“History is Calling: Australia and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons”
– Melissa Parke, ICAN International Executive Director, 30 Apr 24 https://icanw.org.au/history-is-calling-report/
“History is Calling: Australia and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons” sets out in detail the case for Australia to join the global majority of nations in supporting the nuclear weapon ban treaty. It outlines Australia’s progress on implementation, the TPNW’s complementarity with other agreements, nuclear safeguards and disarmament architecture, enforcement, universalisation, victim assistance and environmental remediation, Australia and its alliances, and nuclear deterrence theory.
By early 2024, almost half the world’s nations have already joined the TPNW. More will join. And they are getting to serious, practical work implementing the treaty.
Australia is currently the only nuclear-allied state where the governing party has repeatedly committed to sign and ratify the ban treaty. Under governments both Coalition and Labor, Australia has joined every other treaty banning an inhumane, indiscriminate weapon, but not yet this one banning the worst weapons of mass destruction.
Australia must step up and do its part to wind back the looming nuclear danger. Let’s get on the right side of history, not add to the risk of ending it. It’s time Australia joined the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.
– Melissa Parke, ICAN International Executive Director
Staggering rise of clean energy in China a wake-up call to Australia – including on nuclear
Given the implications for Australian taxpayers of the massive capital, time and LCOE blowouts of A$50-60bn per nuclear plant, it’s time to call the nuclear debate here for what it is – a politically motivated furphy designed to derail the renewables transition.
Taxpayers have already funded six government nuclear inquiries since 2015 which all concluded nuclear is too slow and too costly.
Nuclear works at scale in China. Here, it is a deliberate distraction by fossil fuel incumbents and politicians on their payroll.
Tim Buckley, Apr 30, 2024, https://reneweconomy.com.au/staggering-rise-of-clean-energy-in-china-a-wake-up-call-to-australia-including-on-nuclear/
China is undergoing a monumental power shift, with the staggering rise of zero-emissions energy positioning the green powerhouse to end new coal power before 2030. This has massive implications for global and Australian decarbonisation.
Climate Energy Finance’s latest report, released this week, modelled China’s electricity system nationally at the annual level through to 2040, evaluating its likely GDP growth trajectory and the resulting energy demand growth, as well as the increased share and hence demand for electricity in the energy mix as China continues to pursue its ‘electrification of everything’ strategy of the last two decades.
CEF forecasts that through to 2040, China will install a world-leading 323GW per annum of solar capacity, 80GW of wind, 1GW of hydropower and 3GW of nuclear.
Sustaining this rate of installation of >400GW pa of zero-emissions additions a year – over six times the total capacity of Australia’s National Electricity Market (NEM) – would see China achieve its ‘dual carbon’ targets, to peak carbon emissions by 2030 and reach carbon neutrality by 2060, ahead of time.
This in turn opens up the potential for it to revise its emissions reduction pledge to net zero by 2050 or 2055, bringing the behemoth in line with the rest of the developed world.
While China’s total electricity demand will continue to rise through 2040 due to sustained strong economic growth and economy-wide electrification, CEF forecasts that the share of thermal power in total generation will progressively decline, from 70% in 2023 to just 50% by 2030 and potentially to just 30% by 2040. A staggering transformation in under two decades.
This astonishing acceleration of the nation’s energy pivot is reflected in its energy investment trend. China Invested US$890bn in cleantech in 2023, more than double the US as the second largest investor.
China installed 63GW of zero-emissions electricity capacity in the first three months of 2024, as much as the entire NEM of Australia. That represented growth of 35% year-on-year (yoy), building on the 301GW of new zero emissions capacity installed in 2023, which was in turn double the rate of new capacity installs of 2022.
This rate of expansion is both world leading and global energy system-transforming.
Nuclear in China
China also leads the world in deployment of new nuclear energy. The levelised cost of energy (LCOE) of nuclear, at US$70 per megawatt hour (MWh), is half the cost of the US$160/MWh in Europe and US$105/MWh in the US.
This is a key point that Australia’s nuclear proponents fail to appreciate: There are demonstrable financial benefits to the technology in a super-large-scale, centrally-planned economy with a well-entrenched record of deploying complex, dangerous, massively capital-intensive nuclear power plants every year. These conditions do not apply in western economies and are completely out of the question for Australia.
The IEA estimates China can build nuclear power plants at half the capital cost of the US and Europe, and in almost half the time. Australia, on the other hand, has never built a commercial nuclear power plant, as confirmed by the World Nuclear Association.
China currently has 54GW of operable nuclear power reactors, with 31GW of nuclear power reactors under construction, another 45GW in planning and 98GW proposed as of February 2024, with more proposals for new nuclear reactors awaiting approval.
CEF’s Chinese electricity model forecasts China will double its nuclear power plant fleet to 108GW by 2040 to be #1 in the world in terms of total installed capacity, overtaking the US at 100GW.
December 2023 saw the world’s first 4th generation nuclear power plant go into commercial operation, operated by Huaneng Shandong Shidao Bay Nuclear Power. The facility has a modest net capacity of 150MW, but still took a lengthy 11 years to construct after approval in 2012.
In 2011 the National Energy Administration (NEA) announced that China would make nuclear energy the foundation of its electricity generation system in the next “10 to 20 years,” adding as much as 300GW of nuclear capacity over that period.
China has delivered less than a sixth of this target. Post Fukushima China wanted to only install the most modern facilities deploying the latest technology, which they developed themselves, becoming the world leader in this technology as in all zero-emissions technologies of industries of the future..
We forecast China will add 3GW annually of new capacity as part of its all-of-the-above strategy for domestic power generation. We estimate nuclear will rise to 790TWh of annual generation by 2040, representing a national share of 5.0% (vs 433TWh and a 4.9% share in 2023), just a fraction of the 20-25% share targeted a decade ago.
With the massive scaling up of nuclear power capacity in China, the IEA models the real LCOE will fall 10% to US$65/MWh by 2050, vs the 50% decline in solar LCOE to US$25/MWh.
By comparison, the IEA models Chinese coal with carbon capture and storage will rise to US$220/MWh, ten times the cost of solar, and three times the 2050 cost of nuclear, making coal increasingly uneconomic.
In short, nuclear makes sense as part of the zero-emissions energy mix in China given the need to decarbonise at speed.
As for its viability in Australia, there is not a single small scale nuclear reactor (SMR) – the Federal Coalition’s preferred nuclear technology – approved for construction anywhere in the world outside of Russia and China.
This begs the question of whether Opposition Leader and chief nuclear spruiker Peter Dutton is proposing to deploy 4th generation Chinese developed technologies, or antiquated 2nd generation Russian technology, here.
Given the implications for Australian taxpayers of the massive capital, time and LCOE blowouts of A$50-60bn per nuclear plant, it’s time to call the nuclear debate here for what it is – a politically motivated furphy designed to derail the renewables transition.
Taxpayers have already funded six government nuclear inquiries since 2015 which all concluded nuclear is too slow and too costly.
Nuclear works at scale in China. Here, it is a deliberate distraction by fossil fuel incumbents and politicians on their payroll.
Let’s wait till at least one plant is commissioned and the cost of nuclear power plants built somewhere in the west is remotely affordable and proven, and timeframes for deployment make sense as the imperative to decarbonise escalates, and then have a debate about its merits.
Opportunities for Australia
The critical shift in the energy landscape in China that we map toward zero-emissions technology, with coal playing a diminishing back-up role, also has profound significance for Australia – including the inevitable decline in demand for coal in China.
This is a wakeup call for Australia to accelerate the transition of its economy from its historic overdependence on coal exports and diversify its economic base. We should be pivoting now to deploy our natural advantages – our world-leading wealth of critical minerals and strategic metals – to produce value-added energy transition materials for export.
Key to this is enhancing cleantech supply chain partnerships and bi- and multilateral agreements in the Asian region – a central premise of the new Future Made in Australia Act – including with China, the world’s green economic powerhouse.
And while they do nuclear, alongside their accelerating VRE capacity additions, we can be “embodying decarbonisation” in our exports by value-adding our lithium and other critical minerals, producing green iron, and manufacturing energy transition materials such as cleantech using the boundless potential of our superabundant renewable energy.
For this, we also need to be boosting the ambition, speed and scale of our utility and distributed wind and solar rollout, a critical enabler of Australia’s opportunity to reposition the domestic economy as a zero-emissions trade and investment leader in a rapidly transitioning world.
Nuclear has no viable part in this picture.
72 Minutes Until the End of the World?
Carl Sagan’s conclusion is that the enemy is not a foreign nation, it’s the weapons themselves.
The generals that I refer to in that section on the SIOP [Strategic Integrated Operational Plan, the 1960s-era plan for general nuclear war] believed they could fight and win nuclear war, even if it meant killing 600 million people across the globe. That is insane. No one would argue that now.
A new book lays out the frighteningly fast path to nuclear Armageddon.
By KATHY GILSINAN, 04/29/2024 https://www.politico.com/news/magazine/2024/04/29/the-frighteningly-fast-path-to-nuclear-armageddon-00154591
Nuclear war would be bad. Everyone knows this. Most people would probably rather not think through the specifics. But Annie Jacobsen, an author of seven books on sensitive national security topics, wants you to know exactly how bad it would be. Her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, sketches out a global nuclear war with by-the-minute precision for all of the 72 minutes between the first missile launch and the end of the world. It’s already a bestseller.
It goes without saying that the scenario is fictional, but it is a journalistic work in that the scenario is constructed from dozens of interviews and documentation, some of it newly declassified, as a factual grounding to describe what could happen.
That’s this, in Jacobsen’s telling: A North Korean leader launches an intercontinental ballistic missile at the Pentagon, and then a submarine-launched ballistic missile at a nuclear reactor in California, for reasons beyond the scope of the book except to illustrate what one “mad king” with nuclear weapons could do. A harried president has a mere six minutes to decide on a response, while also being evacuated from the White House and pressured by the military to launch America’s own ICBMs at all 82 North Korean targets relevant to the nation’s nuclear and military forces and leadership. These missiles must fly over Russia, whose leaders spot them, assume their country is under attack (the respective presidents can’t get one another on the phone), and send a salvo back in the other direction, and so on until 72 minutes later three nuclear-armed states have managed to kill billions of people, with the remainder left starving on a poisoned Earth where the sun no longer shines and food no longer grows.
Some scholars, particularly among those who favor large nuclear arsenals as the best deterrent to being attacked with such weapons ourselves, have criticized some of Jacobsen’s assumptions. The U.S. wouldn’t have to court Russian miscalculation by overflying Russia with ICBMs when it has submarine-launched ballistic missiles in the Pacific. Public sources indicate that the president’s six-minute response window is still about in line with what Ronald Reagan noted with dismay in his memoirs. But that assumes he’s boxed into a “launch on warning” policy, something Jacobsen’s sources characterize as a constraint to move before enemy missiles actually strike, but which government policy documents insist is merely an option and not a mandate. (The president could also just decide, contra the deterrence touchstone of “mutual assured destruction,” not to nuke anybody at all in response.)
The book arrives at a time when the countries with the world’s largest nuclear arsenals, the U.S. and Russia, are violently at odds in Ukraine, a Russian state TV host is calling a Russia/NATO conflict “inevitable,” and the Council on Foreign Relations is gaming out scenarios in case the Russians use tactical nukes in Ukraine. Oh, and Iran is closer to a nuclear weapon than ever before. It’s a fair time to ask Jacobsen’s central question — what if deterrence fails? Even if we’d rather not think about it.
This conversation has been edited for length and clarity.
Kathy Gilsinan: The book starts with two missiles out of North Korea and ends with essentially the end of the world 72 minutes later. And the subtitle calls this “a scenario.” Is it a realistic scenario?
Annie Jacobsen: The scenario I chose was pieced together from interviews I did with 46 on-the-record sources and dozens of sources on background, and I ran by them various scenarios to come up with the most plausible scenario that unfolds once it begins. And this is what I came up with. And so far, I haven’t had anyone who actually runs these scenarios for NORAD take issue with the choices that I’ve made and the way in which the decision trees unfold, which makes it all the more frightening.
Gilsinan: Can you walk me through why it would be inevitable that the North Koreans hit us with two and we hit them back with 80?
Jacobsen: Let’s look at the words of General [John] Hyten, former STRATCOM commander, when he did an interview with CNN during former President Donald Trump’s “fire and fury” rhetoric days. And General Hyten said on the record, in a rather “don’t you dare” way, speaking almost directly to North Korea: “If somebody launches a nuclear weapon against us, we launch one back. They launch two, we launch two.”
To drill down a little bit further on that I looked to Dr. Bruce Blair, a former missileer himself. Now he’s deceased, but he became one of the world’s experts on nuclear command and control systems and authority. And he explained in a monograph I cite in the book that it’s far more likely that if North Korea hit the United with one missile, America would send 82 in return. [The monograph, written under the auspices of the anti-nuclear group Global Zero, points to about 80 “aimpoints” relevant to North Korea’s nuclear and other military forces as well as its leadership, but also notes that “graduated and flexible strikes” would be possible. Jacobsen says she relied on other sources to support the assumption the U.S. would attack all the targets.] Everything I did, I linked to an open-source scenario that had been thought through by experts who have dedicated their intellectual prowess to these issues for decades.
Gilsinan: In this scenario, the U.S. responds with ICBMs that have to fly over Russia, with predictable consequences. Why, according to the folks you’ve spoken to, would we risk flying missiles over a nuclear power if we could use submarine-launched missiles from the Pacific Ocean?
Jacobsen: I asked that same question to numerous people, and the most powerful answer came from former Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta himself: “There’s not a lot of thought given to who the hell else may be thinking about doing what … at a time like this.”
Gilsinan: Maybe this is the point of the book. I would like very much to believe that STRATCOM is smarter than me and has thought this through ahead of time.
Jacobsen: Part of the terrifying truth about nuclear war, or if a nuclear exchange were to unfold, is the insane time clock that was put on everything from the moment nuclear launch is detected. This is fact. And so is the fact that the president has only six minutes, that’s the rough time to make this decision. And in that time, the Black Book gets opened; he must make a choice from a counterattack list of choices inside the Black Book. Those choices have been thought through for multiple scenarios, but you can’t possibly take into consideration every contingency in real time, which makes so clear to readers exactly how insane the truth is about the unfolding of the scenario. And the unpredictability of it. And for example, one of the few people that actually read the contents of the Black Book and spoke to me about it in general terms so as not to violate security clearances is Ted Postol [a former assistant to the chief of naval operations]. He’s the one who said to me that every decision was a bad decision.
Gilsinan: Why do we think it’s six minutes specifically? I know that’s in Reagan’s memoirs, but why do we think that is still the case?
Continue readingWhy Iran may accelerate its nuclear program, and Israel may be tempted to attack it
Bulletin, By Darya Dolzikova, Matthew Savill | April 26, 2024
On April 19, Israel carried out a strike deep inside Iranian territory, near the city of Isfahan. The attack was apparently in retaliation for a major Iranian drone and missile attack on Israel a few days earlier. This exchange between the two countries—which have historically avoided directly targeting each other’s territories—has raised fears of a potentially serious military escalation in the region.
Israel’s strike was carried out against an Iranian military site located in close proximity to the Isfahan Nuclear Technology Center, which hosts nuclear research reactors, a uranium conversion plant, and a fuel production plant, among other facilities. Although the attack did not target Iran’s nuclear facilities directly, earlier reports suggested that Israel was considering such attacks. The Iranian leadership has, in turn, threatened to reconsider its nuclear policy and to advance its program should nuclear sites be attacked.
These events highlight the threat from regional escalation dynamics posed by Iran’s near-threshold nuclear capability, which grants Iran the perception of a certain degree of deterrence—at least against direct US retaliation—while also serving as an understandably tempting target for Israeli attack. As tensions between Israel and Iran have moved away from their traditional proxy nature and manifested as direct strikes against each other’s territories, the urgency of finding a timely and non-military solution to the Iranian nuclear issue has increased.
A tempting target. While the current assessment is that Iran does not possess nuclear weapons, the Islamic Republic maintains a very advanced nuclear program, allowing it to develop a nuclear weapons capability relatively rapidly, should it decide to do so. Iran’s “near-threshold” capability did not deter Israel from undertaking its recent attack. But Iran’s nuclear program is a tempting target for an attack that could have potentially destabilizing ramification: The program is advanced enough to pose a credible risk of rapid weaponization and at a stage when it could still be significantly degraded, albeit at an extremely high cost.
Iran views its nuclear program as a deterrent against direct US strikes on or invasion of its territory, acting as an insurance policy of sorts against invasion following erroneous Western accusations over its nuclear program, ala Iraq in 2003. That’s to say, during an attempted invasion, Iran could quickly produce nuclear weapons……………………………
Israel sees the Iranian nuclear program as an existential threat and has long sought its elimination. For this reason, reports that Israel might have been preparing to target Iranian nuclear sites as retaliation for Iran’s strikes against its territory came as little surprise……………………………………………………………………….
A range of bad options. The possibility of Iranian weaponization and Israeli attacks on Iran’s nuclear sites could lead to a serious escalation spiral and, potentially, a wider military conflict in the region……………………………………………………………
Following past instances of Israeli sabotage against the Iranian nuclear program, Tehran has doubled down—rebuilding damaged sites, hardening facilities, and ramping up its nuclear activity. The same is likely to be true should Iranian facilities be targeted directly this time, only to a greater degree. The shift from a proxy conflict between Iran and Israel to a direct engagement will only increase the value Iran places on its nuclear program as a deterrent against further direct attack on its territory and US military intervention. Should Iran assess that its regional proxies and its missile and drone capabilities have been insufficient to deter Israel from conducting direct strikes against its strategically significant nuclear program, Tehran may see the actual weaponization of its nuclear program as the only option left that can guarantee the security of the Iranian regime……………………………………………………………………………………………………………. more https://thebulletin.org/2024/04/why-iran-may-accelerate-its-nuclear-program-and-israel-may-be-tempted-to-attack-it/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=MondayNewsletter04292024&utm_content=NuclearRisk_IranNuclearProgramIsrael_04262024
Biden’s pledge to aid Palestinians is a big, murderous lie
Walt Zlotow, West Suburban Peace Coalition, Glen Ellyn IL 29 Apr 24
President Biden claims to be supporting food, water and medical aid to Palestinians now dying in Gaza from disease, starvation as well as being blown to bits by Biden’s 2000 lb. bombs.
But he knows full well Israel is violation his February 8th directive requiring assurances from Israel that it’s not using U.S. military aid to violate human rights law. Israel’s ongoing genocide of 2,300,000 Palestinians there puts Israel about as far from required compliance with Biden’s edict as the two sides of the Grand Canyon.
Biden’s February 8th directive states that Israel “will facilitate and not arbitrarily deny, restrict, or otherwise impede, directly or indirectly, the transport or delivery of United States humanitarian assistance.”
But Israel is not only blocking most aid from alleviating starvation and disease in Gaza, It’s using Biden’s bombs to attack Palestinian and foreign humanitarian workers from delivering that aid. When it comes to impeding, Israel know what works. Its already killed one American aid worker.
Biden knows this but maintains the fantasy, sadly swallowed whole by many of his reelection supporters, that he’s doing ‘everything he can to aid the staving, disease ridden Palestinians.’
’ Truth is he’s doing everything he can to enable Israel’s grotesque removal of the Palestinians from their Gaza land coveted by Israel.
He’s even conspiring with Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu to derail the impending indictment of Netanyahu by the International Criminal Court. The indictment is expected this week unless the Netanyahu-Biden genocide tag team can prevent it.
President Biden has bigger problems that losing tens of millions of his 2020 voters, sealing his reelection defeat, by his enabling of Israeli genocide. He may end up a fellow indicted war criminal with Benjamin Netanyahu in the dock at The Hague.
Antinuclear 