Amid ‘staggering’ Ukrainian toll and souring US polls, Biden seeks billions more for war

the Zelensky government does appear to be a willing partner in McConnell’s sacrifice ritual. Ukrainian defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov is said to have told US officials that flooding Ukraine with weapons allows NATO allies to “actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”

As Ukraine faces “staggering” losses and US public mood shifts, the Biden administration seeks billions more to prolong the war.

The Biden administration is asking Congress for an additional $24 billion for the Ukraine proxy war, more than half of it in military aid. The request comes one week after a CNN poll showed, for the first time, that a majority of Americans oppose additional funding to Kiev.

For a White House committed to ensuring a Russian “quagmire” in Ukraine, public opinion is of secondary importance. Two months into a widely hyped yet now faltering Ukrainian counteroffensive, a fresh influx of NATO weaponry appears necessary to prolong the war. In one of several gloomy assessments to appear in US establishment media, a senior western diplomat tells CNN that the prospect that Ukrainian forces can “make progress that would change the balance of this conflict” is “extremely, highly unlikely.” Ukraine’s “primary challenge” is breaking through Russia’s heavily fortified defensive lines, where “Ukrainian forces have incurred staggering losses.” According to Democratic Rep. Mike Quigley, US military assessments of the war are “sobering,” with Ukraine now facing “the most difficult time of the war.”

This picture, CNN’s Jim Sciutto observes, represents “a marked change from the optimism at the start of the counteroffensive,” with Western officials now acknowledging that “those expectations were ‘unrealistic.’” The battlefield reality is so dire that it is even “now contributing to pressure on Ukraine from some in the West to begin peace negotiations, including considering the possibility of territorial concessions.”

But as Biden’s new spending request suggests, there is no sign that the US is among those Western states applying pressure for peace. After all, the stated US aim, as top officials have made clear, is not to defend Ukraine and its long-term future but to instead “weaken” Russia (Lloyd Austin) and ensure “a strategic failure for Putin,” so that Russian can “pay a longer-term price in terms of the elements of its national power.” (Jake Sullivan)

Whereas CNN’s Western sources now allow themselves to admit that their publicly voiced “optimism at the start of the counteroffensive,” was “unrealistic”, it was in fact, dishonest. As Pentagon leaks and subsequent disclosures have confirmed, US officials were well aware that Ukraine was not prepared to take on Russia’s heavily fortified defenses, but kept that assessment under wraps. Accordingly, while Ukraine’s battlefield losses are indeed “staggering”, what is perhaps most “sobering” is the fact that the Biden administration both anticipated and encouraged them.

But just like souring US public opinion, Ukrainian casualties are also a secondary concern, as the Biden administration’s more candid neoconservative proxy war partners continue to make clear.

To push through the new spending package , the White House is “counting on help from Senator Mitch McConnell of Kentucky, the Republican minority leader,” the New York Times reports. At a public event, McConnell detailed his rationale: The US, he explained, hasn’t “lost a single American in this war,” – not accurate if one counts mercenaries and private citizens, but correct in its implicit recognition that Ukraine has lost tens of thousands of lives on its American sponsors’ behalf. According to McConnell, there are additional benefits of the war that do not extend to ordinary Ukrainians: “Most of the money that we spend related to Ukraine is actually spent in the US, replenishing weapons, more modern weapons. So it’s actually employing people here and improving our own military for what may lie ahead.”

Therefore, according to prevailing Biden-McConnell policy, the US must continue to fund a war that will sacrifice many more Ukrainian lives, all so that domestic war profiteers can reap taxpayer largesse for “replenishing weapons”, and so that the US – not having its soldiers die in Ukraine – can use the opportunity for “improving our own military” for a war that it might actually fight.

Although US officials have reportedly “expressed frustration” at Ukraine’s efforts to minimize military casualties, the Zelensky government does appear to be a willing partner in McConnell’s sacrifice ritual. Ukrainian defence minister Oleksiy Reznikov is said to have told US officials that flooding Ukraine with weapons allows NATO allies to “actually see if their weapons work, how efficiently they work and if they need to be upgraded. For the military industry of the world, you can’t invent a better testing ground.”

For the benefit of weakening Russia, enriching US military contractors and serving as a NATO “testing ground,” Ukrainian lives are not the only staggering sacrifice. According to the Wall Street Journal, “20,000 and 50,000 Ukrainians who have lost one or more limbs since the start of the war,” a scale unseen for a Western military since the First World War, and a potential undercount “because it takes time to register patients after they undergo” surgery.

According to veteran State Department bureaucrat Aaron David Miller, the Biden administration has no other choice but to continue sacrificing Ukrainians. The US, he explained, “is in an investment trap in Ukraine with no clear way out. Chances of a military breakthrough or a diplomatic solution are slim to none; and slim may have already left town. We’re in deep and lack the ability to do much more than react to events.” The key term here is “investment trap”: having invested in a proxy war aimed at bleeding Russia, the US is therefore obliged to continue it.

But if the US were driven by other concerns – such as Ukrainian well-being – it could consider supporting the diplomatic opportunities that it has blocked to date. Prior to Russia’s invasion, the Biden administration encouraged the Ukrainian government to crack down on political opponents; further integrate its military into NATO; avoid implementing the Minsk accords for ending its post-2014 civil war; and assault the Russian-allied Donbas. When Russia submitted detailed proposals in December 2021 to address its concerns, the White House effectively balked. And after Russia’s invasion, the US blocked a tentative peace deal that would have seen Russia withdrew to its pre-February 2022 lines. More recently, the US has pushed Ukraine into a counteroffensive that it knew had no chance, and rejected a Ukrainian NATO bid that it had long encouraged for the apparent purpose of baiting Moscow.

In short, the Biden administration has provoked this war and is now seeking a new influx of taxpayer money to prolong it. Even the latter goal is now openly admitted. At last month’s NATO summit in Lithuania, the New York Times reported, “several American and European officials acknowledged” that their “commitments” to Ukraine “make it all the more difficult to begin any real cease-fire or armistice negotiations.” Additionally, US-led “promises of Ukraine’s eventual accession to NATO — after the war is over —create a strong incentive for Moscow to hang onto any Ukrainian territory it can and to keep the conflict alive.”

So long as keeping the conflict alive comes predominantly at the cost of Ukrainian lives, then Washington’s bipartisan proxy warriors clearly have no qualms about forcing a war-weary public to foot the bill.

August 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Small Modular Reactors- a US view

we now have ‘an echo chamber, with each outlet clambering over the next to crow about the great benefits of nuclear power in misleading language that suggests this technology is already entirely proven out’. 

It all fits into what see she see as an emerging pro-SMR mind set, with there being a lot of speculative investment venture cash still around- and a lot of press support. She says that though ‘very few of the proposed SMRs have been demonstrated and none are commercially available, let alone licensed by a nuclear regulator’, the media has been promoting them as the way ahead.

August 12, 2023  https://renewextraweekly.blogspot.com/2023/08/small-modular-reactors-us-view.html

Allison Macfarlane, who was Chair of the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) from 2012-2014, has been looking at Small Modular Reactors in the USA and elsewhere. She thinks they are likely to be uneconomic, much like the their larger brethren, which, as she describes, have recently been doing very poorly in the USA. 

Indeed, just like the EPR story in the EU, it makes for a sorry saga: ‘The two units under construction in South Carolina were abandoned in 2017, after an investment of US$9 billion. The two AP-1000 units in Georgia were to start in 2016/2017 for a price of US$14 billion. One unit started in April, 2023, the second unit promises to start later in 2023. The total cost is now over US$30 billion.’

Big reactors do look increasingly hard to fund and build on time and budget, while it is argued that smaller ones could be mass produced in factories at lower unit costs and finished units installed on site more rapidly. However, that would mean foregoing conventional economies of (large) scale, and, overall, Macfarlane claims that SMRs may end up being worse that large plants in operational and economic terms. 

For example, she says ‘one of the reasons SMRs will cost more has to do with fuel costs’ with some designs requiring ‘high-assay low enriched uranium fuel (HALEU), in other words, fuel enriched in the isotope uranium-235 between 10-19.99%, just below the level of what is termed “highly enriched uranium,” suitable for nuclear bombs.’ She notes that ‘currently, there are no enrichment companies outside of Russia that can produce HALEU, and thus the chicken-and-egg problem: an enrichment company wants assurance from reactor vendors to invest in developing HALEU production. But since commercial-scale SMRs are likely decades away, if they are at all viable, there is risk to doing so.’

She also notes that the use of HALEU, so as to offset the smaller size of the reactor core, will ‘result in increased security and safeguards requirements that will add to the price tag’. As she has explored in a PNAS paper with others, smaller cores mean more neutron escapes and so a need for more shielding, which will become activated, adding to the waste burden to be dealt. Indeed she says, overall, some SMRs may produce ‘significantly more high-level waste by volume that current light water reactors.’ That view did not go down well with SMR promoters, who sometimes portray SMRs as being cleaner than standard reactors.  

Some advanced SMRs may use molten salt fluids as a reactant and also coolant, and the waste chemistry then is different, although there will still be wastes to deal with. But for the moment, the focus is on simpler technology – just scaled down versions of the standard  Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR). Macfarlane notes that one of these, NuScale, is the only SMR design to received ‘design certification’ for its 50MW unit from the NRC

However, the company has now decided to submit a new application to the NRC to build a larger version, presumably in the expectation that this would be more economic. It’s also proposed to have multiple units on one site, sharing some common services.  That might offset some of the extra costs of small systems, but not much. Macfarlane says ‘cost estimates for the reactor have risen from US$55/megawatt electric (MWe) in 2016 to $89/MWe in 2023, according to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis.’

Arguably, to be economic, they need to be bigger. That seems to have been the logic behind another mini-PWR, the Rolls Royce SMR being developed in the UK by Rolls Royce. Although at 470MW, that one is hardly ‘small’. 

By contrast, Oklo, another US company, is going in the opposite direction. It has been developing Auora, an advanced micro-nuclear power plant. It’s a tiny (1.5 MW) liquid sodium cooled fast neutron reactor. However, it was outright rejected by the NRC. Macfarlane says that ‘the NRC rarely outright rejects an application, instead working with licensees until they either get the application right or decide to walk away. In this case, Oklo refused to fill “information gaps” related to “safety systems and components.’ But Oklo persevered. And she notes it has gone for public finance via a merger with AltC Acquisition Corporation. 

It all fits into what see she see as an emerging pro-SMR mind set, with there being a lot of speculative investment venture cash still around- and a lot of press support. She says that though ‘very few of the proposed SMRs have been demonstrated and none are commercially available, let alone licensed by a nuclear regulator’, the media has been promoting them as the way ahead.

Even usually sane US outlets like the Atlantic Policy journal seem to have joined in. She says we now have ‘an echo chamber, with each outlet clambering over the next to crow about the great benefits of nuclear power in misleading language that suggests this technology is already entirely proven out’. 

 So she concludes, a bit pessimistically, that, in the USA, ‘in the nuclear celebratory mood of the moment, there is little patience or political will for sober voices to discuss the reality that new nuclear power is actually many decades away from having any measurable impact on climate change – if at all’.

The situation in Europe is a bit different. Although nuclear is also being supported in some countries, like the UK and France, anti-nuclear views are also apparent. For example a recent academic paper in Joule claims that ‘relying on nuclear new-builds to achieve the EU climate targets is virtually impossible.’ And overall it concludes ‘in solving the climate crisis, new nuclear is a costly and dangerous distraction.’ Whereas SMRs will be any better is unclear. There are quite few speculative SMR ventures around the word, as a UK review noted, but a recent study of 19 proposed SMR designs found that they were likely to be generally more expensive than conventional nuclear, and even more so than renewables. So, why bother?

As Macfarlane says, the battle lines are drawn on this issue around the world, with much of it being a PR battle – there is no real hardware yet. While the likes of Forbes magazine are pushing SMRs as the ‘go-to energy source’, in a hard hitting article in Fortune, Stephanie Cookes says ‘the billions currently being spent on nuclear are crowding out viable, less costly solutions for decarbonizing the power sector.’ 

Place your bets…but, for some, the outcome already looks clear. As David Schlissel said in US trade journal Utility Drive, ‘an old adage is that anything that sounds too good to be true probably is. Given the history of the nuclear power industry, everyone – utilities, ratepayers, legislators, federal officials and the general public – should be very skeptical about the industry’s current claim the new SMRs will cost less and be built faster than previous designs.’

August 15, 2023 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment