Small modular reactor plan – a dangerous distraction from climate change action
Feds’ Small Modular Reactor Action Plan is a dangerous distraction from climate change mitigation, Corporate Knights BY RICK CHEESEMAN, December 29, 2020
Canada can be a world leader in this promising, innovative, zero-emissions energy technology, and this is our plan to position ourselves in an emerging global market,” Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said in a statement.
The governments of New Brunswick, Ontario, Saskatchewan and Alberta, together with the federal government, advocate that small modular reactors (SMRs) are essential if Canada is to achieve a net-zero economy by 2050. According to the feds’ 2018 Call to Action report on the mini nuclear reactors, “SMRs are a reliable, clean, non-emitting source of energy, with costs that are predictable and competitive with other alternatives.”
The first problem with these claims is that SMRs don’t yet exist and aren’t expected to exist for a decade, making these claims dubious. It’s not the only questionable claim made by proponents.
Are SMRs a clean, zero-emission source of power?
Nuclear reactors emit much lower concentrations of carbon than fossil fuels, so one could claim they are zero-emission. But they have their own, uniquely harmful, emissions. From thousands of tonnes of spent fuel to hundreds of thousands of tonnes of mine tailings, nuclear power leaves a radioactive trail that is an immediate threat to waterways and water tables and is lethal for hundreds of thousands of years. SMRs will only add to that.
In 2010, Ad Standards Canada ruled that an ad claiming CANDU reactors were emission-free was “inaccurate and unsupported.” The Power Workers’ Union was expected to remove all ads containing the “emission-free” statement and to qualify any future claims. ……
After 70 years, the nuclear industry still hasn’t found a way to keep habitable environments safe from spent fuel for anything close to the time frames required for it to be harmless. There have been many plans in the past and there are current plans but all have one thing in common: they are unfit for purpose.
Some SMR technologies promise to use CANDU spent fuel in the SMR, claiming this will reduce both the radioactivity and quantity of the spent fuel. This claim is theoretical, based on proprietary data, and a report published by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists said doing so would be “playing with fire,” noting that the process, called pyroprocessing, will exacerbate the spent fuel storage and disposal challenges, not mitigate them.
Will SMRs be safe?
A range of power-generation and storage technologies that are clean, emissions-free, safe and low cost, is imminent. Within 10 years, these technologies will be widespread, fully incorporated into all levels of society, and deployed to all regions – all before the first SMR comes online. In all likelihood, by the time an SMR comes to market, there will be a more economical and environmentally responsible alternative in place.
While the rhetoric is persuasive, the case for SMRs doesn’t stand up to objective scrutiny. Allocating climate-change funds to them is a travesty.
USA is not facing up to the climate threats to its nuclear wastes
US is Ill-Prepared to Safely Manage its Nuclear Waste from Climate Threats. More than 150 sites across the country have to be managed for radioactive waste for centuries or millennia. But there’s no plan in place for how this will be done, says GAO report. Earth Island Journal , CHARLES PEKOW, December 29, 2020 The Cold War never erupted into the nuclear nightmare that the world feared for decades. But the legacy of the never-used nuclear weapons remains a ticking time bomb that could endanger countless people and lead to environmental catastrophe any time.
The GAO report, “Environmental Liabilities: DoE Needs to Better Plan for Post-Cleanup Challenges Facing Sites” (pdf), issued earlier this year, found, among other things, that the DoE doesn’t have a plan for how to address challenges at some sites that may require new cleanup work that is not in the scope of LM’s expertise.
some of these sites have already been creating serious problems.
Among the many other problem sites, the Legacy Management office is struggling to figure out what to do with contaminated groundwater at the Shiprock nuclear waste dump on the Navajo Nation Indian Reservation in northwest New Mexico. Contaminated water, the legacy of uranium mining for nuclear power plants and weapons, is being pumped to an evaporation pond there.
Donald Trump’s dangerous nuclear legacy
David AxeForbes Staff In his single term in the White House, Donald Trump expanded America’s nuclear arsenal and undermined decades of arms-control efforts. While President-elect Joe Biden could reverse some of Trump’s atomic initiatives, it’s highly unlikely he can undo all of them.
And it’s impossible for Biden to travel back in time and seize opportunities for nuclear arms-reduction that Trump squandered—with North Korea, in particular.
For that reason alone, Trump’s atomic legacy will be a meaningful one. “He drove the final few nails in the coffin for the first era of arms-control,” said Jeffrey Lewis, a nuclear expert at the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in California.
Kingston Reif, a missile expert at the Arms Control Association in Washington, D.C., neatly summarized Trump’s nuclear initiatives on Twitter in mid-December. To paraphrase:
1. Trump nudged the Pentagon to double the number of low-yield nuclear weapons, which according to experts raise the risk of nuclear war by making nukes seemingly more “useable” in an armed clash between major powers. At the same time, Trump’s nuclear doctrine expanded the list of external threats that officially justify nuclear retaliation. Perhaps most notably, the list of threats now includes a major hacking event. The U.S. Navy subsequently deployed the low-yield W76-2 variant of its Trident II submarine-launched ballistic missile.
2. At the opposite end of the yield spectrum, the billionaire president accelerated development of high-yield SLBMs and canceled a Pentagon plan to decommission the megaton-class B83-1 gravity bomb.
3. To arm these new weapons, Trump took steps to restart production of plutonium cores for nuclear warheads, despite arguments that the United States already possesses plenty of cores. The core-production falls under a roughly $9-billion budgetary boost that Trump helped push through for the U.S. National Nuclear Security Agency, which oversees America’s nukes.
4. Citing Russian development of banned weapons, Trump withdrew the United States from the 1987 Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces, which limited ground-launched nukes in Europe. The former reality TV star also pulled America out of the 1992 Open Skies Treaty, which allows the United States, Russia and many European states to monitor each other’s atomic arsenals via photographic-reconnaissance flights. Finally, Trump has been reluctant to approve an extension—due in February—of the 2010 New START, a U.S.-Russian accord that puts a cap on nuclear weapons and helped both countries reduce their atomic arsenals in the years prior to Trump’s presidency. It’s possible Biden could bring the USA back into Open Skies while also scrambling to extend New START, but the INF Treaty almost certainly is dead, as both the United States and Russia now openly are developing intermediate-range nukes.
5. After failing several times to negotiate any kind of enforceable arms limitations with North Korea, Trump became the first president since the 1960s not to negotiate any new nuclear arms-control agreement. Instead, he did the very opposite—loosened controls, encouraged proliferation and, as a result, is “the first post-Cold War president not to reduce the size of the nuclear warhead stockpile,” according to Reif.
“The Trump administration’s nuclear legacy is one of failure,” Reif said. “The administration inherited several nuclear challenges, to be sure, but it has made nearly all of them worse.”
Nuclear power ridiculously expensive an uncompetitive – the market has spoken
“nuclear is ridiculously expensive and uncompetitive”. So, nothing really needs to happen for renewable energy investment to grow. The reality is that the market has said “no” to nuclear and “yes” to renewables.
The Reality Is that the Market Has Said “No” to Nuclear and “Yes” to Renewables, RIAC, Paul Dorfman PhD, Honorary Senior Research Associate at the UCL Energy Institute University College London; Chair of the Nuclear Consulting Group; Member of the Irish Govt. Environment Protection Agency Radiation Protection Advisory Committee, and Tatyana Kanunnikova– 27 Dec 20,
“………. As for nuclear energy, can it be used to help mitigate climate change? What are the problems associated with nuclear energy?
With mounting public concern and policy recognition over the speed and pace of the low carbon energy transition needed to mitigate climate change, nuclear power has been reframed 
as a response to the threat of global warming. However, at the heart of the question of nuclear power, there are differing views on how to apply foresight, precaution, and responsibility in the context of the poor economics of nuclear, the possibility of accidents, the consequences of those accidents, and indeed whether there exists a place for nuclear at all within the swiftly expanding renewable evolution.
When one considers nuclear, it is absolutely important to consider its life cycle in terms of carbon emissions. A study by Prof Benjamin Sovacool looked at 103 different studies and concluded that the average value for nuclear in terms of life cycle emissions was about 66 grams of carbon dioxide for every kilowatt-hour produced. This compares to about 9 grams per kilowatt-hour for wind and 32 grams per kilowatt-hour for solar. This puts nuclear as the third-highest carbon emitter after coal-fired plants and natural gas.
So, in terms of carbon emissions, nuclear is lower than fossil fuel but produces significantly more carbon dioxide in terms of its life cycle than renewable power. And perhaps more importantly, with ramping predictions for sea level rise and climate disturbance, nuclear will be 
an important risk, since climate change will impact coastal nuclear plants earlier and harder than is currently expected. Proposed new reactors, together with radioactive waste stores, including spent fuel located on the coasts, will be vulnerable to sea level rise, flooding, and storm surge. These coastal sites will need considerable investment just to protect them against sea level rise, and in the medium term, they will even be subject to abandonment or relocation.
Adapting coastal nuclear power to climate change will entail significantly increased expense for construction, operation, waste storage, and decommissioning. Inland nuclear power plants will do no better. This is because they must be cooled by significant amounts of water and they have to shut down if that cooling water is either too warm or the river flow is reduced. These are two factors that will absolutely happen with increased climate change. We are seeing this 
already in France where their reactors stationed by rivers, reliant on river water for cooling, have both diminished river flow and increased water temperatures in the summertime. That implies that there will be a significant inland nuclear station nuclear power shutdown in the future.
The other problem is one of economics, since nuclear is so hugely expensive. Carrying on constructing and prolonging the life of current nuclear plants is enormously costly. New construction is eye-wateringly expensive, which means that if we continue to build nuclear plants, we have much less resource, money, to put into the real solution to climate change, which is renewable power, demand-side management, and storage.
What are the advantages of solar and wind power?
A recent report by Standard and Poor, the key market analyst, found that renewable energy technology global investment has been running at about 350 billion dollars per year for the last few years. But for nuclear, it fell to about 17 billion for last year.
Standard and Poor say that they see “little economic rationale for new nuclear build in the US or Western Europe owing to massive cost escalations and renewables cost-competitiveness, which should lead to a material decline in nuclear generation”. Similarly, Lazard—the world’s leading financial advisory and asset management firm—has just compared the cost of new nuclear, which runs at about $119 to $192 per megawatt-hour, compared to $32 to $42 for utility-scale solar and between $20 and $54 for onshore wind per megawatt-hour. So there is a huge cost difference between nuclear and renewable technologies. Lazard go on to say that the unsubsidized, levelized cost of energy of large-scale wind and solar are at a fraction of the cost of new nuclear or even coal generators, even if the very great cost of nuclear decommissioning and ongoing maintenance is excluded.
Bloomberg New Energy Finance agrees with Lazard’s analysis. The key disadvantage to nuclear power is that it is just too expensive. For renewables, the cost is far lower and continues to fall, which is why what we see is the majority of new nuclear only being constructed with the support of vast state and public subsidy. So, given the reality that funding is limited, we need to make a choice between very expensive nuclear and very inexpensive renewables.
What hinders investments in renewable energy?
In fact, all of the markets are putting all of the money into renewable energy and none of the markets are putting their money into nuclear. There is no market investment in new nuclear. All the investment is going into renewable energy, as I have just discussed. The only problem is, of course, is that if governments via state subsidy put enormous amounts of the low carbon energy budgets into nuclear, they will have less money to invest properly in real low carbon energy technologies such as renewables, storage, and demand-side management.
What initiatives could help promote investments in renewable energy?
I do not think renewable energy needs pushing. The cost of renewables is a fraction of the cost of new nuclear. As Mr. Tanaka, a former director of the International Energy Agency and a former long-standing nuclear advocate, says, “nuclear is ridiculously expensive and uncompetitive”. So, nothing really needs to happen for renewable energy investment to grow. The reality is that the market has said “no” to nuclear and “yes” to renewables……………..
In the journey to manage the decline of fossil fuels, not all low carbon technologies are equal. The reality is that nuclear is far less benign, far more expensive, and far more carbon-intensive than other renewable options. Nuclear will struggle to compete with the technological, economic, and security advantages of the coming renewable evolution. In bidding goodbye to fossil fuels, we should also say goodbye to nuclear. And given the ramping costs and risks that cling to this, essentially late 20th-century technology, it is not before time.
Interviewed by Tatyana Kanunnikova. https://russiancouncil.ru/en/analytics-and-comments/interview/the-reality-is-that-the-market-has-said-no-to-nuclear-and-yes-to-renewables/
Storage of Chernobyl nuclear waste – in reality unsafe for 1000s of years
Paul Waldon Fight to Stop a Nuclear Waste Dump in South Australia, 28 Dec 20, A scary reality, Trump still has the nuclear codes
Former Reagan aide: Trump still has the nuclear codes. And that’s genuinely scary. https://www.nj.com/opinion/2020/12/former-reagan-aide-trump-still-has-the-nuclear-codes-and-thats-genuinely-scary-opinion.html By Star-Ledger Guest Columnist By Mark Weinberg, 24 Dec 20
Almost anything Donald Trump does in his last weeks as president can be undone by Joe Biden. Executive Orders can be reversed, regulations can be changed, unnecessary commissions can be disbanded, and (some) political appointees can be removed from their positions. Unfortunately, a few will remain after Trump leaves because of how terms are structured, but their ability and probably their willingness to cause mischief will be severely limited when their man is out of the White House. At least one hopes so.
That’s the good news.
The bad news is that until noon on January 20th Trump will have access to the codes necessary to authorize a nuclear war. That is genuinely scary.
The size, scale and influence of the United States’ economy notwithstanding, what makes the president of the United States the most powerful person in the world is control of our nuclear weapons.
Our two most threatening adversaries, Russia and China, both have significant nuclear arsenals. Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping are aware that Trump is a wounded and weakened president and will be so until he leaves office next month. Whether they sense that translates into an opening for them to outright attack us — or at least threaten to — is an open question. No doubt they are watching closely for opportunities to enhance their world domination campaigns at our expense, which means we must be super-vigilant. Nuclear war is no joke. It is as serious as it gets. What animated Ronald Reagan most in his efforts to engage the Soviet Union to reduce both country’s nuclear stockpiles was that each nation had the ability to destroy each other. Reagan called this the “MAD” – Mutually Assured Destruction – policy, which he rightly thought was unacceptably dangerous and worked hard to eliminate. He famously said: “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.” Contrary to opponents’ depictions, Reagan was not a trigger-happy warmonger. Indeed, he was the opposite. A World War II veteran, he knew well of, and worried about, the indescribably deadly potential of nuclear weapons and took very seriously his duties as president in either responding to — or initiating — a nuclear strike.
As with all modern-day presidents, elaborate steps were taken to make certain Reagan always had access to the nuclear codes wherever he was. There was never a time during Reagan’s presidency when his stability or suitability to have the nuclear codes was in question.
So what to do until he is replaced by a more stable, sensible, and sane president?
Tempting and legitimate as it may be, invoking the 25th Amendment to declare Trump “unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office” is not a realistic possibility at this point. For reasons they will have to explain later, most members of Trump’s Cabinet, including Vice President Michael Pence, are either unable or unwilling to recognize Trump’s instability and unsuitability for office and fear that doing anything to upset him could be professional suicide.
Perhaps a solution can be found in the presidency of Trump’s hero, Richard Nixon. It has been widely reported that in the last few days Nixon was in office, then-Secretary of Defense James Schlesinger, concerned that a distraught Nixon might do something rash, issued a directive to the military that if Nixon ordered a nuclear strike, they were to check with him or Secretary of State Henry Kissinger before executing.
Hopefully, acting Defense Secretary Christopher Miller has the wisdom to issue such an order. He needs to. Whether Secretary of State Mike Pompeo has the courage and patriotism to act as a backstop against any reckless Trump order is a question which, with any luck, will never require an answer.
In USA’s economic and health crisis – nuclear weapons spending is booming
Roughly 50,000 Americans are now involved in making nuclear warheads at eight principal sites stretching from California to South Carolina. And the three principal U.S. nuclear weapons laboratories — located in Los Alamos and Albuquerque, N.M., and Livermore, Calif. — have said they are adding thousands of new workers at a time when the overall federal workforce is shrinking.
“the insane idea that after a pandemic and dealing with climate change and in an economic crisis in which people are struggling with massive inequality that we are going to spend this much money modernizing every last piece of our nuclear infrastructure — that would be a failure, a failure of policy and a failure of imagination.”
But major defense contractors and their employees — including many of those making nuclear weapons or running the national laboratories where they are designed — have long influenced budget choices by helping to finance elections of the members of Congress who approve spending for that work. The industry’s donations in the current election cycle to members of the House and Senate Armed Services committees alone had reached $9.4 million as of mid-October; of that amount, the two chairmen took in a total of at least $802,000, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a nonpartisan research group. These tallies don’t include separate donations by lawyers or lobbyists.
 Under Trump, America’s nuclear weapons industry has boomed, https://www.latimes.com/world-nation/story/2020-12-23/under-trump-americas-nuclear-weapons-industry-has-boomed By R. JEFFREY SMITH, DEC. 23, 2020
While the country has been preoccupied with the COVID-19 pandemic, economic decline and the election, President Trump’s administration quietly
 and steadily steered America’s nuclear weapons industry to its largest expansion since the end of the Cold War, increasing spending on such arms by billions of dollars with bipartisan congressional support.Overall, the budget for making and maintaining nuclear warheads has risen more than 50% since Trump was elected in 2016, substantially outpacing the rates of increase for the defense budget and overall federal spending during his presidency before the pandemic. On Monday, Congress approved Trump’s proposal to increase spending next year for the production of such weaponry by nearly $3 billion. President-elect Joe Biden may embrace other priorities as he confronts the pandemic, tries to steer the country out of a recession, and is pressured to address social programs neglected under the Trump administration, as well as a ballooning deficit created by the 2017 Trump tax cuts and COVID-19 stimulus spending. But the creation of a larger and more modern nuclear warhead complex of factories, laboratories and related businesses is already playing out around the country, despite slowdowns in other federal projects due to the pandemic Four factories in Texas, South Carolina, Tennessee and New Mexico dedicated to producing warheads are being modernized. Four existing warheads are being substantially rebuilt with modern parts, on top of another such upgrade — costing $3.5 billion — that was completed last year. This pace compares with an average modernization of one type of warhead at a time during the Obama administration. “Over the next five years, the [nuclear weapons-related] costs start going up dramatically,” Continue reading |
“Mutual admiration society” -between civilian and military nuclear experts
Civilian nuclear and military nuclear members of a “mutual admiration society” ~ Dr. Gordon Edwards, https://concernedcitizens.net/2020/12/19/civilian-nuclear-and-military-nuclear-members-of-a-mutual-admiration-society/by Dr. Gordon Edwards, President of the Canadian Coalition for Nuclear Responsibility
December 19, 2020
Civilian nuclear and military nuclear have always been friendly room-mates, members of a “mutual admiration” society. In today’s announcement of an SMR Action Plan, Natural Resources Minister Seamus O’Regan said that nuclear power in Canada is a “home-grown” technology and referred to C. D. Howe’s role in this connection. In fact C.D. Howe arranged for all Canadian uranium extracted from Canadian mines to be sold to the US military for use in tens of thousands of nuclear weapons from 1945 to 1965. C D Howe was also on the Committee that met in Washington DC in 1944 to approve the first nuclear reactors to be built in Canada (at Chalk River) as part of the ongoing effort to produce plutonium for use as a nuclear explosive. Mr. Howe approved of the policy of selling plutonium produced at Chalk River to the US military for weapons use, a practice that continued until 1975 and beyond. Plutonium from Chalk River was sent to Britain (it was the first sample of plutonium that Britain had ever obtained) just a few months before Britain detonated its first A-Bomb in the Monte Bello Islands off Australia.
To the best of my knowledge, no civilian nuclear power agency – not the Canadian Nuclear Association, nor the Canadian Nuclear Society, nor the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission, nor Atomic Energy of Canada Limited, nor Canadian Nuclear Laboratories, NOBODY – has ever issued a clear statement denouncing nuclear weapons or even calling for a nuclear weapons free world. Most nuclear scientists and engineers feel a strong kinship and camaraderie with those who are in the nuclear weapons business. The same goes for those in the nuclear division of Natural Resources Canada. I remember on one occasion (prior to the exchange of nuclear tests between India and Pakistan) I expressed alarm at the fact that both neighbours are developing a nuclear war-fighting capability and a couple of senior civil servants said “Would that be so bad? Maybe that’s just what the world needs. More deterrence. Creates stability”
Despite regular denials from our puppet masters that civilian nuclear has nothing to do with military nuclear, it is clear that civilian nuclear (including the frankly discriminatory provisions of the NPT) has adopted an appeasement policy that will never succeed in bringing about a nuclear weapons free world. Why does Canada continue to sell uranium to countries that are in the process of investing hundreds of billions to improve and modernize the nuclear arsenals in utter defiance of the NPT, knowing that the vast bulk of Canadian uranium that is rejected from enrichment plants as DU end up as the raw material for producing plutonium for Bombs, and that the lion’s share of the explosive power – and the overwhelming share of the radioactive fallout – of every H-bomb comes from the fissioning of DU atoms that are freely accessed by the military even if they are the leftovers of “peaceful” fuel production for nuclear power plants?
“See ‘The Nuclear Fudge’ at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lK65S5eHRQ&feature=youtu.be“. This 16-minute W5 segment from the Regan era is very informative.
The insanity of the big push for nuclear power in space
The Big Push for Nukes in Space, https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/12/15/the-big-push-for-nukes-in-space/?fbclid=IwAR1rGf0qomJlTKuhqCOsTTl3EkKOQzxf2QxOJ-3n0MnxGWNLvybgxXPovTU BY KARL GROSSMAN.– 15 Dec 20, Last week a SpaceX rocket exploded in a fireball at the SpaceX site in Texas. “Fortunately,” reported Lester Holt on NBC TV’s Nightly News, “no one was aboard.”But what if nuclear materials had been aboard?
The nuclear space issue is one I got into 35 years ago when I learned—from reading a U.S. Department of Energy newsletter—about two space shuttles, one the Challenger which was to be launched the following year with 24.2 pounds of plutonium aboard.
The plutonium the shuttles were to carry aloft in 1986 was to be used as fuel in radioisotope thermoelectric generators—RTGs—that were to provide a small amount of electric power for instruments on space probes to be released from the shuttles once the shuttles achieved orbit.
The plutonium-fueled RTGs had nothing to do with propulsion.
I used the U.S. Freedom of Information Act to ask what would be the consequences of an accident on launch, in the lower or upper atmosphere—and what about the dispersal of deadly plutonium. A few years earlier, I wrote Cover Up: What You Are Not Supposed to Know About Nuclear Power, so I was well familiar with plutonium, considered the most lethal radioactive substance.
For 10 months there was a stonewall of challenges to my FOIA request by DOE and NASA. Finally, I got the information, heavily redacted, with the claim that the likelihood of a shuttle accident releasing plutonium was “small.”
Said one document: “The risk would be small due to the high reliability inherent in the design of the Space Shuttle.” NASA put the odds of a catastrophic shuttle accident at one-in-100,000.
Then, on January 28, 1986 the Challenger blew up.
It was on its next mission—in May 1986—that it was slated to have a plutonium-fueled RTG aboard.
From a pay phone in an appliance store –amid scores of TV sets with that horrible video of the Challenger exploding—I called The Nation magazine and asked the folks there whether they knew that the next launch of the Challenger was to be a nuclear mission. They didn’t.
They had me write an editorial that appeared on The Nation’s front page titled “The Lethal Shuttle.” It began, “Far more than seven people could have died if the explosion that destroyed Challenger had occurred during the next launch…”
And I got deeper and deeper into the nukes-in-space issue—authoring two books, one The Wrong Stuff, presenting three TV documentaries, writing many hundreds of newspaper and magazine articles and speaking widely on the issue.
NASA, incidentally, later in 1986, drastically increased the odds of a catastrophic shuttle accident to one-in-76. It turned out the one-in-100,000 estimate was based on dubious guessing.
I found that accidents involving the use of nuclear power in space is not a sky-is-falling threat. In the then 26 U.S. space nuclear shots, there had been three accident, the worst in 1964 involving a satellite powered by a SNAP 9-A radioisotope thermoelectric generator fueled with plutonium.
The satellite failed to achieve orbit, broke up in the atmosphere as it came crashing back down to Earth, its plutonium dispersing as dust extensively on Earth. Dr. John Gofman, an M.D. and Ph.D., professor of medical physics at the University of California at Berkeley, formerly associate director of Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, author of Poisoned Power and involved in early studies of plutonium, long pointed to the SNAP 9-A accident as causing an increase in lung cancer on Earth.
Today the use of nuclear in space is being pushed harder than ever.
“US Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars,” declared the headline this July of an Associated Press dispatch. “US Eyes Building Nuclear Power Plants for Moon and Mars”.
As Linda Pentz Gunter, editor at Beyond Nuclear International, recently wrote here on CounterPunch, “Yet undeterred by immorality and expense, and apparently without the slightest concern for the radioactive dirt pile these reactors will produce, NASA and the Department of Energy are eagerly soliciting proposals.” https://www.counterpunch.org/2020/10/21/nukes-on-the-moon/
In July, too, the White House National Space Council issued a strategy for space exploration that includes “nuclear propulsion methods.” “US Ramps Up Planning for Space Nuclear Technology”
General Atomics Electromagnetic Systems has come out with a design for a nuclear propulsion reactor for trips to Mars.
Nuclear propulsion, its promoters are saying, would get astronauts to Mars quicker.
Shouted the headline in Popular Mechanics last month: “The Thermal Nuclear Engine That Could Get Us to Mars in Just 3 Months.”
And Elon Musk, founder and CEO of Space X, has been touting the detonation of nuclear bombs on Mars to, he says, “transform it into an Earth-like planet.” https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/elon-musk-mars-nuke-humans-live-mirrors-spacex-a9072631.html
As Business Insider explains, Musk “has championed the idea of launching nuclear weapons just over Mars’ poles since 2015. He believes it will help warm the planet and make it more hospitable for human life.”
As space.com says: “The explosions would vaporize a fair chunk of Mars’ ice caps, liberating enough water vapor and carbon dioxide—both potent greenhouse gases—to warm up the planet substantially, the idea goes.” https://www.space.com/elon-musk-nuke-mars-terraforming.html
It’s been projected that it would take more than 10,000 nuclear bombs to carry out the Musk plan.
The nuclear bomb explosions would also would render Mars radioactive.
The nuclear bombs would be carried to Mars on the fleet of 1,000 Starships that Musk wants to build—like the one that blew up this week.
SpaceX is selling T-shirts emblazoned with the words “Nuke Mars.”
Beyond the this completely insane plan to ruin Mars, as on Earth, solar energy can provide all the power needed for would-be settlements on Mars and the Moon. Continue reading
Unsafe levels of radiation found in Chernobyl crops
Unsafe levels of radiation found in Chernobyl crops, By Harry Baker – Staff Writer https://www.livescience.com/chernobyl-radioactive-isotopes-crops.html– 19 December 20, The effects of the explosive 1986 disaster can still be seen in nearby crops.
Crops grown near the Chernobyl nuclear site in Ukraine are still contaminated with radiation from the explosive 1986 disaster.
In a new study, researchers found that wheat, rye, oats and barley grown in this area contained two radioactive isotopes — strontium 90 and cesium 137 — that were above safe consumption limits. Radioactive isotopes are elements that have increased masses and release excess energy as a result.
“Our findings point to ongoing contamination and human exposure, compounded by lack of official routine monitoring,” study author David Santillo, an environmental forensic scientist at Greenpeace Research Laboratories at the University of Exeter, said in a statement, referring to the fact that the government suspended its radioactive goods monitoring program in 2013.
Santillo and his colleagues, in collaboration with researchers from the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology, analyzed 116 grain samples, collected between 2011 and 2019, from the Ivankiv district of Ukraine — about 31 miles (50 kilometers) south of the nuclear plant.
This area is outside of Chernobyl’s “exclusion zone,” which is a 30 mile (48 km) radius around the plant that was evacuated in 1986 and has remained unoccupied. They found radioactive isotopes, predominantly strontium 90, were above safe consumption level in 48% of samples. They also found that wood samples collected from the same region between 2015 and 2019, had strontium 90 levels above the safe limit for firewood.
The researchers believe that the lingering radiation in the wood, in particular, may be the reason for the continued contamination of crops, almost 35 years after the disaster. When analyzing the wood ash from domestic wood-burning ovens, they found strontium 90 levels that were 25 times higher than the safe limit. Locals use this ash, as well as ash from the local thermal power plant (TPP), to fertilize their crops, which continues to cycle the radiation through their soil.
However, computer simulations suggest that it could be possible to grow crops in the region at “safe” levels if this process of repeated contamination ceased. The researchers are now calling for the Ukrainian government to reinstate its monitoring program and create a system for properly disposing of radioactive ash.
“Contamination of grain and wood grown in the Ivankiv district remains of major concern and deserves further urgent investigation,” study author Valery Kashparov, director of the Ukrainian Institute of Agricultural Radiology, said in the statement. “Similarly, further research is urgently needed to assess the effects of the Ivankiv TPP on the environment and local residents, which still remain mostly unknown.”
The findings were published on Dec. 17 in the journal Environment International.
Originally published on Live Science.
USA government resists paying compensation to nuclear workers made ill by ionising radiation
the labor department ignored overwhelming evidence that her husband became sick from working at SRS
the system has become hard to navigate, with the government often fighting tooth-and-nail against the workers they were supposed to help
More than 2,200 workers had spent five years or more going through the exhaustive claims process, according to McClatchy’s 2015 “Irradiated’’ series. Some workers who filed for benefits died while awaiting decisions from the government, McClatchy found.
Death and despair. How the feds refused to help a nuclear worker’s family in SC, The State, BY SAMMY FRETWELL, December18, 2020 Every time Jerry Bolen came home from a construction job at the local nuclear weapons complex, he took off his dusty coveralls before stepping into the house he shared with his wife and children.
It was a precaution against tracking hazardous, radioactive materials into the family’s home in rural Barnwell County, says his widow, recalling how she would gingerly place the contaminated garment into the washing machine.
But while the effort protected the couple’s three kids, Jerry Bolen suffered. The long days he spent working at the Savannah River Site, exposed to chemicals and radiation, eventually killed him, his widow says.
Now, an exasperated Carolyn Bolen has sued the U.S. Department of Labor following a 13-year battle with the government over whether the family should receive compensation for the cancer that took Jerry Bolen’s life in 2006. Continue reading
We’re in a storytelling crisis”: Advice for writing on nuclear issues, from the author of “Fallout”
 We’re in a storytelling crisis”: Advice for writing on nuclear issues, from the author of “Fallout” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, By Sara Z. Kutchesfahani | December 16, 2020 Storytelling is an important tool to change public perception. Recent research has shown that people are ready for nuclear weapons to enter the storytelling space, as long as these new stories are told in less intimidating ways and feature nuclear weapons in the background—rather than the forefront—of a story. Very few publications in the national security space provide a forum for storytelling, with the notable exception being the online publication Inkstick.
How can nuclear policy experts become better storytellers? I thought Lesley M. M. Blume would have some prescient advice. Her new book powerfully shows how one courageous American reporter unraveled one of the deadliest cover-ups of the 20th century—the true effects of the atomic bomb—potentially saving millions of lives. Fallout tells the incredible story of how New Yorker journalist John Hersey of Hiroshima fame was able to go to the Japanese city in the aftermath of the bombing and interview six survivors. Even before the Japanese surrendered in 1945, the US government and military had begun a secret propaganda and information-suppression campaign to hide the devastating nature of nuclear weapons. The cover-up intensified as Allied occupation forces closed Hiroshima and Nagasaki to Allied reporters, preventing leaks about the horrific long-term effects of radiation that would kill thousands during the months after the blast. For nearly a year, the cover-up worked—until John Hersey got into Hiroshima and managed to report the truth to the world. As Hersey and his editors prepared his article for publication, they kept the story secret—even from most of their New Yorker colleagues. When the magazine published “Hiroshima” in August 1946 as a single issue, it became an instant global sensation, and it changed the US public’s perception of the dropping of the bombs virtually overnight from that of pride to that of visceral repulsion and existential fear. Hersey’s story brought home, for millions across the United States and around the world, the true implications of the then-new atomic age. On December 10, I interviewed Lesley about her brilliant book. We talked about how the publication of Hiroshima changed the US public’s perception of the bombs, the lessons learned, and how nuclear experts can become better storytellers. The transcript is below. [on original]. 2020. Blume’s book Fallout, published in August 2020, documents the Hiroshima cover-up and how a reporter – John Hersey – revealed it to the world. ………… Lesley M. M. Blume: There was the “before” Hersey’s Hiroshima, and then there was the “after” Hersey’s Hiroshima. Before Hersey’s book came out, the atomic bomb had been largely painted by the US government and military essentially as a conventional mega weapon. It was quickly becoming an accepted part of our conventional arsenal, even a tenable cost-saving weapon—it costs a lot less money to lob a nuke at somebody than it does to move troops into an area to wage combat—and, as such, there was a widespread acceptance of and enthusiasm about the weapon between August 1945 and August 1946. The bomb was normalized, in the public’s estimation, with surprising rapidity. [US President] Harry Truman himself referred to the bomb as just a “bigger piece of artillery.” After Hersey’s Hiroshima comes out, readers—and not just American readers, but readers around the world—are seeing what these then-experimental weapons indeed do to human beings, not just at the moment of detonation, but in the hours, days, weeks, months, and years to come. This is because Hersey was able to document the first part of the long tail of nuclear weapons, namely that they are the weapon that continues to kill indefinitely after detonation. The book immediately affected American attitudes: the vast majority of polled Americans in August 1945 were thrilled about the bombs because, they were told, the bombings had saved both American and Japanese lives, hastened the end of the war, and avoided a land invasion. Not only that, but they also viewed it as pure vengeance. When President Truman made his announcement about the Hiroshima bombing, he said that the Japanese had been repaid manyfold for Pearl Harbor. Many people agreed with him then, and they agree with him now; people are still passionate about the payback element of it……….. Lesley M. M. Blume: As I’ve been doing publicity for Fallout this fall since the book came out on August 4, I’ve been pretty shocked by an increased complacency toward the nuclear landscape, which the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists has deemed the most perilous ever. I‘ve been shocked by how, here we are in the most perilous nuclear landscape in 75 years, how the nuclear threat is not on most people’s minds. And it certainly wasn’t a significant election issue by any stretch of the imagination. Whenever you would see these write ups about where the candidates stood on 10 or 12 issues such as trade with China, the pandemic, or climate change, the nuclear landscape was never one of them. The younger my interviewers were, the less concerned they were, and that’s because it hasn’t been a part of their psyche of what’s surrounding them—and not just because we’ve been dealing with other urgent existential threats like the pandemic and climate change……… And as the pandemic worsens, this issue is getting less and less attention. Fallout came out in the United Kingdom a few weeks ago, and there was no bandwidth for op-eds about staring down the nuclear threat. Nor was there much of an appetite among US editors for an op-ed advocating that the nuclear landscape be a bigger election issue—even among publications that gave Fallout considerable launch coverage. As vaccines start to roll in, and it’s the beginning of the end for the pandemic, we need to be anticipating the moment when the news landscape opens up enough for us to leap in and start to drive home the urgency of this threat. The nuclear challenges that still face us have never been resolved in 75 years—even during historical moments when world leaders put their all into creating de-escalation mechanisms, when whole populations were completely immersed in the dangers of the nuclear threat. We are now far from eras of peak awareness like the 1950s, 1960s, and 1980s, and we need to work really, really hard to create an increased awareness as soon as possible. Because with the pandemic, there’s a vaccine; with climate change, we can work to dial it back. But nuclear disaster on a global scale? There’s no coming back from that. As Albert Einstein said, “I know not with what weapons World War III will be fought, but World War IV will be fought with sticks and stones.” https://thebulletin.org/2020/12/were-in-a-storytelling-crisis-advice-for-writing-on-nuclear-issues-from-the-author-of-fallout/ |
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Sleepwalking Toward the Nuclear Precipice
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Sleepwalking Toward the Nuclear Precipice, The World Needs a Wake-Up Call, FOREIGN AFFAIRS, By Ernest J. Moniz and Sam Nunn, December 15, 2020,
One of the best accounts of the lead-up to World War I, by the historian Christopher Clark, details how a group of European leaders led their nations into a conflict that none of them wanted. Gripped by nationalism and ensnared by competing interests, mutual mistrust, and unwieldy alliances, “the Sleepwalkers,” as Clark dubs them, made a series of tragic miscalculations that resulted in 40 million casualties.
Around the world today, leaders face similar risks of miscalculation—except heightened by the presence of nuclear weapons. The United States and Russia together possess more than 90 percent of the world’s atomic arsenal but they share the stage with seven other nuclear powers, several of which are engaged in volatile rivalries. Whereas a century ago millions died over four years of trench warfare, now the same number could be killed in a matter of minutes. President-elect Joseph Biden, Vice-President-elect Kamala Harris, and their incoming national security team must confront the sobering fact that the potential for nuclear weapons use shadows more of the world’s conflicts than ever before. A single accident or blunder could lead to Armageddon. As a result, Biden will need to chart a new path on nuclear policy and arms control—one that creates new safeguards against accidental or ill-considered use of nuclear weapons and shores up international mechanisms that have long helped to keep the peace. UNTHINKABLE, BUT NOT IMPOSSIBLE The warning bells have been ringing for years. We wrote in Foreign Affairs more than a year ago (“The Return of Doomsday,” September/October 2019) about the elements that have destabilized the previous equilibrium and increased nuclear risks: where national interests clash, countries are making less use of dialogue and diplomacy than they once did; and as arms control structures have eroded, advanced missile systems, new technologies, and cyberweapons have appeared on the scene. Now, the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the fragility of the international mechanisms for managing transnational risks and underscored the need for new cooperative approaches to anticipate and deal with threats. One lesson of COVID-19 is that the unthinkable does happen. And with nuclear weapons, the consequences would be even more devastating. To reduce the risk of nuclear accident or war, the Biden administration must reestablish nuclear dialogue with key nuclear states and other important powers. To be successful, however, it will have to build a working relationship with Congress, including with its Republican members, on issues that should be not just bipartisan but nonpartisan—such as arms control, nuclear policy, and diplomacy with other nuclear powers. U.S.-Russian relations are in a dismal state, but Washington and Moscow must once again acknowledge that they share an existential interest in preventing the use of nuclear weapons. The Biden administration and congressional leaders must also acknowledge that fact and work together to reverse the erosion of arms control dialogue and structures that have for many decades made the world a safer place. Dealing with adversaries in the nuclear arena calls for diplomacy, not posturing. Both the Biden administration and Congress must create the political space for the United States and Russia to renew military-to-military, diplomat-to-diplomat, and scientist-to-scientist engagement. NUCLEAR RESTARTThere is much Biden can do to signal an immediate shift in U.S. policy. ……. A WAR THAT MUST NEVER BE FOUGHTIn the long term, the Biden administration will need to make a sustained diplomatic effort to revive the many processes, mechanisms, and agreements that allow nations to manage their relations in peacetime and thus to avoid nuclear conflict. ……… The lesson of World War I is that mutual misunderstandings can lead even reluctant leaders into conflict. World leaders are once again sleepwalking toward the precipice—this time of a nuclear catastrophe. They must wake up before it is too late. https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/united-states/2020-12-15/sleepwalking-toward-nuclear-precipice |
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Britain’s push for nuclear power makes no sense, unless it is a hidden subsidy for the Royal Navy
Britain’s push for nuclear power makes no sense, unless it is a hidden subsidy for the Royal Navy
The Government can fund a robust nuclear deterrent if it so desires, but should stop pretending that it is energy policy Telegraph, AMBROSE EVANS-PRITCHARD16 December 2020 – (subscribers only)
Green group raise toxic leak concern at Ranger Uranium Mine
Green group raise toxic leak concern at Ranger Uranium Mine Environmental groups have raised concerns that remnants of a tailings dam at the closing Ranger Uranium Mine site could leak toxic contaminants into Kakadu National Park. – (subscribers only)
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