at twice the concentration of the tissues in the mother, pointing to its disproportionate impact on the most vulnerable human lifecycle: the developing child.
1 This Month
22 June – Virtual Event –Climate Change: New Data, New Debate
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25 June- THE PUKE ON NUKES
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From NRC & DOE Deregulation to Techno-Fascist Billionaires Going Nuclear, Plus a Few Songs from Atomic Cabaret REGISTER
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Cuba Is Not a Failed State – It Is a Besieged State
PETITION: “Global Appeal to Endorse Palestinian Right of Return of Refugees”
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