Standards don’t protect them and studies dismiss them
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In a peer reviewed article published in the British Medical Journal Pediatrics Open in October, my Beyond Nuclear colleague, Cindy Folkers and I, reviewed the studies currently available that look at the impact on children from radiation exposures caused by the nuclear power sector.
In particular, we looked at the disproportionately negative impact on children living in disadvantaged communities, primarily those of color. As we wrote in the article:
“From uranium mining and milling, to fuel manufacture, electricity generation and radioactive waste management, children in frontline and Indigenous communities can be disproportionately harmed due to often increased sensitivity of developing systems to toxic exposures, the lack of resources and racial and class discrimination.”
At about the same time, and as if to confirm our hypothesis, the story of the Jana elementary school in Missouri began to break.
The school is in a predominantly Black community in northern St. Louis and the US army corps of engineers had been called in to assess radioactivity found in classrooms, playgrounds and on sports fields at the school after findings of unacceptable levels of radioactivity on the premises were revealed in an independent report conducted by Dr. Marco Kaltofen, President of Boston Chemical Data Corporation.
The radioactive contamination found at the school was, as the report described it, “consistent with the radioactive legacy uranium processing wastes notoriously found in the heavily contaminated Coldwater Creek in North St. Louis County, MO, and in low-lying areas subject to flooding from the creek.”
The report concluded that “radiological contamination exists at unacceptable levels (greater than 5.0 net pCi/g as alpha radiation) at the Jana School property.”
Those wastes, dating back from the 1940s to 1960s, were produced by a company called Mallinckrodt, which processed uranium from the Belgian Congo as part of the Manhattan Project. The radioactive waste they produced was illegally dumped in what was then surrounding countryside and at the West Lake Landfill. It seeped into creeks and spread into parks and even homes.
A story we ran on Beyond Nuclear International in March 2018 relates the struggle of residents to get their community cleaned up. Atomic Homefront, a compelling documentary about this fight, brings home exactly the toll this environmental crime has taken on people living there, especially women.
Radioactive lead-210, thorium and radium-226 were among the isotopes found at Jana Elementary school, at levels far higher than those considered permissible (but not safe) at Superfund sites. The lead-210 was at levels 22 times what would be considered “expected” in such an environment.
Why had it taken so long to discover this immense and unacceptable risk to children?
Jana’s PTA president, Ashley Bernaugh, believes she knows the answer.
“Jana elementary’s radioactive past looks like a lot of other communities where hazardous waste has been allowed to exist in predominantly minority communities and in lower middle income communities, where it never would have been allowed in upper income level communities because of the public outrage,” she told The Guardian.
By November 9 the corps had declared that radiation levels at the school “showed no levels of radiation higher than ‘the level of radioactivity Mother Nature already provides.’”
“Mother Nature” is a euphemistic reference to “background radiation,” already problematic given the decades of atomic testing and major nuclear accidents that have added to what “background” radiation levels once were but are no longer. Of far greater concern is that these levels, while likely not even safe for adults, are certainly not safe for children.
This determination of what is “safe” is based on a standard that is not only outdated but was wrong from the start. Here is what we wrote about this in our BMJ article.
“Pregnancy, children and women are underprotected by current regulatory standards that are based on ‘allowable’ or ‘permissible’ doses for a ‘Reference Man’. Early in the nuclear weapons era, a ‘permissible dose’ was more aptly recognized as an ‘acceptable injury limit,’ but that language has since been sanitized.”
Reference Man is defined as a nuclear industry worker 20–30 years of age, who weighs around 154 pounds, is 67 inches tall and is a Caucasian Western European or North American in habitat and custom.
“Very early research conducted in the USA in 1945 and 1946 indicated higher susceptibility of pregnancy to radiation exposure. Pregnant dogs injected with radiostrontium had defects in their offspring and yet, complete results of these studies were not made public until 1969,” we wrote.
“By 1960 however, U.S. experts were clearly aware that research indicated higher susceptibility of children, when the Federal Radiation Council (established in 1959 by President Eisenhower) briefly considered a definition for ‘Standard Child’—which they subsequently abandoned in favor of maintaining a Standard Man definition, later renamed Reference Man.”
Reference Man still stands, although our organization, in partnership with the Gender + Radiation Impact Project, are working to get it changed to Reference Girl. (If you are interested in learning more about this, you can join our online classes.)
Why are children, and especially female children, as well as women and especially pregnant women, more susceptible to harm from radiation exposure? This is not fully understood and regulatory practices, particularly in the establishment of protective exposure standards, have failed to take this difference into account.
An examination of Navajo babies born between 1964 and 1981 showed that congenital anomalies, developmental disorders and other adverse birth outcomes were associated with the mother living near uranium mines and wastes.
Other studies — among Aboriginal communities in Australia and members of Indigenous tribes in India —showed similar outcomes. But so-called anecdotal evidence is invariably dismissed in favor of “statistical insignificance”.
Even perhaps the most famous study, in Germany, of children living near nuclear plants showing elevated rates of leukemia directly correlated to the proximity of their homes to the nuclear sites, was dismissed with claims that the doses were simply too low to have such an impact.
As we concluded in our BMJ article, which is fully accessible and can be read in its entirety here, “more independent studies are needed focused on children, especially those in vulnerable frontline and Indigenous communities. In conducting such studies, greater consideration must be applied to culturally significant traditions and habits in these communities.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International.
Most recently, NATO has performed its familiar war-mongering role in Ukraine, where it has trained Ukrainian troops, including members of the neo-Nazi-led Azov Battalion.
The latter began attacking the people of eastern Ukraine after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup that triggered the devastating ongoing conflict.
This conflict was provoked in part by U.S. efforts to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, which CIA Director William Burns had warned was a red line that should not be crossed.[14]
In late March 2022, thanks to peace talks mediated by Turkey, Russia was ready to withdraw from all the territory it had captured if Ukraine agreed to give up any commitment to join NATO or allow NATO military bases or missiles to be stationed on its territory.
The deal was scuttled when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky that the “collective West” would not support it.
Will a formidable peace movement ever emerge that can succeed in stopping it?
This past week, the North Atlantic Treaty Organization (NATO) celebrated its 75th anniversary by hosting a summit in Washington, D.C., where its founding treaty was signed.
A declaration issued at the summit made clear NATO’s intent to continuously confront Russia in Ukraine, and to further expand its operations in Southeast Asia and the Middle East.[1]
The Biden administration announced that: a) they are going to start stationing long-range nuclear and other missiles (including hypersonic missiles, that the U.S. doesn’t even have yet) in Germany, within easy striking-distance of Moscow; b) nuclear-capable F-16 fighter jets will be arriving in Ukraine any day now, and will go into service “during the summer”; and that c) Ukraine is on an “irreversible path” to join NATO.
A commemorative documentary featured now on NATO’s website celebrates NATO’s role in facilitating the Western victory in the Cold War and in allegedly ending ethnic cleansing and genocide in the Balkans in the 1990s, curtailing terrorism from Afghanistan after 9/11, and helping to protect the world from Russian aggression.
NATO’s formation in April 1949 is depicted as being vital in preventing the U.S. from having fallen into dreaded isolationism as it had after World War I, and in protecting European security in the face of the Soviet threat.
Colonel Richard Williams, Deputy Director of NATO’s Defense Investment Division, 1997-2011, states that “NATO is the only organization that offers hope that peace can become a real possibility.”
George Orwell would surely be proud of these latter comments in light of NATO’s long record of war-making. The true, venal history is exposed in a short book by peace activists Medea Benjamin and David Swanson, NATO: What You Need to Know, whose publication was timed to encourage protests at the 75th NATO anniversary summit.
Danger to World Peace
In the preface, Columbia University Professor Jeffrey Sachs wrote that “NATO is a clear and present danger to world peace, a war machine run amok that operates beyond the democratic control of the citizenry of the NATO countries.” Sachs continued: “The war machine lines the pockets of the arms contractors at the core of NATO, U.S. companies like Lockheed Martin and Northrop Grumman and Europe’s arms manufacturers…NATO also sucks one nation after another into the vortex of war, instability, displacement, and poverty. During the past 30 years, NATO has fomented a vast arc of violence stretching from Libya to Afghanistan and with many victims in between.”[2]
Benjamin and Swanson emphasize in their introduction that NATO has repeatedly violated the UN Charter outlawing military aggression and the UN’s 1970 Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons because of the placement of U.S. nuclear weapons in five European NATO nations.
NATO’s formation in 1949 as a military defense alliance against the Soviet Union was predicated on rampant propaganda that grossly exaggerated the Soviet threat, and on the ouster of peace-oriented politicians such as Henry Wallace, Franklin Roosevelt’s Vice President.
Wallace had proposed a continuation of Roosevelt’s policy of cooperation with the Soviets and was consequently removed in a coup d’état at the Democratic Party convention in Chicago in 1944 and then fired by Harry S. Truman as Commerce Secretary.
Under the direction of Truman’s advisers, including Joe Biden’s political mentor W. Averell Harriman, NATO established private clandestine armies among fascist elements throughout Western Europe who carried out black-flag terrorist activities as part of a strategy to inculcate fear in local populations and to discredit the political left.
In Italy, NATO operatives bombed a Bologna rail station and then planted evidence in the home of a left-wing journalist to make it look like he was the culprit.[3]
Rather than supporting democracy in Western Europe, NATO has a record of empowering reactionary forces. After World War II, it helped destroy popular movements of the left that had led the fight against fascism and were intent on redistributing wealth.
Greece was accepted as a NATO member only after its “ruthless Western-backed government killed or jailed the last of the partisans who had liberated it from the Nazis.”[4]
Turkey’s membership in NATO gave NATO military control of the Bosporus Strait—the only navigational waterway between the Mediterranean and Black Seas and a choke point for the Soviet ports of Odessa and Sevastapol.[5]
Within a decade of joining the Alliance, both Turkey and Greece were toppled in right-wing coups, which did not affect NATO membership. NATO further accepted Portugal as a member when it was ruled by a fascist dictator, Antonio Salazar, who provided the U.S. with a military base in the Azores.
NATO backed Portugal’s brutal suppression of anti-colonial movements in its African colonies (i.e., Angola and Mozambique), supported France’s colonial war in Algeria and the U.S. aggression in Korea, which resulted in the killing of 20% of North Korea’s population.
At an Asian-African conference in Bandung in 1955, Indian Prime Minister Jawaharlal Nehru called NATO “the most powerful protector of colonialism” and said that Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia “would probably have been independent if it had not been for NATO.”[6]
Upholding Unipolar U.S. Power
The U.S. has long been a driving force behind NATO because NATO “provides a vehicle for imposing U.S. leadership over Western nations,” according to Benjamin and Swanson. It has “tied Europe to U.S. military, geopolitical, and economic interests, made Europeans dependent on U.S. military power, and helped fortify U.S. global economic interests.”[7]
After the end of the Cold War, U.S. weapons companies helped lobby for NATO’s expansion. A lobby group called U.S. Committee to Expand NATO was run by the Vice President of Lockheed Martin.[8]
The father of the Cold War containment strategy, George F. Kennan, warned that NATO expansion in the 1990s would be a disastrous folly that would antagonize the Russians and trigger a new Cold War, but to no avail.
Beholden in part to the Polish-American and other Eastern European lobbies alongside the weapons lobbyists, the Clinton administration expanded NATO to three Eastern European countries (Poland, Hungary and Czech Republic)—in violation of a pledge made by the George H.W. Bush administration to the Russians that NATO would not be expanded “one inch to the East.”
George W. Bush followed Clinton by expanding NATO to seven additional countries—Bulgaria, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Romania, Slovakia and Slovenia. Later, NATO was expanded to Montenegro and to Sweden and Finland.
Sowing Methodical Devastation
In 1994, NATO launched its first-ever combat operations in Bosnia, conducting hundreds of air strikes, which contributed to the dismemberment of the former Yugoslavia and transformed Bosnia into what Swanson and Benjamin call a “dysfunctional ward of NATO and the West.”[9]
In 1999, NATO carried out an illegal bombing campaign that dropped 23,000 bombs on Serbia, which killed thousands of civilians. This was followed by the U.S.-NATO invasion and occupation of the Serbian province of Kosovo, resulting in the empowerment of the terrorist Kosovo Liberation Army (KLA), which established Kosovo as a mafia state.
As a spoil of victory, the U.S. acquired the 955-acre Camp Bondsteel in southeastern Kosovo, which became a secret CIA black site for illegal detention and torture. (Europe’s Human Rights Commissioner Álvaro Gil-Robles called Camp Bondsteel a “smaller version of Guantanamo.”[10])
NATO caused more mayhem and bloodshed in the catastrophic 20-year military occupation of Afghanistan. During that time, U.S. and NATO forces dropped 85,000 bombs and missiles and conducted tens of thousands of “kill or capture” night raids, largely targeting innocent civilians, in a futile attempt to destroy the Taliban.
In Iraq, NATO soldiers from Canada, Hungary, Italy, Norway and the Netherlands trained senior military officers who carried out massive human rights crimes in sustaining the illegal U.S. military occupation.[11]
NATO played a further instrumental role in the 2011 regime-change operation targeting Libyan ruler Muammar Gaddafi who had given Libya the fifth-highest GDP per capita in Africa and the highest human development rating there.
Before the start of bombing operations, NATO secretly deployed CIA officers and British, French, Canadian and Qatari Special Forces to organize and lead Libyan jihadist forces intent on toppling the secular nationalist Qaddafi.[12]
NATO took full command of all aspects of the Libyan air war, with warships from 12 NATO countries sent to enforce a critical naval blockade.
Benjamin and Swanson wrote that, “after taking the capital, Tripoli, NATO and its allies cut off food, water, and electricity to the people of Sirte and Bani Walid as they bombarded them for weeks. The combination of aerial, naval, and artillery bombardment, starvation and rebel atrocities on these civilian populations made a final, savage mockery of the UN Security Council’s mandate to protect civilians.”[13]
Ukraine Breathes New Life into NATO
Most recently, NATO has performed its familiar war-mongering role in Ukraine, where it has trained Ukrainian troops, including members of the neo-Nazi-led Azov Battalion.
The latter began attacking the people of eastern Ukraine after the 2014 U.S.-backed coup that triggered the devastating ongoing conflict.
This conflict was provoked in part by U.S. efforts to extend NATO membership to Ukraine, which CIA Director William Burns had warned was a red line that should not be crossed.[14]
In late March 2022, thanks to peace talks mediated by Turkey, Russia was ready to withdraw from all the territory it had captured if Ukraine agreed to give up any commitment to join NATO or allow NATO military bases or missiles to be stationed on its territory. The deal was scuttled when British Prime Minister Boris Johnson flew to Kyiv to tell Ukrainian Prime Minister Volodymyr Zelensky that the “collective West” would not support it.
This ensured that the war would go on—at the cost of the flower of Ukraine’s youth who have been sacrificed in another unwinnable war.
Hope for the Future?
NATO’s dubious role in triggering the ongoing bloodbath in Ukraine is sadly characteristic of a 75-year history of provoking warfare and terrorizing civilians—in the service of U.S. and Western global hegemony.
At the end of their book, Swanson and Benjamin note that people around the world increasingly see the U.S. as the greatest threat to world peace.
Americans themselves remain divided about NATO: 47% want to see the U.S. keep its current commitment, and 28% want to either decrease it or withdraw entirely.
In a reflection of the rising hawkishness of the Democratic Party base and its susceptibility to government propaganda, only 14% of Democrats want no or less participation in NATO compared to 42% of Republicans.[15]
These data, while potentially discouraging, do reflect the fact that a significant percentage of Americans—including many living in the conservative heartland—are weary of foreign military intervention and NATO and represent a significant potential organizing base.
Given the high percentage of support for NATO among liberal Democrats, an urgent task should be for peace activists to embark on a vigorous campaign of public education targeting liberals that focuses on NATO’s horrifying history.
Benjamin and Swanson’s book is a perfect resource for that campaign and should be widely distributed to better inform the U.S. public about the evil ways their tax dollars are being spent.
To this day, WIPP only houses transuranic waste with medium radioactivity from nuclear defense projects — not, for example, waste from nuclear energy, or items with very high or low levels of radioactivity. There is no pilot plant for high-level materials in the U.S. at the moment or in the plans
Castoffs from U.S. nuclear weapons get buried at one site in New Mexico. But what happens when that facility fills up?
THE LAND around Carlsbad, New Mexico is spiked with oil and gas wells. Mines hoist up minerals. Hotel parking lots teem with twinning white work trucks, driven by employees who specialize in pulling material out of the Earth.
Amid these extractors, though, are others putting material into the planet: They work for a facility called the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, located about 40 minutes from downtown Carlsbad. At first glance, WIPP resembles a normal industrial site: A road sign near the entrance sports its inscrutable name, pointing toward tan warehouse-like buildings, evaporation ponds, and headframes for hoisting material.
Superficially, it looks like any other mine in the area. But that sameness belies the strangeness of what lies below ground: A huge subterranean salt deposit that stores nuclear waste from the country’s defense projects.
Once the repository is full, the salt will naturally undo the miners’ work: Tunnels and rooms will collapse, entombing the radioactive material and protecting life aboveground. WIPP has buried more than 14,000 shipments of nuclear waste since its start in 1999.
Twenty-five years after that opening, on a chilly March morning, a charter bus carries a crowd of people — some wearing cowboy attire, others in insulated vests zipped over dress shirts — into the parking lot. They congregate next to a semitruck laden with cylindrical cargo containers that sport radioactive warning labels. The labels, it turns out, are just for show. These containers are empty — staged for a photograph as part of WIPP’s 25th anniversary, and these guests have come to mark the occasion.
When the event starts, in a building plunked just before the security gate, Mark Bollinger, head of the Department of Energy’s Environmental Management Carlsbad field office, heads to a lectern.
“This,” he proclaims, “is a celebration.”
Others beg to differ. According to WIPP’s founding documents, the site should be winding down soon: It is a pilot plant — an experiment, a proof-of-concept — these critics argue, not a permanent one. The goal is to show that it is possible to safely store nuclear waste underground, shut the plant down, and seal it off. Initially, the timeline estimated disposal would stop in the middle of this decade, letting earth close around the waste. Over the course of WIPP’s operating life, and drawing on lessons learned here, the United States would identify and open new repositories for America’s nuclear waste.
That’s not exactly what has happened though.
Today, there are no concrete plans for new deep geologic repositories in the U.S. There are no established future sites for the medium-level nuclear waste that WIPP handles, nor for more dangerous radioactive waste, nor for the tens of millions of pounds of spent nuclear fuel from power plants. Indeed, much of the radioactive trash the country has created since the 1940s still lives in temporary storage, spread across the U.S. And officials now expect WIPP could remain open until the 2080s — decades beyond its originally conceived chronology.
The lack of permanent nuclear waste storage in the U.S. isn’t an engineering problem. “It’s not technically difficult,” said Allison Macfarlane, director of the School of Public Policy and Global Affairs at the University of British Columbia, and former chair of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission.
The solution, she says, is to bury it. The more radioactive, the deeper it goes.
Politically and culturally, however, convincing communities to permanently host nuclear detritus remains difficult, and WIPP is the world’s only operational example of a deep geological repository for nuclear waste — and the only one on the horizon. If officials are to find a post-WIPP solution for the mid-level nuclear waste being stored here — and the other kinds of radioactive discards — they’ll need to study how WIPP came to be, and why Carlsbad residents haven’t put up much of a fuss.
“In any future repository program,” said Matt Bowen, a senior research scholar at the Center on Global Energy Policy at Columbia University and a former official with the National Nuclear Security Administration, “state and local officials are going to want to understand WIPP.”
THE IDEA that you could store nuclear waste in salt dates to the 1950s, when the National Academy of Sciences published a report about radioactive waste disposal, identifying places where nuclear waste could remain undisturbed. Subterranean salt deposits, the panel of experts concluded, were the best spots, geologically speaking.
“The great advantage here is that no water can pass through salt,” read the report. Cracks in the mineral would heal themselves, theoretically helping halt radioactivity’s flow up or down. Salt deposits are also typically in seismically inactive areas, so nothing should shake the dangerous drums. “Abandoned salt mines or cavities especially mined to hold waste are, in essence, long-enduring tanks,” it continued.
Other geologic options that have been floated include crystalline rock, shale or clay, shale over hard rock, and volcanic rock called tuff, all of which can isolate the waste from the outside environment.
More than a decade passed before officials implemented the academy’s suggestion, with the defense apparatus continuing to produce nuclear waste the whole time. But when they did move forward with preliminary work in the 1970s, they settled on a part of New Mexico underlain by a huge slab of salt from the long-gone Permian Sea. This salt is 2,000 feet thick, starting 850 feet underground. It seemed perfect.
But first they needed to convince the public.
Proponents and politicians navigated this in part by allowing independent oversight and research and giving the state of New Mexico some power over the process. In the 1970s, the state created a radioactive and hazardous waste committee in the legislature, to recommend legislation for WIPP and for the transportation of radioactive material. And in the 1980s Congress allocated money to mine two shafts through the salt and research the site and its safety, access that allowed the state of New Mexico to do its own, independent research.
That was part of a plan that politicians and policymakers in favor of WIPP had in this era, says former Rep. John Heaton, whose district housed the future site. Namely, that they wanted the public to “hang loose.”
“Let’s not go overboard,” Heaton said of the advice to the public at the time. It is no use thinking of only bad-case scenarios or scary what-ifs. Let’s instead, the advice went, wait for the facts to come in.
As those facts arrived, independent researchers learned about how waste containers corroded over time, and how the underground salt behaved at different temperatures. The research pointed to the long-term safety of the site, and waiting on the scientific results had worked: Carlsbad was on board, with opposition coming mostly from larger, more liberal cities like Santa Fe, where Heaton lives now. And while the project did face controversy and opposition from the state, by the time the project was getting started, more people were in favor of WIPP than against it.
By 1992, politicians had drawn up the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant Land Withdrawal Act, giving more than 10,000 acres to WIPP and laying out its parameters — including the total amount of waste the Department of Energy could “emplace” — a fancy word used to mean “put underground.” WIPP would house material dubbed “transuranic,” largely objects contaminated with radioactive elements heavier than uranium — in this case, mostly plutonium — soiled during nuclear defense work.
(To this day, WIPP only houses transuranic waste with medium radioactivity from nuclear defense projects — not, for example, waste from nuclear energy, or items with very high or low levels of radioactivity. There is no pilot plant for high-level materials in the U.S. at the moment or in the plans.)
TODAY, WIPP is not just a hole in the ground but a series of tunnels and rooms largely housing barrels filled with pieces of rebar, rags, clothing, empty containers of spray adhesive — remnants of the objects engineers and technicians used while working on nuclear weapons or defense research.
…………………………………………………………………………………………………………… “legacy waste” — radioactive trash created long ago when records were less detailed and methods less stringent than they are now. Some of it was simply put in containers and buried in shallow trenches, or even above-ground, on the nuclear labs’ property during the Cold War. Legacy material makes up much of WIPP’s contents, and much of what will be in its future deliveries.
…………………………….. CHECKS and balances have been fine-tuned since 2014, when WIPP experienced its greatest setback.
February that year was a bad month for the plant. First, a truck hauling salt caught fire underground, spreading soot on important equipment and smoke throughout the site — and endangering the 86 workers underground. Everyone made it the 2,000 feet to the surface, but several had to be treated for smoke inhalation.
Just over a week later, in a different part of WIPP, a drum of waste exploded, turning itself essentially into a dirty bomb, blasting out transuranic radioactive material in a fiery burst.
Twenty-two workers received doses of radiation, and a small amount of contamination escaped into the outside world — about 3 percent of the amount of radiation from a chest X-ray.
The dangerous drum had originally come from Los Alamos, where workers had mixed in the wrong kind of cat litter — a simple substance that typically helps stabilize nuclear waste. But in this case, instead of combining the hazardous substances with inorganic kitty litter, they had mixed it with “an organic kitty litter,” the instructions having gotten garbled. And organic material can react with nitrates, causing chemical reactions that release heat. The increasing heat bumped up the pressure inside the drum, until it burst.
………………………………………………… The 2014 accidents may have been the most significant in WIPP’s history, but yearly, smaller incidents also occur. “It’s difficult to operate this kind of facility,” said Hancock. “Nobody in the world has ever safely operated a deep geologic repository.”
And that is the difference between the real world and a report from a national academy about what kind of rock or mineral is safe: A place can be perfect in geological theory, but when operated by flawed humans, it will be subject to their mishaps and misjudgments.
………………………………………………………………………Critics, like proponents, want the legacy waste cleaned up, and safely. But they don’t trust WIPP with that last part. While the bigger cities in the region are unlikely to suffer ill effects from a disaster at the plant itself, trucks of nuclear waste pass through on their highways. And some residents are concerned about the safety of those trucks. Any vehicle traveling anywhere, carrying anything, can have an accident.
They are also worried about WIPP’s proximity to oil and gas activity…………………………………………………………………..
WIPP RECENTLY received its latest 10-year operating permit from the state of New Mexico. As part of the final agreement, the DOE agreed to look for a future waste-disposal site, in another state. “I think it will be a consent-based siting program,” said Bowen, of repositories to come. “I don’t think anybody wants to fight states.”
But it will be hard to find a new, permanent place — or other places for the other kinds of nuclear waste out there. “At some point in time, we’re going to have to start this effort of establishing another deep geologic repository,” said Bowen. WIPP, after all, took decades to open, so starting now could mean getting a new space in the 2040s or 2050s, with more waste piling up in the meantime. “We need to get going on that,” he continued. He’s hopeful things may get started in 2025.
And as with WIPP, the hardest part won’t be finding more salt spots, or deciding between volcanic rock and shale: It will be getting the people sitting in Washington and the people living atop those deposits to agree to something. “The affected public has to trust those who are implementing this process and those who are regulating this process,” said Macfarlane.
But the requirement goes the other way, she added: The implementers and regulators have to trust the public. That latter part often falls apart, she said………………………………………………………………
In the 1990s, Sandia National Laboratories convened linguists, scientists, and anthropologists, among others, to figure out how to separate WIPP from the people of the future. They came up with a plan involving signs and symbols: The site will be surrounded by huge earthen berms, metal objects and magnets buried within, meant to reflect radar beams and make this place register as magnetically anomalous. The perimeter will also host 25-foot-tall granite columns, engraved with warnings, and no-go markers will be buried up to six feet deep throughout the site. WIPP’s center, if someone gets that far, will host an information center that includes pictorial messages today’s humans hope will convey “leave this alone” to future ones.
Atlas has tended to function to create neoliberal conditions in America and across the globe: the purpose of this was to erase every obstacle to American corporations’ profit and growth.
The Atlas project, like that of its Mont Pelerin Society inner sanctum, has never been investedin democracy, which leading members saw as a threat to business interests. Democracy was a risk to be controlled or eliminated, not an aspirational form of government.
the movement that drives Atlas emerges out of the Cold War battle by business that asserts any social wage is a slippery slope to totalitarianism.
Twice in a fortnight, the president of the Heritage Foundation has declared that America is experiencing its second revolution. The revolution would remain bloodless(because their side is “winning”) “if the left allows it to be.” The two bodies whose acts provoked the announcements are leading Atlas Network partners; they are, furthermore, listed on the Council for National Policy (CNP) rolls. The two junktanks – and their partner organisations – are also spending millions of dollars in Europe to roll back rights for women and LGBTQIA people. The revolution is transnational. It is working to destroy rights and democratic projects around the world. The relentless pursuit of profit and the determination to impose virtue on an unruly world are united in authoritarian intent.
The Revolution
Both Heritage’s president Kevin Roberts’ announcements were made on Steve Bannon’s War Room broadcast, centralto the Trumpist movement and its efforts to remake America from every school boardandelectoral precinct upwards.
The first announcementof revolution was made on the 22nd June. It functioned as an advertisement for the MAGA audience to take part. Becoming a revolutionary involves undertaking Project 2025’s recruitmentand trainingof loyalists to staff the incoming Trump administration, but also at state and local government levels. Roberts declared they were building not just for 2025, but for the next century in the United States.
Project 2025 is the most recent iterationof Heritage’sMandate for Leadership. The first was written for Ronald Reagan, spelling out his massive reforms. He implementedtwo thirds in his first term. The last iteration for Donald Trump’s first term was similarly “business Republican” in tone, and Trump too implementedtwo thirds in his first year. The newest iteration is, as Roberts describes, revolutionary. It dictates the process for the dismantling most of the federal government as well as setting America on track to eliminate reproductive and Queer rights.
It also sets out the intention to dismantlethe vital energy transition work underway as a result of the Inflation Reduction Act, with plans to boost fossil fuel production instead. This is fitting as much of Heritage’s fundingcomes from fossil fuel sources. This is true for the Atlas Network generally, although it has tobacco and other unpopular corporate sectors as donors.
Project 2025 is a joint Atlas Network and CNP project.
The second announcementof revolution was made after the Supreme Court’s dramatic week of judgements. In particular, the one that granted the President of the United States immunity for the vaguely worded field of “official acts.” Naturally the partisan court will make the determination which acts are “official.”
The week also compounded the Trumpist Supreme Court’s norm-violating series of decisions that have rolled back reproductive healthcare access for women across Republican states, further damaged voters’ representation, and frozen programs that aim to address entrenched disadvantage.
As a footnote, the same week revealeda decision that said regions could make it illegal to be homeless. This can provide numbers for private prison operator profits. There prisoners are hiredout to businesses for near slave-labour wages.
No matter who wins the election in November, the radical right majority on the court can now prevent action their faction rejects: they have created an imperial juristocracy.
All these decisions have resulted from the years of work by the Federalist Society which handedTrump his literal list from which to choose judges. Republicans had stalledappointments to federal benches over the Obama era, granting Trump the giftof over one hundred appointments; some appointees were considered scandalous.
The years of surreptitious work by theFederalist Society and its Machiavellian leader, Leonard Leo, have been documentedby Pro Publica. The body made headlineswhen it was gifted $1.6 billion by a single donor. The corruption that pervades the Supreme Court features several Atlas and CNP junktanks. Heritage paidJustice Thomas’s insurrectionist wife a secret salary amounting to almost $700,000 between 2003 and 2007. The Federalist’s Leo paidGinni Thomas through her “consulting” firm. An Atlas Partner, the Islamophobic Center for Security Policy, paidher. Another Project 2025 Advisory Council and CNP member, Hillsdale College, also “employed” her. The coup being perpetrated by the court is funded by plutocrat donors to remove any constraints on their action. It is also used, by the filing of amicus briefs, to achieve goals such as restricting voting rights.
Why are fossil fuel magnates working with Christian extremists?
They are also Council for National Policy (CNP) members. The CNP is the Atlas-interlinked network that has been driving the Christian Nationalist takeover of America. In 2019, Columbia School of Journalism lecturer Ann Nelson documentedthat organisation, founded in 1981, in Shadow Network: Media, Money and the Secret Hub of the Radical Right. As with Atlas, Charles Koch is a major donor. The CNP has steered the evangelical television and radio media organisations that have helped turn (Heritage co-founder) Paul Weyrich’s Moral Majority from a marginal array of individual churches and groups into a more unified force with coherent policy platforms. The latest leaked CNP membership list from Documentedincludes several Atlas junktanks as integrated into that network as well as key players in American politics and media ranging from Mike Pence to Steve Bannon. Pence represents the Evangelical alliance that made Trump’s first term possible. Bannon represents both Rad Trad Catholicism and the esoteric “philosophy” of Traditionalism. This apocalyptic belief was exploredin 2021’s The War for Eternity: The Return of Traditionalism and the Rise of the Populist Right by University of Colorado ethnography professor Benjamin Teitelbaum. Bannon was a leading figure in the Rad Trad Catholicism that has been fightingas sedevacantists to say that the Catholic Church has no Pope but has been infiltrated by a socialist. They place Putin as a hero of Christians, with Moscow as the Third Rome. Another of its leaders, Archbishop Viganò, has just been excommunicated.
Charles Koch by contrast has been one of the drivers of the most extreme libertarianism in America. His brother, David, was placed at the forefront of their goals as their Libertarian Party vice-presidential candidate in 1980. It was a disastrousexperiment, with its brutal policies attracting a tiny percentage of the vote. The libertarian project needed a veil to win enough votes to enact it. Project 2025 is, likely, ultimately that veil. The Libertarian Party platform is expanded there, but so is the devastating statist authoritarianism of the Christian Nationalist movement. It appears that Charles Koch, unsurprisingly for anyone who has followed his career, will do anything to ensure his own freedom from constraint. Disdain for “woke” talking points might bolster that readiness.
Other key figures amongst the oligarch donors and their operatives appear much more committed to a statist agenda, whereby the government will enforce “Christian” virtue upon an immoral population. Their definition of virtue is distinctive. While the project to ensure women’s inability to engage in sexual activity outside inescapable marriage might not shock mainstream Christians, the concurrent oligarch campaign to prevent employers being compelled to ensure child labourers have a meal break should disturb them. The neofeudal truths at the core of the neoliberal branding are becoming clearer: to believe that employers will act responsibly without enforcement is to be their gull.
Both Heritage and the Federalist Society are run by Rad Trad Catholic extremists. Kevin Roberts has taken the Heritage Foundation from being the leading “business Republican” junktank in America to being at the tip of the spear of the Christian Nationalist attempt to turn the USA into a theocratic autocracy. Leonard Leo, who has orchestrated five radical Catholic appointments to the Supreme Court, is an extremist. The exact nature of the interactions between the two secretive networks is unclear.
The Atlas Network
Atlas has tended to function to create neoliberal conditions in America and across the globe: the purpose of this was to erase every obstacle to American corporations’ profit and growth. Local aspiring oligarchs are enlisted to fund the project within their own terrain for those same goals. While the intent was ostensibly free market, the impact has always been to promote the interests ofmonopolists and oligopolists at the expense of competitors and the society around them. Some of the junktanks in Atlas have promoted reactionary social messaging as their bailiwick. TheActon Institute for the Study of Religion and Liberty has been the highest profile example. It exists to educate business leaders and academics in “the connection that can exist between virtue and economic thinking.” Leonard Leo jokedto the Institute in 2017 about not yet managing to “launch a hostile takeover” of the Supreme Court.
There appear to be two main intents for this aspect of the Atlas information campaign. One is to conceal the immorality of the “free market” project stripped of any constraints on the actions of business no matter the harm done. To appeal to a sufficient electoral percentage to gain power, they deployed a social message that endorsed individual “virtue.” The strategy was called paleoconservativism.
Evangelicals had worked in cooperationwith the interests of fossil fuel (at the expense of First Peoples) for decades beforehand, but the movement that drives Atlas emerges out of the Cold War battle by business that asserts any social wage is a slippery slope to totalitarianism. During the Cold War, communism was depicted as deadly to business but also atheist and immoral: the Manichaean battle between good and evil made a Christian Libertarianism (or religious neoliberalism) the answer. It promoted both ultimate freedom for business and the enforcing of religion and virtue on the population.
This cynical project had the additional important role of ensuring that the damage done to society and family by the Fordist economic model was mitigated by pressure on individuals (mainly women) to fill the cracks in family and community created by ruthless market societies.
The Atlas project, like that of its Mont Pelerin Society inner sanctum, has never been investedin democracy, which leading members saw as a threat to business interests. Democracy was a risk to be controlled or eliminated, not an aspirational form of government.
Investigative journalist at the New Yorker Jane Mayer revealedAtlas’s American operations in Dark Money: How a Secretive Group of Billionaires is trying to buy Political Control in the US in 2016. She used the label “Kochtopus” after the networks’ biggest funders and strategists. In 2018, Duke University history Professor Nancy MacLean documentedits longer history in Democracy in Chains: the deep history of the radical right’s stealth plan for America. It was only after the book’s completion that MacLean became awareof the network’s secretive global ramifications as Atlas.
Also founded in 1981, the Network systematises propaganda for the Chicago School’s bunk economics, so ably disseminated by Milton Friedman. It now has around600 partner organisations in over 100 countries, but its global operations remain less obvious because the system is intentionally covert. Local transparency failures suppress information about its funding and impact.
The central “think” tanks fosterthe replication of more such bodies, providing seed funding if necessary and training in fundraising and public relations strategies to help the local offshoots become independent. They network. The primary function is to sell the donors’ messages by advertising them constantly: in 1985, Heritage Foundation co-founder Ed Feulner toldAustralian operatives to treat campaigns as if they were for a toothpaste brand that needed constant reinforcing. The messages: low tax, deregulation, small government, dismantling of social safety nets. Together the junktanks, as journalist George Monbiot has labelledthem, create a chorus of voices from university centres and civil society bodies reinforcing the wishlist.
Dr Jeremy Walker explainedthe process by which the Atlas Network architecture of influence operates in the lead-up to the Voice referendum in 2023. His “Freedom to Burn” essay details the intimate connections in Australia between mining goals and the the Atlas Network’s architecture of influence. The sideline in culture war battles promoted by the low-rent Atlas junktanks like the Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) and LibertyWorks, aided by allyAtlas-connected Rupert Murdoch, both divides voters from their economic interests and fosters the demonisation of rights culture. Without rights, women, LGBTQIA people, non-White and non-Christian people can be returned to their traditionalsubservience.
Quinn Slobodian is trackingthe interaction of (Atlas) junktanks and the European far-right. A French investigationhas detailed the way that corporate goals are being pursued by Atlas affiliates in Europe. An Italian investigationexplored corporate money and Atlas connections supporting far right politics there. Hungary’s Viktor Orbán is a leading figure in the transnational movement. Heritagehas connections with these far-right parties.
Hindsight reveals the way revolutionising political economy and the law to grant monopolist corporations their every goalhas failed to produce the economic paradise promised by the Chicago School’s plutocrat economics. This year, UC law professor Mehrsa Baradaran has detailedin The Quiet Coup: Neoliberalism and the Looting of America the role that Atlas and Chicago School economics played in rewriting the law to oblige plutocrats. Columbia Law School professor Katharina Pistor has documentedhow contract law is used to concentrate power in the hands of the wealthy in The Code of Capital: How the Law Creates Wealth and Inequality.
In Australia, the presence of these Atlas junktanks has been primarily deployed to reinforce “business propaganda,” but the social messages of disgust for modern, inclusive society are readily apparent too. The interlinked Ramsay Centre seems to be the strongest voice for outright Christian goals. That may relate to the close involvement ofAtlas-connected Tony Abbott who is a key figure in the global campaign to place Christianity both as a religion and as a cultural signifier for White Western “civilisation” to the forefront of politics. This is visible in his workwith Viktor Orbán and also on the Alliance for Responsible CitizenshipAdvisory Board./
Atlas’s extremist connections
The more toxic and bigoted “family values” groups tend to appear interconnected with Atlas rather than Atlas partners themselves. Trump appointeeBetsy DeVos, for example, links the two. She has been chairand on the boardof two Atlas partners: the American Federation for Childrenthat aims to replace the public school system with privatised charter schools and the Acton Institute Both her Prince and DeVos families are substantial donors to the anti-LGBTQIA group Focus on Family. Focus is part of the CNP, whose donors include Charles Koch and the Prince and DeVos families.
Both the extremist Christians and the libertarians are close to achieving their goals in America. Apart from the impact the implosion of the United States government and civil rights framework will have on the rest of the world, this is relevant because the very global nature of Atlas means that its outposts are trying to replicate its work outside the American homeland. These campaigns are reinforced by the fact that America’s homegrown Pentecostalform of Christianity has been an aggressively international missionary project from its earliest days.
The European Parliament conducted a studyaffirming reportingthat $280 million dollars have been funnelled into the EU over the last decade by Atlas and CNP partners as well as by Evangelical mission programs. Heritage and Federalist stand alongside the Cato Institute, the Leadership Institute and Acton as having donated roughly $20 million towards European groups fighting to repeal reproductive healthcare rights and LGBTQIA rights. Another American body, the CNP-connected American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (TFP) has also been training European groups in strategy in cooperation with Bruce Eberle a “visiting professor” at the Leadership Institute. The Koch, DeVos and Prince families are named as major sources of the money. (These donations are overshadowed in scale by those from European and Russian sources.)
Atlas and CNP seem to be convening around the National Conservative (NatCon) project. This is a transnational exercise that manifests in various conferences. Some are NatCon, or PopCon or CPAC or Faith and Freedom. The Alliance for Responsible Citizenship (in large part funded by the Atlas-partner, the Legatum Institute) would fall within the parameters. NatCon is a network of religio-ethnonationalist operators. The Christian Nationalists are supported by, and supportive of, extremist nationalist projects focused on religion as an ethnic identifier. A Jewish nationalist is one of the founders of the movement, and Modi’s Hindutva nationalism is also befriended. The projects all denote Muslims as a chief enemy, with ethnic cleansing implied and even stated. Each dictates a “traditional” identity and social roles as key to their mission. Natalistpolicies supporting higher birth rates in the approved identity group accompany such goals, often linked to attacks on feminism and LGBTQIA rights. Race suicide is the result of these “evils.”
The message of “freedom” is endorsed for business and the individual. The individual must be free from public health measures of protective regulations by demonised bodies such as the UN or EU or WHO. The freedom of “woke” people, by contrast, is a threat rather than a consideration.
Rod Dreher’s accountof last October’s inaugural Alliance for Responsible Citizenship event focused on the extreme Christianity that underpinned it, not surprising since Dreher has converted twice in pursuit of a more rigorous faith. The (Atlas) Australian Institute for Progress reportsemphasised that feature too. The populist NatCon events such as CPAC unite conspiracists with libertarians and preachers. Australia saw such a conferencein Albury in March.
A key purpose of these events is shaping a communal identity in the face of a manufactured existential threat. The identity being forged stands in opposition to modern, inclusive and knowledge-based societies. The diagonalistideology visible there too – where left and right attributes are muddied – is drawing Christianity in as a key component for that identity. Russell Brand is not the only influencer to have ostentatiously converted to Christianity recently.
For many of the participants, the identity they are building together is connected to being White. The Atlas Network, like the Kochs, emerges out of the John Birch Society era of American conspiracist racism. Christianity is the code.
Christianity has the added advantage for an extreme libertarian project of demanding obedience and promising rewards for it in the Afterlife.
The NatCon project is often intertwined with fossil fuel money. It is, unsurprisingly, also deeply antagonistic to climate action.
Conclusion
Evangelical groupsin Australia are often transnational and importing ultraconservative goals here.
A separate presence of CNP groups is not yet obvious, but it is worth noting that Feulner, speaking to Atlas junktanks in Australia in 1985, would have been as much connected to the CNP as Atlas.
Australia’s Centre for Independent Studies (CIS) mostly leaves the culture war battles on gender and religious virtues to the IPA and their media ally, News Corp. This October’s CIS Consiliumevent where the Atlas pipelinersintermingle with localand internationaltalking heads is running adjacent to the inaugural conference of the Australian Chapter of the Alliance for Responsible Citizenship. The consecutive timing is convenient for international guests to attend both.
America’s second revolution is frightening. While Trump disavowsProject 2025, his current spokesperson is part of the project. It will be difficult for him to step away from a strategy designed by people he has worked with, setting out the steps his people need to take and providing him with the partisan leaders and employees he will need to enact his dreams of vengeance. He is too lazy not to accept the process.
The rest of us must remain focused on the fact that these networks operate transnationally. They share talking points, strategies, people and money. The revolution that Kevin Roberts has declared they are winning in the US is to be reenacted, piecemeal, for all of us.
The nation’s 85 interim storage sites hold more than 86,000 tons of waste, a situation that’s akin to leaving your trash behind the garage indefinitely. The situation could grow more dire as the nation invests in advanced small modular reactors.
Everybody talks about the shiny new reactors, but nobody ever talks about back-end management of the fuel that comes out of them.”
The world’s first permanent depository for nuclear fuel waste opens later this year on Olkiluoto, a sparsely populated and lushly forested island in the Baltic Sea three hours north of Helsinki.
Onkalo — the name means “cavity” or “cave” in Finnish — is among the most advanced facilities of its kind, designed for an unprecedented and urgent task: safely storing some of the most toxic material on Earth nearly 1,500 feet underground in what’s called a deep mined geologic repository.
The process requires remarkable feats of engineering. It begins in an encapsulation plant, where robots remove spent nuclear fuel rods from storage canisters and place them in copper and cast iron casks up to two stories tall. Once full, these hefty vessels, weighing around 24 metric tons, will descend more than a quarter-mile in an elevator to a cavern hollowed out of crystalline bedrock 2 billion years old. (The trip takes 50 minutes.) Each tomb will hold 30 to 40 of these enormous containers ensconced in bentonite clay and sealed behind concrete. As many as 3,250 canisters containing 6,500 metric tons of humanity’s most dangerous refuse will, the theory goes, lie undisturbed for hundreds of thousands of years.
Nothing assembled by human hands has stood for more than a fraction of that. The world’s oldest known structure, Gobekli Tepe in Turkey, is a bit more than 11,000 years old. Designing Onkalo to endure for so unfathomably long is necessary because the material left behind by nuclear fission remains radioactive for millennia. Safely disposing of it requires stashing it for, essentially, eternity. That way nothing — be it natural disasters, future ice ages, or even the end of humanity itself — would expose anyone, or anything, to its dangers.
The plan is that there will be no sign [of the facility],” said Pasi Tuohimaa, communications manager for Posiva, the agency that manages Finland’s nuclear waste. “Nobody would even know it’s there, whether we’re talking about future generations or future aliens or whatever.”
Building such a place, as technologically complex as it is, might be easier than convincing a community to host it. Gaining that approval can take decades and rests upon a simple premise.
“One of the principles of geologic disposal is the idea that the generations that enjoy the benefits of nuclear power should also pay for and participate in the solution,” said Rodney Ewing, a mineralogist and materials scientist at Stanford University and co-director of the university’s Center for International Security and Cooperation.
The long process of gaining such support is called consent-based siting, an undertaking many in the nuclear energy sector consider vital as the world abandons fossil fuels. Nuclear power accounts for almost a fifth of the United States’ electricity generation, and its expansion is among the few elements of the Biden administration’s energy agenda that enjoys strong bipartisan support. Over the last year, Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm has touted the nation’s newest reactor, celebrated plans for an experimental small modular reactor, and unveiled a $1.5 billion loan to restart a defunct plant in Michigan.
These are hardly one-offs. The U.S. intends to triple its nuclear energy capacity by 2050. Yet experts say there isn’t enough public discussion of how to deal with the corresponding increase in radioactive trash, which will compound a problem the country has deferred since the start of the nuclear age. After botching plans for a deep mined geological repository a generation ago, the United States is scrambling to catch up to Finland and several other nations, including Canada, which could choose a site by year’s end.
As the U.S. races toward a post-carbon future in which nuclear energy could play a key role, policymakers, energy experts, and community leaders say dealing with the inevitable waste isn’t a technical problem, but a social one. Engineers know how to build a repository capable of safeguarding the public for millennia. The bigger challenge is convincing people that it’s safe to live next to it.
The United States knew, even before the world’s first commercial nuclear power plant began operating in Pennsylvania in 1957, how best to dispose of the effluvium generated by splitting atoms to generate electricity. Earlier that year, geologists and geophysicists wrote a National Academy of Sciences report that proposed burying it. Opinions haven’t changed much in the 67 years since.
“The only viable way to possibly deal with the issue of isolating radioactive waste that can remain hazardous for hundreds of thousands of years from the environment is a deep geologic repository,” said Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety at the Union of Concerned Scientists. “There’s really no alternative.”
Yet this refuse, most of it from the nation’s 54 commercial reactors, remains in what amounts to cold storage. Depleted fuel rods are kept on-site in water tanks for about half a decade, then moved to steel and concrete canisters called dry casks and held for another 40 years in what’s known asinterim storage. Only then is the material cool enough to stash underground. That last step has never happened, however. The nation’s 85 interim storage sites hold more than 86,000 tons of waste, a situation that’s akin to leaving your trash behind the garage indefinitely. The situation could grow more dire as the nation invests in advanced small modular reactors.
“It’s a pet peeve of mine, to be honest,” said Paul Murray, who became the Department of Energy’s deputy assistant secretary for spent fuel and waste disposition in October. “Everybody talks about the shiny new reactors, but nobody ever talks about back-end management of the fuel that comes out of them.”
Congress attempted to rectify that in 1982 when it passed the Nuclear Waste Policy Act. President Ronald Reagan called the law “an important step in the pursuit of the peaceful uses of atomic energy.” It required that the federal government begin taking responsibility for the nation’s nuclear waste by 1998, and that the utilities generating it pay a fee of one-tenth of a cent per kilowatt-hour of nuclear-generated electricity to be rid of it. The plan stalled because the government never took possession of most of the waste. That failure has allowed the utilities to collect $500 million in fines from Washington each year since 1998. A report that the Government Accountability Office released in 2021 noted that federal liabilities could reach $60 billion by 2030.
The federal government’s missteps continued when plans for a deep geologic repository derailed about 15 years ago. The 1982 law directed the Department of Energy to provide the president, Congress, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and the Environmental Protection Agency with suggestions for several sites. Congress amended the law in 1987 to designate one: Yucca Mountain, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas on land the Western Shoshone Nation considers sacred.
This top-down process was the antithesis of consent-based siting, and it collapsed amid community opposition and the efforts of then-Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. The Nevada Democrat convinced President Obama to scuttle the proposal, which by that point had cost $13 billion. The Obama administration convened a panel of scientists to devise a new plan; in 2012, it suggested creating an independent agency, giving it responsibility for the nuclear fund and directing it to revamp the effort through consent-based siting.
That recommendation mimicked what Finland had done, and Canada was doing, to build community consensus. Posiva spent four decades working toward the facility on Olkiluoto; the Canadian search started 24 years ago with the creation of the independent Nuclear Waste Management Organization. Yet more than 10 years after the Department of Energy made consent-based siting its official policy, there’s been little progress toward a deep mined geologic repository in the U.S. for commercial nuclear waste. (Radioactive refuse generated by the defense industry has, since 1999, been secured 2,150 feet underground at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in New Mexico.)
Instead of identifying possible sites for a deep geologic repository, the Energy Department directed Murray, who has a background in nuclear technology and environmental stewardship, to address a backlog of waste that could, by his estimate, take 55 years to clear out of interim storage. Much of this trash is languishing in dry casks that dot power plants in 37 states. Last year, he formed a 12-member Consent-Based Siting Consortia to start the search for a federally-managed site that would temporarily consolidate the nation’s waste until a permanent site is built.
The foremost reason is that as the project was being discussed with the public, SKB’s research was found to be incomplete and, in certain cases, inaccurate.
When, in 2011, Sweden’s SKB first applied for a license to build the Forsmark repository, the KBS-3 project documentation was published, which made it possible to give the project a review that would be independent from the nuclear industry’s own evaluation.
In February 2016, a special expert group appointed by the government, called the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste (Kärnavfallsrådet), published a 167-page report entitled “Nuclear Waste State-of-the-Art Report 2016: Risks, uncertainties and future challenges.” Among other things, it identifies the repository project’s risks and uncertainties having to do with earthquake impacts, with the long-term prospects of financing and monitoring the site’s condition, and with the health effects of low doses of radiation.
Finland has no such expert body. The concept of the repository, under construction in Euroajoki municipality, is criticized by many Finnish scientists, but the government is not taking notice and is likewise ignoring the scientific objections coming from its neighbor Sweden.
When haste makes risky waste: Public involvement in radioactive and nuclear waste management in Sweden and Finland – How did it happen that in Sweden, the country that developed the technology for deep geological disposal of radioactive waste, construction of a such a repository – a first of its kind in the world – has been suspended for recognized risks and uncertainties, whereas Finland, which has copied the Swedish approach, is moving full speed ahead with building one? Bellona has looked for the answer on a fact-finding visit of the two countries. Bellona August 9, 2016 by Andrei Ozharovsky, translated by Maria Kaminskaya
“……..Out of sight, out of mind?
The deep geological disposal concept was first suggested over 40 years ago to solve the problem of spent nuclear fuel, the nuclear industry’s most dangerous byproduct. To a certain degree, this was a continuation of the “bury and forget about it” principle, applied to the less radioactive and thus less dangerous waste – radioactive waste. But where radioactive waste could be placed in shallow trench-type reservoirs or semi-buried near-surface concrete vaults, for nuclear waste, disposal facilities – repositories or burial sites – were proposed for construction in rock formations at a depth of several hundred meters. To date, no such deep geological repository has been created anywhere in the world.
The engineering side of a project for such a repository has been most fully explored in Sweden, where the concept has been under development since the 1970s by the Swedish Nuclear Fuel and Waste Management Company (Svensk Kärnbränslehantering AB, SKB). In 1984, the concept of direct final disposal of spent fuel inside hermetically sealed copper canisters embedded in bentonite clay and placed in crystalline bedrock at a depth of 500 meters – the so-called KBS-3 method – was, by a political decision of the Swedish government, adopted as the “most acceptable from the point of view of ensuring safety and radiation protection.” Suggested over 30 years ago, this approach to a possibility of relatively safe disposal of radioactive waste and spent nuclear fuel is one that is still endorsed and promoted by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
The KBS-3 method also served as the basis for the Onkalo Finnish repository, near Olkiluoto Nuclear Power Plant, and already construction has started there. But in Sweden, where the concept originated, the KBS-3 repository project ultimately sited for Forsmark, near Forsmark Nuclear Power Plant, has yet to receive government approval. SKB has for several years been attempting to obtain a license to start construction in Forsmark, but has been denied permission by a land and environmental court ruling.
The foremost reason is that as the project was being discussed with the public, SKB’s research was found to be incomplete and, in certain cases, inaccurate. It turned out, for instance, that there is significant disagreement over the estimated corrosion rate of the copper canisters – which are considered the main engineered barrier to prevent the escape of long-lived radionuclides into the surrounding environment. SKB asserts the canisters will remain intact for the next 100,000 years, while independent university research shows that copper’s corrosion rate in an oxygen-free environment but in the presence of salty seawater is considerably higher than expected and that the canisters may start to decay within the first thousand years………
Independent science steps in
An independent scientific assessment of a project is made possible, first and foremost, by complete transparency and access to information – and not to the abridged environmental impact assessment statement, but to project documentation detailing engineering solutions that are critical to safety. This access only is what gives substance and meaning to public control over the nuclear industry’s actions.
When, in 2011, Sweden’s SKB first applied for a license to build the Forsmark repository, the KBS-3 project documentation was published, which made it possible to give the project a review that would be independent from the nuclear industry’s own evaluation.
Researchers at a number of universities experimented with testing copper’s susceptibility to corrosion under various environments. It was thus established that copper’s corrosion rate observed during experiments was much higher than that cited in SKB’s calculations. In particular, corrosion was shown to be accelerated by heat and radiation emitted by the radioactive waste that was expected to be disposed of in copper canisters. These were the first tests of such kind since the issue of copper corrosion over hundreds of thousands of years had simply not been taken up by scientists before.
Other facts cast doubt over the KBS-3 project’s safety as well. In February 2016, a special expert group appointed by the government, called the Swedish National Council for Nuclear Waste (Kärnavfallsrådet), published a 167-page report entitled “Nuclear Waste State-of-the-Art Report 2016: Risks, uncertainties and future challenges.” Among other things, it identifies the repository project’s risks and uncertainties having to do with earthquake impacts, with the long-term prospects of financing and monitoring the site’s condition, and with the health effects of low doses of radiation. The same National Council had earlier published reports on copper corrosion and bentonite clay erosion – the project’s two main engineered safety barriers. The council’s reports as an independent scientific body and at the same time one acting on a mandate from the Swedish government played an important role in revealing the KBS-3 project’s flaws.
Finland has no such expert body. The concept of the repository, under construction in Euroajoki municipality, is criticized by many Finnish scientists, but the government is not taking notice and is likewise ignoring the scientific objections coming from its neighbor Sweden. Finnish Parliament member Satu Hassi told the June visit participants that, for instance, one such voice of criticism is the retired Finnish geologist Matti Saarnisto, who believes no suitable place in Finland exists at all for a repository since no safety guarantees can be provided during the next expected ice age………..
The precautionary principle is not being observed, either: There is no certainty that the copper corrosion rate, the ice conditions, and the seismic risks have been properly factored in.
“Under the worst possible scenario, dangerous radionuclides may escape into the surrounding environment already in a thousand years, the first of the 500 thousand years that the repository, according to SKB’s assertions, is designed for. Our data says radiation levels at the surface in such a case may exceed background radiation levels by 1,000 times. This is unacceptable,” Swahn said.
MKG, the Swedish NGO Office for Nuclear Waste Review has made an unofficial translation into English of the Swedish Environmental Court opinion on the power industry’s Nuclear Waste Company SKB’s license application for a final repository for spent nuclear fuel in Forsmark, Sweden.
The court said no to the application because it considered that there were problems with the copper canister that had to be resolved now and not later. The translation shows the courts judicial argumentation and why it decided not to accept the regulator SSM’s opinion that the problems with the integrity of the copper canister were not serious and could likely be solved at a later stage in the decision-making process.
The main difference between the court’s and the regulator’s decision-making was that the court decided to rely on a multitude of scientific sources and information and not only on the material provided by SKB. It had also been uncovered that the main corrosion expert at SSM did not want to say yes to the application at this time that may have influenced the court’s decision-making. In fact there appear to have been many dissenting voices in the regulator despite the regulator’s claim in the court that a united SSM stood behind its opinion.
The court underlines in its opinion that the Environmental Code requires that the repository should be shown to be safe at this stage in the decision-making process, i.e. before the government has its say. The court says that some uncertainties will always remain but it sees the possible copper canister problems as so serious that it is not clear that the regulator’s limits for release of radioactivity can be met. This is a reason to say no to the project unless it can be shown that the copper canister will work as intended. The copper canister has to provide isolation from the radioactivity in the spent nuclear fuel to humans and the environment for very long time-scales.
It is still unclear how the process will proceed. The community of Östhammar has cancelled the referendum on the repository, as there will be no question from the government in the near future. The government has set up a working group of civil servants to manage the government’s handling of the opinions delivered by the court and SSM. SSM has told the government that it is ok to say yes to the license application.
The court has stated that there are copper canister issues that need to be considered further. The nuclear waste company SKB has said that it is preparing documentation for the government to show that there are no problems with the canister. Whether the government thinks that this will be enough remains to be seen. This is likely not what the court had in mind. The government would be wise to make a much broader review of the issue. There is a need for a thorough judicial review on the governmental level in order to override the court’s opinion. Otherwise the government’ decision may not survive an appeal to the Supreme Administrative Court.
There are eminent corrosion experts that are of the opinion that copper is a bad choice as a canister material. There is also increasing experimental evidence that this is the case. One problem for the court was likely that SKB has hesitant to do the required corrosion studies that show that copper does not corrode in an anoxic repository environment. The 18-year FEBEX field test shows that copper corrodes relatively rapidly with pitting corrosion. SKB says that all corrosion is due to in-leaking oxygen but it is now clear that experimental systems containing copper and clay become anoxic within weeks or months so this explanation is not valid.
MKG has for long wanted SKB to retrieve the next experimental package in the LOT field test in the Äspö Hard Rock Laboratory. SKB had refused. The remaining packages have now been heated for 18 years. When a 5-year package was retrieved in 2006 it was discovered that there was “unexpectedly high corrosion”. There is clearly a need for more lab and field test results to decide whether copper is a good and safe choice for a canister material.
The court’s decision-making shows the importance of a democratic and open governance in environmental decision-making. It is important that the continued decision-making regarding the Swedish repository for spent nuclear is transparent and multi-faceted.
Zelensky: The “Winston Churchill of Our Time” (George W. Bush)
In the Western symphony of propaganda, the hated Putin, the “autocrat,” is contrasted with the heroic Zelensky the “democrat” (Time magazine’s 2022 “person of the year”). But how democratic is Zelensky?
His man-of-the-hour image had help from international friends. Zelensky’s global perception management team is run by a well-connected London-based British firm, The PR Network, that helps him prepare messages for global consumption.
“It is not a matter of what is true that counts, but a matter of what is perceived to be true.”
– Henry Kissinger
“But the most brilliant propagandist technique will yield no success unless one fundamental principle is borne in mind constantly and with unflagging attention. It must confine itself to a few points and repeat them over and over.”
– Adolf Hitler
“We lied, we cheated, we stole. We had entire training courses [on deceiving the public].”
– Mike Pompeo on his time as CIA director
What is state propaganda? It is a disciplined and coordinated discourse using mass persuasion on behalf of state interests. It’s one instrument of what’s called realpolitik – foreign policy designed to advance “national interests,” which in a neoliberal economy like the US means corporate interests. The oligarchs, the billionaire class in the age of neoliberalism, in their unfettered greed have employed both US political parties and their accessories in the media, the intelligence community, and Congress and turned them into a collective ministry of (dis)information and subalterns of empire. Propaganda as a tool in foreign policy commonly relies on hate-laden ideology to mobilize public consensus.
Enemies
A key to successful mass mobilization of the public mind is the enemy construct. One of the key studies on the subject found that the US has had a permanent need for enemies, and when not “readily available, we have created them” (Finlay, Holsti, and Fagen, cited in Murray & Myers, 1989, p. 555). Russia as enemy (Russophobia) works just as well if not better when it’s conceived in demeaning ethnic rather than political economic terms. That’s because hierarchical race and ethnicity ideas are closer to the surface of public prejudice than those focused on, for example, effigies of socialism or communism. In other words, it is easier to orchestrate hatred toward Russia and Putin when there preexists a deep distrust of Russians, their history, and (orthodox religious) culture and its people based on “difference” and a perceived civilizational threat to the West. Under such collective psychological conditioning, this has led to a rejection of Russia membership in the congregation controlled by white European Christian nations.
The US has manufactured innumerable enemies during the course of its existence, and it has had to in order to become a world superpower. Since 1776, there have been only 16 years when the country was not at war. In the pantheon of America’s villains during its 247-year history, one of the most prominent portraits is that of the demonic Vladimir Putin, whose “enemy” status among Americans was pumped up to 70% by March 2022, soon after the start of Russia’s “special operation” in Ukraine.
The “liberal” Democrats are found to be far more inclined to carry out a proxy war against Russia than Republicans and much more supportive of supplying Ukraine with advanced weapons and US troops: tanks (67% to 48%), long-range missiles (60% to 41%), fighter jets (56% to 39%), direct invasion (33% to 22%) (Frankovic and Orth, 2023). Former CIA director and defense secretary under Obama, Leon Panetta bluntly declared, ‘It’s a proxy war with Russia, whether we say so or not” (Bloomberg, 2022).
The massive US “proxy” assault on Russia, more like a full-scale invasion but without its own troops physically on the ground and in the air, is only the latest episode of a hundred-year-old effort to impose Western hegemony over that country. It started with the joint “expedition” that the sanctimonious Woodrow Wilson (“I am going to teach the South American republics to elect good men”) sent to Siberia and northern Russia in a failed attempt, along with mainly European allies, to back the White Russians in the civil war and overthrow the Bolshevik government. Anti-communism was toned down during the Second World War, as it was the Soviet Union, including Ukraine, tactically allied with the US and the British Empire, that bore by far the heaviest burden, suffering 27 million deaths, in defeating the Nazi regime. It’s a sobering reality of historical proportions that is rarely acknowledged in the US. Immediately following the war, the US quickly converted the USSR/Russia from ally to enemy (and their enemies to allies) and worked closely with anti-communist groups in Ukraine and the larger Soviet region in efforts to break apart the Soviet state.
The then newly formed CIA, established in 1947, covertly supervised underground far right organizations in Ukraine, in particular the pro-Nazi Organization of Ukrainian Nationalists (OUN) and the anti-Soviet Ukraine Insurgent Army (UPA), as part of its “psychological warfare activities
The venting may harm pregnant women and fetuses, advocates say.
SEARCHLIGHT NEW MEXICO, by Alicia Inez Guzmán 12 June 24
Last fall, the international community rose up in defense of the Pacific Ocean. Seafood and salt purveyors, public policy professors, scientists and environmentalists, all lambasted Japan’s release of radioactive wastewater from the disastrously damaged Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant into the sea.
At the heart of the contention was tritium, an element that, by mass, is 150,000 times more radioactive than the plutonium used in the cores of nuclear weapons. Odorless and colorless, tritium — the radioactive form of hydrogen — combines with oxygen to form water. Just one teaspoon is enough to contaminate 100 billion gallons more water up to the U.S. drinking water standard, according to Arjun Makhijani, an expert on nuclear fusion and author of the monograph, “Exploring Tritium Dangers.”
What didn’t make international headlines — but was quietly taking place on the other side of the world — was Los Alamos National Laboratory’s own plans to vent the same radioactive substance into northern New Mexico’s mountain air. Japan’s releases would take place over three decades. LANL’s would include up to three times more tritium — and take place in a matter of days.
There is no hard timeline for the release, but if the plans are approved by the Environmental Protection Agency, LANL is looking at a period with “sufficiently warm weather,” a spokesperson from the National Nuclear Security Administration wrote by email. That could mean as soon as this summer.
Those controversial plans date back to 2016, when LANL discovered that a potentially explosive amount of hydrogen and oxygen was building up in four containers of tritium waste stored in a decades-old nuclear dump called Area G. The safest and most technically viable solution, the lab decided — and the best way to protect workers — would be to release the pressure and, with it, thousands of curies of tritium into the air.
When advocates caught wind of the venting in March 2020, Covid was in its earliest and most unnerving phase. Pueblo leaders, advocates and environmentalists wrote impassioned letters to the lab and the EPA, demanding that they change or, at the very least, postpone the release until after the pandemic. At the same time, Tewa Women United, a nonprofit founded by Indigenous women from northern New Mexico, issued its first online petition, focusing on tritium’s ability to cross the placental barrier and possibly harm pregnant women and their fetuses. Only after a maelstrom of opposition did the lab pause its plans and begin briefing local tribes and other concerned members of the community.
“We see this as a generational health issue,” said Kayleigh Warren, Tewa Women United’s food and seed sovereignty coordinator. “Just like all the issues of radioactive exposure are generational health issues.”
Last fall, the lab again sought the EPA’s consent. A second petition from Tewa Women United followed. Eight months later, the federal agency’s decision is still pending.
The NNSA, which oversees the health of America’s nuclear weapons stockpile from within the Department of Energy, declined Searchlight New Mexico’s requests for an interview.
The crux of the issue comes down to what is and isn’t known about the state of the containers’ contents. Computer modeling suggests they are pressurized and flammable, but the actual explosive risk has not been measured, the lab has conceded.
Critics have requested that the contents be sampled first to determine whether there is any explosive risk and whether venting is even needed. The EPA says that sampling would require going through the same red tape as venting. The lab, for its part, plans to sample and vent the contents in one fell swoop.
But why, critics wonder, are these containers in this state in the first place? Were they knowingly over packed and left for years to grow into ticking time bombs?
“I do not like the position we’re in,” James Kenney, cabinet secretary of the New Mexico Environment Department, told the Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee in 2020. The containers, he said, had been “neglected for so long by both DOE and the Environment Department” that NMED potentially faces a lose-lose situation: Vent the tritium drums and try to prevent the emissions from being released into the air or “run the risk of leaving those drums onsite knowing that they are pressurized and could rupture, meaning an uncontrolled amount of tritium would go out.”
Venting and vexing
State and federal documents paint a kind of chicken-and-egg dilemma. The containers can’t be moved until the pressure is vented. But the movement itself may cause more pressure to build up, requiring a second, third or even fourth venting……………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Tritium 101
Plutonium and uranium are familiar to most people, if by name only. But few know anything at all about tritium — a radioactive isotope of hydrogen that is used to make watch dials and EXIT signs glow bright neon. Tritium’s other, lesser-known use is as a “boost gas,” which, when inserted into the hollow core of a plutonium pit, amplifies a nuclear weapon’s yield. Globally, hundreds of atmospheric weapons tests dispersed tritium into the atmosphere, steeping rain, sea, and groundwater with the element and, ultimately, lacing sediment worldwide.
Tritium is widely produced at nuclear reactors and is today tested, handled and routinely released at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Criticisms of this venting have always centered on two of the element’s key characteristics: First, it travels “tens to hundreds of miles,” according to lab documents. Second, when tritium is in the form of water, it becomes omnipresent and easy for bodies to absorb.
“Tritium is unique in this,” wrote Makhijani. “It makes water, the stuff of life, most of the mass of living beings, radioactive.”
Years of LANL reports depict tritium’s ubiquity in the lands and ecosystem within its bounds, a palimpsest of radioactive decay. This is measured in curies, a basic unit that counts the rate of decay second by second.
The lab’s first environmental impact statement, published in 1979, estimated that it had buried close to 262,000 curies of tritium at Area G and released tens of thousands more into the air from various stacks over the decades. The lab had two major accidental releases of tritium around the same time — 22,000 curies in the summer of 1976 and nearly 31,000 curies in the fall of 1977.
Today, trees have taken it into their root systems on Area G’s southeast edge. Rodents scurrying in and out of waste shafts are riddled with the substance, owing to tritium vapors from years past. A barn owl ate those rodents and had 740 times more tritium concentration in its body than the U.S. drinking water standard, the common reference value for indicating tritium contamination. The lab’s honeybee colonies — kept to determine how radioactive contaminants are absorbed — produced tritiated honey up to 380 times more concentrated than the drinking water standard, reports show.
The EPA set the current standard for radioactive emissions at DOE facilities in 1989, but that didn’t stop the lab from releasing thousands of curies of tritium into the air shortly afterward. In 1991, the EPA issued a notice of non-compliance to the lab for not calculating how much of a radiation dose the public received. Another notice followed in 1992.
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety filed a lawsuit two years later alleging that the DOE hadn’t properly monitored radioactive emissions, as required by the Clean Air Act. At the time, a former lab safety officer, Luke Bartlein, observed what he described in an affidavit as a “pattern and practice of deception at LANL with respect to the radionuclide air monitoring system.” It was routine for lab staffers and management to vent glove boxes and other materials contaminated with tritium outside so that the contamination would deliberately “not register” on the stack monitors, he recounted, leading to false emissions reports.
The lab settled in 1997; a consent decree followed and would stay in effect until 2003. The lab says it has maintained low annual emissions ever since…………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
In 1999, Makhijani and more than 100 scientists, activists and physicians across the country and worldwide signed a letter to the National Academy of Sciences. Their ask? To evaluate how radionuclides that cross the placental boundary, including tritium, impact the fetus, a request Makhijani renewed in 2022.
As he put it, tritium — the “most ubiquitous pollutant from both nuclear power and nuclear weapons” — has largely escaped regulatory and scientific scrutiny when it comes to matters of pregnancy.
Cindy Folkers, the radiation and health hazard specialist at Beyond Nuclear, a national advocacy organization, believes the reason is rooted in the radiation establishment’s fear of liability. “You get layers and layers and layers and layers of denial.”
The scant research that does exist comes from pregnant women who survived atomic bombs in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. In 1986, the International Commission on Radiation Protection concluded that exposing a fetus to ionizing radiation, the kind that tritium emits, has a “damaging effect…upon the development of the embryonic and fetal brain.” The area most at risk of harm, it went on, is the forebrain, which controls complex and fundamental functions like thinking and processing information, eating, sleeping and reproduction.
Ionizing radiation damages the cell in two ways. On the one hand, it breaks apart the building blocks from which humans are made, causing rifts in DNA. On the other, it fundamentally changes the chemistry of the cell, breaking apart its water molecules and upsetting its metabolism.
That’s what makes it different from, say, an X-ray, Folkers said. “A machine can be shut off,” but “a radioactive particle that’s inside your body will continue irradiating you.” For a pregnant woman, this adds up to “cumulative biological damage,” the kind that cuts across generations.
“We’re dealing with a life cycle,” Folkers said. “And females are an integral part of that life cycle. Not only are they more damaged by radioactivity, and their risks are higher for cancer, but they are also carrying in them the future generations. So when you’re dealing with a female baby who’s developing in the womb, you are dealing with that child’s children at the very least.”
While no sodium-cooled reactors currently operate in the United States, the U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) is working with industry on a number of “advanced” reactor designs, including the Sodium-Cooled Fast Reactor (SFR). One of the SFR’s safety advantages, to quote the DOE, is that the design provides a “Long grace period for corrective action, if needed.” SRE’s meltdown transpired over a two-week period. Fermi Unit 1 had indications of inadequate core cooling in June that were repeated in August and dismissed until extensive damage occurred in October 1966. The “if needed” grace period is never long enough when warning sign after warning sign is dismissed or ignored.
DOE did acknowledge some “challenges” for the SFR: their higher speed and higher energy neutrons can embrittle and degrade nearby materials, liquid sodium coolant reactors with air and water and degrades concrete, and the opaqueness of the liquid sodium coolant complicates in-service inspections and maintenance.
Thank goodness for the “Long grace period for corrective actions, if needed.” That and the fact that SFRs only operate in cyberspace where the primary threat is carpal tunnel syndrome
Nuclear Plant Accidents: Fermi Unit 1, Union of Concerned ScientistsDave Lochbaum, director, Nuclear Safety Project | July 12, 2016,Disaster by Design
Jorge Agustin Nicolás Ruiz de Santayana y Borrás, also known as George Santayana, wrote that “Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” Continue reading →
The Israeli massacre in Gaza’s Nuseirat camp killed over 270 Palestinians and injured many more. Survivors say the horrors they witnessed will stay with them for the rest of their lives.
The Israeli massacre in the Nuseirat camp to liberate four Israeli prisoners held by resistance factions in the Gaza Strip started at 11:00 in the morning on June 8. Although the scenes of Palestinians running for safety may have seemed sadly familiar, this invasion was different from others that have been carried out across the Gaza Strip.
This time, the Israeli military wore civilian clothes, rode in Palestinian cars, and moved among the people in disguise. There were no warnings to evacuate, or orders from the army to move elsewhere, and people were surprised by the Israeli special forces and tanks. A large number of special forces hidden among the people only revealed themselves once the deadly operation began as other special forces stormed the area traveling in cars loaded with luggage, the same luggage that the displaced people carry with them, such as mattresses, pillows, blankets, and bags. When the Palestinians detected them, the soldiers quickly called for support, and helicopters, fighter planes, artillery, and tanks descended. Reconnaissance aircraft and foot solders then began committing massacres against the civilian population.
The intensity of shelling and gunfire soon warned the residents that a massacre was unfolding. They left their homes and took to the streets running in search of safety, which could not be found.
The Israeli operation killed 274 Palestinians, including 64 children, and injured 689 Palestinians in total. “Some of the bodies that arrived at the hospital were body parts, as well as dismembered bodies,” the Gaza Ministry of Health reported when announcing the casualty numbers.
As the world celebrates the liberation of four Israeli hostages from the Gaza Strip, and the media focuses on their lives, freedom, and the happiness of their families there is barely a mention of the number of Palestinian casualties or consideration that each of those killed are also leaving behind a bereaved family.
Issam Hajjaj, 27, survived the massacre and spoke to Mondoweiss. “We were running away from bombing and killing. In all directions, there was either bombing, an Israeli tank, or Israeli gunmen shooting at anyone in their path,” he explained. “While we were running away from death, I saw dismembered bodies on the road as a result of the bombing, and I saw those who left their loved ones under the rubble and fled to save the rest of the family.”
“We did not know from which direction death would come for us.”
Anatomy of a massacre
Following the attack the Israeli army announced that the element of surprise had been crucial. This is why the military operation took place during daylight hours and in a densely populated area. This is also why there was such a high number of Palestinian casualties.
Hajjaj says that within minutes of the invasion starting, Israeli forces surrounded the targeted location from all sides and did not leave any route for people to escape except one road, Al-Zuhur Road connecting Nuseirat and Deir Al-Balah. However, just at the same time that the Nuseirat massacre took place, people near Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital in Deir Al-Balah were fleeing to Nuseirat, and people were using this street to arrive. The intense crowding in the street during the continuous bombing spread panic, and bodies soon began to fly as a result of the direct targeting of everything in that area.
“During our escape, we saw bodies being loaded into cars heading to Al-Aqsa Martyrs Hospital. Women were screaming in the streets, and children were crying and screaming,” Hajjaj recounted. “I saw a family that was fleeing together. A shell fell on the father and killed him in front of his wife and young daughter. After the mother got up and carried her daughter, she discovered that her husband was killed; she left him on the ground and fled to save her daughter and herself.”
Hajjaj explained that the targeted location was two buildings near Al Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat camp, but to reach these two buildings, the Israeli army destroyed an entire residential square. He says that while the Israeli army liberated more than four hostages, the intensity of fire from the Palestinian resistance stopped them from getting out more captives.
The Al-Qassam Brigades, the military arm of Hamas in the Gaza Strip, seemed to confirm this account in a video it published declaring that three Israeli prisoners were killed by the Israeli bombing of the Nuseirat camp.
“We inform you that in exchange for these, your army killed three prisoners in the same camp, one of whom held American citizenship,” Al-Qassam announced in the video. The resistance group stressed that the remaining Israeli prisoners would not be liberated until the Palestinian prisoners in Israeli prisons were freed as well.
Several Palestinians published photos and video from the scene in Nuseirat that confirmed the firsthand accounts collected by Mondoweiss showing an Israeli special force vehicle entering the camp at the beginning of the invasion which was followed by indiscriminate bombing as a form of support cover. Other videos show a car loaded with luggage entering the Block 5 area in the Nuseirat camp and killing a person at the door of one of the buildings. Israeli forces then used iron ladders to reach the upper floors, as shown in one of the pictures that spread on social media. Other details of the invasion are still being established. Many on social media have circulated photos that seem to indicate the floating pier constructed by the United States on the Gaza coast was used as a launching point for the operation, a claim the U.S. Central Command denied.
Clashes continued for more than three hours. During this time, the Israeli army used excessive force to demolish homes and kill hundreds of residents in the vicinity of the operation.
“I did not think for a moment that I might survive” Tawfiq Abu Youssef, an 11-year-old child, sits in Nasser Hospital in Khan Younis where he was referred to for treatment. His face is bloodied and his eyes are swollen blue after he was pulled from under the rubble of their home in Nuseirat. He says he doesn’t know how he escaped death.
“Suddenly, the situation in the area changed, and people started running in fear, saying that special forces had stormed the area,” the boy recounted to Mondoweiss. “All of this was happening in front of our house, and we were stuck inside under fire and bombing. We tried to get out, but drones opened fire on us until the house was bombed and fell over our heads.”
“Before our house was bombed, we saw people in the street across from our house on the ground cut up. We saw missiles hitting the people fleeing in the streets, how they cut them off, and how the planes bombed everything moving in the streets – cars and people. The street was full of people, and suddenly, all of them… They were on the ground, and smoke and blood filled the place. Everywhere we looked, shelling and shrapnel were flying.”
As Tawfiq leaned his back against the hospital wall and sat on the floor to receive treatment, he said that he did not expect to survive this massacre. The scenes he saw were too difficult to believe.
“I stayed under the rubble for hours. I did not think for a moment that I might survive and see life again. I had lived through death enough while I was under the rubble. That was death. I do not think I will forget or get over these moments.”
The operation was carried out near a central market, where Amjad Abu Laban, 43, was selling some food items on the road. He survived death but suffered various injuries to his hand and foot.
He says that everything started at once: planes, tanks, shooting, and people were in the middle of bombing and death and did not know how to react or where to turn.
“Intense bombardment began in several areas in front of us, around us, and behind us, and people began falling to the ground by the dozens near Al-Awda Hospital in the Nuseirat camp. Before our eyes, we saw bodies being torn apart and scattered on the roads, and we saw soldiers hidden in civilian clothes and in people’s cars running and killing everyone they met on their way without distinguishing between a child, a woman, a young person, or an old person. We saw the bodies of our brothers cut up, without heads, lying on the ground,” Abu Laban told Mondoweiss.
“These massacres that occurred before my eyes cannot be described.”
In the same hospital, Mahmoud Al-Hawar, 27, lies on his back as a result of an injury to his leg. Al-Hawar witnessed the massacre as he bravely attempted to save his family and neighbors from the bombing.
“The planes bombed our neighbors’ house, and there was a girl under the rubble screaming to be saved. I went with my friends to try to save her, but the rubble was heavy, and we could not dig her out or even lift it to reach that girl, so we waited until the civil defense team arrived. A large number of young men gathered to try to rescue them. But the planes bombed us,” he told Mondoweiss.
Al-Hawar recounted that he felt the missile hit him and his group of friends and they were thrown to the ground. Minutes later, Mahmoud regained consciousness and found himself covered in blood and saw his friends next to him, on the verge of death.
“Before we were bombed, if I told you that I saw more than 10 drones above our heads, you would not believe it. We were looking at the sky and did not know what was happening.”
After the bombing, Al-Hawar tried to stand up to save himself and his friends. “I tried to stand up, but I couldn’t. I was covered in blood. I looked at my leg and it was cut off. I looked at my best friend next to me, and I found him taking his last breath.”
Their injuries were all severe, and when someone arrived who could take them to the hospital, the five friends were placed on top of each other in a small transport truck, with Al-Hawar underneath them all.
“I was in pain from my injury, but I was feeling more pain because I could hear my friends pronouncing their martyrdom and taking their last breaths. All my friends were dying above me, and I was hearing and feeling everything. They were all killed. Some of them were martyred on the road before my eyes, and some of them died later.”
Al-Hawar agreed that the scenes he saw of the dead in the streets will never be forgotten. “I have not slept since the incident. I cannot sleep. I cannot forget anything I witnessed and saw. I cannot forget the people who were running in panic and fear, searching for their relatives and families amidst the destruction and dismembered bodies.”
Rescue operations continue
Rescue teams are still working in Nuseirat with limited capabilities in an attempt to recover the bodies that remained under the rubble. Many residents remain missing due to the massive bombing in the area, and the many homes that were demolished, some on top of their residents. Many others were killed in the market as they tried to meet the needs of their families.
Anees Ghanima, an activist in the Nusreiat refugee camp, summarized the senseless killing on social media, ““This is what happens when we say that we are at risk of being killed at any moment. Imagine that most of those who just left were only in the market, trying to meet their families’ needs. Put yourself in the place of the child who spent all night deceiving his mother to buy him some necessities, and she was killed today during raids. How could we tell him about peace in this world?”
June 11, 2024 by Ed Lyman,Ed Lyman is Director, Nuclear Power Safety, at the Union of Concerned Scientists
Small Modular Reactors (SMRs) are being presented as the next generation of nuclear technology. While traditional plants face cost overruns and safety issues, SMRs are seen by their champions as cheaper, safer, and faster to deploy. But Ed Lyman at UCS cites evidence that cast these claims into doubt.
In five sections of this article, he lists the reasons why. SMRs are not more economical than large reactors. SMRs are not generally safer or more secure than traditional large light-water reactors. SMRs will not reduce the problem of disposal of radioactive waste. SMRs cannot be counted on to provide reliable and resilient off-the-grid power (for facilities like data centres, bitcoin mining, hydrogen or petrochemical production). SMRs do not use fuel more efficiently than large reactors.
And where problems might be ironed out over time, the learning cycle of such technology is measured in decades during which costs will remain very high. SMRs may have a role to play in our energy future, says Lyman, but only if they are sufficiently safe and secure, along with a realistic understanding of their costs and risks.
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 centralised 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 aredistinct 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 centres, cryptocurrency mining operations, petrochemical production, and even electrical vehicle charging station
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.
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
“Frozen“ children —it’s an unusual description ofan appalling reality.
They’re the wordsSydney clinical psychologist Scarlett Wong used after a recent trip to Gaza with Doctors Without Borders.
“When you see a starving child, they are apathetic, they have no response,” she told SBS News. “This is the kind of thing we were seeing from a medical view … children have become frozen, with no emotion, and apathetic.”
The situation, Dr Wong said, was “the worst humanitarian disaster I have ever seen”.
One of the few countries denying this is Israel. Not only is there not a famine, said Ron Dermer, a member of Israel’s war cabinet, but there is an abundance of food.
Dermer’s claim defies all available evidence. Given the Israeli army has drones flying constantly across the tiny enclave, Dermer could have provided photographs of the “bustling markets”. Where are the photos?
According to Foreign Policy magazine, 30 of Gaza’s 36 hospitals have been bombed — many repeatedly — even while medical staff, patients and civilians seeking shelter remained inside. Satellite imagery shows vast sections of Gaza in rubble.
The Wall Street Journal reported that from October 7 to December 15, Israel dropped 29,000 bombs, munitions and shells on Gaza. This means that, on average, Israel hit every square kilometre of Gaza with 79 bombs, munitions or shells.
After just nine weeks of the war, the newspaper said the destruction of homes, schools and other buildings resembled “some of the most devastating campaigns in modern history”.
When the war does finish, the rebuilding of Gaza could take a generation. The Washington Post reported that the head of the UN’s Mine Action Program, Mungo Birch, said the number of unexploded missiles and bombs lying under the rubble was “unprecedented” since World War II and that Gaza was now the site of about 37 million tons of rubble — more than what had been generated across all of Ukraine during Russia’s war — and 800,000 tons of asbestos and other contaminants.
Has the response been proportional?
Over the weekend, Israel rescued four hostages captured on October 7from a heavily populated refugee camp. Gazan authorities said at least 210 Palestinians were killed and 400 wounded during the rescue, which involved heavy bombardment.
Hamas has had its day of reckoning; the videos from October 7 would be, for any reasonable observer, proof of atrocities and war crimes. The videos and photos not released to the public are even more appalling. Hamas has kept hostages for more than eight months.
But Israel’s day of reckoning for its eight-month-longresponse is still to come. The question is, has its response been proportional?
Every country that engages in war has a day, or years, of reckoning. America had such a day after the Vietnam and Iraq wars. Australia has had — and continues to have — days of reckoning after its involvement in Afghanistan, with continuing investigations into possible war crimes.
Israel will argue that for self-defence it needed to ensure that Hamas was never again in a position to commit an attack. They will argue that throughout the war, Hamas has used civilians as human shields and that, therefore, a large number of civilians were killed.
But there will be very specific allegations that Israel will be under pressure to answer. Human Rights Watch (HRW) reported this week that the Israeli military has been using white phosphorous in Gaza and south Lebanon. HRW noted that white phosphorous causes severe burns, often down to the bone, and burns to only 10 per cent of the body are often fatal. It said it can cause respiratory damage and organ failure.
“Using airburst white phosphorous is unlawfully indiscriminate in populated areas and otherwise does not meet this legal requirement to take all feasible precautions to avoid civilian harm,” the group said.
The HRW report also referenced the Israel-Lebanon border. It said Israel had engaged in “widespread” use of white phosphorous since October, including at least five municipalities where white phosphorous munitions were unlawfully airburst over populated residential areas. It said Lebanon should turn to the International Criminal Court and enable the prosecution of grave international crimes.
The ABC put these allegations to the Israel Defense Forces (IDF), who said that like many western militaries, the IDF possesses “smoke-screen shells that include white phosphorous that are legal under international law”.
“These shells are used by the IDF for creating smoke screens and not for targeting or causing fires and are not defined under law as incendiary weapons.”
Tough questions are being asked
As the war drags on, some media outlets are increasingly asking difficult questions of Israel.
The US media outlet spoke to three Israeli whistleblowers from the facility who revealed atrocities ranging from doctors amputating prisoners’ limbs due to injuries sustained from constant handcuffing and medical procedures sometimes performed by underqualified medics, which earned the facility a reputation for being “a paradise for interns” and a place “where the air is filled with the smell of neglected wounds left to rot”.
One medic from the facility said beatings of Palestinians were not done to gather intelligence but out of revenge for the October 7 attack.
He said he was ordered to perform medical procedures on Palestinians for which he was not qualified: “I was asked to learn how to do things on the patients, performing minor medical procedures that are totally outside my expertise.”
My favorite piece of fictional writing of all time is the play for voices, Under Milk Wood by the Welsh writer, Dylan Thomas. It opens like this: “To begin at the beginning”.
If you want to put human faces to the story of nuclear power, you have to begin at the beginning. That’s why those who continue to promote nuclear power never begin at the beginning. Because if they do, they meet the faces of the people who are the first witnesses to the fundamentally anti-humanitarian nature of the nuclear age.
When we begin at the beginning, what do we find? We find uranium. We find people. And we find suffering.
When we begin at the beginning, we are on Native American land, First Nations land in Canada, Aboriginal land in Australia. We are in the Congo, now the site of a genocide with six million dead, the fighting mostly over mineral rights. We are walking on the sands of the Sahel with the nomadic Touareg. We are among impoverished families in India, Namibia, and Kazakhstan.
We see black faces and brown faces, almost never white faces — although uranium mining also happened in Europe.
Mostly, we find people who already had little and now have lost so much more. We find people whose ancient beliefs were centered in stewardship of the Earth, whose tales and legends talk of dragons and rainbow serpents and yellow dust underground that must never be disturbed.
And yet, it was they who were forced to disturb the serpent —in Australia, in Africa, in Indian country. As they unearthed uranium — the lethal force that would become the fuel for nuclear weapons and nuclear power — they were being made to destroy the very thing they held sacred. And their lives were about to be destroyed by it, too.
We are seeing a genocide. Because a genocide is not just a massacre. A genocide is also the erasure of a people culturally. It is the destruction of a way of life, often also a language, a belief system.
It was at that moment, when we first dug uranium out of the ground, that nuclear power became a human rights violation. And it never ceases to be one, along the entire length of the uranium fuel chain, from uranium mining to processing, to electricity generation, to waste mismanagement.
When we begin at the beginning in the United States, we are on Navajo land, or Hopi, Zuni, Laguna, Acoma, Lakota and, now, Havasupai. The places they now call home are sacred. But they also represent the indifference and abandonment of successive US governments and they were reached on a forced march to exile, the Trail of Tears.
Beginning in the late 1940s, Native Americans began to mine for uranium, without protective gear and without warning or knowledge of the dangers. They were told it was their patriotic duty.
So they breathed in the radon gas, and wore their radioactive dust-covered clothes home for their wives to wash. And they died, and so did their families. Unacknowledged as victims of the arms race or of the nuclear power industry, they have had to fight for compensation and cleanup ever since.
In Niger, in Arlit, a dusty desert town in the Sahel, people live in shacks, some with no running water or electricity. Here we find homes that have been built using radioactive scraps foraged from the uranium mine site. Discarded radioactive metal is available in the marketplace, potentially finding its way into household goods.
In the distance there is a mountain. It isn’t real. But it’s not a mirage either. It’s a tailings pile, ravaged by the Sahara winds, scattering radioactivity far and wide.
Areva, now Orano, whose subsidiaries mine there, make millions, lighting swank Paris apartments overlooking the Seine with nuclear powered electricity fueled by the sweat and toil of people whose children pick up radioactive rocks from the sandy streets and whose fathers die in the local hospital where the Areva-hired doctors tell them their fatal illnesses have nothing whatever to do with exposures at the mines.
When Guria Das died in her village in Jaduguda, India, she had the body of a three-year old. She was 13. She could not speak, she could not move. Nearby, the Uranium Corporation of India, Limited keeps working its six uranium mines, its tailing ponds leaching poison into a community ravaged by disease and birth defects, but who are told, of course, that their problems have nothing whatever to do with the uranium mines. It’s a story that repeats, over and over, wherever you find uranium mining. The corporations profit and then they deny.
This is the beginning. But it’s not the only part of the atomic lie that the nuclear power industry would rather keep hidden.
Erwin, Tennessee is home to a facility that processes highly-enriched uranium so that it can eventually be used as commercial nuclear reactor fuel. There are many stories here, too many to be purely coincidence, heartbreaking stories that were collected and published. Here is what one person wrote:
“I know we ate radiation straight from Mama’s garden. Our beloved little dog died of cancer. My dad died at 56 with colon cancer. Our next door neighbor died of colon cancer; I doubt she was 60. A friend and close neighbor had extensive colon cancer in his early 30s. I had a huge lymphoma removed from my heart at the age of 30. My brother had kidney failure in his early 30s. My sister and I both have thyroid nodules and weird protein levels in our blood that can lead to multiple myelosis.”
Once the fuel is loaded into nuclear power plants, the story of unexplained cancers continues.
In Illinois in the early 2000s, far too many children living between two nuclear power plants are suffering from brain cancer. Childhood brain cancer is extremely rare. Here there are numerous cases and they are rising. The children are taken away to Chicago for medical treatment. Those who die there are not recorded in the statistics of their local community. In this way, their deaths have nothing whatever to do with the nuclear power plants.
In Shell Bluff, Georgia, a poor African American community fought to stop the construction of the Vogtle 1 and 2 nuclear reactors. They lost. Then they fought again — against two new reactors — Vogtle 3 and 4 — and lost again.
In Japan, before that fateful moment on March 11, 2011, when the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant began melting down, the legal radiation exposure limit for the Japanese public was one millisievert a year. This is still too high. But after the disaster, when cleaning up the radioactive contamination proved an impossible task, the Japanese government raised the exposure limit, by 20 times. Now it is 20 milisieverts a year, unsafe for anyone, but especially babies born and still in the womb, and children and women. This represents an undeniable violation of human rights.
The Fukushima story includes animals, too. When evacuations began, many animals were left behind, some never to be retrieved. Dairy cows, tethered in their milking sheds, slowly died of starvation. It’s hard to look at the pictures that were captured of this suffering. But it’s even harder to say that this is something we are willing to accept, as part of the deal for using nuclear power.
Some farmers didn’t accept it and continued to tend their cows even though they could never sell the meat or milk. To abandon their cows would be a betrayal, a loss of our fundamental humanity. And of course they also knew that slaughtering the cows meant they disappeared from view — exactly what the Japanese government wants to see happen to the Fukushima disaster itself.
Before Fukushima there was Chernobyl and before that Church Rock and before that Three Mile Island. And before that Mayak. And after these, where?
Church Rock is the least known major nuclear disaster. It happened on July 16, 1979, just over three months after the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, and, ironically, on the same date and in the same state as the first ever atomic test, the 1945 detonation, Trinity.
At Church Rock, New Mexico, ninety million gallons of liquid radioactive waste, and eleven hundred tons of solid mill wastes, burst through a broken dam wall at the uranium mill facility there, creating a flood of deadly effluents that permanently contaminated the Puerco River, an essential water source for the Navajo people. It was the biggest release of radioactive waste in U.S. history. But it happened far away in New Mexico, to people who didn’t count. Just one more chapter in the quiet genocide.
The atomic lie was at its most powerful after Chernobyl, selling us on the idea that only a handful of liquidators died as a result but no one else.
But there were many others who died and many who were sickened, suffering all their lives. Some of them told their stories to Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian investigative journalist. She put five hundred of their testimonies in her book, Chernobyl Prayer, recording their pain, their fears, and their losses.
These are the faces that are not seen by the ivory tower pro-atomic pundits, pushing papers in their glass-enclosed corner offices with the splendid view. These are the faces they dare not look at, who expose their great lie, the people who lost children. As one father told Alexievich:
“Can you imagine seven bald girls together? There were seven of them in the ward. No, that’s it! I can’t go on! Talking about it gives me this feeling….Like my heart is telling me: this is an act of betrayal. Because I have to describe her as if she was just anyone. Describe her agony….We put her on the door. On the door my father once lay on. Until they brought the little coffin. It was so tiny, like the box for a large doll. Like a box.”
Chernobyl remains the world’s worst nuclear power plant accident. But that record could still be broken. In the United States the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) and the industry are working to extend the licenses of nuclear power plants not just for 60 years, but out to 80 and even potentially 100 years.
Incredibly, the NRC has decided that protecting nuclear power plants from the ravages of the climate crisis — including significant sea-level rise, unprecedented rainfall and ever more violent storms — is not something they are required to plan for.
The NRC and the nuclear industry are also perfectly willing to ignore the fact that nuclear power is both dangerous and obsolete, and that reactors will continue producing radioactive waste that is lethal for millennia and for which there is no safe, longterm plan.
France and the United Kingdom chose to reprocess radioactive waste in a chemical bath that separates out the plutonium and uranium, reducing the amount of highly radioactive waste left over but greatly increasing the volume of other gaseous and liquid radioactive wastes.
Where do those wastes go? Into the air and into the sea and into living breathing organisms, including children. Around both the La Hague reprocessing site in Northern France and the Sellafield reprocessing site off the northwest coast of England, leukemia clusters have been found, especially among children. The researchers who discovered this were both dismissed and derided.
The radioactive waste produced at the end of the chain of these atomic lies has to go somewhere, or stay where it is. Either way, the outcome is a bad one. Should it be stored, buried, locked away or retrievable? Who takes care of it? And for how long?
And so we return to the lands of Indigenous people, and communities of color.
Yucca Mountain — for a time the chosen destination for America’s high-level radioactive waste —ripples across Western Shoshone Land in Nevada. We are back in the dreamtime with stories of serpents. The Shoshone call Yucca Mountain “Serpent Swimming Westward”. It is a sacred place. It is also theirs by treaty, a treaty the United States has chosen to ignore and then to break.
“Nothing out there” is how areas like Yucca Mountain tend to be characterized. But the eyes of the Western Shoshone look closer. They see:
Quaking Aspens, a tree species that dates back 80,000 years. Thyms Buckwheat, a plant that only exists on five acres there, and nowhere else on Earth. There is the desert tortoise and the Devils Hole Pupfish that somewhere in its evolutionary history went from salt water to fresh water. And of course there are people, Native people, trying hard to preserve this precious corner of their history and the land they steward.
And so we keep searching. In Cumbria in England. In the Gobi desert. In Finland, a deep geological repository is under construction, even though no one can be sure if it will work, or how it can be marked so curious future generations don’t excavate it.
In Bure, France, nature protectors calling themselves owls, built houses in treetops in the forest that would be crushed to make way for a nuclear repository.
And in New Mexico and Texas there are Latino communities faced with the prospect of hosting the country’s reactor waste “temporarily”, at so-called Consolidate Interim Storage Facilities. But given we haven’t found anywhere else for the waste, it likely won’t be temporary. And once again, it is a minority community which must assume this burden.
The great Atomic Lie lives on, slithering through the halls of power, poisoning the minds of willing, gullible listeners in the media, the public, and the political sphere. Our fight isn’t over and it may never be. But we are the ones who are here now, the voices of reason, whispering on a breeze that will keep blowing, until our breath ceases and others take up the clarion call.
Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits the organization’s news site, Beyond Nuclear International. Her forthcoming book, Hot Stories. Reflections from a Radioactive World, will be published in autumn 2024.
– It’s time to smash the narrative that using nuclear weapons is ‘patriotic,
A recurrent trope in the post-election analysis has been Jeremy Corbyn’s supposed lack of patriotism. It’s worth examining.
Rather than arriving at this conclusion by demonstrating that Corbyn doesn’t love his country – for which there is no evidence whatsoever – it seems largely to be based on his unwillingness to commit to killing millions of innocent civilians at the touch of a button.
The media seemed hell-bent on pushing this approach during the election (and it’s resurfacing in the leadership debate). Fortunately others in the public eye, footballer Gary Lineker for one, have more common sense. ‘Nuclear thing is bonkers’ he tweeted, ‘We’re all f**ked if they’re ever used.’
Quite so. And he went on to say – in a twitter debate with TV presenter Piers Morgan – that Trident should be scrapped. Morgan tried to assert the strange logic that because we had them they hadn’t been used. Lineker quite sensibly pointed out that nuclear weapons would not have been used if there were no nuclear weapons.
This is a point we have been making for some time. It reminds me of a debating point made by some pro-nuclear advocates that ‘we have them in order not to use them’. Clearly a silly approach – we could save ourselves £205 billion by not having them in order not to use them!
But having blighted the election with a knee-jerk prime ministerial virility test this is now resurfacing during the Labour leadership contest. Candidates – most notably and recently, Rebecca Long Bailey on Tuesday’s Today programme – are again being asked their position on the use of nukes. Because willingness to press the button has come to falsely symbolise strong leadership, patriotism and a commitment to Britain’s status in the world, who is going to say no?
Nothing could show more clearly the urgent need to have a genuine debate about nuclear weapons, what they are and what their use would mean. We also need politicians to realise that nuclear weapons are not something to posture wildly about – they are indeed weapons of mass destruction. There will be no life worthy of the name after their use. Survivors will envy the dead.
Most concerning is the fact that unquestioning attachment to a totemic but anachronistic weapons system prevents a real assessment of what is needed to meet our security needs in the 21st century – and what we need to spend our defence budget on.
It is an open secret that the MoD is overcommitted on ‘big ticket’ projects. Yet no one seems to dare to question Trident, presumably on the grounds that they would be immediately characterised as a lily-livered traitor.
National security strategies since 2010 have identified cyber warfare, terrorism, climate change, pandemics and organised crime as some of the key contemporary threats we face. Nuclear threats have actually been downgraded in risk level but nevertheless Trident replacement is proceeding – with significant opportunity cost to other higher level defence priorities.
Even former advocates of nuclear weapons, like Lord Des Browne, are speaking out. He was the Defence Secretary who pushed the decision on Trident replacement through parliament in the Blair years. Now he has raised serious concerns about the impact of new technology on Trident and its replacement.
When Trident was launched in the 1990s it was the gold standard of nuclear weapons, undetectable under the waters, 24/7. Now, he states, the replacement will be obsolete before it’s launched: the rapid development of underwater drone technology will render subs fully detectable and advanced hacking skills will jeopardise the security of targeting and missile use.
So this is the problem with reducing serious questions about our national security to the level of a ‘will they/won’t they press the button?’ game show, trapping politicians in a ridiculous zero-sum game where actually everyone loses. Our real security needs are ignored and underfunded. It’s time for change – rethinking our security is well overdue.
Kate Hudson is General Secretary of the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament.
There are eminent corrosion experts that are of the opinion that copper is a bad choice as a canister material. There is also increasing experimental evidence that this is the case. One problem for the court was likely that SKB has hesitant to do the required corrosion studies that show that copper does not corrode in an anoxic repository environment. The 18-year FEBEX field test shows that copper corrodes relatively rapidly with pitting corrosion. SKB says that all corrosion is due to in-leaking oxygen but it is now clear that experimental systems containing copper and clay become anoxic within weeks or months so this explanation is not valid. 
Nuclear Plant Accidents: Fermi Unit 1, Union of Concerned Scientists Dave Lochbaum, director, Nuclear Safety Project | July 12, 2016, Disaster by Design
Corbyn was smeared for rejecting the use of nuclear weapons – but he was right https://leftfootforward.org/2020/01/corbyn-was-smeared-for-rejecting-the-use-of-nuclear-weapons-but-he-was-right/, Kate Hudson
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