Antinuclear

How the “peaceful”American nuclear industry subsidises the nuclear weapons industry

The Real Nuclear Triad: Energy, Weapons and Waste  by JAMES HEDDLE , COUNTERPUNCH, NOVEMBER 7, 2017   “……….Chasing Nuclear Market ShareIn a recent piece in Foreign Affairs, entitled Will the West Let Russia Dominate the Nuclear Market? – What the Westinghouse Bankruptcy Means for the Future, born-again ‘new environmentalists’ and new nukes enthusiasts Nick Gallucci and Michael Shellenberger argue that US taxpayers should bail out the once-powerful, now bankrupt and Japanese-owned nuclear giant Westinghouse, or risk losing both global commercial and military nuclear primacy.

In the face of documented world-wide nuclear industry collapse, these guys want to revive what they call Eisenhower’s ‘humanitarian dream’ of Atoms for Peace (which spread deadly US nuclear technology around the world in the first place ) in order to, as Ike promised,  “provide abundant electrical energy in the power-starved areas of the world.”

Now, according to nuclear true-believers Nick and Mike, with the added benefit of saving civilization from climate change with new, ‘clean’ nuclear energy will be run on what they call ‘accident tolerant fuels’ – still a completely untested ‘nukes-for-ever’ concept.

The core element in their misguided pitch is that the decline of the civilian nuclear industry in the USA “would significantly undermine U.S. and Western national security interests.”

This, despite statistics showing that global investments in non-hydro renewables are now greater than the global investments in nuclear, hydro and fossil fuels combined.

Nuclear Policy Group-Think Adrift in a Sea of Delusion

Elsewhere in the news, a report by the pro-nuclear Energy Innovation Reform Project  on the future costs of new nuclear in the USA notes that: “A sustained decline in the commercial industry could also have a negative impact on the U.S. nuclear naval program.”

A 2017 report entitled The U.S. Nuclear Energy Enterprise: A Key National Security Enabler by the Energy Futures Initiative – another pro-nuke shop established by former Energy Secretary Ernest J. Moniz – clearly highlights the risks posed by US civilian nuclear decline to US naval supply chains………https://www.counterpunch.org/2017/11/07/the-real-nuclear-triad-energy-weapons-and-waste/

November 13, 2017 - Posted by Christina Macpherson | General News