Jimmy Carter hailed as ‘action’ hero for stopping nuclear meltdown at 28
Jimmy Carter hailed as ‘action’ hero for stopping nuclear meltdown at 28 https://nypost.com/2021/12/16/jimmy-carter-is-action-hero-for-stopping-nuclear-disaster/
By Hannah Sparks, December 16, 2021 Who needs action movies when there are real-life superheroes like Jimmy Carter among us?
A viral Twitter thread is reminding the world that the 39th US President James Earl Carter Jr., now 97, actually rescued Ottawa, Ontario, from nuclear destruction as a 28-year-old way back on Dec. 12, 1952.
“Do you remember the world’s very first nuclear meltdown? That time the US President, an expert in nuclear physics, heroically lowered himself into the reactor and saved Ottawa, Canada’s capital?” asked Canadian physicist University of Ottawa professor Jeff Lundeen in his now-viral thread, originally posted Tuesday but officially trending two days later.
Sounds like schlocky action movie, but it actually happened!”
Lundeen’s revelatory tweet to his modest 1,078 followers now boasts nearly 50,000 likes, more than 20,000 retweets and hundreds of cheerfully shocked comments. He included data from the Ottawa Historical Society and a snippet of a 2011 report documenting Carter’s heroics, and he followed up with several other media sources that recount the historic tale.
As the story goes, the Plains, Ga., native planned his entire life to join the Navy — and did so when he received his appointment to the Naval Academy in 1942. After graduating with distinction, Carter spent two years completing his service ship duty before signing on to the Submarine Force. Following a series of relocations and promotions, the young lieutenant would request to join Captain Hyman G. Rickover’s nuclear sub program, where they were developing the world’s first atomic subs.
Rickover then sent Carter to work for the US Atomic Energy Commission, where he served on temporary duty with the Naval Reactors Branch. Meanwhile, a few months later, an accidental power surge at Chalk River Laboratories in Ottawa caused fuel rods within a nuclear research reactor to rupture and melt — risking a full nuclear meltdown.
It was the first such incident of its kind, and Carter’s team of 23 men was ordered to clean it up.
I
n a scene straight out of modern-day blockbusters, the operation would require the brave men to descend into the core by rope and pulley so they could deconstruct the reactor bolt by bolt. The lab had set up a duplicate reactor as a training field for Carter’s team, who would get only one shot at the real thing. Each man would have to descend into the core and complete their high-flying tasks in 90-second spurts, as exposure to toxic radiation within the reactor posed a high risk to their long-term health.
Their plan went off without a hitch. The core was shut down and then rebuilt. From there, Carter went on to become the engineering officer for the USS Seawolf, one of the first submarines to operate on atomic power. By 1961, he retired from the Navy and Reserves, and, in 1963, ran for his first political office.
For those who admire the single-term Democratic president, Lundeen’s tweet was just another reminder of Carter’s selfless service — and good jokes.
One top Twitter response included a quote from the president, who visited Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island power plant in 1979, during their disastrous partial meltdown.
When asked by media if he thought it too dangerous to visit the radioactive site, he reportedly quipped, “No, if it was too dangerous they would have sent the vice president.”
Lepreau nuclear plant’s costs will continue to balloon: critic.
But NB Power insists the station should supply safe, reliable electricity for years to come
Telegraph-Journal, John Chilibeck • Local Journalism Initiative reporter, Jan 08, 2025
Last year’s costly, prolonged shutdown at the Point Lepreau Nuclear Generating Station near Saint John is just a piece of debilitatingly expensive repairs to come, warns an industry critic.
The outage that lasted between April 6 and Dec. 11 could end up costing New Brunswick ratepayers hundreds of millions.
But Gordon Edwards argues far bigger costs could be coming down the line in the years ahead to the workhorse in NB Power’s fleet of generators that supplies more than one-third of the province’s electricity.
Edwards is the president and co-founder of the nonprofit organization Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility and a long-time anti-nuclear activist who testified in 2023 before a New Brunswick legislative committee.
He told Brunswick News in a recent interview that many of the hopes behind the massive $2.5-billion refurbishment of the plant in 2012 turned out to be a fantasy. Now 41 years old, the plant is showing its age, he said.
There are things in the Lepreau reactor that were simply not done that should have been done at the time of the refurbishment. – Gordon Edwards
“The promise was held out that by spending all this money on refurbishment that essentially we’d have a brand new reactor,” Edwards said from his home in Montreal.
“And that’s obviously not true. When you replace a part of a complicated piece of machinery, like an automobile for that matter, often times it causes something else to go wrong because it’s worn but has not been replaced. And there are things in the Lepreau reactor that were simply not done that should have been done at the time of the refurbishment.”
According to a report by New Brunswick’s auditor general in 2014, Lepreau’s refurbishment took 37 months longer and cost $1 billion more than anticipated.
The latest shutdown started on April 6. It was supposed to be a 100-day planned maintenance outage to ensure the ongoing reliability and safety of the station’s operations. However, when workers started to fire up the plant again, they discovered a big problem on the non-nuclear side of the station where none of the maintenance work had been done.
Before the plant could get back up and running, the problem had to be fixed: six damaged stator bars inside the main generator. NB Power described the repair process as complex, requiring careful disassembly, reassembly, and extensive testing to meet strict safety and operational standards.
In the end, it took 149 extra days to get the job done and the plant back online.
No official figures have been released on the extra cost to customers, but earlier in the summer an NB Power official at rate hearings in Fredericton said the repairs would be more than $70 million and the cost of buying power or burning more fossil fuel at other stations to pick up the slack would be on average $900,000 a day.
This raises the possibility that the shutdown cost as much as $294 million.
“NB Power continues to assess the financial impact of the extended outage and is actively exploring options to mitigate costs for customers, including potential recovery through corporate insurance policies,” the public utility stated in a press release on Dec. 12.
Edwards predicts more problems will arise because the refurbishment, now more than a decade old, mostly addressed the plant’s nuclear side, not the conventional one.
“The fact that you have the core of the reactor back up to top operating condition, puts more of a strain on these other components that have not been replaced,” he said. “Among the components that weren’t replaced are the steam generators, which are critical.”
Edwards said the private consortium Bruce Power in Ontario took a different course, replacing steam generators at the first two units at the Bruce nuclear plants on the eastern shore of Lake Huron when they were refurbished in 2012.
“That was a prudent thing to do, but NB Power did not replace them at Lepreau. I predict that will be a source of problems going forward,” said the critic, an octogenarian who has a PhD in mathematics from Queen’s University.
……………………………………………………………………Edwards said another major issue at the plant is the prolonged use of the same hard water, which has different physical properties than regular water. He said the 200,000 litres that circulate in tubes is highly radioactive and should have been replaced long ago.
“To keep the costs from ballooning completely out of proportion, NB Power hasn’t replaced the hard water,” he said. “The cost of hard water is expensive. As much as one-fifth of the cost of a nuclear plant is simply the hard water.”
He and other anti-nuke activists, such as the Sierra Club of Canada, have for years called for the hard water’s replacement, arguing the radioactivity can leak during accidental spills, causing a threat to plant workers and the wider environment.
But NB Power says for the time being, such a drastic step is unnecessary.
“We continue to monitor industry-wide processes and improvements as it relates to the reactor moderator heavy water,” Couture said. “It has not been determined at this time that a replacement of the moderator heavy water is required.” https://tj.news/new-brunswick/lepreau-nuclear-plants-costs-will-continue-to-balloon-critic#:~:text=No%20official%20figures%20have%20been,slack%20would%20be%20on%20average
Ohio Community Faces Cancer Crisis from Radioactive Contamination
PIKETON, OH – A growing health crisis in Pike County, Ohio, has brought national attention to a region plagued by some of the highest cancer rates and premature death rates in the country. Decades of uranium enrichment and ongoing demolition at the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant are now being linked to the troubling health trends impacting this community and six surrounding counties.
A recent study by Joseph J. Mangano, epidemiologist and executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, paints a stark picture of the consequences of radioactive contamination in Pike County. Released last summer, the study highlights significant increases in cancer, infant mortality, and premature death rates in communities located downwind of the former uranium enrichment plant.
Cancer Rates and Premature Deaths
The numbers are alarming. Between 2021 and 2023, Pike County’s premature death rate for individuals under 74 years old was 107% higher than the national average, a sharp rise from 85% above the national average between 2017 and 2020. Over 750 premature deaths occurred during this period in a county with a population of just over 27,000.
Cancer rates in Pike County and six neighboring counties—Adams, Gallia, Jackson, Lawrence, Scioto, and Vinton—were 17.5% above the national average between 2015 and 2019. Infant mortality rates in the region were also 31.9% higher than the U.S. average between 1999 and 2020, and middle-aged adults saw mortality rates more than double the national average.
A School at the Center of Controversy
In 2019, concerns about radioactive contamination reached a tipping point when Zahn’s Corner Middle School in Piketon was permanently closed after radioactive isotopes, including enriched uranium and neptunium-237, were discovered inside the building. The school, located just a few miles from the Portsmouth plant, became a symbol of the community’s struggle with the health impacts of the site. Over the years, several students and staff members at Zahn’s succumbed to rare cancers, further heightening concerns.
Recently, the school district sold the building to a Christian ministry, which plans to reopen it as a STEM academy. While the sale marks a new chapter for the facility, it has reignited fears about whether the site is truly safe, given the radioactive materials previously found within its walls.
Radioactive Contamination and Ongoing Demolition
The Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant, operational from 1954 to 2001, enriched uranium for nuclear weapons and reactors, releasing radioactive particles such as Americium-241, Plutonium-238, and Uranium-235 into the environment. These isotopes, which remain hazardous for thousands of years, have contaminated the air, water, and soil in the surrounding area.
Although uranium enrichment operations ceased in 2001, the plant remains active with demolition and decommissioning projects. Experts have raised concerns that open-air demolition of contaminated buildings is releasing additional radioactive particles into the environment. Critics argue that the U.S. Department of Energy’s (DOE) air monitoring, which detects only “background” levels of radiation, fails to capture the full extent of the contamination.
Community Devastation
The impact on the community has been profound. Families across Pike County and neighboring areas have experienced unusually high rates of rare cancers and aggressive diseases, particularly among children and young adults. Many residents believe these illnesses are tied to decades of exposure to radioactive materials released by the plant.
The closure of Zahn’s Corner Middle School and the deaths of students and staff members have become a grim reminder of the broader crisis affecting the region. Parents and advocates continue to demand answers about the plant’s role in the contamination and the steps being taken to ensure the safety of current and future generations.
A Call for Accountability
Despite mounting evidence of health risks, the DOE has proposed new projects at the Portsmouth site, including uranium purification and experimental reactors. These plans have fueled further concerns among residents, who argue that additional activities could exacerbate the environmental and health challenges they already face.
Advocates and researchers are calling for independent investigations into the health impacts of the Portsmouth plant and comprehensive public health monitoring for affected communities. Many argue that stricter oversight is urgently needed to prevent further harm.
A Community Demanding Justice
The study by Mangano highlights the devastating and long-lasting effects of radioactive contamination in Pike County. The ongoing health crisis, coupled with incidents like the closure of Zahn’s Corner Middle School, underscores the urgent need for accountability and meaningful action to address the region’s toxic legacy. For residents of Pike County and surrounding areas, the fight for answers—and justice—continues.
The Atlas Network has eugenicist roots
January 8, 2025 Lucy Hamilton, https://theaimn.net/the-atlas-network-has-eugenicist-roots/
We don’t expect the free market’s ad men to understand their movement’s deep integration with eugenicist ideas. It is worth knowing that fact, however much they will deny the relevance of their origin stories.
Peter Kurti, of the Atlas Network’s Centre for Independent Studies, wrote an opinion piece for The Australian recently called “Citizenship based on rights can’t replace the glue of civil society.” There he posits “social cohesion” as more important than rights. He blames “multiculturalism” for the reluctance of Australians to volunteer. These are baseless tropes common to the Atlas Network, and also to Viktor Orbán’s junktank space where Kurti is a feature.
British investigative journalist Nafeez Ahmed has just published a book tracking the tight integration of the same American eugenics movement that fed the Nazi death camps into the “science” of free market economics. The integration of “former” Nazis and fellow travellers into the movement around libertarianism is made quite clear in his account. The same donors that fund the Atlas Network also funded the “science” of class and racial difference.
It is not surprising that a movement designed to serve the rich should emerge out of racist beliefs. The upper classes of the early 20th century tended to be eugenicist and many supported the Nazis. The 19th century Social Darwinist idea that success, in society or business, reflected genetic fitness never went away.
The Mont Pelerin Society (that later birthed the Atlas Network to act as the self-replicating advertising agency for its oligarch donors’ policy goals) was established in 1947 to fight the threat of communism. Property had to be protected from the masses. Keynesian government involvement in the market and society was just another form of theft for these economist-servants of the upper echelons.
At the same time, Ahmed explains, the proto-CIA was integrating former Nazi spies into the Western intelligence gathering circuit where they fostered anti-Soviet hysteria for their own purposes. William Casey was one of the key OSS figures in that era and later director of the CIA under Reagan.
Casey also worked with the creator of the Atlas Network Sir Antony Fisher, co-founding together Fisher’s first American junktank, the Manhattan Institute.(1)
Race, empire and capitalism have deeply intertwined roots. Part of the monumental global violence of the Cold War involved empires and capitalist forces rejecting the colonised people’s demand for freedom. One of the Atlas Network’s roles has been to deploy disgruntled local elites to foster a more convenient definition of “freedom” that protects the local (lighter skinned) aristocracy’s property, alongside the (foreign) corporations’ investments and profits.
The Cold War struggle against redistribution came to demarcate the “communist” enemy in any group that wanted equal rights. Old racisms were recast as factual detection of communist subversion. The Civil Rights movement was depicted by the propagandists entrenching privilege as a communist threat.
Many amongst the moneyed class in America belonged to the notorious John Birch Society through the 1950s into the 70s. Charles Koch, one of the key Atlas Network donors and strategists later in the century bought a lifetime membership. His father had been a founding member. Birch was an hysterical conspiracist organisation that fought communism but was also explicitly racist.
So the fact that key Atlas donors like the Mellon-Scaifes, Bradleys and Olins were also funding research to establish that “science” could shore up the Evolutionary Ladder is not surprising. They wanted the proof that Black people were genetically inferior.
It had the adjunct benefit of establishing that the White working class was inferior also.
Atlas junktanks and Rupert Murdoch, who was a junktank director at Atlas’s Cato Institute in the 90s, fostered the career and disseminated the writing of figures like Charles Murray who gave them the (discredited) science to fight “welfare.” There was no value in helping the poor, of any skin colour, if they were genetically trapped in their suffering.
Many of the same donors funded the transition of the race biology industry into the Islamophobia industry after 9/11. They needed a new enemy, now that Russia was White and Christian again. Creating a sense that there was an integral “clash of civilisations” with the Islamic “world” was as useful as the certainty that the Soviets were an existential threat and that Black people were genetically inferior.
Many of same figures and families continue to work now in this movement that gradually flipped Western society from a Keynesian understanding of political economy to a neoliberal one.
In the wake of the shooting of a CEO in New York, there have been many musings on the “ruthless arithmetic” of neoliberal capitalism, the implicit knowledge that some lives have no value for the shareholder.
The same old idea of the fungibility of the lower orders underpins the Atlas Network’s Institute of Public Affairs (IPA) hosting Jay Bhattacharya in Australia during the pandemic to promote his easily debunked research fighting public health measures. The massive death toll amongst (darker skinned) “essential workers” in the USA was a small price to pay for quarterly profit protection.
One of the reasons such tools argued that schools must remain open (despite the unwillingness to allow investment in the improvements that would make schools safer during a pandemic) is because the CEOs needed them as childminding.
Atlas Network junktanks fight any regulation that translates into making workplaces and products safer. Their workers, neighbours and customers can die if the shareholder is happy.
The demonisation of “welfare” by Atlas Network junktanks over the decades created the space for Alan Tudge’s threats towards the battlers in the rhetoric around Robodebt. It provides the context for the individual cases that Tudge had extracted and provided to “friendly” media to ruin the reputation of people complaining about the illegal program.
The rich are on tax strike, one of the Atlas Network’s key goals. Much of the common wealth that is collected is funnelled up to the investors in industries such as the weapons sector, or just gifted as Jobkeeper overpayments were. This limits the money available for social goods.
That means that Kurti’s emphasis on volunteering becomes even more important. If the oligarchs have ensured that there is very little money available for the community, we need volunteers to compensate. The neoliberal project also partly works to fan up “family values” because they need women to provide the care for the family unit that they have prevented society making available.
And the enemy must be depicted as the Other. Whether it is the Black rights activist who must be portrayed as “communist” or the multicultural society that Kurti singles out as undermining “social cohesion,” the enemy cannot be the oligarch whose propaganda has enabled making our lives more precarious. Viktor Orbán is the guiding light of those who want ethnostates, the only way they can imagine cohesion.
The alleged socialism of anyone who wants their rights protected continues in random allegations of “socialism” by Atlas Network operatives. They rant against the trope of “woke” which they claim is the product of “cultural marxism,” a fevered furphy that is both an allegation of socialism and an antisemitic slur.(2)
The roots of the racism and desired inequality that underpinned the creation of the Atlas Network continue in its talking points now. We need to help those around us see those ghostly echoes for the dangerous entrenchment of privilege that they are.
- Atlas’s Manhattan Institute now has Christopher Rufo as a Senior Fellow. This is the man who took the academic legal study of residual racist laws from past eras – Critical Race Theory – and turned it into a frenzied effort by the MAGA base to prevent the teaching of accurate history in schools. His work to return American education to a White mythologised version of the nation’s history has been very effective at mobilising – and distracting – the radicalised base. Rufo followed up that work with a second toxic campaign to erase the existence of LGBTQIA+ people from education. Rufo is one of the connections between the acknowledged Atlas junktanks and Viktor Orbán’s junktank sphere.
Jack Posobiec was a 2019 Fellow at Atlas’s Claremont Institute. Claremont was a more reputable right-wing junktank but has become radicalised. It has many personnel connections with an “extremist fraternal order” with Christofascist goals. It hosted senior personnel connected to the plot behind Donald Trump’s insurrection attempt in 2021. It appeared to be promoting a new civil war. Jack Posobiec has written a book that labels anyone not belonging to the radicalised Right a “socialist” threat and an Unhuman. The violence likely to follow that label has clear historical precedents.
Iran has absolutely no intention to build nuclear weapons, president says
Jan 7, 2025 https://www.iranintl.com/en/202501076906
Tehran has no plan to acquire a nuclear bomb since Iran’s Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei has forbidden it on religious grounds, Iran’s president said on Tuesday.
“The Islamic Republic has absolutely no intention of utilizing its nuclear capabilities for military purposes based on its ideological beliefs and a fatwa by Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei,” Masoud Pezeshkian said in a meeting with Britain’s new ambassador to Tehran.
For two decades, the Supreme Leader’s so-called nuclear fatwa has been repeatedly cited by senior officials as proof of Iran’s peaceful intentions. But even supporters of that view say the decree could be amended.
The nuclear engineer went on to say that if Khamenei’s opinion changed, Iran would have the capacity to build a nuclear weapon.
Tehran ready for return to JCPOA
Pezeshkian’s comments came one day after French President Emmanuel Macron warned Tehran’s nuclear program is nearing the point of no return.
Iran says its uranium enrichment program is for peaceful purposes but has accelerated activity since US President-elect Donald Trump withdrew from the 2015 nuclear deal – officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) – during his first term and reimposed sanctions on Tehran.
“The Islamic Republic is fully prepared for all parties to return to the 2015 agreement and fulfill their mutual commitments,” Pezeshkian added on Tuesday.
Last month, European powers France, Germany, and Britain warned that Iran’s actions had further eroded the agreement, noting that Tehran’s stockpile of highly enriched uranium has no credible civilian justification.
In December, the head of the UN nuclear watchdog reported that Iran was dramatically advancing enrichment close to the 90% purity needed only for weapons-grade material.
The three European nations, co-signatories of the 2015 accord, had brokered the deal under which Iran agreed to limit enrichment in exchange for the lifting sanctions.
“According to the Leader’s opinion, going in this direction is now forbidden, because he is a religious authority; (but) maybe he will change his opinion tomorrow,” Shahid Beheshti University President Mahmood-Reza Aghamiri said recently in an interview.
Nuclear energy groups race to develop ‘microreactors’
Companies vie to create small plants for deployment to sites from data centres to oil platforms
Ft.com Malcolm Moore and George Steer in London, 9 Jan 25
Nuclear energy companies are trying to shrink reactors to the size of shipping containers in a bid to compete with electric batteries as a source of zero-carbon energy. Led by Westinghouse, the race to develop “microreactors” is based on the notion they can replace diesel and gas generators used by everything from data centres to remote off-grid communities to offshore oil and gas platforms.
Microreactors have a much smaller output of up to 20MW, enough to power roughly 20,000 homes, and are likely to operate like large batteries, with no control room or workers on site. The reactors would be transported to a site, plugged in and left to run for several years before being taken back to their manufacturer for refuelling. Westinghouse in December won approval from US nuclear regulators for a control system that will eventually allow the 8MW eVinci to be operated remotely. The reactor, which has minimal moving parts, uses pipes filled with liquid sodium to draw heat from its nuclear fuel and transfer it to the surrounding air, which can then run a turbine to produce electricity or be pumped into heating systems.
“Our goal is to be able to operate autonomously from a central location where we can just simply monitor a fleet of reactors that are deployed around the world,” said Ball…………………………………………
Ball said two of the target markets for eVinci reactors were data centres and the oil and gas industry, both on and offshore. He said the ability to run several microreactors side by side would make data centres more resilient than with a single source of energy.
…………………………………………………………………. But J Clay Sell, chief executive of X-energy, said the market for microreactors was “still emerging”. “We’ve probably invested as much as anyone in the sector,” he said. “But when you go down in size, the economics become much more challenged. You have to get to a greater level of scale for microreactors to become economic.”
………………………………………. there are questions over how to build, transport and run microreactors safely, said Ronan Tanguy, programme lead for safety and licensing at the World Nuclear Association. Regulators still have to draw up rules around whether microreactors can be operated remotely and how to make them safe from cyber attacks. Rules are also needed around transporting them, especially across national borders, and whether they should be fuelled in a factory or on site. Given their smaller size, they may also pose an easier target for nuclear fuel theft…………………. https://www.ft.com/content/a4c98cb2-797a-4943-9643-2fd75accfd59
Japanese crime boss admits to conspiring to sell nuclear material to Iran
Takeshi Ebisawa faces a maximum punishment of life in prison after pleading guilty to six counts in a Manhattan court.
A Japanese crime boss has pleaded guilty to conspiring to sell nuclear material from Myanmar to Iran along with drug trafficking and weapons offences, authorities in the United States have said.
Takeshi Ebisawa, 60, a member of the yakuza, entered a guilty plea to six counts in federal court in Manhattan on Wednesday, the US Department of Justice said in a statement.
He is set to be sentenced on April 9.
According to prosecutors, Ebisawa in 2020 told an undercover agent for the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA) and a DEA source that he had acquitted a large quantity of thorium and uranium that he wished to sell.
In response to Ebisawa’s repeated inquiries, the undercover agent agreed to help Ebisawa broker the sale of the nuclear materials to an associate who was posing as an Iranian general, prosecutors said.
Ebisawa then offered to supply the undercover associate with plutonium that would be even “better” and more “powerful” than uranium for making nuclear weapons, according to prosecutors.
A powdery yellow substance that Ebisawa’s co-conspirators showed to undercover agents was later determined in a laboratory analysis to contain detectable quantities of uranium, thorium and plutonium, the Justice Department said.
Ebisawa also conspired to broker the purchase of US-made surface-to-air missiles and heavy-duty weaponry to arm multiple ethnic armed groups in Myanmar, and to accept large quantities of heroin and methamphetamine as partial payment for the arms, according to prosecutors.
US officials said they conducted Ebisawa’s arrest and prosecution in cooperation with law enforcement partners in Indonesia, Japan and Thailand.
“Today’s plea should serve as a stark reminder to those who imperil our national security by trafficking weapons-grade plutonium and other dangerous materials on behalf of organized criminal syndicates that the Department of Justice will hold you accountable to the fullest extent of the law,” said Assistant Attorney General Matthew G Olsen of the Justice Department’s National Security Division.
Ebisawa, who was previously charged in 2022 with international drug trafficking and firearms offences, faces possible life imprisonment for the most serious of the charges.
No more buckets and spades – would nuke dump end West Cumbrian tourism?
NFLA 7th Jan 2025
The UK/Ireland Nuclear Free Local Authorities fear the siting of a Geological Disposal Facility in the South Copeland Search Area could lead to irrecoverable damage to the tourist economy and the loss of many local jobs.
Local campaigners in Millom and District against the Nuclear Dump have always been aware of this possibility. One of their first posters in a nod to Fifties tourism flyers urged visitors to ‘Come holiday at Britain’s first nuclear waste dump’, with the tagline ‘Its radiant’.
The most recent statistical analysis published by Cumbria Tourism shows that day trippers and holidaymakers brought in almost £300 million in annual revenue to South-West Cumbrian coastal resorts, helping to sustain over 2,300 full-time jobs…………………………………………….. https://www.nuclearpolicy.info/news/no-more-buckets-and-spades-would-nuke-dump-end-west-cumbrian-tourism/
University of Cumbria’s central role in new £4.9 million nuclear robotics and AI cluster.
University of Cumbria is part of a consortium with
UK Atomic Energy Authority, University of Oxford and University of
Manchester to develop a new nuclear robotics and AI cluster linking Cumbria
and Oxfordshire. Awarded £4.9 million, the cluster is the largest of seven
new projects supported through an overall funding package of £22 million
from the UK Research and Innovation (UKRI) Engineering and Physical
Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) Place Based Impact Acceleration Account
(PBIAA) scheme to strengthen emerging and existing research and innovation
clusters to kickstart economic growth and address regional needs.
University of Cumbria 6th Jan 2025
https://news.cumbria.ac.uk/news/university-of-cumbrias-central-role-in-new-gbp-4-9-million-nuclear-robotics-and-ai-cluster
Iran Condemns US Threats to Nuclear Facilities, Calls for UN Accountability
Latifa Ferial Nail, 6 Jan 25, https://nbmediacoop.org/2025/01/06/first-nations-chiefs-shouldnt-be-duped-by-nuclear-is-green-deception/
Iran’s Foreign Ministry spokesman, Esmaeil Baghaei, has condemned recent remarks by US national security adviser Jake Sullivan regarding potential military action against Iran’s peaceful nuclear program.
Baghaei urged the UN Security Council to hold the United States accountable for its threats to attack Iran’s nuclear facilities, emphasizing that such actions violate the United Nations Charter.
Sullivan reportedly presented US President Joe Biden with options for strikes on Iranian nuclear sites, should Tehran allegedly pursue a nuclear weapon—a claim Iran has repeatedly denied.
Baghaei noted that these threats had been made multiple times and stressed that the international community must address this issue to maintain global peace and security. The spokesman reaffirmed Iran’s determination to defend its sovereignty and dignity.
Raffi Berg: BBC Middle East Editor Exposed as CIA, Mossad Collaborator
By Alan MacLeod / MintPress News
Asenior BBC editor at the center of an ongoing scandal into the network’s systematic pro-Israel bias is, in fact, a former member of a CIA propaganda outfit, MintPress News can reveal. Raffi Berg, an Englishman who heads the BBC’s Middle East desk, formerly worked for the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service, a unit that, by his own admission, was a CIA front group.
Berg is currently the subject of considerable scrutiny after thirteen BBC employees spoke out, claiming, among other things, that his “entire job is to water down everything that’s too critical of Israel” and that he holds “wild” amounts of power at the British state broadcaster, that there exists a culture of “extreme fear” at the BBC about publishing anything critical of Israel, and that Berg himself plays a key role in turning its coverage into “systematic Israeli propaganda.” The BBC has disputed these claims.
Our Man in London
Berg came to public attention in December after Drop Site News published an investigation based on interviews with 13 BBC staffers who present him as a domineering figure, systematically blocking coverage critical of Israel and manipulating stories to suit pro-Israel narratives.
The 9000-word report, written by popular journalist Owen Jones, is extensive and well-researched. However, one aspect of the story it almost completely avoids is Berg’s connections to the U.S. national security state, which MintPress News can now reveal.
According to his LinkedIn profile, Berg was an employee of the U.S. State Department’s Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) three years before joining the BBC. The FBIS is understood the world over to be a CIA front group known for gathering intelligence for the agency.
As the first two lines of its Wikipedia entry read:
The Foreign Broadcast Information Service (FBIS) was an open source intelligence component of the Central Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Science and Technology. It monitored, translated, and disseminated within the U.S. government openly available news and information from media sources outside the United States.
In 2005, the FBIS was subsumed into the CIA’s new Open Source Enterprise.
Berg does not dispute that he was, in fact, a CIA man. In fact, according to a 2020 interview with The Jewish Telegraph, he was “absolutely thrilled” to be secretly working for the agency. Berg said, “One day, I was taken to one side and told, ‘you may or may not know that we are part of CIA, but don’t go telling people.’” He was unsurprised by this news, as the application process was extremely long and rigorous. “They went through my character and background with a fine tooth comb, asking if I had ever visited communist countries and, if I had, did I form any relationships while I was there,” he said.
Mossad Collaborator
The CIA, however, is not the only clandestine spy organization with which Berg has a long history of collaborating. He also has a rich professional relationship with Mossad, Israel’s premier intelligence agency………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Relentlessly Pro-Israel
Of course, it is entirely possible that a pro-Israel stance would help one climb the ladder at the BBC, an organization long known to display a strong bias in favor of the country and its interests………………………………………………………………………………………………………..
Berg is alleged to have made extensive pre-publication edits to others’ stories, changing the framing of news events to shield Israel from blame. One example of this is the whitewashing of the Israeli attack on the funeral of Palestinian-American journalist Shireen Abu Akleh. In May 2022, Israeli snipers shot the Al Jazeera anchor in the head and proceeded to lie about their culpability. Israeli forces subsequently attacked the public funeral, beating mourners and firing tear gas. The BBC’s text, allegedly penned by Berg himself, read:
Violence broke out at the funeral in East Jerusalem of reporter Shireen Abu Aqla, killed during an Israeli military operation in the occupied West Bank.
Her coffin was jostled as Israeli police and Palestinians clashed as it left a hospital in East Jerusalem.
Thus, Abu Akleh’s murder by Israeli forces was downgraded to a mere death during an operation (with no perpetrator mentioned), while a police attack on a funeral procession was presented as a “clash” between rival factions, presumably of roughly equal responsibility.
…………………………………………………………… The BBC, meanwhile, has offered unequivocal support for him and his work, rejected any suggestion of a lenient stance towards Israel, and alleges that the Drop Site article “fundamentally misdescribe[s] Berg’s power, influence, and how the network works. https://www.mintpressnews.com/bbc-israel-coverage-raffi-berg-cia-mossad-links/288909/
State of the Cryosphere Report 2024
Lost Ice, Global Damage
In the State of the Cryosphere 2024 – Lost Ice, Global Damage report, over 50 leading cryosphere scientists warn of vastly higher impacts and costs to the global economy given accelerating losses in the world’s snow and ice regions. Current climate commitments, leading the world to well over 2°C of warming, would bring disastrous and irreversible consequences for billions of people from global ice loss.
Based on the most recent cryosphere science updates from 2024, the authors underscore that the costs of loss and damage will be even more extreme, with many regions experiencing sea-level rise or water resource loss well beyond adaptation limits in this century if our current level of emissions continues – leading towards a rise of 3°C or more. Mitigation will also become more costly due to feedbacks from thawing permafrost emissions and loss of sea ice.
For the first time, the report notes a growing scientific consensus that melting Greenland and Antarctic ice sheets, among other factors, may be slowing important ocean currents at both poles, with potentially dire consequences for a much colder northern Europe and greater sea-level rise along the U.S. East Coast.
Reviewed and supported by over 50 leading cryosphere scientists, this is the latest report in the State of the Cryosphere series, which takes the pulse of the cryosphere on an annual basis. The cryosphere is the name given to Earth’s snow and ice regions and ranges from ice sheets, glaciers, snow and permafrost to sea ice and the polar oceans – which are acidifying far more rapidly than warmer waters. The report describes how a combination of melting polar ice sheets, vanishing glaciers, and thawing permafrost will have rapid, irreversible, and disastrous impacts worldwide.
Energy efficiency, the forgotten tool for dealing with climate change
How to keep warm when budgets are squeezed.
Sub-zero temperatures are hitting the UK just as gas and electricity prices have risen for millions of households. Energy bills are about 50% higher than pre-Covid levels,
leaving many struggling to cover the cost alongside other financial
demands.
So what can you do to stay warm while keeping costs down? Before
having an argument between family or flatmates about the heating, try
touring the property to work out how to save energy. That may include
turning off radiators in unused rooms, switching lights off when they are
not needed, and not leaving electrical appliances on standby. Curtains
should be open during the day, then drawn at dusk. Manage your draughts by
putting a black bag with scrunched up paper up an unused chimney, or try
limiting other draughts around the home. You can easily make your own
draught excluders. Cold, hard floors can be covered by a rug if you have
one. Layer up with clothes, safely use a hot water bottle, and make sure
you have warm nightwear.
BBC 3rd Jan 2025
https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cd6084l4zx6o
TODAY. The polar playground for a suicidal species?
https://theaimn.net/the-polar-playground-for-a-suicidal-species/ 7 January 25
Where to begin on this mind-boggling story about epic changes on a very small planet?
Well, let’s begin on the fun part. The Australian Antarctic Program encourages some pretty innocuous recreational activities, plus of course, encouragement for tourists to come, and to learn about the polar world. So that’s OK, I suppose. But lately, in the news, there is growing concern that tourists, Australians in particular, are taking such a playful attitude to Antarctica, that they are risking their personal safety.
Interesting that the video above puts the blame on TikTok for encouraging the fun and danger. But tourism itself is good for increasing education about Antarctica. As long as individuals personally behave safely, that’s fine, isn’t it?
But what about planetary safety?
What Australians, and most of the world, learn about Antarctica, is that it’s pretty, and has penguins, Oh, and the ice is melting a bit, too. And that’s about it. The media does not trouble our complacent little minds with information about the thermohaline ocean circulation, the atmospheric circulation patterns, the carbon-sequestration of krill, the polar vortex…. Much too hard for us, in this cricket-tennis season.
Right now, Northern Europe and parts of the USA are experiencing extreme cold weather. No doubt some people would say that this disproves global heating, climate change. Alas, these extremes, emanating from the Arctic, by the polar vortex, are exacerbated by global heating. The polar vortex is a complex system, difficult to grasp, for the average news reader, so it is part of the whole poorly known, global climate system.
Antarctica is at the other end of the world – not connected to all this? Well, not if you ignore the global thermohaline circulation, among other things like sea level rise.
Global thermohaline circulation
Professor Elisabeth Leane, Professor of Antarctic Studies at the University of Tasmania says – What happens in Antarctica doesn’t stay in Antarctica. Its future will shape the future of the planet
Which brings me to the question of safety in relation to Antarctica – planetary, not just personal.
And here’s what the University of Tasmania says about it – Antarctica’s tipping points threaten global climate stability.
The map above is from the University of Tasmania’s report by international climate scientists . It identifies the various cascading tipping points and their interactions and pressures on the ecosystem.
For those who care about the climate change issue, and about Australia and the Antarctic, I would urge them to watch, and persist with, this brilliant report by climate researcher Paul Beckwith – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6WccDhnM8R8
Beckwith explains the potential tipping points identified by the study and their interrelationships , and adds the issue of sea ice loss. Critical issues are ice sheets, ocean acidification, ocean circulation, species redistribution, invasive species, permafrost melting, local pollution, chemical impacts, social impacts, local pollution and the Antarctic Treaty System. He goes on to explain with excellent graphics, the global thermohaline circulation, and then, in-depth, the records on sea ice, and then on to his detailed study on the tiny krill or light shrimp, and their global importance. Finally, Beckwith outlines the politics, the various national claims in the Antarctic Treaty System. The scientists’ conclusion – the urgent need for action on climate. Heavy stuff. Fascinating stuff. He finishes with a reminder of the unique role of that amazing critter the krill.
If you want a more concise discussion of the University of Tasmania’s December remarkable workshop of international marine scientists – go to Radio Ecoshock – World-changing Tipping Points – In Antarctica !
The “mainstream media” rarely covers climate change in any depth. For decades, the public has been informed very superficially on this life and death matter for our survival. The dedicated scientists produce their research results, but the media seem to find these too difficult, or too “political” to bother to report on them properly. The December 2024 “emergency summit” of international polar scientists in Tasmania barely got a mention in the Australian or international press.
You have to go to alternative media, to get any real insight into what is happening to the climate of our planet home. For decades now, Paul Beckwith has being producing his highly informative and wonderfully illustrated videos, on Youtube. Meanwhile Alex Smith has been doing the same sort of thing on radio and podcast, and print, – on Radio Ecoshock, which is heard in Australia on Community Radio 3CR.
In 2025, it is ever more urgent for people to wade through the morass of “social” media, and corporate media, and “alternative” media, to find the facts on climate change. Paul Beckwith and Radio Ecoshock are two examples of a rare and endangered human species – journalists who do their homework on climate change.
1 This Month
26 April – Chernobyl: Inside the Meltdown airs on National Geographic on Sunday 26th April from 4pm
29 April – Nuclear Expert Webinar #1 – Radiation Impacts on Families with Mary Olson and Cindy Folkers
- 12:15 PM MT – 1:45 PM MT
- Location: Virtual – REGISTER TODAY
4 May -West Suburban Peace Coalition to discuss Iran war at May Educational Forum
Monday, May 4, 7:00 – 8:00 PM Central Standard Time
Title: : How Trump’s Narrative Tries to Shape the Reality of the War on Iran.
Contact Walt Zlotow, zlotow@hotmail.com 630 442 3045 for further information
14 May – online event From Bombs to Data Centres: the Face of Nuclear Colonialism
Pine Ridge Uranium is the real threat, not Tehran- Tell Burgum: Stop the Extraction.
Chernobyl: The Lost Tapes – A good documentary on Chernobyl on SBS available On Demand for the next 3 weeks– https://www.sbs.com.au/ondemand/tv-program/chernobyl-the-lost-tapes/2352741955560
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity – go to https://nuclearinformation.wordpress.com
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