TODAY. How very unfashionable! Scottish MP is worrying about health aspects of nuclear power, (instead of the finances!).
Really and truly ! Doesn’t he understand what the zeitgeist Is? (OK – I’m not really sure what zeitgeist means, anyway).
But the thing is. If you want to talk seriously about the nuclear industry, then you must just focus on the costs and the (supposed) financial benefits.
Nobody’s that interested in public health these days. it’s all about the money. Perhaps we should be grateful for this global obsession about money and profits. It’s the one thing that might stop this toxic industry.
MP Allan Dorans of Scotland has had the temerity to suggest that disturbance of the seabed on the Cumbrian coast might cause radioactivity from nuclear wastes to be transmitted up the food chain - increasing cancer risks.
Last year, the British Medical Journal aired a similar warning, about the cancer risks from low level ionising radiation – Cancer mortality after low dose exposure to ionising radiation in workers in France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
But that story didn’t really catch on. And after all, with the increasing numbers of cancer cases, we’re all gonna need increased nuclear electricity for the medical technology - and nuclear power is supposed to be cheaper, isn’t it?
The feckless four – hypocrisy of the nuclear weapons nations
What do governments led by Rishi Sunak, Vladimir Putin, Emmanuel Macron and Kim Jong-un have in common?
Inside Story NIC MACLELLAN ,2 FEBRUARY 2024
Just three days before Christmas, the UN General Assembly adopted a resolution designed to assist survivors of nuclear testing and restore environments contaminated by nuclear weapons testing and use. Jointly developed by Kiribati and Kazakhstan, the resolution won overwhelming support, with 171 nations in favour, six abstentions and just four votes against.
It’s little surprise that five of the six abstentions came from nuclear weapon states: the United States, China, Israel, Pakistan and India (joined, oddly, by South Sudan). But in a dismaying display of power politics, France and Britain voted with Russia and North Korea to oppose assistance to people and landscapes irradiated during decades of nuclear testing.
Diplomats representing Western powers are prone to talk about “the international community,” “the rules-based order” and “democratic versus authoritarian states.” But on this occasion the jargon was undercut by the willingness of London and Paris to line up alongside Moscow and Pyongyang to avoid responsibility for past actions and to limit reparations.
With the International Court of Justice debating genocide in Ukraine, Myanmar and Palestine and UN agencies seeking to defend international humanitarian law, the hypocrisy of major powers has been polarising international opinion. Developing nations are increasingly challenging an international order that sanctions official enemies, at the same time as absolving major powers of the responsibility to deal with their own breaches of international law.
Over the past three years, ambassadors Teburoro Tito of Kiribati and Akan Rakhmetullin of Kazakhstan have coordinated international consultations on how the nuclear assistance provisions of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, or TPNW, should be implemented. Articles 6 and 7 of the treaty, which entered into force in January 2021, include unprecedented obligations on parties to the treaty to aid nuclear survivors and contribute to environmental remediation.
Kiribati and Kazakhstan might seem an unlikely couple, but they have bonded over a common twentieth-century legacy. Both nations’ lands, waters and peoples have been devastated by cold war nuclear testing, and in each case the responsible countries refuse to take responsibility. Britain and Russia have bonded, too, but in their case, they’re united in their refusal to assist their former colonies.
After conducting twelve atmospheric atomic tests in Australia in 1952–57 — at the Monte Bello Islands, Emu Field and Maralinga — Britain sought a new location for developing and testing more powerful hydrogen bombs. During Operation Grapple, the British military conducted nine atmospheric thermonuclear tests at Malden and Christmas (Kiritimati) islands in the Gilbert and Ellice Islands Colony, which is today part of the Republic of Kiribati.
Just as Britain chose the “vast empty spaces” of the South Australian desert and the isolated atolls of Kiribati for its tests, Moscow sought similar expanses within the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Over more than four decades, it held 456 nuclear tests in the Semipalatinsk region of Kazakhstan. The history of Soviet testing in the Central Asian republic and its radioactive legacies, spread across more than 18,000 square kilometres, has been documented by Kazakh scholar Togzhan Kassenova in her compelling 2022 book Atomic Steppe.
Once the TPNW was adopted, Kiribati and Kazakhstan led efforts to develop mechanisms for dealing with the health and environmental effects of radioactive fallout. After seeking technical advice from survivors, nuclear scientists and UN agencies, they developed a set of proposals for action and a UN resolution seeking international support.
Now adopted by the UN General Assembly, that resolution proposes bilateral, regional and multilateral action and the sharing of technical and scientific information about nuclear legacies, and “calls upon Member States in a position to do so to contribute technical and financial assistance as appropriate.” It requires UN secretary-general Antonio Guterres to seek members’ views and proposals about assistance to nuclear survivors and report back to the General Assembly…………………………………………………. more https://insidestory.org.au/the-feckless-four/
The new space race Is Causing New Pollution Problems
NY Times, Ed Friedman Tue, 30 Jan 2024
The high-altitude chase started over Cape Canaveral on Feb. 17, 2023, when a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket launched. Thomas Parent, a NASA research pilot, was flying a WB-57 jet when the rocket ascended past the right wing — leaving him mesmerized before he hit the throttle to accelerate.
For roughly an hour, Mr. Parent dove in and out of the plume in the rocket’s wake while Tony Casey, the sensor equipment operator aboard the jet, monitored its 17 scientific instruments. Researchers hoped to use the data to prove they could catch a rocket’s plume and eventually characterize the environmental effects of a space launch.
In the past few years, the number of rocket launches has spiked as commercial companies — especially SpaceX, founded by Elon Musk — and government agencies have lofted thousands of satellites into low-Earth orbit. And it is only the beginning. Satellites could eventually total one million, requiring an even greater number of space launches that could yield escalating levels of emissions.
SpaceX declined to comment about pollution from rockets and satellites. Representatives for Amazon and Eutelsat OneWeb, two other companies working toward satellite mega-constellations, said they are committed to sustainable operations. But scientists worry that more launches will scatter more pollutants in pristine layers of Earth’s atmosphere. And regulators across the globe, who assess some risks of space launches, do not set rules related to pollution.
Image
The exhaust plume from a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket taking off from Vandenberg Air Force Base in California in 2018,Credit…Matt Hartman/Associated Press
Experts say they do not want to limit the booming space economy. But they fear that the steady march of science will move slower than the new space race — meaning we may understand the consequences of pollution from rockets and spacecraft only when it is too late. Already, studies show that the higher reaches of the atmosphere are laced with metals from spacecraft that disintegrate as they fall back to Earth.
“We are changing the system faster than we can understand those changes,” said Aaron Boley, an astronomer at the University of British Columbia and co-director of the Outer Space Institute. “We never really appreciate our ability to affect the environment. And we do this time and time again.”
……………………………… By the time a rocket curves into orbit, it will have dumped in the middle and upper layers of the atmosphere as much as two-thirds of its exhaust, which scientists predict will rain down and collect in the lower layer of the middle atmosphere, the stratosphere.
The stratosphere is home to the ozone layer, which shields us from the sun’s harmful radiation. But it is extremely sensitive: Even the smallest of changes can have enormous effects on it — and the world below.
………………………….Just how rockets will affect that relatively clear top, the stratosphere, remains uncertain. But scientists are concerned that black carbon, or soot, that is released from current rockets will act like a continuous volcanic eruption, a change that could deplete the ozone layer and affect the Earth below.
……………………………………………… A Race Against the Space Race
As space companies set records for launches and satellites deployed, scientists are starting to quantify the potential effects.
In a paper published in 2022, soot from rockets was shown to be nearly 500 times as efficient at heating the atmosphere as soot released from sources like airplanes closer to the surface. It’s the muddy-barrel effect.
“That means that as we start to grow the space industry and launch more rockets, we’re going to start to see that effect magnify very quickly,” said Eloise Marais, an associate professor in physical geography at University College London and an author of the study.
That said, Dr. Maloney’s team did not quantify how much more radiation exposure could occur.
The exact amounts of soot emitted by different rocket engines used around the globe are also poorly understood. Most launched rockets currently use kerosene fuel, which some experts call “dirty” because it emits carbon dioxide, water vapor and soot directly into the atmosphere. But it might not be the predominant fuel of the future. SpaceX’s future rocket Starship, for example, uses a mix of liquid methane and liquid oxygen propellants.
Still, any hydrocarbon fuel produces some amount of soot. And even “green rockets,” propelled by liquid hydrogen, produce water vapor, which is a greenhouse gas at these dry high altitudes.
“You can’t take what’s green in the troposphere and necessarily think of it being green in the upper atmosphere,” Dr. Boley said. “There is no such thing as a totally neutral propellant. They all have different impacts.”
Smithereens of Satellites
What goes up must come down. Once satellites in low-Earth orbit reach the end of their operational lifetimes, they plunge through the atmosphere and disintegrate, leaving a stream of pollutants in their wake. Although scientists do not yet know how this will influence Earth’s environment, Dr. Ross thinks that it will be the most significant impact from spaceflight.
A study published in October found that the stratosphere is already littered with metals from re-entering spacecraft. It used the same NASA WB-57 jet that chased the SpaceX rocket plume last year, studying the stratosphere over Alaska and much of the continental U.S.
When the researchers began analyzing the data, they saw particles that didn’t belong. Niobium and hafnium, for example, do not occur naturally but are used in rocket boosters. Yet these metals, along with other distinct elements from spacecraft, were embedded within roughly 10 percent of the most common particles in the stratosphere.
The findings validate earlier theoretical work, and Dr. Boley, who was not involved in the study, argues that the percentage will only increase given that humanity is at the beginning of the new satellite race.
Of course, researchers cannot yet say how these metals will affect the stratosphere.
“That’s a big question that we have to answer moving forward, but we can’t presume that it won’t matter,” Dr. Boley said.
…………………………………..scientists argue, satellite operators and rocket companies need regulations. Few are currently in place.
“Space launch falls into a gray area,” said Gavin Schmidt, director of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, who has been involved in a working group on this research. “It falls between the cracks of all the regulatory authorities.”
The Montreal Protocol, for instance, is a treaty that successfully set limits on chemicals known to harm the ozone layer. But it does not address rocket emissions or satellites.
In the United States, the Environmental Protection Agency is not responsible for analyzing rocket launches. The Federal Communications Commission licenses large constellations of satellites but does not consider their potential harm to the environment. (The Government Accountability Office called for changes to that F.C.C. policy in 2022, but they have yet to occur.) And the Federal Aviation Administration assesses environmental impacts of rocket launches on the ground, but not in the atmosphere or space.
That could put the stratosphere’s future in the hands of Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos and other private space company executives — which is particularly worrying to Dr. Boley, who says the space industry does not want to slow down.
“Unless it immediately affects their bottom line, they’re simply not interested,” he said. “The environmental impact is an inconvenience.”……… https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/science/astronomy-telescopes-satellites-spacex-starlink.html?action=click&module=RelatedLinks&pgtype=Article—
France limits its investment in Britain’s Sizewell C, as the global nuclear industry requires massive government subsidies.
Why are nuclear power projects so challenging? Increasing nuclear energy
capacity is not easy. Projects across the globe have been fraught with
delays and budget overruns, with the Financial Times revealing last week
that France is pressing the UK to help fill budget shortfalls at the
Hinkley Point C project in England, being built by EDF.
The International Energy Agency (IEA) says nuclear projects starting between 2010 and 2020
are on average three years late, even as it forecasts nuclear power
generation will hit a record high next year and will need to more than
double by 2050. Technical issues, shortages of qualified staff,
supply-chain disruptions, strict regulation and voter pushback are the key
factors developers and governments are grappling with. In the US, Georgia
Power is scheduled to complete work within weeks on the second of two
gigantic new nuclear reactors that are at the vanguard of US plans to
rebuild its nuclear energy industry.
But the expansion of Plant Vogtle is
seven years late and has cost more than double the original price tag of
$14bn due to a series of construction problems, highlighting the complexity
of nuclear megaprojects. These complexities, high costs and long build
times — as well as strict regulation due to risks of nuclear accidents
— make nuclear power a daunting prospect for many investors.
As a result, the sector is heavily subsidised by governments. Many reactor suppliers for
large-scale projects are state-owned, working alongside the private sector
to build the full plant. But countries also have a limit on how much they
are willing to spend. EDF, now fully owned by the French state, will limit
its stake in its next planned UK plant, Sizewell C, to 20 per cent.
FT 1st Feb 2024
https://www-ft-com.ezproxy.depaul.edu/content/6d371375-b7be-4228-a3d5-2ad74f91454a
In waging war on the UN refugee agency, the West is openly siding with Israeli genocide
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
By Jonathan Cook, Feb 1, 2024, – https://johnmenadue.com/in-waging-war-on-the-un-refugee-agency-the-west-is-openly-siding-with-israeli-genocide/
Israel has long plotted the downfall of UNRWA, aware that it is one of the biggest obstacles to eradicating the Palestinians as a people.
There is an important background to the decision by the United States and other leading western states, the UK among them, to freeze funding to the United Nations’ Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), the main channel by which the UN disseminates food and welfare services to the most desperate and destitute Palestinians.
The funding cut – which has been also adopted by Germany, France, Japan, Switzerland, Canada, Netherlands, Italy, Australia and Finland – was imposed even though the International Court of Justice (ICJ) ruled on Friday that Israel may be committing genocide in Gaza. The World Court judges quoted at length UN officials who warned that Israel’s actions had left almost all of the enclave’s 2.3 million inhabitants on the brink of a humanitarian catastrophe, including famine.
The West’s flimsy pretext for what amounts to a war on UNRWA is that Israel claims 12 local UN staff – out of 13,000 – are implicated in Hamas’ break-out from the open-air prison of Gaza on October 7. The sole evidence appears to be coerced confessions, likely extracted through torture, from Palestinian fighters captured by Israel that day.
The UN immediately sacked all the accused staff, seemingly without due process. We can assume that was because the refugee agency was afraid its already threadbare lifeline to the people of Gaza, as well as millions of other Palestinian refugees across the region – in the West Bank, Lebanon, Jordan and Syria – would be further threatened. It need not have worried. Western donor states cut their funding anyway, plunging Gaza deeper into calamity.
They did so without regard to the fact their decision amounts to collective punishment: some 2.3 million Palestinians in Gaza face starvation and the spread of lethal disease, while another 4 million Palestinian refugees across the region are at imminent risk of losing food, health care and schooling.
According to law professor Francis Boyle, who filed a genocide case for Bosnia at the World Court some two decades ago, that shifts most of these western states from their existing complicity with Israel’s genocide (by selling arms and providing aid and diplomatic cover) into direct and active participation in the genocide, by violating the 1948 Genocide Convention’s prohibition on “deliberately inflicting on the group [in this case, Palestinians] conditions of life calculated to bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
Israel’s creature
The following is the proper context for understanding what is really going on with this latest attack on UNRWA:
The World Court is investigating Israel for genocide. But it could easily widen its investigation to include western states. The threat to UNRWA needs to be seen in that light. Not only is Israel thumbing its nose at the World Court and international law, but states like the US and UK are doing so too, by cutting their funding to the refugee agency. They are slapping the court in the face, and indicating that they are four-square behind Israel’s crimes, even if they are shown to be genocidal in nature.
1 The agency was created in 1949 – decades before Israel’s current military slaughter in Gaza – to provide for the basic needs of Palestinian refugees, including essential food provision, health care and education. It has an outsize role in Gaza because most of the Palestinians living there lost, or are descended from families that lost, everything in 1948. That was when they were ethnically cleansed by the fledgling Israeli military from most of Palestine, in an event known to Palestinians as the Nakba, or Catastrophe. Their lands were turned into what Israel’s leaders described as an exclusively “Jewish state”. The Israeli army set about destroying the Palestinians’ towns and villages inside this new state so that they could never return.
2. UNRWA is separate from the UN’s main refugee agency, the UNHCR, and deals only with Palestinian refugees. Although Israel does not want you to know it, the reason for there being two UN refugee agencies is because Israel and its western backers insisted on the division back in 1948. Why? Because Israel was afraid of the Palestinians falling under the responsibility of the UNHCR’s forerunner, the International Refugee Organisation. The IRO was established in the immediate wake of the Second World War in large part to cope with the millions of European Jews fleeing Nazi atrocities.
Israel did not want the two cases treated as comparable, because it was pushing hard for Jewish refugees to be settled on lands from which it had just expelled Palestinians. Part of the IRO’s mission was to seek the repatriation of European Jews. Israel was worried that very principle might be used both to deny it the Jews it wanted to colonise Palestinian land and to force it to allow the Palestinian refugees to return to their former homes. So in a real sense, UNRWA is Israel’s creature: it was set up to keep the Palestinians a case apart, an anomaly.
Prison camp
3. Nonetheless, things did not go exactly to plan for Israel. Given its refusal to allow the refugees to return, and the reluctance of neighbouring Arab states to be complict in Israel’s original act of ethnic cleansing, the Palestinian population in UNRWA’s refugee camps ballooned. They became an especial problem in Gaza, where about two-thirds of the population are refugees or descended from refugees. The tiny coastal enclave did not have the land or resources to cope with the rapidly expanding numbers there. The fear in Israel was that, as the plight of the Palestinians of Gaza became more desperate, the international community would pressure Israel into a peace agreement, allowing for the refugees’ return to their former homes.
That had to be stopped at all costs. In the early 1990s, as the supposed Oslo “peace process” was being unveiled, Israel began penning the Palestinians of Gaza inside a steel cage, surrounded by gun towers. Some 17 years ago, Israel added a blockade that prevented the population’s movement in and out of Gaza, including via the strip’s coastal waters and its skies. The Palestinians became prisoners in a giant concentration camp, denied the most basic links to the outside world. Israel alone decided what was allowed in and out. An Israeli court later learnt that from 2008 onwards the Israeli military put Gaza on what amounted to a starvation diet by restricting food supplies.
There was a strategy here that involved making Gaza uninhabitable, something the UN started warning about in 2015. Israel’s game plan appears to have gone something like this:
By making Palestinians in Gaza ever more desperate, it was certain that militant groups like Hamas willing to fight to liberate the enclave would gain in popularity. In turn, that would provide Israel with the excuse both to further tighten restrictions on Gaza to deal with a “terrorism threat”, and to intermittently wreck Gaza in “retaliation” for those attacks – or what Israeli military commanders variously called “mowing the grass” and “returning Gaza to the Stone Age”. The assumption was that Gaza’s militant groups would exhaust their energies managing the constant “humanitarian crises” Israel had engineered.
At the same time, Israel could promote twin narratives. It could say publicly that it was impossible for it to take responsibility for the people of Gaza, given that they were so clearly invested both in Jew hatred and terrorism. Meanwhile, it would privately tell the international community that, given how uninhabitable Gaza was becoming, they urgently needed to find a solution that did not involve Israel. The hope was that Washington would be able to arm-twist or bribe neighbouring Egypt into taking most of Gaza’s destitute population.
Mask ripped off
4. On October 7, Hamas and other militant groups achieved what Israel had assumed was impossible. They broke out of their concentration camp. The Israeli leadership’s shock is not just over the bloody nature of the break-out. It is that on that day Hamas smashed Israel’s entire security concept – one designed to keep the Palestinians crushed, and Arab states and the region’s other resistance groups hopeless. Last week, in a knockout blow, the World Court agreed to put Israel on trial for genocide in Gaza, collapsing the moral case for an exclusive Jewish state built on the ruins of the Palestinians’ homeland.
The judges’ near-unanimous conclusion that South Africa has made a plausible case for Israel committing genocide should force a reassessment of everything that went before. Genocides don’t just emerge out of thin air. They happen after long periods in which the oppressor group dehumanises another group, incites against it and abuses it. The World Court has implicitly conceded that the Palestinians were right when they insisted that the Nakba – Israel’s mass dispossession and ethnic cleansing operation of 1948 – never ended. It just took on different forms. Israel became better at concealing those crimes, until the mask was ripped off after the October 7 break-out.
5. Israel’s efforts to get rid of UNRWA are not new. They date back many years. For a number of reasons, the UN refugee agency is a thorn in Israel’s side – and all the more so in Gaza. Not least, it has provided a lifeline to Palestinians there, keeping them fed and cared for, and providing jobs to many thousands of local people in a place where unemployment rates are among the highest in the world. It has invested in infrastructure like hospitals and schools that make life in Gaza more bearable, when Israel’s goal has long been to make the enclave uninhabitable. UNRWA’s well-run schools, staffed by local Palestinians, teach the children their own history, about where their grandparents once lived, and of Israel’s campaign of dispossession and ethnic cleansing against them. That runs directly counter to the infamous Zionist slogan about the Palestinians’ identity-less future: “The old will die and the young forget.”
Divide and rule
But UNRWA’s role is bigger than that. Uniquely, it is the sole agency unifying Palestinians wherever they live, even when they are separated by national borders and Israel’s fragmentation of the territory it controls. UNRWA brings Palestinians together even when their own political leaders have been manipulated into endless factionalism by Israel’s divide and rule policies: Hamas is nominally in charge in Gaza, while Mahmoud Abbas’ Fatah pretends to run the West Bank.
In addition, UNRWA keeps alive the moral case for a Palestinian right of return – a principle recognised in international law but long ago abandoned by western states.
Even before October 7, UNRWA had become an obstable that needed removing if Israel was ever to ethnically cleanse Gaza. That is why Israel has repeatedly lobbied to stop the biggest donors, especially the US, funding UNRWA. Back in 2018, for example, the refugee agency was plunged into an existential crisis when President Donald Trump acquiesced to Israeli pressure and cut all its funding. Even after the decision was reversed, the agency has been limping along financially.
6. Now Israel is in full attack mode against the World Court, and has even more to gain from destroying UNRWA than it did before. The freeze in funding, and the further weakening of the refugee agency, will undermine the support structures for Palestinians generally. But in Gaza’s case, the move will specifically accelerate famine and disease, making the enclave uninhabitable faster.
But it will do more. It will also serve as a stick with which to beat the World Court as Israel tries to fight off the genocide investigation. Israel’s barely veiled claim is that 15 of the International Court of Justice’s 17 judges fell for South Africa’s supposedly antisemitic argument that Israel is committing genocide. The court quoted extensively from UN officials, including the head of UNRWA, that Israel was actively engineering an unprecedented humanitarian crisis in Gaza. Now, as former UK ambassador Craig Murray notes, the coerced confessions against 12 UNRWA staff serve to “provide a propaganda counter-narrative to the ICJ judgment, and to reduce the credibility of UNRWA’s evidence before the court”.
Extraordinarily, the western media have done Israel’s PR work for it, happily focusing more attention on Israel’s claims about a handful of UNRWA staff than it has on the World Court’s decision to put Israel on trial for genocide.
Equally a boon to Israel is the fact that leading western states have so quickly pinned their colours to the mast. The funding freeze cements their fates to Israel’s. It sends a message that they will stand with Israel against the World Court, whatever it decides. Their war on UNRWA is intended as an act of collective intimidation directed towards the court. It is a sign that the West refuses to accept that international law applies to it, or its client state. It is a reminder that western states refuse any restraint on their freedom of action – and that it is Israel and its sponsors who are the true rogue states.
1 This month
of the week – Disrupting War & Militarism in Oceania. Active solidarity. Radical practice.
Antinuclear 