Western Australia’s Premier Cook goes nuclear on Dutton’s ‘simplistic, ridiculous’ power plan
SMH, Hamish Hastie, March 5, 2024 —
A Coalition proposal to build nuclear power stations at the sites of retired or retiring coal stations is ridiculous and a distraction from efforts to reach net zero using renewables, West Australian Premier Roger Cook has said.
Opposition leader Peter Dutton floated the idea of building nuclear power stations on sites of retired coal stations – which could include the South West town of Collie – as a zero-emissions solution to the nation’s energy woes.
Cook blasted the Coalition proposal that federal Nationals leader David Littleproud was spruiking in WA this week as a fantasy.
“The rollout of small nuclear reactors or modular reactors in other countries has been halted because it’s not commercial, it’s not viable,” he said.
“In addition to that, Australia has no experience in nuclear power generation so we don’t have the workforce, we don’t have the know-how to be able to bring them in.
“You simply cannot plonk these things into a landscape and plug it into the grid. These simplistic sort of ideas are ridiculous.
“What we need to do is accept that climate change is a reality and move to exploit the abundance of wind and solar that we have at our disposal.
“There’s no quick fix here, you’ve got actually do the hard work and this is simply a sound grab by the Nationals to distract people from the real hard work which is being done.”……………………………………………………… https://www.smh.com.au/politics/western-australia/cook-goes-nuclear-on-dutton-s-simplistic-ridiculous-power-plan-20240305-p5fa0r.html
Talk of nuclear power plant sites ‘conjecture’, says Liberal MP amid internal division on Dutton’s policy
Rowan Ramsey says overturning ban on nuclear first is the ‘most logical thing’ to do as opposition leader prepares to nominate up to six locations
Paul Karp Chief political correspondent, Guardian, 5 Mar 24
The Liberal MP Rowan Ramsey has said any talk of where nuclear power plants would be built or waste would go is “conjecture” that cannot sensibly be tackled until after the nuclear ban is lifted.
As the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, prepares to announce an energy policy nominating up to six possible sites for nuclear plants, he faces internal divisions about the level of government support required, proposed locations and questions about storage of nuclear waste.
On Tuesday Dutton all but confirmed the Coalition will propose locating nuclear power plants on the site of retiring coal power plants, claiming that this would save having to build new transmission infrastructure for renewables.
The plan would suggest that the Labor-held seat of Hunter, independent Andrew Gee’s seat of Calare and Coalition-held Flynn, Maranoa, O’Connor and Gippsland are on the shortlist for nuclear power stations.
The Gippsland MP, Darren Chester, has argued that his community would need to receive “direct economic benefits” if it were to host power plants.
The Liberal MP for Sturt, James Stevens, has argued that community concerns must be allayed by explaining where and how waste will be stored. This opens another can of worms for the Coalition, as Australia has failed for decades to build a dump for its slowly accumulating intermediate nuclear waste.
Ramsey told Guardian Australia that Kimba, a proposed site for a waste dump in his South Australian electorate of Grey, was “never envisaged, planned or promised to hold high-level waste”……..
It is unclear how the Coalition’s nuclear policy hopes to overcome the enormous cost, long lead-in time and lack of private investment to make new power plants a reality.
Stevens said on Monday that “embracing nuclear generation for civilian electricity purposes is not something to be done on a whim” and that Australians would rightly want to know “how we will deal with some challenges, such as the custody of waste, the location of these generation plants”.
But the Liberal candidate for Cook, Simon Kennedy, who is likely to take Scott Morrison’s seat in parliament, argued on Tuesday that voters in his electorate are “used to” the idea of nuclear waste, because the Lucas Heights reactor – for production of medical and industrial isotopes – is “right outside the electorate”.
Kennedy told Sky News that Australians want “clean, cheap and reliable” power, accusing the Albanese government of being “ideological” for not considering nuclear.
Chester told Guardian Australia he has an “open mind when it comes to the public debate regarding nuclear energy in Australia”.
“It is premature to rule regions in or out as potential locations for a nuclear power station because there’s no proposal on the table,” he said.
“But as a matter of principle, you would need to be able to demonstrate to a potential host community, including Gippsland, that any safety concerns could be ameliorated and there were direct social and economic benefits to our community.”……………………………………
Jason Falinski, the former member for Mackellar and the New South Wales Liberal party president, told Sky News on Monday that “nuclear energy is not something that we are necessarily advocating for”.
“What we’re saying is that it should be part of the mix, part of the option available for Australian policymakers.”
On Tuesday the prime minister, Anthony Albanese, questioned where financing will come from and whether “taxpayers will be expected to pay” for nuclear, because “we know that nuclear is not only the most expensive form of new energy, it is also more than a decade off”.
“I noticed in today’s reports, [Dutton] seems to have backed away a little bit from talking about a technology that does not exist in small, modular reactors that he’s been speaking about,” Albanese told reporters on the sidelines of the Asean conference in Melbourne.
“He’s now speaking about large nuclear reactors. They need to be near populations and need to be near water.”
Albanese said “investment never comes” into nuclear because “it simply doesn’t stack up commercially”.
Dutton told reporters in Brisbane that nuclear is “the only credible pathway we have to our international commitments to net zero by 2050”.
Dutton would not rule out support for large-scale reactors, saying only that the Coalition wanted the “latest technology”.
“We’ve said we’re only interested in sites where you have an end-of-life coal-fired generation asset, so that means you can use the existing distribution network.”
Asked if taxpayers will have to support nuclear, Dutton did not respond but cited the Canadian province of Ontario and the United States as examples where businesses and households pay less for power with nuclear in the mix https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2024/mar/05/peter-dutton-liberal-coalition-nuclear-power-plant-policy-locations-waste-rowan-ramsey
Coalition’s plan to go nuclear puts five regions on the table as favoured locations for nuclear reactors
ABC News, By political reporter Jake Evans, 5 Feb 24
There are just a handful of regions in Australia shaping up as the most likely candidates for the Coalition’s proposal to install nuclear reactors in Australia, as the party eyes retiring coal stations as a way to go nuclear.
Opposition Leader Peter Dutton says he will be up front with voters about where the Coalition is looking to place potential nuclear reactors when the party announces its policy in coming weeks.
Speaking on Channel Seven this morning, Mr Dutton confirmed the party was “interested” in replacing retiring coal plants with nuclear, because the sites come ready with poles and wires to distribute power.
“If there’s a retiring coal asset, so there’s a coal fired generator that’s already got an existing distribution network, the wires and poles are already there to distribute the energy across the network into homes and businesses, that’s really what we’re interested in,” Mr Dutton said.
Doing so would leave just a narrow range of possible regions for a nuclear reactor.
The federal divisions of Gippsland in Victoria, Hunter in New South Wales, Maranoa and Flynn in Queensland and O’Connor in West Australia are the only electorates with coal plants scheduled to completely close in the next two decades.
There are also partial closures scheduled at Callide, Loy Yang and Vales Point in the NSW Central Coast, which would add Labor minister Pat Conroy’s electorate of Shortland to the list.
With its policy yet to be announced, it’s not clear what the Coalition considers as viable options.
Australia also still has a total ban on nuclear energy in place, which the Coalition would have to win the support of parliament to lift even if it won government at the next federal election.
And there are a number of safety and technical requirements for installing any nuclear reactor, such as geological stability and a readily available source of water.
The national science agency CSIRO has estimated nuclear energy from small modular reactors (SMRs), modern reactors built in a factory and then shipped to a site for installation, would also be more expensive than powering the grid through wind and solar.
The agency projected in its draft GenCost report that wind and solar would cost an average of $82 per megawatt hour by 2030, while SMR nuclear power would cost an average $282 by 2030.
Even if the nuclear ban was lifted tomorrow and a decision immediately taken to commission a nuclear reactor, CSIRO estimates the first SMR would not be in full operation before 2038, ruling it out of “any major role” in reaching net zero emissions by 2050.
Mr Dutton said nuclear reactors would provide a more reliable source of clean energy, and would avoid the need for thousands of kilometres of new transmission lines to be built.
“We need to make sure that we can firm up the renewables that are in the system. We know that of the G20 nations, Australia is the only nation that doesn’t have or hasn’t agreed to adopt nuclear power domestically,” he said.
Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said he looked forward to the Coalition announcing its nuclear policy.
“I look forward as well to [Mr Dutton] arguing where the financing will come for such reactors, whether taxpayers will be expected to pay for this, because we know the cheapest form of energy in Australia is renewables,” he said.
“Every ten years there are these proposals … what never comes is any investment, because it simply doesn’t stack up commercially…………………………………. https://www.abc.net.au/news/2024-03-05/coalition-nuclear-plan-identifies-retiring-coal-likely-sites/103545440
Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’
who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police
The AI researcher on how natural resources and human labour drive machine learning and the regressive stereotypes that are baked into its algorithmsSun 6 Jun 2021 18.00 AESTShare
Kate Crawford studies the social and political implications of artificial intelligence. She is a research professor of communication and science and technology studies at the University of Southern California and a senior principal researcher at Microsoft Research. Her new book, Atlas of AI, looks at what it takes to make AI and what’s at stake as it reshapes our world.
……………………………………… What’s the aim of the book?
We are commonly presented with this vision of AI that is abstract and immaterial. I wanted to show how AI is made in a wider sense – its natural resource costs, its labour processes, and its classificatory logics. To observe that in action I went to locations including mines to see the extraction necessary from the Earth’s crust and an Amazon fulfilment centre to see the physical and psychological toll on workers of being under an algorithmic management system. My hope is that, by showing how AI systems work – by laying bare the structures of production and the material realities – we will have a more accurate account of the impacts, and it will invite more people into the conversation. These systems are being rolled out across a multitude of sectors without strong regulation, consent or democratic debate.
………………………..systems might seem automated but when we pull away the curtain we see large amounts of low paid labour, everything from crowd work categorising data to the never-ending toil of shuffling Amazon boxes. AI is neither artificial nor intelligent. It is made from natural resources and it is people who are performing the tasks to make the systems appear autonomous.
Problems of bias have been well documented in AI technology. Can more data solve that?
Bias is too narrow a term for the sorts of problems we’re talking about. Time and again, we see these systems producing errors – women offered less credit by credit-worthiness algorithms, black faces mislabelled – and the response has been: “We just need more data.” But I’ve tried to look at these deeper logics of classification and you start to see forms of discrimination, not just when systems are applied, but in how they are built and trained to see the world. Training datasets used for machine learning software that casually categorise people into just one of two genders; that label people according to their skin colour into one of five racial categories, and which attempt, based on how people look, to assign moral or ethical character. The idea that you can make these determinations based on appearance has a dark past and unfortunately the politics of classification has become baked into the substrates of AI.
……………………………Beginning in 2017, I did a project with artist Trevor Paglen to look at how people were being labelled. We found horrifying classificatory terms that were misogynist, racist, ableist, and judgmental in the extreme. Pictures of people were being matched to words like kleptomaniac, alcoholic, bad person, closet queen, call girl, slut, drug addict and far more I cannot say here. ImageNet has now removed many of the obviously problematic people categories – certainly an improvement – however, the problem persists because these training sets still circulate on torrent sites [where files are shared between peers].
And we could only study ImageNet because it is public. There are huge training datasets held by tech companies that are completely secret. They have pillaged images we have uploaded to photo-sharing services and social media platforms and turned them into private systems.
……………………………………………. What do you mean when you say we need to focus less on the ethics of AI and more on power?
Ethics are necessary, but not sufficient. More helpful are questions such as, who benefits and who is harmed by this AI system? And does it put power in the hands of the already powerful? What we see time and again, from facial recognition to tracking and surveillance in workplaces, is these systems are empowering already powerful institutions – corporations, militaries and police……………………………………………………………………………………………………………
Atlas of AI by Kate Crawford is published by Yale University Press (£20). To support the Guardian order your copy at guardianbookshop.com. Delivery charges may apply https://www.theguardian.com/technology/2021/jun/06/microsofts-kate-crawford-ai-is-neither-artificial-nor-intelligent
The nuclear narrative
What is a narrative? ……… In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Jean-François Nadeau, March 4, 2024, https://www.ledevoir.com/opinion/chroniques/808350/chronique-narratif
The future of the world, at least according to the head of the AtkinsRéalis firm, lies in nuclear power. This company, formerly known as SNC-Lavalin, has changed its name. The scandals that have affected her, she asserts, belong to the past.
For its campaign to promote atomic energy, AtkinsRéalis secured the services of two former prime ministers: Jean Chrétien and Mike Harris. In 2019, as revealed by Radio-Canada, Jean Chrétien had already gone so far as to propose, with astonishing lightness, storing foreign nuclear waste in Labrador. In a letter, the former prime minister wrote to a Japanese firm: “Canada has been the largest supplier of nuclear fuel for years, and I have always thought it would be appropriate for Canada to become, at the end of account, the steward and guarantor of the safe storage of nuclear waste after their first service cycle. »
No carbon neutrality without nuclear power , repeats the boss of AtkinsRéalis like an advertising slogan. We must replace fossil fuels, while doubling or tripling, thanks to nuclear power, the production of electricity, he pleads. There is no question, in this presentation, of rethinking a model of society based on an infinite expansion of consumption. Always more cars, as long as they are electric. Always more heating, regardless of the fact that our buildings are thermal sieves. In other words, what continues to matter is growth. And the increase in AtkinsRéalis’ turnover is largely due to nuclear power, as noted by Le Devoir .
Last week, Minister Pierre Fitzgibbon reiterated again that he was not closing the door to the return of nuclear power. Since the arrival of Michael Sabia at the head of Hydro-Québec , the signals pointing in the direction of this revival have multiplied. “I think that as a government, in the ministry, at home, we must stay on the lookout for what is happening in nuclear power,” the minister further affirmed in front of an audience of business people. To have such projects accepted, the minister specified that “you simply have to have a good narrative”. In Quebec, he laments, “we have not had any narrative on nuclear power” since the closure of Gentilly-2 .
What is a narrative? In 1928, Edward Bernays, the founding father of the public relations and advertising industry, called these language elements capable of manipulating public opinion propaganda . This word ended up, as we know, having unfavorable connotations. Others were therefore substituted. Here is the latest addition, used in all sauces: the narrative . In other words, it is about occupying public space to disseminate enchanting stories that give pride of place to industry, multinationals, investors, billionaires, each greener than the last.
Pierre Fitzgibbon shows interest in mini nuclear reactors. The boss AtkinsRéalis also praises this technology, which is far from wonderful. Nobody says too loudly that these types of plants produce more nuclear waste per megawatt. These mini power plants would produce up to thirty times more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants.
In his “narrative”, the boss of AtkinsRéalis barely concedes that the management of radioactive materials constitutes a serious danger for humanity.
In Ontario, a large dump for radioactive waste was approved on January 9. Tons of heavy metals, dangerous radioactive elements, plutonium, uranium, etc. will pile up there for a century, not far from the Ottawa River. The whole thing promises to occupy, for eternity, an area equivalent to 70 National Hockey League ice rinks.
In France, 280 km of underground galleries are being built to store nuclear waste. To give an idea, the galleries of the Montreal metro total 71 km. This giant sarcophagus will be the largest construction site in Europe. In these galleries, the most dangerous waste will be able to spew radioactivity for 100,000 years.
So that the hydrogen and the fumes released from this collection of waste do not explode, it is necessary to continually ventilate. Which requires electricity. A power outage, if it lasts more than a week, could be catastrophic. Obviously, electrical problems, cataclysms, wars, terrorists, this will never happen in a hundred years. Not again in a thousand years, probably. Moreover, at the entrance to these sites, in what language should we warn future generations not to dig?
The speech of the boss of AtkinsRéalis is very similar to that which is also being given these days by the cereal manufacturer Kellogg’s. Gary Pilnick, its CEO, is sad to see the cost of food soaring. However, he does not recommend reviewing the profit margins on which the food giants are fattening, nor the exploitation system which governs this surge in prices. He simply suggests eating cereal at dinner, so that consumers can lower their bills and cereal manufacturers can make more money. At the bottom of the scale, this makes no difference to the misfortunes of the majority. Agricultural producers in Quebec, for example, find themselves this year with the lowest net incomes since 1938, they say.
Nuclear industries operate according to the same elastic logic which consists of making money at all costs. Our dependence on automobiles and energy-intensive lifestyles suits them. And it is enough, to hear them, to continue to rush forward, head down, to escape from a reality that is ruining the future. Their technologies promise to fix everything. As long as you are willing to swallow their narrative first, like soft cereal .
TODAY. Normalising the unthinkable – the 16th Annual Nuclear (so-called) Deterrence Summit
The 16th Annual Nuclear Deterrence Summit in Washington DC finished in early February
The propaganda guff should alert us to the deliberately misty thinking of the war-mongers, as they contort the facts, and kid themselves, and us, that they work for a peaceful world. The lovely phrases trip off their tongues so easily:
“Analytically driven data” “state of the art capabilities” “incredible efficiencies ” ” the cloud-based environments” “A digitalized enterprise”. Blah blah . My favourite is always “the cloud”, when what they really mean is acres and acres of dirty great machines guzzling electricity and water.
What this whole conference (now more gloriously termed “summit”) is really about, is profit, money for the American corporations – weapons ones, digital ones, space companies, contractors, and also the Pentagon, government agencies, corporate media and universities. Check out the sponsors –
There are words and phrases that you won’t hear at these conferences – “diplomacy” “negotiation” “understanding”. There’s no money in that stuff.
But you will hear “adversaries” “enemies” “evil” – there’s money in being “war ready” even better “global war ready”. Some participants actually believe that the USA could wage a nuclear war and win it – (whatever “winning a nuclear war” might mean)
I’m not religious, but I can’t help thinking what might have happened if Jesus somehow got into this crooked conference. He wouldn’t have been polite – tables overturned, lap-tops and projectors busted, corporate salesmen driven. Of course, he would be arrested as a terrorist, and given the Julian Assange treatment.
Silencing the Voice: the fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s Campaign against Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australia
Jeremy Walker, University of Technology Sydney,Sep 30, 2023
Abstract
Australians will soon vote in a referendum to recognise Indigenous Australia in its 1901 Constitution and establish a First Nations Voice to Parliament. A year ago, polling suggested the referendum proposal of the 2017 National Constitutional Convention and its Uluru Statement from the Heart enjoyed 60% support. Since lead anti-Voice campaign organisation Advance Australia began its media offensive, the Yes vote has declined to 40%. This article argues the No campaign is being conducted on behalf of fossil-fuel corporations and their allies, whose efforts to mislead the public on life-and-death matters reach back over half a century. Coordinated across the Australian branches of the little-known Atlas Network, a global infrastructure of 500+ ‘think-tanks’ including the Centre for Independent Studies, the Institute of Public Affairs and LibertyWorks, I demonstrate that the No campaign shares the aims and methods of the longstanding Atlas disinformation campaign against climate policy. Opposition to long-overdue constitutional recognition for Indigenous Australians can be traced to fears the Voice might strengthen the capacity of Indigenous communities and Australia’s parliamentary democracy to rein in the polluting industries driving us toward climate and ecological collapse.
Article Details
Issue Vol 15 No 2 (2023)
So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now
CAITLIN JOHNSTONE, MAR 4, 2024, https://www.caitlinjohnst.one/p/so-theyre-experimenting-with-military?utm_source=post-email-title&publication_id=82124&post_id=142282788&utm_campaign=email-post-title&isFreemail=true&r=1ise1&triedRedirect=true&utm_medium=email
One of the most horrifying facts about this dystopia we live in is that large-scale military operations are routinely used as testing grounds for new war machinery, using human bodies as guinea pigs for experimentation in what amount to giant blood-soaked field laboratories — all to benefit the strategic objectives of empire managers and the profit margins of the military-industrial complex.
Haaretz has a new article out titled “Gaza Becomes Israel’s Testing Ground for Military Robots”, which reports that “In an effort to avoid harming soldiers and dogs, the IDF has been experimenting with the use of robots and remote-controlled dogs in the Gaza War.”
(Yeah because my gosh, can you imagine how terrible it would be if Israeli soldiers and dogs got harmed while carrying out a genocide?)
The article’s author Sagi Cohen reports that drone-mounted robot dogs and remotely controlled bulldozers are two of the new apocalyptic horrors currently being battle-tested in Gaza, saying “defense establishment officials confirm that there has been a leap in the use and sophistication of robots on the battlefield.” Which is a pretty disconcerting sentence to read.
This news comes out at the same time as a new Public Citizen report warning of the likely imminent arrival of autonomous weapons systems which will kill people with minimal instruction from human pilots, saying “The most serious worry involving autonomous weapons is that they inherently dehumanize the people targeted and make it easier to tolerate widespread killing, including in violation of international human rights law.”
The more normalized robots become within the world’s militaries the closer we come to this point, and steps are already being taken in that direction. As Common Dreams’ Thor Benson notes in an article about the Public Citizen report, “Israel has purchased and at times deployed self-piloting, lethal drones.”
Back in January I wrote that “Gaza is a live laboratory for the military industrial complex,” saying “Data is with absolute certainty being collected on all the newer weapons being field-tested on human bodies in Gaza (just like has been happening in Ukraine) to be used to benefit the war machine and arms industry.”
What sparked this comment at the time was reports and first-hand witness accounts we’d seen coming out about the prolific use of IDF “sniper drones” in Gaza since October, with Israeli forces frequently shooting Palestinians with quad drones armed with rifles. Copious records are most assuredly being compiled on the effectiveness of these newer weapons and tactics in ending human lives, which will then be used to help market those weapons to other states and to improve their efficiency in killing.
When I say this is most assuredly happening, I am not being hyperbolic for effect. Author and journalist Antony Loewenstein gave a lengthy interview on The Chris Hedges Report back in December about Israel’s long and extensively documented history of using Gaza as a testing ground for new weapons, spyware, surveillance and security systems, AI, drones, and tactics, which has profited scores of corporations and enabled Israel to become a player of outsized success in the global weapons industry.
“Israel’s drones, surveillance technology including spyware, facial recognition software, and biometric gathering infrastructure, along with smart fences, experimental bombs, and AI-controlled machine guns are all tried out on the captive population in Gaza, often with lethal results,” says Hedges in introduction. “These weapons and technologies are then certified as ‘battle-tested’ and sold around the world.”
This doesn’t only happen in Gaza. This past September The Wall Street Journal published an article titled “The War in Ukraine Is Also a Giant Arms Fair,” subtitled “Arms makers are getting orders for weapons being put to the test on the battlefield.” In January of last year CNN published a report titled “How Ukraine became a testbed for Western weapons and battlefield innovation,” with one source saying that Ukraine is “absolutely a weapons lab in every sense because none of this equipment has ever actually been used in a war between two industrially developed nations.”
And of course we are also seeing this same phenomenon in Africa. In 2021 Mintpress News published a report by Scott Timcke titled “West Africa is the Latest Testing Ground for US Military Artificial Intelligence” about this very same trend. In 2020 Libya saw what is believed to have been the first time a human being has ever been killed by a fully automated drone attack — that is, killed without the machine having been told to do so by a human.
The other day we discussed how the empire’s great weakness is that it depends on normal human beings to carry out its orders and turn the gears of the machine. If you look at the facts and think about them for a moment, it’s not hard to see how the empire managers are hoping to overcome this weakness in the future.
Could climate change release 35 swimming pools’ worth of nuclear waste? Or worse… unleash a world-ending pandemic? These are the terrifying unexpected consequences of melting ice
By ROB WAUGH FOR DAILYMAIL.COM, 2 March 2024 https://www.dailymail.co.uk/sciencetech/article-13135571/Could-climate-change-release-35-swimming-pools-worth-nuclear-waste-worse-unleash-world-ending-pandemic-terrifying-unexpected-consequences-melting-ice.html
- Buried ‘nuclear city’ and swimming pools’ worth of nuclear waste
- Frozen viruses have already begun to infect human beings
- READ MORE As melting ice exposes new oil reserves, oil giants move in
Around the world, glaciers and permafrost are melting, and in some places the retreating ice is releasing buried secrets people hoped would remain forgotten.
Rising waters have exposed a secret Greenland nuclear base that engineers thought would never resurface as well as a radioactive ‘Tomb’ at the site of American nuclear tests.
And while it sounds far-fetched, very credible experts have warned that the next pandemic may well come from ancient pathogens buried in the ice, or even from diseases harbored by frozen dead Neanderthals.
The ‘secret nuclear city’ under Greenland’s ice
Camp Century in Greenland is a secret nuclear-powered ‘city under the ice’, where U.S. Army engineers carried out weapons research
The base has been abandoned for almost half a century, but now poses a serious concern over nuclear waste.
Powered by a portable nuclear generator, Camp Century was built in 1959, and was built to host 200 soldiers, with a plan to expand the base to hold 600 ballistic missiles.
‘Camp Century’ was abandoned in 1967, but the nuclear reactor at the base – which also had a hospital and a church in its tunnels – has long since been removed, but radioactive waste remains.
When the Army Corps of Engineers (ACE) left the base, they assumed that frigid temperatures and falling snow would keep the nuclear waste there forever.
In total, the waste is equivalent to the mass of 30 Airbus A320 airplanes – and researchers now fear that it could be released into the sea.
A 2016 study suggested that the nuclear waste could be released into the sea this century, but newer measurements at the base suggest that this will not happen until 2100.
‘Tomb’ of poison at nuclear test site
In the Marshall Islands, a huge ‘lid’ which locals know as ‘The Tomb’ covers 31 million cubic feet of nuclear waste – equivalent to the volume of 35 Olympic-sized swimming pools.
The islands were the site of American nuclear tests, but the U.S. military also shipped in waste from the mainland.
From 1946 to 1958, America conducted 67 nuclear tests in the South Pacific.
The concrete ‘lid’ officially known as the Runit Dome was built on Enewetak Atoll in the Marshall Islands to contain radioactive material from American nuclear tests in the 1950s.
Some studies have suggested that radiation levels near the site are similar to those near Chernobyl and the waters around the dome are rising every year.
Changing temperatures are causing the lid to crack, while rising waters are lapping at the atoll.
Plutonium – and a lost hydrogen bomb?
A 1968 plane crash scattered plutonium from American nuclear weapons over the ice in Greenland, which could be released by global warming.
The U.S. military assumed that the Thule air base in Greenland would be rapidly attacked in a nuclear war, so kept nuclear-armed bombers in the air to fly towards Russia in the event of an attack.
The Thule incident saw large amounts of radioactive plutonium dispersed onto the ice sheet, as a cabin fire in a B-52 bomber forced the crew to bail out.
Conventional explosives inside the four B28FI thermonuclear bombs detonated, spreading radioactive waste.
But the uranium-235 fissile core of one of the bombs was never found, despite a search with submarines.
Reports in the decades since have suggested that the lost bomb is lying under the seabed.
Frozen viruses and the next pandemic
Researchers have warned that the next pandemic could come from melting ice.
Genetic analysis of soil and lake sediment near the highest Arctic freshwater lake, Lake Hazen, suggests that the risk of ‘viral spillover’ may be high close to melting glaciers.
‘Spillover’ is where a virus infects a new host for the first time – and analysis of viruses and potential hosts in the lakebed suggests this risk may be higher near to melting glaciers.
Researchers at Ohio State University found genetic material from 33 viruses, 28 of which were unknown, in the Tibetan plateau in China, putting their age at 15,000 years old.
Viruses from Neanderthals
Other researchers have warned of viruses unleashed by melting permafrost: one-quarter of the northern hemisphere sits on top of permanently frozen ground – known as permafrost, but large areas are now melting as the world warms.
There are already examples of this – with a 2016 anthrax outbreak in Siberia attributed to melting permafrost exposing an infected reindeer carcass.
Previously researchers have warned that global warming and thawing ice might unearth diseases such as smallpox frozen into the corpses of victims, with a few infectious particles enough to revive the pathogen.
As permafrost thaws due to climate change, virologist Jean-Michel Claverie has warned that ancient viruses harbored in the long-frozen ground could be released.
Claverie explains that if an ancient pathogen eradicated Neanderthals, for instance, their frozen remains might still contain infectious viruses that could be unleashed as ice melts.
Claverie told Bloomberg News, “With climate change, we are used to thinking of dangers coming from the south.
“Now, we realize there might be some danger coming from the north as the permafrost thaws and frees microbes, bacteria and viruses.”
Claverie’s team previously revived giant viruses from up to 48,000 years ago – and the veteran scientist has warned that there could be even more ancient viruses in the ice, some of which could potentially infect humans.
Frozen poison in the ice
Polar regions have acted as a ‘chemical sink’ for the planet, locking away poisons in the ice – but melting ice could release this.
A study in Geophysical Research Letters found huge reserves of the toxic heavy metal mercury frozen in Arctic permafrost.
The amount may be 10 times higher than all the mercury pumped into the atmosphere from industry in three decades.
Paul Schuster, a U.S. Geological Survey hydrologist, “This is a complete game-changer for mercury. It’s a natural source, but some of it will be released through what we’re doing with climate change.”
Mercury is released by industry, volcanic eruptions and rock weathering – but what’s less clear is what will happen if the ‘pool’ in the Arctic is released.
Nuclear news – week to 4 March 2024
Some bits of good news – Passion for compassion: the group working to make the Commons kinder. Major research suggests humans can break free from tribalism **************************************
TOP STORIES. US Refuses to Assure UK Judges That Assange Won’t Be Executed If He’s Extradited. Atlantic Council report lays out options and possible first use of nuclear weapons against China over Taiwan.
Texas wildfires continue to pose threat to Pantex nuclear weapons plant, and climate change will bring further threats to nuclear facilities. USA is littered with nuclear sites that could face danger from natural disasters.
Nuclear space-based ASAT weapons – A brief international legal perspective.Get These Rich People Off the Moon.
AI’s craving for data is matched only by a runaway thirst for water and energy.
Climate. New Research from Antarctica Affirms the Threat of the ‘Doomsday Glacier,’ but Funding to Keep Studying It Is Running Out.
Noel’s notes. My dilemma in writing about nuclear issues. Nuclear power stopping climate change? IT’S THE OTHER WAY AROUND!
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AUSTRALIA. Andrew Forrest attacks Coalition’s nuclear “bulldust” and betraying the bush. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=09OeHD-h9Ak Andrew Forrest and Peter Dutton are on a collision course over Nuclear Power. This is what happens when an uncosted Coalition thought-bubble on nuclear power is presented as a concrete proposal. Dutton wants a ‘mature debate’ about nuclear power. By the time we’ve had one, new plants will be too late to replace coal. Nuclear boondoggle | The West Report https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XdALb8Vr3t8
No nuclear option for $275m green-manufacturing and innovation grants. Silencing the Voice: the fossil-fuelled Atlas Network’s Campaign against Constitutional Recognition of Indigenous Australia.
NUCLEAR ISSUES
CLIMATE. Texas: Disaster declaration issued and nuclear weapons plant shut down as wildfires spread. Texas nuclear weapons facility pauses as fires spread. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Ba_oPoqeF2Y
Buried Nuclear Waste From the Cold War Could Resurface as Ice Sheets Melt. USA is littered with nuclear sites that could face danger from natural disasters. Could climate change release 35 swimming pools’ worth of nuclear waste? Or worse… unleash a world-ending pandemic? These are the terrifying unexpected consequences of melting ice.
| ECONOMICS. Tax-payer to take bigger financial risks under new payment plan for nuclear command satellites. The Cost of Nuclear War in Space. Inside Europe’s only nuclear unicorn — and its €1bn fundraising hopes. | ENERGY. Blackout risks due to Hinkley nuclear delays – a reminder of the value of energy efficienc | ENVIRONMENT. Oceans. Release of fourth batch of Fukushima treated radioactive water begins. China is ‘unlikely’ to lift import ban on Japanese seafood as dumping continues. Conservationists say Hinkley C nuclear water intakes could wipe out Atlantic salmon stocks |
| LEGAL. Fish v. electricity: Could Salem nuclear plant be shut down?More indictments for Ohio nuclear crimes. | MEDIA. When The Imperial Media Report On An Israeli Massacre.Einstein’s Postwar Campaign To Save The World From Nuclear Destruction.Chilling Pictures of Hiroshima Weeks After Atomic Bomb Dropped Emerge. | OPPOSITION to NUCLEAR . IT’S TIME TO CANCEL SIZEWELL C |
| POLITICS. Has the nuclear lobby hijacked Welsh democracy? “Big nuclear reactor” lobby fights back against “Small nuclear reactor” lobby. | POLITICS INTERNATIONAL and DIPLOMACY. Biden administration restores Trump-rescinded policy on illegitimacy of Israeli settlements. France accused of ‘unacceptable’ behaviour after demanding UK taxpayer cash for Hinkley nuclear. Chris Huhne Letter: UK Taxpayers shouldn’t be footing bill for EDF failings. Macron stands by remarks on NATO troops in Ukraine. | SAFETY. New nuclear reactors shielded from liability if federal law passes Congress: Price-Anderson Act renewal hidden from public. Mistakes, Misfiring and Trident: Britain’s Flawed Nuclear Deterrence |
| SPACE. EXPLORATION, WEAPONS. Satellites burning up in our atmosphere may not be as harmless as first thought. | TECHNOLOGY.So They’re Experimenting With Military Robots In Gaza Now.SMRs are useless says the UK’s leading SMR analyst! – 100 per cent renewable energy is much more feasible!UK spurns European invitation to join ITER nuclear fusion project.Microsoft’s Kate Crawford: ‘AI is neither artificial nor intelligent’.Finland’s Olkiluoto nuclear power station to be disconnected for 37 days. | WASTES.“Tritium Removal” A Report on the Proposed MCECE nuclear Facility at Chalk River also at https://nuclear-news.net/2024/03/03/2-b1-tritium-removal-a-report-on-the-proposed-mcece-facility-at-chalk-river/Burying nuclear waste the best of a bad bunch of options.Locals oppose nuclear waste plant – parish council. Holderness: Government guarantees plans for nuclear waste dump will be dropped for good.New plans to dismantle Rosyth dead nuclear submarines left for decades.Nuclear Restoration Services has been served with an “improvement notice” after the ONR found failures in its storage methods |
| WAR and CONFLICT.Wargame simulated a conflict between Israel and Iran: It quickly went nuclear. Israeli Calls to ‘Nuke Gaza’ Are Undermining the Nuclear Ambiguity Doctrine.After Macron touted troops to Ukraine, Putin warns West of nuclear war risk.Leaked Russian military files reveal its nuclear strike rules.Full Transcript of German Top Military Officials’ Leaked Plot to Attack Crimean Bridge.China urges largest nuclear states to negotiate a ‘no-first-use’ treaty.NewsReal: How Serious Are Western Leaders About Full-on War With Russia? | WEAPONS and WEAPONS SALES. France creates coalition to arm Ukraine with long-range weapons. Victoria Nuland accidentally reveals the true aim of the West in Ukraine. Setting the record straight on Canada’s arms exports to Israel. The reawakening of America’s nuclear dinosaurs. Iran Reduces Near-Weapons-Grade Stockpile, Defying Expectations. |
US Refuses to Assure UK Judges That Assange Won’t Be Executed If He’s Extradited
UK law prohibits extradition to a country that may impose capital punishment.
By Marjorie Cohn , TRUTHOUT, February 27, 2024
n February 20 and 21, as nearly 1,000 supporters of Julian Assange gathered outside the London courthouse, a two-judge panel of the High Court of Justice presided over a “permission hearing.” Assange’s lawyers asked the judges to allow them to appeal the home secretary’s extradition order and raise issues that the district court judge had rejected without full consideration.
The High Court panel, Dame Victoria Sharp and Justice Jeremy Johnson, were concerned that the U.S. government could execute Assange if he is extradited to the United States, a penalty outlawed in the U.K. Although Assange faces 175 years in prison for the charges alleged in the indictment, there is nothing to prevent the U.S. from adding additional offenses which would carry the death penalty.
The Trump Administration Indicted Assange for Exposing U.S. War Crimes
Assange is charged with 17 counts of alleged violations of the Espionage Act, based on obtaining, receiving, possessing and publishing national defense information. He is accused of “recruit[ing] sources” and “soliciting” confidential documents just by maintaining the WikiLeaks website that stated it accepted such materials. Assange is also charged with one count of “conspiracy to commit computer intrusion” with intent to “facilitate [whistleblower Chelsea] Manning’s acquisition and transmission of classified information related to the national defence of the United States.”
The basis for the indictment, Assange’s lawyers told the panel, is WikiLeaks’s “exposure of criminality on the part of the U.S. government on an unprecedented scale.” Assange is charged for revealing war crimes committed by the United States in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantánamo Bay. The indictment has nothing to do with Hillary Clinton and the 2016 election or Swedish allegations of sexual misconduct, which have been dropped.
WikiLeaks revealed the “Iraq War Logs” — 400,000 field reports including 15,000 unreported deaths of Iraqi civilians, as well the as systematic rape, torture and murder after U.S. forces handed over detainees to a notorious Iraqi torture squad. The revelations also included the “Afghan War Diary” — 90,000 reports of more civilian casualties by coalition forces than the U.S. military had reported.
In addition, WikiLeaks revealed the “Guantánamo Files,” 779 secret reports with evidence that 150 innocent people had been held at Guantánamo Bay for years, and 800 men and boys had been tortured and abused, in violation of the Geneva Conventions and the Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment.
WikiLeaks also revealed the notorious 2007 “Collateral Murder Video,” in which a U.S. Army Apache attack helicopter targeted and killed 11 unarmed civilians in Baghdad, including two Reuters journalists and a man who came to rescue the wounded. Two children were injured. The video contains evidence of war crimes prohibited by the Geneva Conventions.
And WikiLeaks exposed “Cablegate” — 251,000 confidential U.S. State Department cables that “disclosed corruption, diplomatic scandals and spy affairs on an international scale.” According to The New York Times, they told “the unvarnished story of how the government makes its biggest decisions, the decisions that cost the country most heavily in lives and money.”
“These were the most important revelations of criminal U.S. state behavior in history,” Assange attorney Mark Summers argued to the High Court panel.
Assange’s Appellate Issues
Assange is asking the U.K. High Court to review issues of treaty obligations, human rights violations and political persecution.
The U.S.-U.K. Extradition Treaty would allow the U.S. to amend or add charges which could expose Assange to the death penalty, a punishment prohibited in the U.K. In response to questioning by one of the judges, the prosecutor admitted that the U.S. had not provided assurances that Assange would not be subject to the death penalty if extradited.
Article 4(1) of the extradition treaty does not allow extradition for political offenses. Espionage is the “quintessential” political offense, Assange attorney Edward Fitzgerald told the panel. “The gravamen (and defining legal characteristic) of each of the charges is thus an alleged intention to obtain or disclose US state secrets in a manner that was damaging to the security of the US state,” which makes them political offenses, Assange’s lawyers wrote. The defense claimed it was an abuse of process for the United States to pursue extradition of Assange for a political offense……………………………………………………………………………….
“The Most Important Revelation Since Abu Ghraib”
The Collateral Murder video is “the most important revelation since Abu Ghraib,” Summers told the panel. “The cables Assange published disclosed extrajudicial assassinations, rendition, torture, dark prisons and drone killings.” Summers said the Guantánamo Files revealed a “colossal criminal act.” The defense pointed out that WikiLeaks’s revelations actually saved lives. After WikiLeaks published evidence of Iraqi torture centers established by the U.S., the Iraqi government refused President Barack Obama’s request to grant immunity to U.S. troops who committed criminal and civil offenses there. As a result, Obama had to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq.
The Obama administration, which prosecuted more whistleblowers under the Espionage Act than all prior U.S. administrations combined, considered prosecuting Assange, but feared it would violate the First Amendment. The administration was unable to distinguish what WikiLeaks did from what The New York Times and The Guardian did since they also published documents that Chelsea Manning had leaked.
But the Trump administration did indict Julian Assange. The U.K. arrested Assange and has held him in Belmarsh Prison for nearly five years pending a decision on whether he should be extradited to the U.S. to stand trial.
In January 2021, following a three-week hearing, Baraitser denied extradition after finding that Assange’s mental health was so frail there was a “substantial risk” of suicide if he was extradited to the U.S. because of the harsh conditions of confinement in which he would be held. But she rejected all other legal objections to extradition that Assange had raised.
U.S. “Assurances” That Assange Will Be Treated Humanely
After Baraitser had already ruled, the U.S. came forward with diplomatic “assurances” that Assange would be treated humanely if extradited to the United States. The Biden administration assured the court that Assange: (1) would not be subject to onerous Special Administrative Measures (SAMs) that would keep him in extreme isolation and monitor his confidential communications with his attorneys; (2) would not be housed at the notorious ADX Florence maximum security prison in Colorado; (3) would receive psychological and clinical treatment in custody; and (4) could serve any custodial sentence in Australia.
But the U.S. said the assurances wouldn’t apply if Assange committed a “future act” that “met the test” for the SAMs. That unspecified contingency would be based on a subjective determination of prison authorities with no judicial review.
Although the United States has reneged on nearly identical assurances in the past, the High Court accepted them at face value, saying it was satisfied that the U.S. was acting in good faith, and in December 2021, the High Court reversed Baraitser’s denial of extradition.
However, in a 2023 decision, the U.K. Supreme Court unanimously held that the court has an independent duty to determine the validity of assurances,
writing, “The government’s assessment of whether there is such a risk is an important element of that evidence, but the court is bound to consider the question in the light of the evidence as a whole and to reach its own conclusion.”
In June 2023, a single High Court judge, Jonathan Swift, refused Assange permission to appeal in a cursory three-page ruling. The hearing on February 20 and 21 was an effort by Assange’s legal team to reverse that decision so that the High Court will entertain his appeal.
Assange Redacted Names of Informants to Protect Them
…………………… Several witnesses testified at the 2020 extradition hearing that Assange took great care to ensure that the names were redacted. Other outlets published the unredacted cables before WikiLeaks with no adverse consequences.
………………….Moreover, Brig. Gen. Robert Carr testified at Manning’s court martial that no one was harmed by the WikiLeaks releases. Summers told the panel that Baraitser never balanced the public interest in the disclosures against the fact that no harm came from them.
Conviction of Assange Would Chill Investigate Journalists From Exposing Government Secrets
In November 2022, The New York Times, The Guardian, Le Monde, DER SPIEGEL and El País signed a joint open letter calling on the Biden administration to drop the Espionage Act charges against Assange. They wrote, “Publishing is not a crime,” noting that Assange is the first publisher to be charged under the Espionage Act for revealing government secrets.
The indictment would punish conduct that national security journalists routinely engage in, including cultivating and communicating confidentially with sources and soliciting information from them, shielding their identities from disclosure, and publishing classified information. If Assange is prosecuted and convicted, it will discourage journalists both in the U.S. and abroad from publishing evidence of government wrongdoing.
No publisher has ever been prosecuted under the Espionage Act for disclosing government secrets. The U.S. government has never prosecuted a publisher for publishing classified information, which constitutes an essential tool of investigative journalism.
But rather than dropping Trump’s prosecution of Assange consistent with the position of the Obama-Biden administration, Joe Biden has zealously pursued extradition and prosecution.
Pending House Resolution Would Call for Dismissal of All Charges Against Assange.
On December 13, 2023, House Resolution 934 was introduced in the U.S. House of Representatives by Rep. Paul A. Gosar (R-Arizona), with cosponsors from both political parties. It would express “the sense of the House of Representatives that regular journalistic activities are protected under the First Amendment, and that the United States ought to drop all charges against and attempts to extradite Julian Assange.” The resolution states that the WikiLeaks disclosures “promoted public transparency through the exposure of the hiring of child prostitutes by Defence Department contractors, friendly fire incidents, human rights abuses, civilian killings, and United States use of psychological warfare.”
…………… The conviction of Assange under the Espionage Act, the resolution continues, “would set a precedent allowing the United States to prosecute and imprison journalists for First Amendment protected activities, including the obtainment and publication of information, something that occurs on a regular basis.”
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At the conclusion of the two-day hearing, the High Court panel set a due date of March 4 for further written submissions from the parties. If the court agrees to review at least one of Assange’s appellate issues, there will be a full hearing. Meanwhile, Assange, who is in poor physical and emotional health, remains in prison.
If the High Court denies his right to appeal, Assange can ask the European Court of Human Rights to hear his case. If that court finds “exceptional circumstances” and an “imminent risk of irreparable harm,” it can order provisional measures, including a stay of execution while the case is pending in the European court. But there is a danger that the U.K. could immediately extradite Assange to the United States before the European Court of Human Rights has a chance to consider Assange’s petition.
Today. My dilemma in writing about nuclear issues.
This might be a peculiarly Australian dilemma. I don’t know. The thing is – most people seem able to tolerate a bit of criticism of the nuclear industry. And indeed, when I post articles on my websites – nuclear-news.net and antinuclear.net, or on my newsletter, – that’s OK.
But if I bring in the subject of Ukraine, or especially of Gaza and Israel, – people get upset. What has that got to do with the nuclear industry? (Well, a lot really – as both situations bring us ever closer to the brink of nuclear war).
The big problem is this. As part of an Australian, and indeed worldwide, movement, for a safe clean nuclear-free world, my stuff is accepted as worthwhile. But, when I digress into examining what is going on in Ukraine, or worse, in Israel – then I am no longer to be trusted. Indeed, I am sometimes being called a Putin-lover, a communist. a terrorist – and especially anti-semitic.
As a consequence, then my anti-nuclear coverage is not to be trusted, either. It’s OK to be anti-nuclear – that’s a respectable opinion, as long as you’re pro Ukraine and pro Israel.
I really don’t know how to deal with this. It seems that, to be respected at all, it is necessary to conform to certain dogmas, such as “Russia is always evil” and “Israelis are holy victims”.
In my view – Putin is a murderous thug, but Russia is not always to blame, and Russian policies and aspirations should be viewed fairly.
Similarly, I think that the Jews, over history, have been terribly persecuted and murdered, but that doesn’t give Israel the licence to now do mass murder of the Gazan people.
There’s a dreadful conformity in Australia, and perhaps in all supposedly-white, English speaking countries. We must side with Ukraine, no matter what. And we must not be seen to be anti-semitic, no matter what.
So – I am left with the dilemma – should I ignore those two nuclear-war-trigger situations, in order to sound credible about nuclear matters?
Should I act “nice” about what Israel is doing, and pretend that I don’t notice? That is all too easy to do, in Australia, with its relentless media focus on sport.
Nuclear boondoggle | The West Report
News Corp and their boy Peter Dutton won’t give up spruiking nuclear energy, though it’s too expensive and could never arrive on time. Why?
by Michael West | Mar 2, 2024 | The West Report
Get These Rich People Off the Moon
Other than allowing billionaires and private companies to benefit from taxpayer-funded pipe dreams and advertising, the value of going to the moon for all mankind is not at all clear.
The US military has also expressed an interest in renting Starships for their Space Force cargo and troops — delivering war to poor countries anywhere in the world within one hour.
Despite the mess it makes on Earth, NewSpace investments are growing in popularity among everyman-for-himself superrich techies
BY PETER HOWSON,on behalf of Koohan Paik-Mander
Texas start-up Intuitive Machines has achieved the first moon landing by a private firm. It’s dumping rich people’s detritus on the lunar surface — a grim sign of how the superrich plan to plant their flag beyond our own planet.
Amid tears of joy at their Houston control room, the Texas start-up Intuitive Machines successfully landed on the moon. Their uncrewed lander, known as Odysseus, hitched a ride on a SpaceX rocket last week, touching down near the moon’s south pole on Thursday. After many failed attempts by various private outfits, Intuitive Machines is the first private company to plant a free-market flag on the moon
In January, a different US private venture crashed back to Earth. Astrobotic’s Peregrine lander had been supposed to dispose of at least seventy dead rich people (and one rich dog) on the lunar surface.
Spending billions of dollars dumping odd things in space has become a tradition among the lunar classes. Elon Musk famously sent a Tesla Roadster as the dummy payload for the 2018 Falcon Heavy test flight. Driven by a mannequin in a spacesuit dubbed “Starman,” the car is now an enduring satellite of the sun. You can track him, if you like.
The Japanese isotonic drinks company Pocari Sweat has been trying to leave a can of pop on the moon since 2014. It finally crashed with Astrobotic’s failed $100 million lander. The Japanese still plan to send a hydrogen-powered Toyota “Lunar Cruiser” up there, despite a few explosive setbacks.
Toxic Effects
Other than allowing billionaires and private companies to benefit from taxpayer-funded pipe dreams and advertising, the value of going to the moon for all mankind is not at all clear. British astronaut Tim Peake suggests the microgravity up there might one day enable exotic treatments for all sorts of diseases, albeit expensive treatments for those who can afford them. Aside from body parts, fizzy pop, and “art,” the squillion-dollar landers are packed full of instruments designed for exploring the unknown, before anyone else gets their mitts on it.
So called “NewSpace” companies are on the prowl for profitable rare earth metals, helium-3, and water. Just like the spice of Arrakis, helium-3 is being pitched as “the most precious resource in the universe.” At least it might be if someone invents a use for it. Getting large quantities of water to space is pricey. A stable reservoir will keep plebs alive while they mine for spice. And both hydrogen and oxygen can make the rocket fuel needed to search for shiny things further afield.
It all sounds very exciting. But realizing these fantasies has costs for the rest of us. According to Atrium, a big insurer for rocket-makers, early space-faring outfits should typically expect 30 percent of their launches to end in catastrophic failure. When two separate SpaceX Starship launches in Texas went south last year, toxic particulates rained down on people’s homes. Debris broke windows and caused fires that burned across Boca Chica Park, home to endangered birds and ocelot cats.
“We never gave our consent,” said one indigenous Carrizo-Comecrudo representative at a SpaceX protest in South Texas. “Yet they [SpaceX] are moving forward. It’s colonial genocide of native people and native lands.” Bekah Hinojosa of the Texas environmental group Another Gulf Is Possible claims environmental deregulation, tax breaks, and subsidies have been used by the Texas state government to lure SpaceX in. Meanwhile local indigenous communities who rely on Boca Chica’s fish to feed their families feel their customary land is being sacrificed.
For the Navajo people, the costly blunders are no bad thing. The Navajo hold the moon to be sacred, and consider fly-tipping and mining there an act of profound desecration. According to the Navajo Nation’s president Dr Buu Nygren, “The sacredness of the Moon is deeply embedded in the spirituality and heritage of many Indigenous cultures, including our own.”
Wars on Our Home Planet
Yet, despite the mess they’re making, SpaceX plans on going bigger and bigger.
SpaceX will soon be moving its monster Starship boosters from Boca Chica to the much larger Kennedy Space Center in Florida. Like the Falcon 9, SpaceX’s Starship is designed as a workhorse for frequent, repeated flights. Instead of only a couple of launches per year, Kennedy will start to resemble an airport. The same powerful and destructive super heavy-lift rockets that devastated Boca Chica will be lifting off on a near daily basis from the Florida coast.
The US military has also expressed an interest in renting Starships for their Space Force cargo and troops — delivering war to poor countries anywhere in the world within one hour.
NewSpace is scaling up US geopolitical influence behind a facade of free-market competition. In Indonesia, SpaceX has edged out Beijing to become the country’s satellite launch partner of choice. The partnership was achieved through the personal relationship Musk nurtured with outgoing Indonesian president Joko Widodo. The deal marks a rare instance of a US company making inroads in Indonesia, whose telecommunications sector is dominated by Chinese outfits offering low costs and easy financing. Some see the SpaceX deal as just a sweetener for Musk to build a new Tesla factory somewhere in Indonesia. The electric vehicle-maker has so far signed contracts worth billions for Indonesia’s nickel and other essential materials for the company’s car batteries.
As well as ripping up Indonesia’s pristine forests for luxury car bits, plans to furnish Musk with a new spaceport on the island of Biak, Papua, is fermenting anger among indigenous Warbon peoples. Clearances for the spaceport are reigniting ethnic tensions and military violence. Somewhere between 40 and 150 Papuans protesting the spaceport have been killed by the Indonesian military since the plans were originally unveiled.
Real People Are Gross
Despite the mess it makes on Earth, NewSpace investments are growing in popularity among everyman-for-himself superrich techies.
For them, dealing with today’s real social and environmental problems tends to involve paying icky taxes and/or remunerating their workers fairly. Meanwhile, finding solutions for potential future problems is far more profitable. For billionaires, “longtermism” packages up this predicament beautifully.
Factoring future populations into decision-making models is just a nice, sustainable thing to do. Longtermism on the other hand, is too much of a good thing. It’s an extreme utilitarian, accelerationist ideology asking us to drastically increase rates of economic growth and technological advancement to ensure humanities’ long-term survivability as a multiplanetary species.
Meanwhile, taxes and government interventions are framed as an impediment to growth and innovation. For these longtermists, someone potentially not being born on Mars in the far distant future is in many ways far worse than someone actually dying of a preventable disease or poverty today. Mars guy is super smart and loaded. Unlike the stinky real person, Mars guy is likely to live a long happy life free of dysentery. He’s white because rich people tend to be that way.
If this all sounds a bit fascist, that’s because it is. According to Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom, widely considered the founding father of longtermism, “blacks are more stupid than whites,” as he once said on an extropian community message board. “I like that sentence and think it is true.” Bostrom then used an offensive slur beginning with “N.” “It seems that there is a negative correlation in some places between intellectual achievement and fertility,” he argued. “If such selection were to operate over a long period of time, we might evolve into a less brainy but more fertile species.” He later apologized for coming across as “racist.”
Thanks in part to Musk, the cost of space travel has dropped considerably. A seat on a Falcon 9 rocket and an eight-day stay on the International Space Station (ISS) now only costs $82 million. Musk predicts his one-way tickets to Mars will cost somewhere between $500,000 to $1 million, a price at which he thinks “it’s highly likely that there will be a self-sustaining Martian colony.” For the poors, Musk has an indentured labor package where workers take out a loan to pay for their tickets, paying them off later by mining for spice or something.
Life on Earth will end one day (we have somewhere between one and five billion years). But the universe will also end. What then? We could just keep on running through the vacuum of a dying universe. Or, instead of living as slaves obsessing over spice and birth quotas for some odious space baron, we could take a leaf from the Navajo’s book, taking the moon for sacred, and mountains, lakes, and rivers, too. If we treat our planet right, we might just live longer and better.
I’ll admit: I wrote two versions of this article, depending on the fate of the Intuitive Machines lander. In 1969, President Richard Nixon did something similar, just in case everyone died onboard Apollo 11. But when it comes to NewSpace, there’s no need for tears or alternative endings.
Private space missions will only ever serve the billionaires, not us.
If we make no effort to change direction, we will end up where we are heading.”
Texas wildfires continue to pose threat to Pantex nuclear weapons plant, and climate change will bring further threats to nuclear facilities
By Jessica McKenzie, François Diaz-Maurin | February 28, 2024
A wildland fire in the Texas Panhandle forced the Pantex plant, a nuclear facility northeast of Amarillo, to temporarily cease operations on Tuesday and to evacuate nonessential workers. Plant workers also started construction on a fire barrier to protect the plant’s facilities.
The plant resumed normal operations on Wednesday, officials said.
“Thanks to the responsive actions of all Pantexans and the NNSA Production Office in cooperation with the women and men of the Pantex Fire Department and our mutual aid partners from neighboring communities, the fire did not reach or breach the plant’s boundary,” Pantex said in a social media post on Wednesday afternoon.
At a press conference Tuesday evening, Laef Pendergraft, a nuclear safety engineer with the National Nuclear Security Administration production office at Pantex, said the evacuations were out of an “abundance of caution.”
“Currently we are responding to the plant, but there is no fire on our site or on our boundary,” Pendergraft told reporters.
The 90,000-acre Windy Deuce fire burning four to five miles to the north of the Pantex plant was 25 percent contained as of late Wednesday afternoon.
Until the fire is fully contained, it will continue to pose a threat to the nearby Pantex plant, says Nickolas Roth, the senior director of nuclear materials security at the Nuclear Threat Initiative. “I think the sign that the coast is clear is that the fire is no longer burning,” he told the Bulletin. “One can imagine many reasons operations would resume.”……………………………………….
While the specific cause of the Smokehouse Creek fire has not yet been identified, climate change is making explosive wildfires more likely, with serious implications for the country’s nuclear weapons programs.
Since 1975, the Pantex plant has been the United States’ primary facility responsible for assembling and disassembling nuclear weapons. It is one of six production facilities in the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nuclear Security Enterprise.
In addition to warhead surveillance and repair, the plant is currently working on the full scale production of the B61-12 guided nuclear gravity bomb and 455-kiloton W88 Alteration (Alt) 370 warhead as part of the broader US nuclear weapons life-extension and modernization programs. The plant handles significant quantities of uranium, plutonium, and tritium, in addition to other non-radioactive toxic and explosive chemicals.
If a wildfire were to impact the site directly, the health and safety implications could be enormous.
“I don’t like to speculate in terms of worst-case scenarios,” Roth told the Bulletin. “The potential for danger if a fire ever broke out at a site with weapons usable nuclear material is quite great.”
“The danger from plutonium really comes from inhaling particulates,” Dylan Spaulding, a senior scientist in the Global Security Program at the Union of Concerned Scientists, explained on a podcast in 2023. “So if powder is inhaled, or if somehow powder were to be dispersed through, say, a big fire or some kind of incident at the site, that would certainly pose a risk for surrounding communities.”
Up to 20,000 plutonium cores, or “pits,” from disassembled nuclear weapons can be stored on site. (The exact figure is classified, but experts contacted by the Bulletin said the current number of “surplus” plutonium pits already dismantled is likely to be around 19,000, plus an additional unknown number of backlog pits awaiting disassembly.)
But as Robert Alvarez wrote in the Bulletin in 2018, the plutonium is stored in facilities built over half a century ago that were never intended to indefinitely store nuclear explosives. After extreme rains flooded parts of the facility in 2010 and 2017, some of the containers began showing signs of corrosion.
A 2021 review by the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board of the Pantex plant’s operations found that an increasing number of plutonium pits are stored in unsealed containers. These pits are either “recently removed from a weapon, planned to be used in an upcoming assembly or life extension program, or pending surveillance,” the board explained. The board previously recommended that these pits be repackaged into sealed insert containers for their safe long-term staging. But the plant personnel “stated it is only achieving approximately 10 percent of its annual pit repackaging goals, citing a lack of funding and priority.”…………………………………………………………………………..
A Department of Energy report published in April 2022 on fire protection at the Pantex, which identified several weaknesses within the plant, did not discuss risks from wildland fires.
“The event is obviously a stark reminder of the dangers of climate change on even high security nuclear weapons facilities,” said Kristensen.
But as other authors have previously argued in the Bulletin, climate change is a blind spot in US nuclear weapons policy. “All of these [nuclear] structures were built on the presumption of a stable planet. And our climate is changing very rapidly and presenting new extremes,” Alice Hill, a senior fellow for energy and the environment at the Council on Foreign Relations, told the Bulletin in 2021……….. https://thebulletin.org/2024/02/texas-wildfires-force-major-nuclear-weapons-facility-to-briefly-pause-operations/
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