ALL reactor-produced plutonium is usable in nuclear weapons.
Gordon Edwards 19 May 4
Whenever plutonium is created in a nuclear reactor, it is always mostly plutonium-239. The higher isotopes – plutonium-240, plutonium-241, plutonium-242 – are always present in diminishing order of importance.
A lighter “burnup” (a shorter residence time in the reactor) will reduce the opportunity for the heavier isotopes to be created (by repeated neutron captures), and so the relative percentage of plutonium-239 will be that much greater.
The important thing to know is that ALL reactor-produced plutonium is usable in nuclear weapons, including the even-numbered isotopes.
See www.ccnr.org/plute_for_bombs_GE_2024.pdf
Plutonium-238 is only a very small fraction of the plutonium in used reactor fuel. By itself, plutonium-238 is the only isotope of plutonium that probably cannot be used for bomb-making, simply because it generates too much spontaneous heat for the bomb to be stable (i.e. the concentniopnal explosive=s needed for detonation will likely melt.)
However the presence of very small amounts of plutonium-238, as in any plutonium extracted from used nuclear fuel, is not a serious problem..
Mini-Nukes, Big Bucks: The Interests Behind the Small Modular Reactor Push
Scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin is playing a major role in the push for SMRs.
Then there’s Terrestrial Energy
the Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC) no longer makes its membership public, the original coalition included such familiar names as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma (Alibaba), David Rubenstein (Carlyle Group), Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg. Many of those names (and others) can now be found on the “Board and Investors” page of Breakthrough Energy’s website.
Why Canada is now poised to pour billions of tax dollars into developing Small Modular Reactors as a “clean energy” climate solution
by Joyce Nelson, January 14, 2021
https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/mini-nukes-big-bucks-the-money-behind-small-modular-reactors/—
Back in 2018, the Watershed Sentinel ran an article warning that “unless Canadians speak out,” a huge amount of taxpayer dollars would be spent on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which author D. S. Geary called “risky, retro, uncompetitive, expensive, and completely unnecessary.” Now here we are in 2021 with the Trudeau government and four provinces (Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta) poised to pour billions of dollars into SMRs as a supposed “clean energy” solution to climate change.
It’s remarkable that only five years ago, the National Energy Board predicted: “No new nuclear units are anticipated to be built in any province” by 2040.
So what happened?
The answer involves looking at some of the key influencers at work behind the scenes, lobbying for government funding for SMRs.
The Carney factor
When the first three provinces jumped on the SMR bandwagon in 2019 at an estimated price tag of $27 billion, the Green Party called the plan “absurd” – especially noting that SMRs don’t even exist yet as viable technologies but only as designs on paper.
According to the BBC (March 9, 2020), some of the biggest names in the nuclear industry gave up on SMRs for various reasons: Babcock & Wilcox in 2017, Transatomic Power in 2018, and Westinghouse (after a decade of work on its project) in 2014.
But in 2018, the private equity arm of Canada’s Brookfield Asset Management Inc. announced that it was buying Westinghouse’s global nuclear business (Westinghouse Electric Co.) for $4.6 billion.
Two years later, in August 2020, Brookfield announced that Mark Carney, former Bank of England and Bank of Canada governor, would be joining the company as its vice-chair and head of ESG (environmental, social, and governance) and impact fund investing, while remaining as UN Special Envoy for Climate Action and Finance.
“We are not going to solve climate change without the private sector,” Carney told the press, calling the climate crisis “one of the greatest commercial opportunities of our time.” He considers Canada “an energy superpower,” with nuclear a key asset.
Carney is an informal advisor to PM Trudeau and to British PM Boris Johnson. In November, Johnson announced £525 million (CAD$909.6 million) for “large and small-scale nuclear plants.”
SNC-Lavalin
Scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin is playing a major role in the push for SMRs. In her mid-December 2020 newsletter, Elizabeth May, the Parliamentary Leader of the Green Party, focused on SNC-Lavalin, reminding readers that in 2015, then-PM Stephen Harper sold the commercial reactor division of Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd. (AECL) “to SNC-Lavalin for the sweetheart deal price of $15 million
May explained, “SNC-Lavalin formed a consortium called the Canadian National Energy Alliance (CNEA) to run some of the broken-apart bits of AECL. CNEA has been the big booster of what sounds like some sort of warm and cuddly version of nuclear energy – Small Modular Reactors. Do not be fooled. Not only do we not need new nuclear, not only does it have the same risks as previous nuclear reactors and creates long-lived nuclear wastes, it is more tied to the U.S. military-industrial complex than ever before. That’s because SNC-Lavalin’s partners in the CNEA are US companies Fluor and Jacobs,” who both have contracts with US Department of Energy nuclear-weapons facilities.”
But, states May, “Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan has been sucked into the latest nuclear propaganda – that ‘there is no pathway to Net Zero [carbon emissions] without nuclear’.”
Terrestrial Energy
Then there’s Terrestrial Energy, which in mid-October 2020 received a $20 million grant for SMR development from NRCan’s O’Regan and Navdeep Bains (Minister of Innovation, Science and Industry). The announcement prompted more than 30 Canadian NGOs to call SMRs “dirty, dangerous, and distracting” from real, available solutions to climate change.
The Connecticut-based company has a subsidiary in Oakville, Ontario. Its advisory board includes Stephen Harper; Michael Binder, the former president and CEO of the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission; and (as of October) Dr. Ian Duncan, the former UK Minister of Climate Change in the Dept. of Business Energy and Industrial Strategy (BEIS).
Perhaps more important, Terrestrial Energy’s advisory board includes Dr. Ernest Moniz, the former US Secretary of the Dept. of Energy (2013-2017) who provided more than $12 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear industry. Moniz has been a key advisor to the Biden-Harris transition team, which has come out in favour of SMRs, calling them “game-changing technologies” at “half the construction cost of today’s reactors.”
In 2015, while the COP 21 Paris Climate Agreement was being finalized, Moniz told reporters that SMRs could lead to “better financing terms” than traditional nuclear plants because they would change the scale of capital at risk. For years, banks and financial institutions have been reluctant to invest in money-losing nuclear projects, so now the goal is to get governments to invest, especially in SMRs.
That has been the agenda of a powerful lobby group that has been working closely with NRCan for several years.
The “billionaires’ nuclear club”
The 2015 Paris climate talks featured what cleantechnica.com called a “splashy press conference” by Bill Gates to announce the launch of the Breakthrough Energy Coalition (BEC) – a group of (originally) 28 high net-worth investors, aiming “to provide early-stage capital for technologies that offer promise in bringing affordable clean energy to billions.”
Though BEC no longer makes its membership public, the original coalition included such familiar names as Jeff Bezos (Amazon), Marc Benioff (Salesforce), Michael Bloomberg, Richard Branson, Jack Ma (Alibaba), David Rubenstein (Carlyle Group), Tom Steyer, George Soros, and Mark Zuckerberg. Many of those names (and others) can now be found on the “Board and Investors” page of Breakthrough Energy’s website.
Writing in Counterpunch (Dec. 4, 2015) shortly after BEC’s launch, Linda Pentz Gunter noted that many of those 28 BEC billionaires (collectively worth some $350 billion at the time) are pro-nuclear and Gates himself “is already squandering part of his wealth on Terra Power LLC, a nuclear design and engineering company seeking an elusive, expensive and futile so-called Generation IV traveling wave reactor” for SMRs. (In 2016, Terra Power, based in Bellevue, Washington, received a $40 million grant from Ernest Moniz’s Department of Energy.)
According to cleantechnica.com, the Breakthrough Energy Coalition “does have a particular focus on nuclear energy.” Think of BEC as the billionaires’ nuclear club.
By 2017, BEC was launching Breakthrough Energy Ventures (BEV), a $1 billion fund to provide start-up capital to clean-tech companies in several countries.
Going after the public purse
Bill Gates was apparently very busy during the 2015 Paris climate talks. He also went on stage during the talks to announce a collaboration among 24 countries and the EU on something called Mission Innovation – an attempt to “accelerate global clean energy innovation” and “increase government support” for the technologies. Mission Innovation’s key private sector partners include the Breakthrough Energy Coalition, the World Economic Forum, the International Energy Agency, and the World Bank.
An employee at Natural Resources Canada, Amanda Wilson, was appointed as one of the 12 international members of the Mission Innovation Steering Committee.
In December 2017, Bill Gates announced that the Breakthrough Energy Coalition was partnering with Mission Innovation members Canada, UK, France, Mexico, and the European Commission in a “public-private collaboration” to “double public investment in clean energy innovation.”
Canada’s Minister of Natural Resources at the time, Jim Carr, said the partnership with BEC “will greatly benefit the environment and the economy. Working side by side with innovators like Bill Gates can only serve to enhance our purpose and inspire others.”
Dr. M.V. Ramana, an expert on nuclear energy and a professor at the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at UBC, told me by email: “As long as Bill Gates is wasting his own money or that of other billionaires, it is not so much of an issue. The problem is that he is lobbying hard for government investment.”
Dr. Ramana explained that because SMRs only exist on paper, “the scale of investment needed to move these paper designs to a level of detail that would satisfy any reasonable nuclear safety regulator that the design is safe” would be in the billions of dollars. “I don’t see Gates and others being willing to invest anything of that scale. Instead, they invest a relatively small amount of money (compared to what they are worth financially) and then ask for government handouts for the vast majority of the investment that is needed.”
Kevin Kamps, Radioactive Waste Specialist at Beyond Nuclear, told me by email that the companies involved in SMRs “don’t care” if the technology is actually workable, “so long as they get paid more subsidies from the unsuspecting public. It’s not a question of it working, necessarily,” he noted.
Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility, says governments “are being suckers. Because if Wall Street and the banks will not finance this, why should it be the role of the government to engage in venture capitalism of this kind?”
“Roadmap” to a NICE future
By 2018, NRCan was pouring money into a 10-month, pan-Canadian “conversation” about SMRs that brought together some 180 individuals from First Nations and northern communities, provincial and territorial governments, industry, utilities, and “stakeholders.” The resulting November 2018 report, A Call to Action: A Canadian Roadmap for Small Modular Reactors, enthusiastically noted that “Canada’s nuclear industry is poised to be a leader in an emerging global market estimated at $150 billion a year by 2040.”
At the same time, Bill Gates announced the launch of Breakthrough Energy Europe, a collaboration with the European Commission (one of BEC’s five Mission Innovation partners) in the amount of 100 million euros for clean-tech innovation.
Gates’ PR tactic is effective: provide a bit of capital to create an SMR “bandwagon,” with governments fearing their economies would be left behind unless they massively fund such innovations.
NRCan’s SMR Roadmap was just in time for Canada’s hosting of the Clean Energy Ministerial/Mission Innovation summit in Vancouver in May 2019 to “accelerate progress toward a clean energy future.” Canada invested $30 million in Breakthrough Energy Solutions Canada to fund start-up companies.
A particular focus of the CEM/MI summit was a CEM initiative called “Nuclear Innovation: Clean Energy (NICE) Future,” with all participants receiving a book highlighting SMRs. As Tanya Glafanheim and M.V. Ramana warned in thetyee.ca (May 27, 2019) in advance of the summit, “Note to Ministers from 25 countries: Prepare to be dangerously greenwashed.”
Greenwash vs public backlash
While releasing the federal SMR Action Plan on December 18, O’Regan called it “the next great opportunity for Canada.”
Bizarrely, the Action Plan states that by developing SMRs, our governments would be “supporting reconciliation with Indigenous peoples” – but a Special Chiefs Assembly of the Assembly of First Nations passed a unanimous 2018 resolution demanding that “the Government of Canada cease funding and support” of SMRs. And in June 2019, the Anishinabek Chiefs-in-Assembly (representing 40 First Nations across Ontario) unanimously opposed “any effort to situate SMRs within our territory.”
Some 70 NGOs across Canada are opposed to SMRs, which are being pushed as a replacement for diesel in remote communities, for use in off-grid mining, tar-sands development, and heavy industry, and as exportable expertise in a global market.
On December 7, the Hill Times published an open letter to the Treasury Board of Canada from more than 100 women leaders across Canada, stating: “We urge you to say ‘no’ to the nuclear industry that is asking for billions of dollars in taxpayer funds to subsidize a dangerous, highly-polluting and expensive technology that we don’t need. Instead, put more money into renewables, energy efficiency and energy conservation.”
No new money for SMRs was announced in the Action Plan, but in her Fall Economic Statement, Finance Minister Chrystia Freeland touted SMRs and noted that “targeted action by the government to mobilize private capital will better position Canadian firms to bring their technologies to market.” That suggests the Canada Infrastructure Bank will use its $35 billion for such projects.
It will take a Herculean effort from the public to defeat this NICE Future, but along with the Assembly of First Nations, three political parties – the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Green Party – have now come out against SMRs.
Award-winning author Joyce Nelson’s latest book, Bypassing Dystopia, is published by Watershed Sentinel Books. She can be reached via www.joycenelson.ca.
NATO Spreads Nuclear Weapons, Energy, and Risk
By David Swanson, World BEYOND War, May 15, 2024, https://worldbeyondwar.org/nato-spreads-nuclear-weapons-energy-and-risk/
Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty declares that NATO members will assist another member if attacked by “taking action as it deems necessary, including the use of armed force.” But the UN Charter does not say anywhere that warmaking is authorized for whoever jumps in on the appropriate side.
The North Atlantic Treaty’s authors may have been aware that they were on dubious legal ground because they went on twice to claim otherwise, first adding the words “Any such armed attack and all measures taken as a result thereof shall immediately be reported to the Security Council. Such measures shall be terminated when the Security Council has taken the measures necessary to restore and maintain international peace and security.” But shouldn’t the United Nations be the one to decide when it has taken necessary measures and when it has not?
The North Atlantic Treaty adds a second bit of sham obsequiousness with the words “This Treaty does not affect, and shall not be interpreted as affecting in any way the rights and obligations under the Charter of the Parties which are members of the United Nations, or the primary responsibility of the Security Council for the maintenance of international peace and security.” So the treaty that created NATO seeks to obscure the fact that it is, indeed, authorizing warmaking outside of the United Nations — as has now played out in Yugoslavia, Afghanistan, and Libya.
While the UN Charter itself replaced the blanket ban on all warmaking that had existed in the Kellogg-Briand Pact with a porous ban plagued by loopholes imagined to apply far more than they actually do — in particular that of “defensive” war — it is NATO that creates, in violation of the UN Charter, the idea of numerous nations going to war together of their own initiative and by prior agreement to all join in any other member’s war. Because NATO has numerous members, as does also your typical street gang, there is a tendency to imagine NATO not as an illegal enterprise but rather as just the reverse, as a legitimizer and sanctioner of warmaking.
The Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty forbids transferring nuclear weapons to other nations. It contains no NATO exception. Yet NATO proliferates nuclear weapons, and this is widely imagined as law enforcement or crime prevention. The prime minister of Sweden said this week that NATO ought to be able to put nuclear weapons in Sweden as long as somebody has determined it to be “war time.” The Nonproliferation Treaty says otherwise, and the people who plan the insanity of nuclear war say “What the heck for? We’ve got them on long-range missiles and stealth airplanes and submarines?” The people of Sweden seem, at least in large part, to also want to say No Nukes — but when were people ever asked to play a role in “defending democracy”? The purpose of bringing nukes into Sweden, for those in the Swedish government who favor it, may in fact be purely a show of subservience to U.S. empire, driven by fear of its obliging partner in the arms race, the militarists in Russia.
Poland’s president says his country would be happy to have “NATO” nuclear weapons there, “war time” or not, and this proposal is reported in U.S. corporate media with no mention of any legal concerns and with the claim that it comes as a response to the Russian placement of nuclear weapons in Belarus. Last year I asked the Russian ambassador to the United States why putting nuclear weapons into Belarus wasn’t a blatant violation of the Nonproliferation Treaty, and he said, oh no, it was perfectly fine, because the United States does it all the time.
In fact, NATO itself owns and controls no nuclear weapons. Three NATO members own and control nuclear weapons. We cannot be certain how many weapons they have, since nuclear weapons are both justified with the dubious alchemy of “deterrence” and, contradictorily, cloaked in secrecy. The United States has an estimated 5,344 nuclear weapons, France an estimated 290, and Great Britain an estimated 240.
NATO calls itself a “nuclear alliance” and maintains a “Nuclear Planning Group” for all of its members — those with and those without nuclear weapons — to discuss the launching of the sort of war that puts all life on Earth at risk, and to coordinate rehearsals or “war games” practicing for the use of nuclear weapons in Europe. NATO partners Israel and Pakistan are estimated to possess 170 nuclear weapons each.
Five NATO members have U.S. nuclear weapons stored and controlled by the U.S. military within their borders: Belgium, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Turkey. These are estimated at 35 nuclear weapons at Aviano and Ghedi Air Bases in Italy, 20 at Incirlik in Turkey, and 15 each at Kleine Brogel in Belgium, Volkel Air Base in the Netherlands, and Büchel Air Base in Germany. The United States is reportedly also moving its own nuclear weapons into RAF Lakenheath in the UK, where it has stored them in the past. The people of each of these countries routinely protest the presence of nuclear weapons and have never been asked to vote on the matter. The notion that the nuclear weapons in a European country are still U.S. nuclear weapons and thus haven’t been proliferated is an odd fit with the general understanding of international treaties, which are conceived and written as if there were no such thing as empire.
With so-called U.S. or NATO nuclear weapons in potentially eight nations in Europe — and perhaps South Korea as well, at least on U.S. submarines docked there to please certain war-crazed South Koreans — there could soon be more nations in the world with “U.S.” nuclear weapons than nations with anybody else’s.
In recent years, the United States has been replacing its nuclear bombs stored in European nations with a newer model (the B61-12), while NATO members have been buying new U.S.-made airplanes with which to drop them. Turkey has had U.S. nukes stored in it even while U.S.-backed and Turkish-backed troops have fought each other in Syria, and even during a non-U.S.-backed coup attempt at the very base where the nuclear weapons are stored.
Seven other NATO members are said to support “nuclear missions” using their non-nuclear militaries: The Czech Republic, Denmark, Greece, Hungary, Norway, Poland, and Romania.
Poland and Romania also host new U.S./NATO missile bases that could launch missiles into Russia from very short distances, leaving the Russian government mere moments to decide whether the weapons are nuclear, or to decide whether to launch missiles of its own. The U.S. and NATO claim the bases are purely defensive, and various supporters of the bases have even claimed they had nothing to do with Russia—that they were either focused on Iran (then-U.S. President Barack Obama) or purely functioned as jobs programs for U.S. workers (former U.S. Ambassador Jack Matlock).
Meanwhile, the U.S. has been manufacturing what many of its officials describe as “more usable” or “tactical” nuclear weapons (merely several times the destructive power of what was used on Hiroshima). At the same time, the U.S. military is aware that, in its war game scenarios, the use of a single so-called “tactical” nuclear weapon tends to lead to all-out nuclear war. Or, as then-Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis told the House Armed Services Committee in 2018, “I don’t think there is any such thing as a ‘tactical nuclear weapon.’ Any nuclear weapon used any time is a strategic game-changer.”
The U.S.-made, disaster-prone F-35 is the first “stealth” airplane designed to carry nuclear bombs, meaning that it can in theory drop a nuclear bomb on a city with no warning from radar at all. The U.S./NATO have managed to sell F-35s to the U.S., UK, Italy, Netherlands, Norway, Denmark, Belgium, Poland, Israel, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and Singapore, with efforts under way to spread them to more nations, eventually perhaps creating a general need for them on the grounds of “interoperability.” The F-35 is currently being demonstrated on the people of Gaza.
The U.S. military has enough nuclear weapons in each of the following three forms to threaten all life on our planet: missiles on U.S. submarines in oceans around the world; bombs on U.S. airplanes circling the globe; and missiles in the ground in the United States. So why also keep nuclear bombs in European countries, where they would have to be loaded onto airplanes and flown (presumably to Russia) on missions either so “stealth” that they avoid all warning or so risky that they would have to be preceded by massive efforts to destroy air defenses?
If the decision to “go nuclear” were up to NATO, all members would have to reach a consensus on it. However, NATO has not always easily reached a consensus. For example, the U.S. attempted to bring NATO into its plans for a war on Iraq in 2003 but failed, in part because of huge public pressure against that war in NATO nations. Nuclear war is one of the least popular ideas ever, so the launch of a nuclear weapon might have to be “stealth” not only in relation to Russia but also in relation to the Western public. If the U.S. decides to use nuclear weapons, it almost certainly will not bother trying to use the ones it keeps stored in Europe. For that matter, were U.S. officials intent on reaching secret bunkers under hills some distance from Washington, D.C., they would need significant warning that a nuclear war had been secretly scheduled — a problematic concept for both the idea of deterrence and the idea of democracy.
The purpose of NATO in the North Atlantic Treaty is supposed to be defense against an attack on Europe, not deterrence. But in the event of responding to such an attack, whether the response were nuclear or not, the U.S. bombs stored in Europe would probably not be used. Threats in the name of deterrence have tended to fuel arms races and wars. But keeping U.S. nuclear weapons in Europe seems to fail even by the usual standards of deterrence theory, since their most likely use would be in an unlikely secret attack. Some U.S. officials believe those nuclear bombs serve no “military purpose” but only a “political” one, to reassure the host countries that the U.S. government cares about them.
The argument has also been made that, since Russia would like the nuclear bombs removed from Europe, the U.S. should either keep them there or demand something huge from Russia in exchange for removing them. Another argument is that this is part of making European nations share the burden, along the lines of making them spend more money on weapons. But if the burden serves no purpose, why should anyone share it? European government officials know the bombs are not useful as bombs. They know the bombs are provocative toward Russia. They know, in fact, that Russia is using the U.S. storage of nuclear bombs in European nations as an excuse to put Russian nuclear weapons into Belarus. So a more realistic understanding of the “political” purpose of U.S. nukes in Europe is probably a combination of the idea that the U.S. military will fight for any nation in which it has stored nukes, the perverse prestige that many imagine comes with possessing nukes (even if someone else actually possesses them on your land), and the general U.S. goals of keeping European governments intertwined with the U.S. military, supportive of U.S. military strategies, and willing to spend vast amounts on U.S.-made weapons.
Spreading along with nuclear weapons is nuclear energy — climate-disastrous, slow, expensive, super-dangerous nuclear energy, which creates permanent deadly waste, which poisons those around it, which no insurance company will insure, and the facilities for which constitute nuclear catastrophes waiting for accident or attack. Listen to Harvey Wasserman on what drugs you need to take in order to believe that nuclear energy is good for the climate. Not only are various nations pursuing nuclear energy in order to be closer to developing nuclear weapons, but nuclear NATO countries like the U.S. and UK are promoting this spread of nuclear technology at home and abroad because it is through nuclear energy that they maintain skills, training, and materials they want for nuclear weaponry.
There is a better way, and everyone who cares about avoiding nuclear apocalypse is invited to join in preparations for unwelcoming NATO to its 75th birthday party this July in Washington DC: https://nonatoyespeace.org.
David Swanson is an author, activist, journalist, and radio host. He is executive director of WorldBeyondWar.org and campaign coordinator for RootsAction.org. Swanson’s books include his latest: NATO What You Need to Know with Medea Benjamin. He blogs at DavidSwanson.org. He hosts Talk World Radio. He is a Nobel Peace Prize nominee, and U.S. Peace Prize recipient.
RADIATION. Euratom Treaty requires continuous monitoring radioactive discharges from nuclear facilities
Study on monitoring of radioactive discharges from nuclear facilities in
the EU. Chapter three of Title II of the Euratom Treaty, Article 35 states:
‘Each Member State shall establish the facilities necessary to carry out
continuous monitoring of the level of radioactivity in the air, water and
soil and to ensure compliance with the basic standards’.
This study focuses on the facilities that have the authorisation to discharge a
significant amount of radioactivity in the environment. With this
authorisation, the nuclear facilities are required to have technical
systems in place to carry out continuous or batch-wise monitoring of these
discharges.
During this study, 11 nuclear facilities in nine Member States
(covering nuclear power plants with different technologies, a spent fuel
reprocessing plant, medical isotope production facilities, and a nuclear
plant under dismantling) were visited for a detailed assessment of the
monitoring of liquid and gaseous radioactive discharge systems.
EU (accessed) 15th May 2024
“Nuclear comes last”
the tail-between-legs exit of the Nuclear Summit conferees declared in a headline: “Taxpayers are needed to foot the bill to achieve 2050 targets.”
Banks reject nuclear funding, stocks nosedive and the industry says it should, believe it or not, slow down
By Linda Pentz Gunter https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/31/nuclear-comes-last/
NuScale, the company whose small modular reactor project collapsed so spectacularly last November, is “burning cash at the rate of $185 million per year”. On March 22, the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, sold 59,768 of his shares in the company. This is the same CEO who declared NuScale’s SMR project, aptly named VOYGR, “a dead horse.” It’s clearly on a journey to nowhere.
Wells Fargo, with an eye on prudent investments, has declared, “We think investor enthusiasm for SMR is misguided”. As The Motley Fool reported, “NuScale’s VOYGR nuclear power product has ‘no secure customers’ and is ‘not cost competitive’ says the analyst.”
The splashy cheerleading Nuclear Energy Summit organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Brussels on March 21 proved to be just that. The participants arrived floating on the hot air of their misplaced enthusiasm but “left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions”.
European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros, told Summit attendees to their face that “The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high”. Representatives from the European and Latin American banking worlds said that “their lending priorities lean toward renewables and transmission grids” and that “nuclear comes last”.
Even the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission couldn’t quite bring itself to slam down its rubber stamp on Oklo’s chalet-in-the-woods micro reactor, the Aurora, which remains about as real as its namesake fairy tale princess.
In January 2022, the NRC denied Oklo’s license application outright because it “continues to contain significant information gaps in its description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components,” wrote the NRC.
Oklo reapplied nine months later but according to the NRC docket there is “no further action”.
Nevertheless, Oklo brags on its website that it “made history” simply by developing “the first advanced fission combined license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission”, which sums up the second nuclear “renaissance” perfectly: Make a drawing. Hit ‘send’.
Meanwhile, the US military canceled its contract for an Aurora reactor originally intended for the Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska.
And finally, an executive from the industry that has consistently delivered its latest new reactors decades late and billions over the original budget — in one case $20 billion over — suggested they should all just slow down. Said Ian Edwards, chief executive of Canadian reactor producer, Atkins Realis, “we all become too optimistic. We have this optimism bias towards being able to deliver faster. Really we should probably slow things down a little bit.”
But nuclear power is the answer to our current climate crisis! Ya think?
It’s tempting to ask whether things can get any worse for the nuclear power industry, but they almost certainly will. Unless we end up paying for it all. As the Bloomberg article that related the tail-between-legs exit of the Nuclear Summit conferees declared in a headline: “Taxpayers are needed to foot the bill to achieve 2050 targets.”
At the moment, a majority in the US Congress seem intent on making sure that is exactly what will happen. Because after all, why should multi-billionaire, Bill Gates, be forced to pay for his own nuclear toys when he can milk (read ‘bilk’) US taxpayers instead?
The US government has already pledged $2 billion of our money to Gates for his proliferation-friendly liquid sodium-cooled molten salt fast reactor produced by his company, TerraPower (more properly, TerrorPower). Gates can’t wait to export it the United Arab Emirates. Nuclear weapons anyone?
The strokey-white-beard-named ADVANCE Act, has been passed by the US House with 365 voting in favor and only 36 Democrats-with-a-conscience voting against it. By its own description, the ADVANCE ACT aims to “advance the benefits of nuclear energy by enabling efficient, timely, and predictable licensing, regulation, and deployment of nuclear energy technologies.” In other words, do away with burdensome — and expensive — safety regulations.
Indeed, New Mexico Democrat, Senator Martin Heinrich, told E&E News in January that “These regulatory timelines do not lend themselves to fighting the climate crisis.” Oh those wascally wegulations!
Meanwhile, Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia doesn’t want to seat any new NRC commissioners who might be “too focused on safety.”
The NRC’s motto is “protecting people and the environment,” a mandate it demonstrably endeavors to avoid already, but even some vestige of interest in safety is probably better than none. Not that safety oversight will be needed of course because, hey, SMRs are “walkaway safe” and “meltdown proof” and any new light water reactors are too “advanced” to be a safety risk.
This makes the insistence by SMR manufacturers that they must be covered by the Price-Anderson Act (PAA) all the more curious. Price-Anderson, due to expire in 2025, was culled out of the ADVANCE ACT, now moving out of Senate committee and working its way through the reconciliation process, and handled separately. The Senate adopted the House version of the PAA, giving it a 40-year extension to 2026, and expanded limited liability for a major accident to just over $16 billion per reactor.
President Biden duly signed it into law, marking another misstep on what is becoming an increasingly problematic presidency.
Ed Lyman, Nuclear Power Safety Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Nuclear Intelligence Weekly that “The nuclear industry’s push for a 40-year Price-Anderson Act extension is a sure sign that it doesn’t believe its own messaging about how safe the next generation of nuclear reactors is going to be.”
But in a joint statement, Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) declared that “The extension of the Price-Anderson Act in the minibus sends a clear message that we are committed to the advancement of this safe and reliable power source.”
The “clear message” this actually sends is that, in the event of a major nuclear accident, US taxpayers will be thrown under that minibus. The $16 billion coverage will be chicken feed and we will all be stuck with the bill. Let’s remember that the Chornobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters are each racking up costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and counting. We have been warned.
But a bi-partisan group of Representatives and Senators think it’s perfectly fine for all of us to pay for such an eventuality. Meanwhile, if you own a home and are forced to abandon it in the path of a nuclear accident, you cannot claim a dime off your homeowner’s insurance. It will just be a total loss. Think about that for a moment.
Are we outraged yet?
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear
Nuclear power and nuclear weapons – two sides of the same coin
In March 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak explicitly linked nuclear weapons production capability with civil nuclear power generation development. This is because nuclear reactors are used to create tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen – necessary for nuclear weapons.
The government has admitted its push for nuclear energy expansion is linked to its strategic military interests
by Peter Wilkinson, 12 May 2024, o https://eastangliabylines.co.uk/nuclear-power-and-nuclear-weapons-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/
The government’s apparent answer to climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to triple the amount of nuclear generated electricity in the belief that it generates ‘low carbon’ electricity. But a recent admission by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak suggests there is a strong military component to what looks on the surface to be a civil matter.
The UK review of the energy sector, prompted by the invasion of Ukraine, offered a golden opportunity to address the need to drive down demand for electricity and energy more generally. This could be achieved by retrofitting insulation to the housing stock and buildings, mandating solar panel use for all new homes, investing heavily in renewables, in emerging battery technology and in decentralisation. Instead, the government has focused on a massive expansion of nuclear-generated electricity.
The dual nuclear agenda
Now the reason has finally been openly admitted. Maintaining and improving the supply chain and the knowledge and skills base in the workforce for the UK’s £100bn Trident nuclear weapons renewal programme relies on the civil nuclear sector.
While this claim has been regularly made by anti-nuclear campaigners – and just as regularly denied by minister after minister – it is now openly acknowledged. The Roadmap states quite clearly that it is important to align civil and military nuclear ambitions across government, to strengthen the interconnections between civil and military industries’ research and development, and thereby reduce costs for both the weapons and power sectors.
In March 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak explicitly linked nuclear weapons production capability with civil nuclear power generation development. This is because nuclear reactors are used to create tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen – necessary for nuclear weapons.
The cat which was so carefully and fraudulently hidden for decades is finally out of the bag: ministers now have to acknowledge that the civil nuclear programme owes more to maintaining weapons of mass destruction – weapons that were outlawed by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which entered into force in January 2021 – than it has to do with salvation from the existential crisis that is climate change.
Debunking myths: the truth behind nuclear ambitions
Its brave new world aims for a nuclear sector generating upto 24 Gigawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s comparable to seven new 3.2 Gw capacity Hinkley Point Cs or Sizewell Cs or forty-eight Sizewell A-size reactors at around half a Megawatt output.
The locations for a proposed ‘mix’ of ‘gigawatt-sized reactors’ such as the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) planned for Sizewell C, and ‘small modular’ and ‘advanced modular’ reactors (SMRs and AMRs respectively) is the subject of the government’s ‘Nuclear Road Map’.
It is, necessarily, largely a work of fiction laced with eulogies to nuclear power and liberally interspersed with admissions of hope over expectations. The truth is that Hinkley Point C is now expected to cost an eye-watering £40+bn from its original £20bn, and Sizewell C has already cost the taxpayer £2.4bn in sweeteners to the private sector.
Commercial SMRs don’t yet exist, and they are not small, unless you consider that Sizewell A falls into that category. AMRs have remained a fantasy for decades and are likely to remain so. Mention them to a nuclear regulator, and you’ll probably get a raised eyebrow in response.
Nuclear revival: promises vs reality
The Sizewell project has yet to be granted multiple construction and operating permits and licences and no final investment decision has been made. Other issues which make Sizewell C a terrible idea include:
- A multi-billion hole existing in its finances
- There is no reliable and guaranteed supply of potable water – of which an average of 2.2 million litres a day are required in the country’s most water-scarce area
- It is situated in a flood zone
- It is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
- It sits on the fastest-eroding coastline in northern Europe
- An estimated 46 hectares of woodland have already been flattened
- The Environment Agency (EA) has authorised the dumping of 1,590 tonnes of dead and dying fish back into the North Sea each year as a consequence of the Sizewell C cooling water intake (not to mention the 100s of millions of fish, fish larvae and other marine biota)
- In addition, there will be an estimated 171 million sacrificial sand goby, none of which are acknowledged by the EA.
- Radiological discharges from Sizewell C to the sea and air have contested health impacts
EDF ploughs on
The Supreme Court is still considering the merits of a judicial review appeal against the original planning approval. None of these uncertainties and deficiencies have stopped EDF devastating the areas around the development with the sanction of the local planning authority.
The tragedy is that nuclear is now a redundant technology which takes too long to come to our climate-change rescue and is not fit to be in the front-line of defence against climate change. It does not represent a plan of great urgency to meet the accelerating existential threats of climate change.
It has a rapidly narrowing window in which to contribute its electricity to the job of reducing climate change risks. When compared to renewables and conservation measures, nuclear is slow, costly and unreliable in terms of the new technology embodied in the EPR design. The Flamanville project in France, using a Sizewell EPR-type reactor, is still offline, is twelve years late and will cost four times the original budget.
The government has been in thrall to nuclear power for a long time. Perhaps with the admission of its connection to its strategic miliary goals, we can now better understand why that is. But the knowledge only deepens and entrenches the divide between the hawks and the doves.
United States nuclear weapons, 2024
The current strategic nuclear war plan—OPLAN 8010–12—consists of “a family of plans” directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran.
Just like previous NPRs, the Biden administration’s NPR said the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners” and rejected policies of nuclear “no-first-use” or “sole purpose” (US Department of Defense 2022a, 9)
Bulletin, By Hans M. Kristensen, Matt Korda, Eliana Johns, Mackenzie Knight | May 7, 2024
The United States has embarked on a wide-ranging nuclear modernization program that will ultimately see every nuclear delivery system replaced with newer versions over the coming decades. In this issue of the Nuclear Notebook, we estimate that the United States maintains a stockpile of approximately 3,708 warheads—an unchanged estimate from the previous year. Of these, only about 1,770 warheads are deployed, while approximately 1,938 are held in reserve. Additionally, approximately 1,336 retired warheads are awaiting dismantlement, giving a total inventory of approximately 5,044 nuclear warheads. Of the approximately 1,770 warheads that are deployed, 400 are on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, roughly 970 are on submarine-launched ballistic missiles, 300 are at bomber bases in the United States, and approximately 100 tactical bombs are at European bases. The Nuclear Notebook is researched and written by the staff of the Federation of American Scientists’ Nuclear Information Project: director Hans M. Kristensen, senior research fellow Matt Korda, research associate Eliana Johns, and program associate Mackenzie Knight.
In May 2024, the US Department of Defense maintained an estimated stockpile of approximately 3,708 nuclear warheads for delivery by ballistic missiles and aircraft. Most of the warheads in the stockpile are not deployed but rather stored for potential upload onto missiles and aircraft as necessary. We estimate that approximately 1,770 warheads are currently deployed, of which roughly 1,370 strategic warheads are deployed on ballistic missiles and another 300 at strategic bomber bases in the United States. An additional 100 tactical bombs are deployed at air bases in Europe. The remaining warheads—approximately 1,938—are in storage as a so-called “hedge” against technical or geopolitical surprises. Several hundred of those warheads are scheduled to be retired before 2030 (see Table 1 on original).
While the majority of the United States’ warheads comprises the Department of Defense’s military stockpile, retired warheads under the custody of the Department of Energy awaiting dismantlement constitute a “significant fraction” of the United States’ total warhead inventory (US Department of Energy 2023b). Dismantlement operations include the disassembly of retired weapons into component parts that are then assigned for reuse, storage, surveillance, or for additional disassembly and subsequent disposition (US Department of Energy 2023b, 2–11). The pace of warhead dismantlement has slowed significantly in recent years: While the United States dismantled on average more than 1,000 warheads per year during the 1990s, in 2020 it dismantled only 184 warheads (US State Department 2021). According to the Department of Energy, “[d]ismantlement rates are affected by many factors, including appropriated program funding, logistics, legislation, policy, directives, weapon system complexity, and the availability of qualified personnel, equipment, and facilities” ……………………………………..
…………….. we estimate that the United States possesses approximately 1,336 retired—but still intact—warheads awaiting dismantlement, giving a total estimated US inventory of approximately 5,044 warheads.
Between 2010 and 2018, the US government publicly disclosed the size of the nuclear weapons stockpile; however, in 2019 and 2020, the Trump administration rejected requests from the Federation of American Scientists to declassify the latest stockpile numbers (Aftergood 2019; Kristensen 2019a, 2020b). In 2021, the Biden administration restored the United States’ previous transparency levels by declassifying both numbers for the entire history of the US nuclear arsenal until September 2020—including the missing years of the Trump administration. . This effort revealed that the United States’ nuclear stockpile consisted of 3,750 warheads in September 2020—only 72 warheads fewer than the last number made available in September 2017 before the Trump administration reduced the US government’s transparency efforts (US State Department 2021). We estimate that the stockpile will continue to decline over the next decade as modernization programs consolidate the remaining warheads.
Following the Biden administration’s initial declassification in 2021, it has since denied successive annual requests from the Federation of American Scientists to disclose the stockpile numbers for 2021, 2022, or 2023 (Kristensen 2023d). A decision to no longer declassify these numbers not only contradicts the Biden administration’s own recent practices, but also represents a return to Trump-era levels of nuclear opacity. Such increased nuclear secrecy undermines US calls for Russia and China to increase transparency of their nuclear forces.
The US nuclear weapons are thought to be stored at an estimated 24 geographical locations in 11 US states and five European countries (Kristensen and Korda 2019, 124). The number of locations will increase over the next decade as nuclear storage capacity is added to three bomber bases. The location with the most nuclear weapons by far is the large Kirtland Underground Munitions and Maintenance Storage Complex south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Most of the weapons in this location are retired weapons awaiting dismantlement at the Pantex Plant in Texas. The state with the second-largest inventory is Washington, which is home to the Strategic Weapons Facility Pacific and the ballistic missile submarines at Naval Submarine Base Kitsap. The submarines operating from this base carry more deployed nuclear weapons than any other base in the United States.
Implementing the New START treaty
The United States appears to be in compliance with the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (New START) limits. Although Russia “suspended” its participation in New START in February 2023, the United States publicly declared in May 2023 that it had 1,419 warheads attributed to 662 deployed ballistic missiles and heavy bombers as of March 1st, 2023 (US State Department 2023a). The United States initially said that it voluntarily released the numbers “[i]n the interest of transparency and the US commitment to responsible nuclear conduct.” However, the United States did not continue this practice beyond that initial exchange and has not published any aggregate numbers since May 2023 (US State Department 2023a)
The United States contends that Russia’s “suspension” of New START implementation is “legally invalid” (US State Department 2023c). In response, the United States adopted four countermeasures in 2023 that it claimed were fully consistent with international law 1) no longer providing biannual data updates to Russia; 2) withholding from Russia notifications regarding treaty-accountable items (i.e. missiles and launchers) required under the treaty; 3) refraining from facilitating inspection activities on US territory; and 4) not providing Russia with telemetric information on US ICBM and SLBM launches (US State Department 2023c).
The New START warhead numbers reported by the US State Department differ from the estimates presented in this Nuclear Notebook, though there are reasons for this. …………………..
Since the treaty entered into force in February 2011, the biannual aggregate data show the United States has cut its arsenal by a total of 324 strategic launchers, reduced deployed launchers by 220 and the warheads attributed to them by 381 (US State Department 2011). The warhead reduction is modest, only equivalent to about 10 percent of the 3,708 warheads remaining in the US stockpile. ………….
As of March 2023, the United States had 38 launchers and 131 warheads less than the treaty limit for deployed strategic weapons but had 119 deployed launchers more than Russia—a significant gap that is just under the size of an entire US Air Force intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) wing. So far Russia has not sought to reduce this gap by deploying more strategic launchers but instead has increased the portion of its missiles that can carry multiple warheads.
The New START treaty has proven useful so far in keeping a lid on both countries’ deployed strategic forces. But it expires in February 2026 and if it is not followed by a new agreement, both the United States and Russia could potentially increase their deployed nuclear arsenals by uploading several hundred of stored reserve warheads onto their launchers.
Nuclear Posture Reviews and nuclear modernization programs
The Biden administration’s 2022 Nuclear Posture Review (NPR) was broadly consistent with the Trump administration’s 2018 NPR…………………………………
Just like previous NPRs, the Biden administration’s NPR said the United States reserved the right to use nuclear weapons under “extreme circumstances to defend the vital interests of the United States or its allies and partners” and rejected policies of nuclear “no-first-use” or “sole purpose” (US Department of Defense 2022a, 9)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
In 2023, multiple governmental advisory commissions published reports intended to influence US nuclear posture. The Congressionally-mandated report on “America’s Strategic Posture,” published in October 2023, included a broad range of recommendations for the United States to prepare to increase the number of deployed warheads, as well as to scale up its production capacity of bombers, air-launched cruise missiles, ballistic missile submarines, non-strategic nuclear forces, and warheads (US Strategic Posture Commission 2023). It also called for the United States to deploy multiple warheads on land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs) and consider adding road-mobile ICBMs to its arsenal…………………………………. the Strategic Posture Commission report’s status as a bipartisan document has been particularly useful for nuclear advocates to push for additional nuclear weapons (Heritage 2023; Hudson Institute 2023; Thropp 2023).
While additional modernization programs are being discussed, the National Nuclear Security Administration, or NNSA, delivered in 2023 more than 200 modernized nuclear weapons (B61–12 bombs and W88 Alt 370 warheads) to the Department of Defense (US Department of Energy 2024).
Nuclear planning and nuclear exercises
In addition to the Nuclear Posture Review, the nuclear arsenal and the role it plays is shaped by plans and exercises that create the strike plans and practice how to carry them out.
The current strategic nuclear war plan—OPLAN 8010–12—consists of “a family of plans” directed against four identified adversaries: Russia, China, North Korea, and Iran. Known as “Strategic Deterrence and Force Employment,” OPLAN 8010–12 first entered into effect in July 2012 in response to operational order Global Citadel. ………………………………………………………………….
…………………………………. changes are evident in the types of increasingly provocative bomber operations over Europe, in some cases very close to the Russian border (Kristensen 2022a). In October 2023, for example, a B-52 bomber from Barksdale AFB in Louisiana participated in NATO’s annual nuclear exercise Steadfast Noon, and in March 2023 a nuclear-capable B-52 cut south only a few kilometers from the Russian sea border and then flew south near Kaliningrad (Kristensen 2023a; NATO 2023).
…………………US strategy has changed in response to deteriorating East-West relations and the new “great power competition” and “strategic competition” strategy promoted by the Trump and Biden administrations, respectively. They also illustrate a growing integration of nuclear and conventional capabilities, as reflected in the new strategic war plan. B-52 Bomber Task Force deployments typically include a mix of nuclear-capable aircraft and aircraft that have been converted to conventional-only missions. With Sweden joining NATO, US strategic bombers now routinely operate over Swedish territory: In August 2022, for example, two B-52s—one version that is nuclear-capable and one that is de-nuclearized—overflew Sweden, the first overflight since it applied for NATO membership in May 2022 (Kristensen 2022c)…………………………………………………………………………………………….
Land-based ballistic missiles
The US Air Force (USAF) operates 400 silo-based Minuteman III ICBMs and keeps “warm” another 50 silos to load stored missiles if necessary, for a total of 450 silos. Land-based missile silos are divided into three wings: the 90th Missile Wing at F. E. Warren Air Force Base in Colorado, Nebraska, and Wyoming; the 91st Missile Wing at Minot Air Force Base in North Dakota; and the 341st Missile Wing at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Montana. Each wing has three squadrons, each with 50 Minuteman III silos collectively controlled by five launch control centers. We estimate there are up to 800 warheads assigned to the ICBM force, of which about half are deployed (see Table 1, on original).
The 400 deployed Minuteman IIIs carry one warhead each, either a 300-kiloton W87/Mk21 or a 335-kiloton W78/Mk12A. ICBMs equipped with the W78/Mk12A, however, could technically be uploaded to carry two or three independently targetable warheads each, for a total of 800 warheads available for the ICBM force……………………………………………………………………………………….
Part of the ongoing ICBM modernization program involves upgrades to the Mk21 reentry vehicles’ arming, fuzing, and firing system at a total cost of nearly $1 billion (US Department of Defense 2023c, 32). The publicly stated purpose of this refurbishment is to extend the vehicles’ service lives, but the effort appears to also involve adding a “burst height compensation” to enhance the targeting effectiveness of the warheads (Postol 2014)………………………………………………………………………………. As part of the Mk21A program, Lockheed Martin was awarded a sole source contract in October 2023 amounting to just under $1 billion for the engineering and manufacturing of the new reentry vehicle (US Department of Defense 2023b). These modernization efforts complement a similar fuze upgrade underway to the Navy’s W76–1/Mk4A warhead.
………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….. The Air Force’s FY24 budget for ICBM Reentry Vehicles Research Development, Test & Evaluation Programs increased significantly from the previous President’s Budget……………………………………………………………………………..
…………………………….Non-governmental experts, including those conducting Department of Defense-sponsored research, have questioned the Pentagon’s procurement process and lack of transparency regarding its decision to pursue the Sentinel option over other potential deployment and basing options (Dalton et al. 2022, 4). Moreover, it is unclear why an enhancement of ICBM capabilities would be necessary for the United States. For instance, any such enhancements would not mitigate the inherent challenges associated with launch-on-warning, risky territorial overflights, or silo vulnerabilities to environmental catastrophes or conventional counterforce strikes (Korda 2021). Additionally, even if adversarial missile defenses improved significantly, the ability to evade missile defenses lies with the payload—not the missile itself. ………………………………………..
……………………………………………….The development of the Sentinel has also been marked by a series of controversial industry contracts, starting with the awarding of a $13.3 billion sole-source contract to Northrop Grumman in 2020 to complete the engineering and manufacturing development stage
…………………………………………..in early 2024, the Air Force notified Congress of a two-year delay in the schedule and an estimated 37-percent increase from the current cost target to at least $125 billion (Tirpak 2024). These amounts do not include the costs for the new Sentinel warhead—the W87–1—which is projected to cost up to $14.8 billion, or the plutonium pit production that the US Air Force and US Strategic Command say is needed to build the warheads (Government Accountability Office 2020).
…………………………………………The schedule and extreme cost overruns for the Sentinel program incurred a critical breach of the Nunn-McCurdy Act, which requires the Secretary of Defense to conduct a root-cause analysis and renewed cost assessment before providing a certification to Congress that verifies the necessity and viability of the program no later than 60 days after a Selected Acquisition
…………………………………………………..Andrew Hunter, Assistant Secretary of the Air Force for Acquisition, Technology, and Logistics clarified that while the cost of the missile itself has increased, challenges with supporting infrastructure is the significant driver of schedule overrun, which also further impacts the overall cost (Tirpak 2024). In addition to an entirely new missile, the Sentinel program includes launch facility replacement and modifications (since the Sentinel may require a larger silo), new missile alert facilities, and new command and control facilities and systems—not to mention new training and curriculum for USAF personnel. Many of these delays are results of staffing shortfalls, clearance delays, IT infrastructure challenges, and trouble with supply chains on the part of Northrop Grumman (Government Accountability Office 2023a, 88)………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Nuclear-powered ballistic missile submarines
The US Navy operates a fleet of 14 Ohio-class ballistic missile submarines (SSBNs), of which eight operate in the Pacific from their base near Bangor, Washington, and six operate in the Atlantic from their base at Kings Bay, Georgia……………………………………………………………………………………………..
Each submarine can carry up to 20 Trident II D5 sea-launched ballistic missiles
……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………Design of the next generation of ballistic missile submarines, known as the Columbia-class, is well underway.
………………………………………..the Navy’s fiscal 2024 budget submission estimated the procurement cost of the first Columbia-class SSBN—the USS District of Columbia (SSBN-826)—at approximately $15.2 billion, followed by $9.3 billion for the second boat (Congressional Research Service 2024, 9). A $5.1 billion development contract was awarded to General Dynamics Electric Boat in September 2017, and construction of the first boat began on October 1, 2020—the first day of FY 2021………………………………………………………..
…………………According to a June 2023 report by the Government Accountability Office, “the program remains behind on producing design products—in particular, work instructions that detail how to build the submarine—because of ongoing challenges using a software-based design tool. These, in turn, contributed to delays in construction of the lead submarine” (Government Accountability Office 2023a, 160). The Navy is working to mitigate additional delays, but these constraints mean that the program is at significant risk of cost overgrowth and is very likely to suffer further setbacks………………………………………………………………………………..
Strategic bombers
The US Air Force currently operates a fleet of 20 B-2A bombers (all of which are nuclear-capable) and 76 B-52 H bombers (46 of which are nuclear-capable)……………………………………………………………Each B-2 can carry up to 16 nuclear bombs (the B61–7, B61–11, B61–12, and B83–1 gravity bombs)…………..An estimated 788 nuclear weapons, including approximately 500 air-launched cruise missiles, are assigned to the bombers, but only about 300 weapons are thought to be deployed at bomber bases (see Table 1). The estimated remaining 488 bomber weapons are thought to be in central storage at the large Kirtland Underground Munitions Maintenance and Storage Complex outside Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The United States is modernizing its nuclear bomber force by upgrading nuclear command-and-control capabilities on existing bombers, developing enhanced nuclear weapons (the B61–12, B61–13, and the new AGM-181 Long-Range Standoff Weapon or LRSO), and designing a new heavy bomber (the B-21 Raider).
Upgrades to the nuclear command-and-control systems that the bombers use to plan and conduct nuclear strikes include the Global Aircrew Strategic Network Terminal (ASNT)…………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
The United States was initially expected to produce approximately 480 B61–12 bombs, but in 2023 it announced that a small number of them instead will be produced as the B61–13, a gravity bomb with a much larger yield (US Department of Defense 2023e………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
The Air Force is also developing a new nuclear air-launched cruise missile known as the AGM-181 LRSO……………………………………………………. The LRSO will arm both the 46 nuclear-capable B-52Hs and the new B-21, the first time a US stealth bomber will carry a nuclear cruise missile. A $250 million contract was awarded to Boeing in March 2019
…………………………………………….It is expected that the Air Force will procure at least 100 (possibly as many as 145) of the B-21, with the latest service costs estimated at approximately $203 billion …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Nonstrategic nuclear weapons
The United States has only one type of nonstrategic nuclear weapon in its stockpile: the B61 gravity bomb. But it exists in several versions: ……………………………………………………. About 100 of these (versions −3 and − 4) are thought to be deployed at six bases in five European countries: Aviano and Ghedi in Italy; Büchel in Germany; Incirlik in Turkey; Kleine Brogel in Belgium; and Volkel in the Netherlands…………………………………………………………………
The Belgian, Dutch, German, and Italian air forces are currently assigned an active nuclear strike role with US nuclear weapons. …………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
The United States withdrew nuclear weapons from the United Kingdom around 2007 after storing them at Royal Air Force (RAF) Lakenheath for several decades (Kristensen 2008). But increasing evidence over the past two to three years suggests that the United States may be returning its nuclear mission to UK soil (Korda and Kristensen 2023) (see Figure 3 on original)
……………………………………………………………In addition to the modernization of weapons, aircraft, and bases, NATO also appears to be increasing the profile of the dual-capable aircraft posture. NATO is now publicly announcing its annual Steadfast Noon tactical nuclear weapons exercise. For example, NATO described in 2023 that the exercise involved the participation of 13 countries and 60 aircraft including fighter jets and US B-52 bombers (NATO 2023)………………………………………………………………………………………………
This research was carried out with generous contributions from the New-Land Foundation, the Prospect Hill Foundation, Longview Philanthropy, Ploughshares Fund, and individual donors.
References…………………………………………….. https://thebulletin.org/premium/2024-05/united-states-nuclear-weapons-2024/
Canada’s federal budget -calls nuclear energy “clean” – the height of absurdity!
Nuclear energy never will be ‘clean,’ write Jones and Edwards.
THE HILL TIMES | MONDAY, MAY 6, 2024
The 2024 federal budget contains many references to nuclear energy as
a “clean” source of electricity. In our view, referring to
nuclear electricity as “clean” is the height of absurdity.
The nuclear fuel chain begins with the mining of uranium from rock
underground where, without human intervention, it would remain safely
locked away from the biosphere. Uranium has many natural radioactive
byproducts, including radium, radon, and polonium-210 that are
discarded in voluminous sandlike “tailings” at uranium mine sites.
These materials are responsible for countless thousands of deaths in
North America alone. Canada has accumulated 220 million tonnes of
these indestructible radioactive mining wastes, easily dispersed by
wind and rain over the next 100,000 years.
Inside a nuclear reactor, uranium atoms are split to produce energy.
The atomic fragments are hundreds of newly created radioactive
poisons, most of them never found in nature before 1940. They make
used fuel millions of times more radioactive than the original
uranium. One used fuel bundle, freshly discharged, will deliver a
lethal dose of radiation in seconds to any unshielded human nearby.
There are hundreds of thousands of tonnes of waste irradiated fuel
bundles worldwide and the quantity grows larger each year. There is no
operating repository anywhere in the world for such wastes, but there
are several failed repositories.
Radioactive waste has the “reverse midas touch” turning everything
it touches into more radioactive waste. This includes the nuclear
vessel in which the waste is created, and everything that comes in
contact with the cooling water needed to prevent the waste from
melting down. Containers for radioactive waste become radioactive
waste themselves. All radioactive waste must be kept out of our food,
air and drinking water for countless millennia.
Radioactive atoms are unstable. They disintegrate, throwing off a kind
of subatomic shrapnel called “atomic radiation.” Emissions from
disintegrating atoms damage living cells. Chronic radiation exposure
can cause miscarriages, birth defects, and a host of degenerative
diseases including cancers of all kinds. Genetic damage to eggs or
sperm can transmit defective genes to successive generations.
Plutonium is one of the hundreds of radioactive byproducts created in
used nuclear fuel. It is of special concern because it is the primary
nuclear explosive in nuclear arsenals worldwide. “Reprocessing” of
nuclear fuel waste to extract plutonium is sometimes called
“recycling” but this is disinformation; the resulting waste is
more difficult to manage than the original fuel waste. Many serious
accidents have occurred around the world at reprocessing plants.
Places where extensive reprocessing has occurred are among the most
radioactively contaminated sites on Earth. Plutonium can be used as a
nuclear fuel, but extracting it is a nuclear weapons proliferation
risk.
Managing radioactive waste is difficult and very expensive. The
projected multi-billion-dollar cleanup cost for the legacy waste at
Chalk River, Ont., is the federal government’s biggest environmental
liability by far, exceeding the sum total of all other federal
environmental liabilities across Canada.
The multinational consortium running Canada’s federal nuclear
laboratories is receiving close to $1.5-billion annually, much of it
for managing legacy radioactive wastes. The consortium’s plans
include piling up one million tonnes of waste in a giant mound beside
the Ottawa River and entombing old reactors in concrete and grout
beside major drinking water sources. Many are of the view that the
plans fail to meet the fundamental requirement to isolate waste from
the biosphere and have been met with widespread concern, opposition
and legal challenges. Nuclear energy is not now, never has been, and
never will be “clean.”
The sooner our elected officials come to terms with this fact, the
better for Canada and Canadians. Honesty is the best policy.
Five Things the “Nuclear Bros” Don’t Want You to Know About Small Modular Reactors
1. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors.
2. SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than large light-water reactors.
3. SMRs will not reduce the problem of what to do with radioactive waste.
4. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power for facilities, such as data centers, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production.
5. SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
Ed Lyman, April 30, 2024 https://blog.ucsusa.org/edwin-lyman/five-things-the-nuclear-bros-dont-want-you-to-know-about-small-modular-reactors/
Even casual followers of energy and climate issues have probably heard about the alleged wonders of small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs). This is due in no small part to the “nuclear bros”: an active and seemingly tireless group of nuclear power advocates who dominate social media discussions on energy by promoting SMRs and other “advanced” nuclear technologies as the only real solution for the climate crisis. But as I showed in my 2013 and 2021 reports, the hype surrounding SMRs is way overblown, and my conclusions remain valid today.
Unfortunately, much of this SMR happy talk is rooted in misinformation, which always brings me back to the same question: If the nuclear bros have such a great SMR story to tell, why do they have to exaggerate so much?
What are SMRs?
SMRs are nuclear reactors that are “small” (defined as 300 megawatts of electrical power or less), can be largely assembled in a centralized facility, and would be installed in a modular fashion at power generation sites. Some proposed SMRs are so tiny (20 megawatts or less) that they are called “micro” reactors. SMRs are distinct from today’s conventional nuclear plants, which are typically around 1,000 megawatts and were largely custom-built. Some SMR designs, such as NuScale, are modified versions of operating water-cooled reactors, while others are radically different designs that use coolants other than water, such as liquid sodium, helium gas, or even molten salts.
To date, however, theoretical interest in SMRs has not translated into many actual reactor orders. The only SMR currently under construction is in China. And in the United States, only one company—TerraPower, founded by Microsoft’s Bill Gates—has applied to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) for a permit to build a power reactor (but at 345 megawatts, it technically isn’t even an SMR).
The nuclear industry has pinned its hopes on SMRs primarily because some recent large reactor projects, including Vogtle units 3 and 4 in the state of Georgia, have taken far longer to build and cost far more than originally projected. The failure of these projects to come in on time and under budget undermines arguments that modern nuclear power plants can overcome the problems that have plagued the nuclear industry in the past.
Developers in the industry and the US Department of Energy say that SMRs can be less costly and quicker to build than large reactors and that their modular nature makes it easier to balance power supply and demand. They also argue that reactors in a variety of sizes would be useful for a range of applications beyond grid-scale electrical power, including providing process heat to industrial plants and power to data centers, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging stations.
Here are five facts about SMRs that the nuclear industry and the “nuclear bros” who push its message don’t want you, the public, to know.
Continue readingWill this whistleblower be heard by anyone?
Date: June 28, 2023, Author: dunrenard, https://dunrenard.wordpress.com/2023/06/28/will-this-whistleblower-be-heard-by-anyone/
RELEASES INTERNAL IAEA DOCUMENT PROVING COLLUSION WITH JAPAN OVER FUKUSHIMA RADIOACTIVE WATER RELEASE.
A whistleblower-released document created by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on June 1, 2023, shows that “the fix is in” – IAEA is not only is planning to approve the release of 1.3 million tons of radioactive water from Fukushima but to manipulate their communication to the world in support Japan’s position despite facts showing otherwise, eliminating anything that might “be viewed negatively by the public.”
This is outrageous and dangerous for the entire world. Japan, with the IAEA’s support – NOT protection – is planning to commit its own nuclear assault on the world through this radioactive water release.
We’ve suspected and accused the IAEA and Japan of working together in the past, and now we have the proof
Please, do what you can to get this word out – not just to our echo chamber, but to media.
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Few days ago a well-intentioned whistleblower has sent me an internal document of the IAEA.
In this IAEA’s internal document the IAEA is seen coaching TEPCO about what to tell and what not tell to the public regarding the « treated » water to be soon discharged into the Pacific Ocean.
One thing that can be drawn from that document’s content is that the IAEA and TEPCO have no intention to be fully transparent about the radioactive contamination of the said « treated water », only the one to cushion insidiously the real facts to the public eyes.
« Treated water » is quite an euphemism as it is public knowledge that in 12 years the TEPCO’s ALPs filtering system has never been capable to fully remove all the 64 radionuclides present in that radioactive water. Not even to mention the radioactive mud which has accumulated at the bottom of all those water tanks. For them to mention in their press releases only the tritium as being present in that “treated” water is their habitual lying by omission.
According to the news, Rafael Mariano Grossi, the director general of IAEA, will visit Japan on 4 July. The IAEA’s final report will be published soon and the nuclear water will be discharged into the ocean after the report.
This internal document is quite certainly making us question their future transparency, and their intention to protect truly the marine life and the health of the people. Cheap expediency, lying by omission when not just plain lying, are part of their usual modus operandi.
This whistleblower, who wishes to remain anonymous for his own protection, took a real risk leaking this document out, ascting out of his conscience as he knows from the inside the dangers of such radioactive marine pollution. Will it be enough to wake up the consciences and stop such dumping of radioactive polllution into our ocean?
Time is crucial in this matter, as for sure soon after the visit of the director general of the AIEA TEPCO will start discharging that water, and then it will be impossible to have them to stop.
I am just a blogger blogging on this little blog, I am sending this message in a bottle out to the world in the hope that someone, some journalists will take up this information and use it to influence the various governments to pressure Japan to not use our Pacific ocean as its personal trash backyard. The Asian countries neighboring Japan and the Pacific nations should protect their population from such marine radioactive pollution.
With all my prayerful wishes, asking for your help. Please share this article widely so that document will be of some use.
Many thanks to the anonymous whistleblower who did his part, now it is our turn to do ours.
72 Minutes Until the End of the World?
Carl Sagan’s conclusion is that the enemy is not a foreign nation, it’s the weapons themselves.
The generals that I refer to in that section on the SIOP [Strategic Integrated Operational Plan, the 1960s-era plan for general nuclear war] believed they could fight and win nuclear war, even if it meant killing 600 million people across the globe. That is insane. No one would argue that now.
A new book lays out the frighteningly fast path to nuclear Armageddon.
By KATHY GILSINAN, 04/29/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/29/the-frighteningly-fast-path-to-nuclear-armageddon-00154591
Nuclear war would be bad. Everyone knows this. Most people would probably rather not think through the specifics. But Annie Jacobsen, an author of seven books on sensitive national security topics, wants you to know exactly how bad it would be. Her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, sketches out a global nuclear war with by-the-minute precision for all of the 72 minutes between the first missile launch and the end of the world. It’s already a bestseller.
It goes without saying that the scenario is fictional, but it is a journalistic work in that the scenario is constructed from dozens of interviews and documentation, some of it newly declassified, as a factual grounding to describe what could happen.
That’s this, in Jacobsen’s telling: A North Korean leader launches an intercontinental ballistic missile at the Pentagon, and then a submarine-launched ballistic missile at a nuclear reactor in California, for reasons beyond the scope of the book except to illustrate what one “mad king” with nuclear weapons could do. A harried president has a mere six minutes to decide on a response, while also being evacuated from the White House and pressured by the military to launch America’s own ICBMs at all 82 North Korean targets relevant to the nation’s nuclear and military forces and leadership. These missiles must fly over Russia, whose leaders spot them, assume their country is under attack (the respective presidents can’t get one another on the phone), and send a salvo back in the other direction, and so on until 72 minutes later three nuclear-armed states have managed to kill billions of people, with the remainder left starving on a poisoned Earth where the sun no longer shines and food no longer grows.
Some scholars, particularly among those who favor large nuclear arsenals as the best deterrent to being attacked with such weapons ourselves, have criticized some of Jacobsen’s assumptions. The U.S. wouldn’t have to court Russian miscalculation by overflying Russia with ICBMs when it has submarine-launched ballistic missiles in the Pacific. Public sources indicate that the president’s six-minute response window is still about in line with what Ronald Reagan noted with dismay in his memoirs. But that assumes he’s boxed into a “launch on warning” policy, something Jacobsen’s sources characterize as a constraint to move before enemy missiles actually strike, but which government policy documents insist is merely an option and not a mandate. (The president could also just decide, contra the deterrence touchstone of “mutual assured destruction,” not to nuke anybody at all in response.)
The book arrives at a time when the countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, the U.S. and Russia, are violently at odds in Ukraine, a Russian state TV host is calling a Russia/NATO conflict “inevitable,” and the Council on Foreign Relations is gaming out scenarios in case the Russians use tactical nukes in Ukraine. Oh, and Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever before. It’s a fair time to ask Jacobsen’s central question — what if deterrence fails? Even if we’d rather not think about it.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kathy Gilsinan: The book starts with two missiles out of North Korea and ends with essentially the end of the world 72 minutes later. And the subtitle calls this “a scenario.” Is it a realistic scenario?
Annie Jacobsen: The scenario I chose was pieced together from interviews I did with 46 on-the-record sources and dozens of sources on background, and I ran by them various scenarios to come up with the most plausible scenario that unfolds once it begins. And this is what I came up with. And so far, I haven’t had anyone who actually runs these scenarios for NORAD take issue with the choices that I’ve made and the way in which the decision trees unfold, which makes it all the more frightening.
Gilsinan: Can you walk me through why it would be inevitable that the North Koreans hit us with two and we hit them back with 80?
Jacobsen: Let’s look at the words of General [John] Hyten, former STRATCOM commander, when he did an interview with CNN during former President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric days. And General Hyten said on the record, in a rather “don’t you dare” way, speaking almost directly to North Korea: “If somebody launches a nuclear weapon against us, we launch one back. They launch two, we launch two.”
To drill down a little bit further on that I looked to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former missileer himself. Now he’s deceased, but he became one of the world’s experts on nuclear command and control systems and authority. And he explained in a monograph I cite in the book that it’s far more likely that if North Korea hit the United with one missile, America would send 82 in return. [The monograph, written under the auspices of the anti-nuclear group Global Zero, points to about 80 “aimpoints” relevant to North Korea’s nuclear and other military forces as well as its leadership, but also notes that “graduated and flexible strikes” would be possible. Jacobsen says she relied on other sources to support the assumption the U.S. would attack all the targets.] Everything I did, I linked to an open-source scenario that had been thought through by experts who have dedicated their intellectual prowess to these issues for decades.
Gilsinan: In this scenario, the U.S. responds with ICBMs that have to fly over Russia, with predictable consequences. Why, according to the folks you’ve spoken to, would we risk flying missiles over a nuclear power if we could use submarine-launched missiles from the Pacific Ocean?
Jacobsen: I asked that same question to numerous people, and the most powerful answer came from former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta himself: “There’s not a lot of thought given to who the hell else may be thinking about doing what … at a time like this.”
Gilsinan: Maybe this is the point of the book. I would like very much to believe that STRATCOM is smarter than me and has thought this through ahead of time.
Jacobsen: Part of the terrifying truth about nuclear war, or if a nuclear exchange were to unfold, is the insane time clock that was put on everything from the moment nuclear launch is detected. This is fact. And so is the fact that the president has only six minutes, that’s the rough time to make this decision. And in that time, the Black Book gets opened; he must make a choice from a counterattack list of choices inside the Black Book. Those choices have been thought through for multiple scenarios, but you can’t possibly take into consideration every contingency in real time, which makes so clear to readers exactly how insane the truth is about the unfolding of the scenario. And the unpredictability of it. And for example, one of the few people that actually read the contents of the Black Book and spoke to me about it in general terms so as not to violate security clearances is Ted Postol [a former assistant to the chief of naval operations]. He’s the one who said to me that every decision was a bad decision.
Gilsinan: Why do we think it’s six minutes specifically? I know that’s in Reagan’s memoirs, but why do we think that is still the case?
Continue readingChernobyl – the Cloud Lingers On
CHERNOBYL – THE FACTS
- The total radioactively released from Chernobyl was 20 times that of the combined releases of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.
- At least 9 million people have been directly affected by the accident
- Over 160,000 square kilometres of land were contaminated with 42,000 squarekilometres rendered unusable.
- At least 400,000 people were forced to leave their homes in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
- Analysis concluded that the former Soviet Union would have been better off financially if it had never begun building nuclear reactors.
- It is estimated that the total cost of compensation paid to UK farmers is over £12 million.
- The Chernobyl disaster has caused a massive increase in thyroid cancers in the three most affected countries of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
- The sarcophagus built to contain the damaged reactor was supposed to last 30 years but some 300 yards of cracks and holes are already evident.
- In Ukraine, two million children live in contaminated areas with 900,000 still living in high-risk zones.
- The stricken reactor will remain radioactive for about 10,000 years.
BY MARIANNEWILDART, https://mariannewildart.wordpress.com/2024/04/26/chernobyl-the-cloud-lingers-on/
38th Anniversary of Chernobyl
Today is the 38th Anniversary of the ongoing Chernobyl nuclear disaster. A huge steel and concrete sarcophagus covers the site of the meltdown. Under its dome, called the New Safe Confinement, lie 200 tons of lava-like nuclear fuel, 30 tons of highly contaminated dust and 16 tons of uranium and plutonium that continue to release high levels of radiation. There is a rather odd link with the Russian state nuclear body Rosatom and Cumbria. Until recently Rosatom shared the same PR company as West Cumbria Mining – New Century Media. The coal mine plans have an uncanny resemblance to the Chernobyl sarcophagus
The damage from Chernobyl is ongoing, snowballing down through the generations with tenacious charities such as Chernobyl Children’s Project (UK) and Chernobyl Childern International doing their utmost to support those whose lives continue to be damaged.
Here we re-publish “The Cloud Lingers On”
a hard hitting article from 1996…in non other than Cumbria Life.
The lifestyle magazine, Cumbria Life, is not where you would expect to find a hard- hitting article on Chernobyl and the nuclear industry. But that is exactly what was published in this Cumbrian coffee table magazine in 1996. ….
(the article is in the public domain but not online – any mistakes in transcript are mine)
Ten years ago a cloud washed over the Cumbrian fells, coating the grass, trees, heather, bracken and rocks with a film of radiation. It came from Chernobyl, a ruptured nuclear reactor in the Ukraine, several thousand miles away. Early, confident predictions that the heavy Cumbrian rain, that brought down the radioactive Caesium in the first place would now wash it from the uplands, were quietly buried. No amount of rain was every going to wash away the poison from Chernobyl. Award winning environmental writer Alan Air reports.
At the height of the Cold War, the superpowers hid behind the perverted logic of the military defence acronym MAD – Mutually Assured Destruction – to shore up a global arms industry worth billions of pounds. We pointed our nuclear warheads at them. They pointed their nuclear warheads at us. Would they dare unleash their missiles? Would we dare unleash our missiles? All that awful tension.
Cumbria at first glance a global backwater of lakes, dry stone walls and back packing ramblers, seemed remote from the world stage but it played a part in the divide between West and East; Sellafield’s nuclear complex, the Broughton Moor arms depot, Anthorn’s submarine tracking station and even the Chapelcross nuclear plant just across the Solway Firth were all key components in the UK’s military and nuclear defence strategy.
Britain’s post-war civil atomic power programme was inextricably interwoven with its nuclear defence objectives; no British Government Minister wanted to enter the nuclear conference chamber naked.
Thankfully, Eastern Bloc missiles never did scream over Saddleback or the back o’ Skiddaw but in the spring of 1986, before the Soviet Union started to implode, Cumbrians felt the heat of Cold War politics on its back when an experiment at the Lenin nuclear plant at Chernobyl, in the Ukraine went wrong and Number 4 reactor exploded and threw up over Europe.
Spiralling weather patterns spread the atomic debris to dozens of countries in different time zones, heavy rain brought the radiation down on our county’s mountain tops and the alarms went berserk at Sellafield evoking a home-grown nuclear nightmare, the Windscale fire of ’57 that contaminated large parts of Cumbria and northern England. Chernobyl was nothing if not ironic.
Ten years later and Chernobyl – the noun is now instantly synonymous with the world’s worst nuclear disaster – is now in the hands of a ‘democratic’ Ukraine, but the perilous state of the infamous Number 4 reactor continues to cause concern among the international community. The cracking concrete sarcophagus, hastily erected around the molten core by nuclear workers a the stricken plant, many of whom later died from the radiation, is already crumbling and radioactive water is pouring from the site. Unless a new containment chamber is constructed, and much of the cash would have to come from a kitty topped up by the rich industrial nations of the West, then Chernobyl 2 – The Sequel, is not just a possibility but a probability, warns Janine Allis-Smith of the campaign group Cumbrians Opposed to a Radioactive Environment (CORE).
“Chernobyl proved that you can never, ever guard against human error, someone doing something stupid. Whatever nuclear experts say about the design of the Chernobyl reactor it was human error that triggered the explosion. It is bound to happen again,” she predicts.
In the weeks, months and years after Chernobyl, hundreds of Cumbrian hill farmers faced restrictions on the movement, and sale for meat, of radioactive-contaminated sheep. Initial Government estimates about the time it would take for dangerous radiation to leave the animals were constantly revised upwards as the main components of Chernobyl fallout, Caesium 137 and Caesium 134, persisted in dangerous amounts in the beasts’ tissues.
Early, confident predictions that the heavy Cumbrian rain that brought down the Caesium in the first place, would now wash it from the uplands were quietly buried.
It took scientists at the Merlewood Research Station at Grange over Sands in south Cumbria, to uncover some very down to earth truths about the persistence of cancer causing Caesium in the Cumbrian hills. The irony of the scientific explanation wasn’t lost on the county’s loose alliance of anti-nuclear and ‘green’ campaigners forever kicking up a stink about nuclear waste reprocessing at Sellafield.
It was all to do with recycling.
In the nutrient poor uplands of the Lake District, native grasses and heathers survive by carefully safeguarding what minerals are available. Elements – which in 1986 including Caesium – are taken up by the roots and then circulated to the succulent shoot tips during the growing season. However, they are not lost when the plant sheds its leaves in the Autumn. Instead they are sucked back into the woody, permanent tissues, to be stored for re-use in the Spring. By another quirk of nature, Caesium was readily absorbed by Cumbrian hill vegetation because of a lack of potassium in the upland soil.
Scientists discovered that plants in potassium deficient areas have a Caesium take up rate that is 12 times greater than those plants growing in potassium rich soil. Even more bizarrely, many of Cumbria’s hillside plants enjoy ‘symbiotic’ relationships with ‘mycorrhizal fungi’ – tiny plants that survive by assisting the host plant to take up minerals. In the case of Cumbrian heather, these fungi helped move Caesium from the roots to the shoot tips on which the sheep fed. Even the lack of clay in our upland soil, a material that binds Caesium and hinders root absorption meant that vegetation could easily access this radioactive ion.
No amount of rain was ever going to wash away the poison from Chernobyl.
Sheep feeding on hillside vegetation took in Caesium with every mouthful. For Ennerdale sheep farmer, John Hinde, who has a 1,500 strong flock at Low Moor End, the Chernobyl fallout meant nine stressful years of working within Government restrictions and monitoring. He has survived but recalls: “For a time it looked as if there wasn’t going to be any sheep left on the fells.”
Ten years on and only a dozen or so farms in Cumbria are regulated by movement restrictions compared to nearly 400 in Wales. That would appear to be good news for our farmers, and the mutton-eating consumer. Janine Allis-Smith of CORE isn’t so sure that radiation levels on the fells have declined quite so dramatically as the Government would have us believe, and she suggests that the de-restrictions are rooted in political pragmatism.
“It is interesting that the only area where this massive de-restriction has taken place is the Lake District. It is obviously important that Cumbrian and the whole tourist area is seen to be okay. I think a lot of Cumbrian farmers had their eyes opened when it was discovered that only 50% of the radiation on the hills came from Chernobyl. Some of the stuff was there long before May 1986” she says.
Indeed, scientists confirmed that radioactive contamination of the fells was not confined to Chernobyl but that much of it came from global nuclear bomb testing, the Windscale Fire of 1957 and routine discharges from Windscale, now Sellafield, in the 1960s and 1970s. Allis-Smith cites an aerial survey revealed the Ravenglass Estuary was contaminated by radioactive discharges from Sellafield long before Chernobyl dumped on us.
“If radiation was like confetti, the whole bloody Lake District would be like a wedding cake.” She suggests.
Cumbrian hill farmer’s daughter Jill Perry is equally suspicious of recent de-restrictions in the Lake District,
“The hill farm where I was born and brought up was one of those where milk had to be destroyed after the 1957 Windscale fire and one which, 29 years later, was placed under Chernobyl restrictions and has recently been exempted>” she explains.
“I think most farmers originally thought the Chernobyl testing was just a formality and were surprised and dismayed when they were placed under restriction, and equally wonder why restrictions have been lifted more quickly than those in Wales, where the number of restricted farms seems to fall much more slowly.”
Mrs Perry who now acts as the spokesman for West Cumbrian Friends of the Earth group, sees no point in differentiating between Windscale ’57 and Chernobyl ’86.
“What these two incidents show most graphically is that whether a nuclear accident happens locally or in another country, the radiation recognises no international borders and that we cannot afford to take lightly the risks brought about by human error in a high tech industry.”
The greatest irony of Chernobyl may yet lie ahead. British Nuclear Fuels, the company that now runs Sellafield in West Cumbria (and which has polluted areas of the UK coastline with its radioactive discharges) is now spreading tentacles around the globe. Selling its decontamination services to a tainted world. No-one can rule out experts from Sellafield, the plant that spawned the world’s first ‘civil’ nuclear disaster in 1957 and whose alarms bells rung out loud and clear when the Chernobyl could went over, will not, in the future, ret-trace the path of the Chernobyl radiation plume and venture into the plant’s exclusion zone.
Bridget Woodman, an anti nuclear campaigner with Greenpeace believes that Chernobyl taught Cumbrians about the universal nature of the nuclear power threat.
“When the Chernobyl explosion first appeared on the news bulletins, most Cumbrians probably never envisaged that it would impact directly on them. Yet within a few days, people were watching the skies apprehensively. Cumbrians may have become blasé about Sellafield on their own doorstep but Chernobyl proved that a nuclear disaster can affect them even if its happening thousands of miles away. There is no guarantee of safety. Chernobyl proved there is no escape.
“And while many of the restrictions on sheep movements in Cumbria have now been lifted, we should remember that there is no safe dose of radiation. No-one knows what the legacy of Chernobyl fallout will be on existing and future generations of Cumbrians.
RED GROUSEThe Red Grouse has escaped media attention but its almost exclusive diet of succulent heather shoots means that many birds will have concentrated Caesium in their bodies post Chernobyl. Work prior to the Chernobyl disaster established that the heather family, Ericaceae, could accumulate high concentrations of Caesium. Since then, surveys in the Lake District have revealed that one species of heather, calluna vulgaris, accumulates the highest Caesium burden.
CHERNOBYL – THE FACTS
- The total radioactively released from Chernobyl was 20 times that of the combined releases of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki atomic bombs.
- At least 9 million people have been directly affected by the accident
- Over 160,000 square kilometres of land were contaminated with 42,000 squarekilometres rendered unusable.
- At least 400,000 people were forced to leave their homes in Russia, Ukraine and Belarus.
Analysis concluded that the former Soviet Union would have been better off financially if it had never begun building nuclear reactors.- It is estimated that the total cost of compensation paid to UK farmers is over £12 million.
- The Chernobyl disaster has caused a massive increase in thyroid cancers in the three most affected countries of Belarus, Russia and Ukraine.
- The sarcophagus built to contain the damaged reactor was supposed to last 30 years but some 300 yards of cracks and holes are already evident.
- In Ukraine, two million children live in contaminated areas with 900,000 still living in high-risk zones.
- The stricken reactor will remain radioactive for about 10,000 years. ENDS
Decrepit nuclear reactors operate without meaningful inspections or insurance.
Convicted of 92 federal felony manslaughter counts, Diablo’s Pacific Gas & Electric is a criminal operation. Its 2010 negligence at San Bruno gas lines incinerated eight people. Its faulty transmission lines killed 84 people in northern California’s infamous 2017 Camp Fire. No PG&E executive went to prison any of those killings. In 2021 its CEO was paid $51.2 million.
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Nuclear Power’s Lethal, Larcenous End Game, BY HARVEY WASSERMAN, 26 Apr 24
“………………………………………………………………………………………………………..Thus Congress has just extended the 1957 Price-Anderson Act which exempts reactor owners from liability for a major disaster, an official vote of no confidence in the industry’s ability to guarantee the public safety.
With the February 29 passage of the Advanced Atomic Reactor Act, the industry stands to grift billions in public subsidies for decrepit reactors whose licenses they want to extend for 60-80 years while fighting basic safety inspections from federal regulators.
Thus the Nuclear Regulatory Commission—whose financial support comes from the operation of the reactors it supposedly regulates—is infamous for its blind eye to the deep structural and operational holes that could soon doom the aging US fleet.
The NRC is currently green-lighting operations at Diablo’s 40-year-old Unit One despite a dangerously embrittled core that could irradiate all of downwind California. Ohio’s Davis-Besse is riddled with mismanagement and decay. Ohio’s Perry, Virginia’s North Anna and Diablo have all been recently shaken earthquakes. California’s San Onofre shut in 2014 because its newly-installed unfixable steam turbines leaked radiation.
Convicted of 92 federal felony manslaughter counts, Diablo’s Pacific Gas & Electric is a criminal operation. Its 2010 negligence at San Bruno gas lines incinerated eight people. Its faulty transmission lines killed 84 people in northern California’s infamous 2017 Camp Fire. No PG&E executive went to prison any of those killings. In 2021 its CEO was paid $51.2 million.
For the public, the costs in health, ecological and economic damage at any US reactor could climb into the trillions, with radioactive clouds and multiple bankruptcies leaving countless victims dead, destroyed, destitute.
According to the US Government Accountability Office, from 2001 to 2006 alone, more than 150 reactor incidents violated acceptable safety guidelines. A 2010 survey of US nuclear accidents showed least 56 by then involved loss of human life or more than $50,000 in property damage.
Said former Vice President Al Gore in 2009:
“Of the 253 nuclear power reactors originally ordered in the United States from 1953 to 2008, 48 percent were canceled, 11 percent were prematurely shut down, 14 percent experienced at least a one-year-or-more outage, and 27 percent are operating without having a year-plus outage. Thus, only about one fourth of those ordered, or about half of those completed, are still operating and have proved relatively reliable.[53]
Yet New York is dumping $7.6+ billion into keeping four decrepit reactors on line (one of which opened in 1969). Ohio’s legislature recently pocketed $61 million in bribes to scam a $1 billion taxpayer bailout for two 40 and 50-year old nukes irradiating Lake Erie. Michigan wants $8 billion to revive the 51-year-old Palisades reactor—which shut two years ago—even though Holtec (the waste management company designated to revive Palisades) has no experience building or operating any nuclear power reactor. Pieces of the reactor have already been sold off for scrap.………………………………………..more https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/04/26/nuclear-powers-lethal-larcenous-end-game/
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Stuxnet – how a simple USB stick sabotaged Iran’s nuclear plan in a ‘world-first’ showdown
‘There is an acceptance you cannot guarantee your cyber security – someone motivated enough can probably get into your system.
Tensions between Iran and Israel are near a boiling point after the firing of hundreds of rockets into Israel and its latest military response.
But the conflict has brewed for years, including sabotage of Iran’s nuclear programme with the help of one spy and a single USB stick.
That same device contained the infamous Stuxnet worm.
It infiltrated the Iranian nuclear programme in 2010, marking the first time a country attacked the critical infrastructure of another state.
A cyber expert has shared how Stuxnet damaged an Iranian nuclear plant and if the UK is safe from similar malicious attacks.
Dr Gareth Mott, research fellow at the RUSI Royal United Services Institute think-tank in London, said that before 2010 similar attacks might have happened, but in the shadows.
However, with Stuxnet, researchers found ‘the code of the malware was way more advanced.’
He told Metro.co.uk: ‘They had years to develop it. It was no small-scale criminal developing it.’
Who was behind Stuxnet?
Signs point to Israel and the US to be responsible for the sophisticated worm.
He said: ‘Israel views Iran as a nemesis. In their view, Iran was developing uranium for nuclear weapons. Iran said it was for civilian systems.’
What Iran was doing was ‘not clandestine’.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) monitors its programme and it is alerted ‘when the pod is opened.’
However, it is ‘hypothetically possible to abuse it,’ he said.
As an ally of Israel, the US got involved in the plan to target Iran’s nuclear facilities.
The development of Stuxnet began in 2005 years before it was smuggled into Natanz nuclear plant by a spy.
How Stuxnext caused a shutdown
Iranian nuclear sites, just like facilities in the UK, are carefully protected against attacks.
It means they are not connected to the Internet to avoid intrusions.
In the uranium enrichment facility, the radioactive chemical element spins around quickly in centrifuges to enrich it.
Dr Mott said: ‘The system is not connected to the Internet, it is air gapped. It is disconnected from the Internet. It is one of the best systems.’
But it has one weakness – USB ports.
He explains: ‘But you can put a USB drive in. You have to have a port to do any updates. That means an attack, if you can get malware on a USB drive and into the critical system, maybe you can disrupt it.’
When the top-secret tool was ready in 2009, Israelis and Americans wanted to use it.
But it did not work as intended so experts designing the worm went back to base and ‘worked what was wrong, in laboratory conditions.’
The US was hesitant and told their partners to wait, but the ‘Israelis went ahead and used it anyways,’ the expert said.
Uranium has to be spun around in a ‘very controlled manner,’ but the malware made the system ‘too quickly and slow down and too quickly again,’ he explained.
‘The system started to wobble and began to collapse.’
It also ‘tricked’ the control panel which would normally spot if the centrifuges were spinning at a risky speed and fix it, making it look like ‘things were fine, but it wasn’t’, Dr Mott said.
As a result of the worm, the Iranian uranium enrichment programme was ‘broken,’ he said.
It is thought to have been set back by several years, tech publication Dark Reading estimated.
Stuxnet highlights how something as innocent as a USB port compromise national security.
In the UK, a senior IT worker at the Sellafield nuclear plant was fired after she had downloaded sensitive data onto a USB stick and dropped it in a car park.
Stuxnet’s existence was revealed after it was found on thousands of infected computers across the world despite, on paper, the Iranian system had no internet connection.
‘Somehow it got released. Maybe one of the scientists took it home to research it.’
Cyber researchers saw it was ‘very advanced’ after ‘years in the making and a lot of money.’
Stuxnet was significant because at the time no country in the world had declared it had a cyber weapon.
‘In 2013 UK did it, and we now have an offensive [cyber] arsenal,’ the expert said.
‘We have always conducted espionage, but we are now doing it with cyber tools.’
Following Stuxnet, Iran grew its cyber offensive capabilities, making it a ‘regionally significant power but internationally it is not,’ he said.
However, in the cyber and Internet space ‘they punch above their weight,’ with hackers and researchers embedded in the cyber command of Iran’s Revolutionary Guards.
Israel has its own cyber force, Unit 8200, which is the country’s version of UK’s GCHQ and the American NSA.
Cyber attacks from Iran to Israel have ‘stepped up since October 7’ when Hamas launched its deadly attack in Israel, followed by destruction of Gaza in Palestine by the Israeli army, with more than 30,000 people killed and 70,000 injured in the unlawfully blockaded strip of land, according to the UN.
Last weekend, Israeli authorities said they have seen ‘no rise in cyber incidents, but researchers have observed cyber attacks have doubled or tripled,’ Dr Mott said.
He suspects they are ‘low-level attacks which Israel will respond to to ‘disrupt Iran.’
Continue readingSmall reactors don’t add up as a viable energy source
Nuclear energy has been declining in importance as a source of power and SMRs will not reverse that.
M. V. Ramana, The University of British Columbia, Sophie Groll, The University of British Columbia, EditorsS. Vicknesan
Senior Commissioning Editor, 360info Southeast Asia 15 Apr 24 https://360info.org/small-reactors-dont-add-up-as-a-viable-energy-source/
The nuclear industry has been offering so-called Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) as an alternative to large reactors as a possible solution to climate change.
SMRs are defined as nuclear reactors with a power output of less than 300 megawatts of electricity, compared to the typically 1000 to 1,500 megawatts power capacity of larger reactors.
Proponents assert that SMRs would cost less to build and thus be more affordable.
However, when evaluated on the basis of cost per unit of power capacity, SMRs will actually be more expensive than large reactors.
This ‘diseconomy of scale’ was demonstrated by the now-terminated proposal to build six NuScale Power SMRs (77 megawatts each) in Idaho in the United States.
The final cost estimate of the project per megawatt was around 250 percent more than the initial per megawatt cost for the 2,200 megawatts Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, US.
Previous small reactors built in various parts of America also shut down because they were uneconomical.
The high cost of constructing SMRs on a per megawatt basis translates into high electricity production costs.
According to the 2023 GenCost report from the Australian Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO) and the Australian Energy Market Operator, the estimated cost of generating each megawatt-hour of electricity from an SMR is around AUD$400 to AUD$600.
In comparison, the cost of each megawatt-hour of electricity from wind and solar photovoltaic plants is around AUD$100, even after accounting for the cost involved in balancing the variability of output from solar and wind plants.
Building SMRs has also been subject to delays. Russia’s KLT-40 took 13 years from when construction started to when it started generating electricity, instead of the expected three years.
Small reactors also raise all of the usual concerns associated with nuclear power, including the risk of severe accidents, the linkage to nuclear weapons proliferation, and the production of radioactive waste that has no demonstrated solution because of technical and social challenges.
One 2022 study calculated that various radioactive waste streams from SMRs would be larger than the corresponding waste streams from existing light water reactors.
The bottom line is that new reactor designs, such as SMRs, will not rescue nuclear power from its multiple problems. Any energy technology that is beset with such environmental problems and risks cannot be termed sustainable.
Nuclear energy itself has been declining in importance as a source of power: the fraction of the world’s electricity supplied by nuclear reactors has declined from a maximum of 17.5 percent in 1996 down to 9.2 percent in 2022. All indications suggest that the trend will continue if not accelerate.
The decline in the global share of nuclear power is driven by poor economics: generating power with nuclear reactors is costly compared to other low-carbon, renewable sources of energy and the difference between these costs is widening.
Nuclear reactors built during the last decade have all demonstrated a pattern of cost and time overruns in their construction.
The Vogtle nuclear power plant being built in Georgia, involving two reactors designed to generate around 1,100 megawatts of electricity each, is currently estimated to cost nearly USD$35 billion.
In 2011, when the utility company building the reactor sought permission from the American Nuclear Regulatory Commission, it projected a total cost of USD$14 billion, and ‘in-service dates of 2016 and 2017’ for the two units.
In France, the 1,630-megawatt European Pressurised Reactor being built in Flamanville was originally estimated to cost 3 billion euros and projected to start in 2012, but the cost has soared to an estimated 13.2 billion euros and is yet to start operating as of March 2024.
These cost increases and delays confirm the historical pattern identified in a study published in 2014: of the 180 nuclear power projects around the world it studied, 175 had exceeded their initial budgets, by an average of 117 percent, and took 64 percent longer than initially projected.
However, the recent projects are even more extreme in the magnitude of the disconnect between expectations and reality.
These reactor projects, and the Hinkley Point C project under construction in the United Kingdom, also confirm another historical pattern: costs of nuclear power plants go up with time, not down. This is unlike other energy technologies, such as solar and wind energy, where costs have declined rapidly with experience.
The climate crisis is urgent. The world has neither the financial resources nor the luxury of time to expand nuclear power. As physicist and energy analyst Amory Lovins argued: “… to protect the climate, we must save the most carbon at the least cost and in the least time.”
Expanding nuclear energy only makes the climate problem worse.
The money invested in nuclear energy would save far more carbon dioxide if it were instead invested in renewables.
And the reduction in emissions from investing in renewables would be far quicker.
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