Congress’s Nuclear Addiction

“Facing its biggest crisis in 25 years, the U.S. nuclear power industry can count on plenty of Democratic and Republican friends in both high and low places,”……… “During the past election cycle alone, the Nuclear Energy Institute and more than a dozen companies with big nuclear portfolios have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to lawmakers in key leadership slots and across influential state delegations.”

CounterPunch, BY KARL GROSSMAN, 26 June 24

The “ADVANCE Act,” a bill to promote nuclear power, was passed 88-to-2 by the U.S. Senate last week. The ADVANCE stands for “Accelerating Deployment of Versatile, Advanced Nuclear for Clean Energy.” The only senators voting against it were Edward Markey of Massachusetts and Bernie Sanders of Vermont.

It was approved in the House of Representatives in May, also by a lopsided margin: 393-13. And it now has gone to President Joe Biden,

Among the many points in the bill are the speeding up of the federal licensing process for new nuclear power plants notably those described as “advanced,” reducing licensing fees, allow ownership of nuclear facilities in the U.S. by foreign nations, and establishing in the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission an Office of International Programs “to carry out the international nuclear export and innovation activities.”

The action by Congress comes amid what Kevin Kamps of the organization Beyond Nuclear says is “the biggest push for nuclear power that I’ve experienced in 32 years of anti-nuclear power activities.”

The nuclear industry, he says, is “trying to use the climate crisis” by claiming nuclear energy is carbon-free. “It’s not true. It’s not carbon-free by any means,” he says, and “not even low carbon when you compare it to genuinely low carbon sources of electricity, renewables like wind and solar.” But the nuclear industry is involved in a “propaganda campaign” attempting to validate itself by citing climate change, he says, and many in government having “fallen for this ploy.”

Diane D’Arrigo of the group Nuclear Information and Resource Service commented: “Nuclear power makes climate worse—stealing resources from climate solutions and districting us from real solutions—and this bill is putting our already threatened democracy at even greater risk.”

“Clearly, the U.S. Congress doesn’t understand or care about the dangers of radiation that will result,” said D’Arrigo in an interview. “The nuclear Advance Act, passed by nearly the whole U.S. House and Senate, hitched a ride on a must-pass bill fire-fighting bill as wildfire season is taking off during an election year.” The act of more than 90 pages was inserted into a three-page Fire Grants and Safety measure.

“The nuclear industry,” she said, “has been investing in Congress to get massive subsidies for operating and proposed new nuclear power reactors and those huge investments paid off billions in the Inflation Reduction Act and Bipartisan Infrastructure laws, possibly more for nuclear and carbon capture than renewables and efficiency. Now the 118^th Congress is again attempting to kickstart nuclear by bending the already-skewed rules making it harder for impacted communities to protect themselves.”

“Possibly most dangerous,” said D’Arrigo, “is the boost to a plutonium economy with accompanying police state. The ‘advanced’ fuel encouraged in this bill is nearly bomb-grade uranium and the bill provides for exporting it to other countries as well as using it in reactors all over this country. It’s a dismal moment in environmental, economic and human history. But one we must continue to challenge.”

Applauding the Senate’s passage of the ADVANCED Act was John Starkey, director of public policy at the American Nuclear Society. “It’s monumental,” said Starkey in an article on HuffPost. His society describes itself as “the premier organization for those that embrace the nuclear sciences and technologies.” Starkey further said: “This has been a long time coming.”

The HuffPost piece by Alexander C. Kaufman on passage of the ADVANCE Act says Biden “is all but certain to sign it into law.” However, his article adds: “Yet it’s only a first step.”

“The full legislation depends on Congress increasing funding to the NRC” and “help the agency staff up for an expected influx of applications” for new nuclear power plants, it says.

The HuffPost article was headlined: “Congress Just Passed The Biggest Clean-Energy Bill Since Biden’s Climate Law. It’s all on nuclear.”

Edwin Lyman, nuclear power safety director of the Union of Concerned Scientists, declared: “Make no mistake. This is not about making the reactor licensing process more efficient, but about weakening safety and security oversight across the board, a longstanding industry goal. The change to the NRC’s mission effectively directs the agency to enforce only the bare minimum level of regulation at every facility it oversees across the United States.”

“Passage of this legislation will only increase the danger to people already living downwind of nuclear facilities from a severe accident or terrorist attack,” said Lyman, “and it will make it even more difficult for communities to prevent risky, experimental reactors from being sited in their midst.”

Lyman, co-author of the book Fukushima: The Story of a Nuclear Disaster, also spoke about it being “extremely disappointing that without any meaningful debate” Congress was “changing the NRC’s mission to not only protect public health and safety but also to protect the financial health of the industry and its investors. Just as lax regulations by the FAA [Federal Aviation Administration]—an agency already burdened by conflicts of interests—can lead to a catastrophic failure of an aircraft, a compromised NRC could lead to a catastrophic reactor meltdown impacting an entire region for a generation.”

Harvey Wasserman, author of the book Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth and co-author of Killing Our Own: The Disaster of America’s Experience with Atomic Radiation, said:

“The ADVANCE Act is another death rattle for history’s most expensive techno-failure.”

In contrast to nuclear power, “Solar-generated electricity is now ‘too cheap to meter’ in California,” he said. And “every day now California goes 100% renewable for hours at a time.” In Texas, he noted, wind turbines are now producing so much electricity that it’s being distributed “for free” at night.

“Of the four big U.S. reactors ordered in the 21st century, two are stillborn in South Carolina at $9 billion,” said Wasserman in an interview. And the two new Vogtle nuclear power plants built in Georgia “are a $35 billion fiasco.”

“For the first time since 1954, zero big new U.S. nukes are under construction,” said Wasserman. As for what the nuclear industry calls “small modular reactors” that it is promoting, the “small mythological reactors are already soaring in price and crashing in production schedules, light years behind renewables in time and price.”

“The attempt to revive shut-down reactors will never work,” he said.

Also, he says the electricity generated by the two Diablo Canyon nuclear plants in California, slated for closure but now scheduled to keep running, “would $8-12 billion over market” price for electricity through 2030.

“The ADVANCE act aims to bail out a boat whose bottom has fallen out,” said Wasserman. And, “Solartopia’s day has dawned.”…………………………………………………………………………………..

Markey continued: “It’s also shortsighted to me to make such a herculean effort to promote new nuclear technologies when we’re yet to solve the longstanding problems resulting from our existing nuclear fleet. To this day, the Navajo nation is dealing with the legacy of uranium contamination, including more than 500 abandoned uranium mines and homes and water sources polluted with elevated levels of radiation.”

Michel Lee, chair of the Council on Intelligent Energy & Conservation Policy, calls “the passage of the ADVANCE Act the legislative equivalent of detonation of a nuclear weapon in our regulatory system.”…………………………………………………………………………………….

Among many other groups opposing the ADVANCE Act have been:  Climate Justice Alliance, Environment America, Friends of the Earth, Institute for Policy Studies, Indigenous Environmental Network, Science and Environmental Health Network, U.S. Public Interest Research Group, Waterspirit, 350 New Orleans, Earth Action, Inc., Endangered Species Coalition, Long Island Progressive Coalition and Methane Action.

In regard to the “follow the money,” that element of Congressional support of the ADVANCE Act was certainly also a factor. Politico in 2011 ran an article headlined: “Nuclear lobbyists clout felt on Hill.”

“Facing its biggest crisis in 25 years, the U.S. nuclear power industry can count on plenty of Democratic and Republican friends in both high and low places,” began the piece by Darren Samuelsohn. “During the past election cycle alone, the Nuclear Energy Institute and more than a dozen companies with big nuclear portfolios have spent tens of millions of dollars on lobbying and campaign contributions to lawmakers in key leadership slots and across influential state delegations.”

The Nuclear Energy Institute, “the industry’s biggest voice in Washington, for example, spent $3.76 million to lobby the federal government and an additional $323,000 through its political action committee on a bipartisan congressional slate, inclu2ding 134 House and 30 Senate candidates…”

“Nearly all of the investor-owned power companies that operate U.S. nuclear reactors play in the donation game,” said the article.

That was last decade, but times on this issue don’t change

Karl Grossman, professor of journalism at State University of New York/College at Old Westbury, and is the author of the book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space’s Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet, and the Beyond Nuclear handbook, The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space. Grossman is an associate of the media watch group Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting (FAIR). He is a contributor to Hopeless: Barack Obama and the Politics of Illusion.  https://www.counterpunch.org/2024/06/26/congresss-nuclear-addiction/

June 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Julian Assange is finally free, but no thanks to the media

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian.

In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.

JONATHAN COOK, 26 JUNE 2024 DeClassified UK

It was the media, led by the Guardian, that kept Assange behind bars. Their villainy will soon be erased because they write the script about what’s going on in the world.

“………………………………………………………………….Everything Assange had warned the US wanted to do to him was proved correct over the next five years, [from 2017] as he languished in Belmarsh entirely cut off from the outside world. 

No one in our political or media class appeared to notice, or could afford to admit, that events were playing out exactly as the founder of Wikileaks had for so many years predicted they would – and for which he was, at the time, so roundly ridiculed.

Nor was that same political-media class prepared to factor in other vital context showing that the US was not trying to enforce some kind of legal process, but that the extradition case against Assange was entirely about wreaking vengeance – and making an example of the Wikileaks founder to deter others from following him in shedding light on US state crimes.

That included revelations that, true to form, the CIA, which was exposed as a rogue foreign intelligence agency in 250,000 embassy cables published by Wikileaks in 2010, had variously plotted to assassinate him or kidnap him off the streets of London. 

Other evidence came to light that the CIA had been carrying out extensive spying operations on the embassy, recording Assange’s every move, including his meetings with his doctors and lawyers. 

That fact alone should have seen the US case thrown out by the British courts. But the UK judiciary was looking over its shoulder, towards Washington, far more than it was abiding by its own statute books.

Media no watchdog

Western governments, politicians, the judiciary, and the media all failed Assange. Or rather, they did what they are actually there to do: keep the rabble – that is, you and me – from knowing what they are really up to. 

Their job is to build narratives suggesting that they know best, that we must trust them, that their crimes, such as those they are supporting right now in Gaza, are actually not what they look like, but are, in fact, efforts in very difficult circumstances to uphold the moral order, to protect civilisation. 

For this reason, there is a special need to identify the critical role played by the media in keeping Assange locked up for so long.

The truth is, with a properly adversarial media playing the role it declares for itself, as a watchdog on power, Assange could never have been disappeared for so long. He would have been freed years ago. It was the media that kept him behind bars. 

The establishment media acted as a willing tool in the demonising narrative the US and British governments carefully crafted against Assange.

Even now, as he is reunited with his family, the BBC and others are peddling the same long-discredited lies. 

Those include the constantly repeated claim by journalists that he faced “rape charges” in Sweden that were supposedly dropped. Here is the BBC making this error once again in its reporting this week. 

In fact, Assange never faced more than a “preliminary investigation”, one the Swedish prosecutors repeatedly dropped for lack of evidence. The investigation, we now know, was revived and sustained for so long not because of Sweden but chiefly because the UK’s Crown Prosecution Service, then led by Sir Keir Starmer (now the leader of the Labour party), insisted on it dragging on. 

Starmer made repeated trips to Washington during this period, when the US was trying to find a pretext to lock Assange away for political crimes, not sexual ones. But as happened so often in the Assange case, all the records of those meetings were destroyed by the British authorities. 

The media’s other favourite deception – still being promoted – is the claim that Wikileaks’ releases put US informants in danger. 

That is utter nonsense, as any journalist who has spent even a cursory amount of time studying the background to the case knows. 

More than a decade ago, the Pentagon set up a review to identify any US agents killed or harmed as a result of the leaks. They did so precisely to help soften up public opinion against Assange. 

And yet a team of 120 counter-intelligence officers could not find a single such case, as the head of the team, Brigadier-General Robert Carr, conceded in court in 2013.

Despite having a newsroom stuffed with hundreds of correspondents, including those claiming to specialise in defence, security and disinformation, the BBC still cannot get this basic fact about the case right. 

That’s not an accident. It’s what happens when journalists allow themselves to be spoon-fed information from those they are supposedly watching over. That is what happens when journalists and intelligence officials live in a permanent, incestuous relationship. 

Character assassination

But it is not just these glaring reporting failures that kept Assange confined to his small cell in Belmarsh. It was that the entire media acted in concert in his character assassination, making it not only acceptable but respectable to hate him.

It was impossible to post on social media about the Assange case without dozens of interlocutors popping up to tell you how deeply unpleasant he was, how much of a narcissist, how he had abused his cat or smeared his walls in the embassy with faeces. None of these individuals, of course, had ever met him.

It also never occurred to such people that, even were all of this true, it would still not have excused stripping Assange of his basic legal rights, as all too clearly happened. And even more so, it could not possibly justify eroding the public-interest duty of journalists to expose state crimes.

What was ultimately at stake in the protracted extradition hearings was the US government’s determination to equate investigative national-security journalism with “espionage”. Whether Assange was a narcissist had precisely no bearing on that matter.

Why were so many people persuaded Assange’s supposed character flaws were crucially important to the case? Because the establishment media – our supposed arbiters of truth – were agreed on the matter.

The smears might not have stuck so well had they been thrown only by the rightwing tabloids. But life was breathed into these claims from their endless repetition by journalists supposedly on the other side of the aisle, particularly at the Guardian. 

Liberals and left-wingers were exposed to a steady flow of articles and tweets belittling Assange and his desperate, lonely struggle against the world’s sole superpower for the right not to be locked away for the rest of his life for doing journalism. 

The Guardian – which had benefited by initially allying with Wikileaks in publishing its revelations – showed him precisely zero solidarity when the US establishment came knocking, determined to destroy the Wikileaks platform, and its founder, for making those revelations possible.

For the record, so we do not forget how Assange was kept confined for so long, these are a few examples of how the Guardian made him – and not the law-breaking US security state – the villain.

Marina Hyde in the Guardian in February 2016 – four years into his captivity in the embassy – casually dismissed as “gullible” the concerns of a United Nations panel of world-renowned legal experts that Assange was being “arbitrarily detained” because Washington had refused to issue guarantees that it would not seek his extradition for political crimes.

Long-time BBC legal affairs correspondent Joshua Rozenberg was given space in the Guardian on the same day to get it so wrong in claiming Assange was simply “hiding away” in the embassy, under no threat of extradition (Note: Though his analytic grasp of the case has proven feeble, the BBC allowed him to opine further this week on the Assange case).

Two years later, the Guardian was still peddling the same line that, despite the UK spending many millions ringing the embassy with police officers to prevent Assange from “fleeing justice”, it was only “pride” that kept him detained in the embassy.

Or how about this one from Hadley Freeman, published by the Guardian in 2019, just as Assange was being disappeared for the next five years into the nearest Britain has to a gulag, on the “intense happiness” she presumed the embassy’s cleaning staff must be feeling. 

Anyone who didn’t understand quite how personally hostile so many Guardian writers were to Assange needs to examine their tweets, where they felt freer to take the gloves off. Hyde described him as “possibly even the biggest arsehole in Knightsbridge” while Suzanne Moore said he was “the most massive turd.”

The constant demeaning of Assange and the sneering at his plight was not confined to the Guardian’s opinion pages. The paper even colluded in a false report – presumably supplied by the intelligence services, but easily disproved – designed to antagonise the paper’s readers by smearing him as a stooge of Donald Trump and the Russians. 

This notorious news hoax – falsely claiming that in 2018 Assange repeatedly met with a Trump aide and “unnamed Russians”, unrecorded by any of the dozens of CCTV cameras surveilling ever approach to the embassy – is still on the Guardian’s website. 

This campaign of demonisation smoothed the path to Assange being dragged by British police out of the embassy in early 2019.

It also, helpfully, kept the Guardian out of the spotlight. For it was errors made by the newspaper, not Assange, that led to the supposed “crime” at the heart of the US extradition case – that Wikileaks had hurriedly released a cache of files unredacted – as I have explained in detail before. 

Too little too late

The establishment media that collaborated with Assange 14 years ago in publishing the revelations of US and UK state crimes only began to tentatively change its tune in late 2022 – more than a decade too late.

That was when five of his former media partners issued a joint letter to the Biden administration saying that it should “end its prosecution of Julian Assange for publishing secrets”.

But even as he was released this week, the BBC was still continuing the drip-drip of character assassination. A proper BBC headline, were it not simply a stenographer for the British government, might read: “Tony Blair: Multi-millionaire or war criminal?” 

For while the establishment media has busily fixed our gaze on the supposed character flaws of Assange, it has kept our attention away from the true villains, those who committed the crimes he exposed: Blair, George W Bush, Dick Cheney and many more. 

We need to recognise a pattern here. When the facts cannot be disputed, the establishment has to shoot the messenger. 

In this case, it was Assange. But the same media machine was rolled out against former Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn, another thorn in the establishment’s side. And as with Assange, the Guardian and the BBC were the two outlets that were most useful in making the smears stick.

Sadly, to secure his freedom, Assange was compelled to make a deal pleading guilty to one of the charges levelled against him under the Espionage Act. 

Highlighting the enduring bad faith of the Guardian, the same paper that so readily ridiculed Assange’s years of detention to avoid being locked away in a US super-max jail, ran an article this week, as Assange was released, stressing the “dangerous precedent” for journalism set by his plea deal.

Washington’s treatment of Assange was always designed to send a chilling message to investigative journalists that, while it is fine to expose the crimes of Official Enemies, the same standards must never be applied to the US empire itself.

How is it possible that the Guardian is learning that only now, after failing to grasp that lesson earlier, when it mattered, during Assange’s long years of political persecution? 

The even sadder truth is that the media’s villainous role in keeping Assange locked up will soon be erased from the record. That is because the media are the ones writing the script we tell ourselves about what is going on in the world.

They will quickly paint themselves as saints, not sinners, in this episode. And, without more Assanges to open our eyes, we will most likely believe them.  https://www.declassifieduk.org/julian-assange-freedom-this-time-no-thanks-to-the-media/

June 29, 2024 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment