No wonder that the poor guy is looking anxious lately.
It must have been kinda fun for Rafael Grossi, being Director General of IAEA, from 2019 to 2022, running around the world, promoting the nuclear industry and the safety of nuclear power plants.
He’s still got that task, but it’s probably not any fun any more.
The shit has hit the fan. Europe’s largest nuclear power plant is, as Grossi is forced to admit, facing “a dangerous situation”. Sitting in a war zone, run by exhausted Ukrainian workers, under control of Russia troops, repeatedly attackedby shelling, now with its essential cooling water threatened – the Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant is in danger. That means that the region is in danger, Ukraine is in danger, the whole of Europe is in danger.
Grossi got to this top job at a “good” time. Everyone was forgetting the series of nuclear accidents large and small. Chernobyl, which radioactively poisoned large swathes of Europe, was over, wasn’t it? The fun time of midwiving a “nuclear renaissance’ was on – “nuclear to save the climate – blah blah”
Poor Rafael – his contradictory job is impossible – to persuade the world that nuclear power is oh so safe, while at the same time warning the world of its deadly peril.
1 The fate of arms has decided. The moment of truth has spoken. The Ukrainian counter-offensive has failed miserably. NATO’s considerable armaments were useless. The battlefield is littered with corpses. All for nothing. The territories that joined the Russian Federation by referendum will remain Russian.
This “checkmate” not only marks the end of Ukraine as we have known it, but of Western domination that had staked its future on its lies. The multipolar world may be born this summer at several international summits. A new way of thinking in which might no longer makes right.
This article was written on June 10. At that time, the only information available came from Russia and allied headquarters. Ukraine had imposed a total embargo on its counter-offensive. We should therefore have waited before publishing this text. However, we felt that if Ukraine had been able to break through Russia’s first line of defense, even if it hadn’t managed to get into the breach, it would have let us know. We are therefore publishing this analysis.
In six days, from June 4 to 10, 2023, the Ukrainian army launched its counter-offensive and suffered a terrible defeat.
During the summer, Russian forces built two defense lines in the part of Novorossia they liberated and in the Donbass. They prevent the passage of all armored vehicles.
Ukrainian forces have chosen a dozen points of attack to retake “enemy-occupied” territory. Their armored vehicles were unable to get through the first line of Russian defenses and piled up in front of it, where they were destroyed one by one by Russian artillery and suicide drones.
At the same time, the Russian army targeted missiles at command centers and arsenals inside Ukrainian territory and destroyed them.
The Ukrainian air defense system was destroyed by hypersonic missiles as soon as it was installed. In its absence, the Ukrainians were unable to carry out the maneuvers planned by Nato.
Russia did not use any of its new weapons, apart from its NATO weapons jamming system and some of its hypersonic missiles.
The border is now a long graveyard of tanks and men. Airports are full of smoking Mig-29 and F-16 wrecks.
The staffs of the United States, the Atlantic Alliance and Ukraine are passing the buck for this historic disaster. Hundreds of thousands of human lives and 500 billion dollars have been wasted for nothing. Western weapons, which shook the world in the 90s, are now worthless compared to the Russian arsenal of today. Strength has changed sides.
Two conclusions can already be drawn:
DO NOT CONFUSE THE UKRAINIAN ARMY WITH THE “INTEGRAL NATIONALISTS”
While there is no longer a Ukrainian army capable of high-intensity warfare, there are still the forces of the “integral nationalists” (sometimes called “Banderists” or “Ukrainian-Nazis”). But they are only trained for low-intensity warfare. Its leaders went to fight in Chechnya in the late 90s on behalf of the CIA and NATO secret services, and sometimes in Syria in the 2020s. They are trained in targeted assassinations, sabotage and civilian massacres. Nothing more.
They succeeded 1. In sabotaging the Russian-German-French-Dutch Nord Stream gas pipeline, plunging Germany and then the European Union into recession on September 26, 2022. 2. In sabotaging the Kerch Strait bridge (known as the “Crimean Bridge”), on October 8, 2022. 3. In attacking the Kremlin with drones, May 3, 2023 4. In using drones to attack the Ivan Kurs, the intelligence vessel defending the Turkish Stream gas pipeline in the Black Sea, on May 26, 2023. 5. In sabotaging the Kakhovka dam to split Novorossia in two, on June 6, 2023. 6. In sabotaging the Togliatti-Odessa ammonia pipeline to destroy the Russian mineral fertilizer industry, on June 7, 2023.
Just as in the two World Wars and the Cold War, they proved their terrorist capabilities, but played no decisive role on the battlefield.
Now more than ever, we need to distinguish between Ukrainians who thought they were defending their people, and the “integral nationalists” [1], who don’t care about their compatriots and have been trying for a century to eradicate Russians and their culture.
THE UKRAINE WE KNEW IS DEAD
Until now, Ukraine has been above all a power of communication. Kiev succeeded in making people believe that the 2014 coup d’état that overthrew a democratically elected president in favor of integral nationalists was a revolution. Likewise, it has managed to make people forget the way it crushed its citizens in the Donbass, refusing to give them access to public services, to pay civil servants’ salaries and pensions to the elderly and, ultimately, bombing its cities. Finally, it succeeded in convincing Westerners that Ukraine was a homogenous country with a single population living a common history.
As in most wars, there is also a “civil war” aspect [2]. Today, everyone can see that, contrary to what was claimed, Vladimir Putin’s analysis was not a reconstruction of history, but a factual truth. The people of Donbass are profoundly Russian. The people of Novorossia (including Crimea) are of Russian culture, albeit with a different history (they have never known serfdom). Ukraine has never existed as an independent state in history, apart from one decade, during the periods 1917-22 and 1941-45, and three other decades, since 1991.
During these three experiences, Kiev never stopped purging its people and massacring its citizens when the full nationalists were in power (1917-22 with Simon Petliura, 1941-45 with Stepan Bandera, and 2014-22 with Petro Poroshenko and Volodymyr Zelensky). In total, over the course of a century, the “integral nationalists” – as they call themselves – have murdered more than 3 million of their compatriots.
During the First World War, the people of Novorossia had already risen up around the anarchist Nestor Makhno; during the Second World War, the people of Donbass and Novorossia rose up as Soviets; while this time, they are fighting against the “integral nationalists” in Kiev with Russian forces.
The only way to stop these massacres is to separate the “integral nationalists” from the population of Russian culture they want to kill [3]. Since Nato staged a coup in 2014 and put them in power, there’s no other way but to note the country’s current division and leave them in power in Kiev. It is the Ukrainians, and they alone, who will have to overthrow them.
Current military operations have already done so. The part of the country liberated by the Russians voted in a referendum to join the Federation. However, last year’s Russian advance was halted by President Vladimir Putin as part of negotiations with Ukraine, conducted first in Belarus, then in Turkey. Odessa is still Ukrainian in law, even though it is culturally Russian. Transnistria is still Moldavian, even though it is culturally Russian.
The war is technically over. No offensive can alter the current borders. Admittedly, the fighting may drag on and a peace treaty is a long way off, but the die is cast. There is still a problem in Ukraine and Moldavia: Odessa and Transnistria are still not Russian. Above all, there remains a fundamental problem: in violation of their oral and written commitments, the members of the Atlantic Alliance have stockpiled US weapons on Russia’s borders, jeopardizing its security.
Nuclear. The drums of war are beating ever more severely. The break in Ukraine’s Nova Kakhovka dam increases the danger to Zaporizhzhia nuclear power station – all rather doom and gloom this wek.
SPACE. EXPLORATION, WEAPONS.Stealth actions by SpaceX, as 36 space launches approved by California Coastal Commission without a vote, public hearing, or public notice.[ on nuclear-news.net]
WIKILEAKS – After years of running up against a brick wall, the first crack has appeared with the latest ruling on our FOIA case issued by Judge O’Connor. In addition to the ruling, British Labour MP John McDonnell has just obtained new information from the Crown Prosecution Service. McDonnell is calling for an independent inquiry into the CPS’s role in the Assange case.
For the last six years, they have rejected all of our attempts to shed light on the destruction of key documents in the Julian Assange case, even though the emails were deleted when the high-profile, controversial case was still ongoing.
But now the British authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service have to come clean: they must declare whether they hold any information as to when, how and why that documentation was deleted, and if they do hold it, they must either release it to us or clarify the grounds for their refusal.
This order was just issued by the London First-tier Tribunal, chaired by Judge O’Connor, in response to our litigation based on the UK Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), in which we are represented by top-notch FOIA specialist Estelle Dehon, of Cornerstone Barristers in London.
The Crown Prosecution Service must comply with this judicial order by June 23, and any failure on their part to do so could lead to contempt proceedings.
Ever since 2017, when we first discovered that documents had been destroyed, we have consistently run up against a brick wall: the Crown Prosecution Service (CPS) has always maintained that deletion of those documents was in conformity with their standard operating procedure. A previous ruling issued in 2017 by the London First-tier Tribunal – chaired by a different judge, Andrew Bartlett – averred that there was “nothing untoward” about their deletion, and the British body instituted to uphold information rights, the Information Commissioner (ICO), has always been pleased with the decision that there was “nothing untoward” about it.
This new ruling by judge O’Connor is the first crack in the brick wall.
Judge O’Connor has also confirmed that “WikiLeaks is a media organization”, though he rejected all of our requests to access the full correspondence between the Crown Prosecution Service and the U.S. State Department, the U.S. Department of Justice, the Swedish Prosecution Authority and the Ecuadorian authorities on the Julian Assange case from 2010 to 2019.
Relative to the correspondence between the CPS and Ecuador, the judge ruled in favour of the Crown Prosecution Service, maintaining an exemption to “neither confirm nor deny” that the British and the Ecuadorian authorities exchanged emails on the case.
As for the case of all other correspondence between the CPS and the Swedish authorities, between the CPS and the U.S. Department of Justice, and between the CPS and the U.S. State Department, Judge O’Connor ruled that if released, the documentation would risk damaging the relationship of trust and confidence that underlies information sharing between prosecuting authorities, and that it would be likely to have a chilling effect on the relationship with both the Swedish and US authorities, as well as with other foreign authorities.
The ruling was issued in two forms: a decision available to the public, and a separate closed decision which can be accessed only by the UK authorities at the Crown Prosecution Service and by ICO.
The documentation on which the closed ruling is based includes, among other documents, over 552 pages of correspondence between the CPS and the U.S. Department of Justice and between the CPS and the State Department between 2010 and 2019, including “the provision of legal advice and queries on wider strategic matters relating to Mr. Assange’s extradition to that country”.
This correspondence is part of the documentation which we have been requesting under FOIA for years, and which has always been denied to us. And yet accessing it would be crucial, as the British authorities are assisting the U.S. government in extraditing a journalist for revealing war crimes and torture, as if he was a mafia boss or drug dealer. From Amnesty International to the International Federation of Journalists (IFJ), all major organizations for the defense of human rights and freedom of the press have called for the extradition case to be dropped and Assange freed.
Assange remains in prison, however, waiting for British justice to decide on his appeal against extradition to the United States, where he risks 175 years in prison for obtaining and publishing classified U.S. government files.
All requests to drop the charges and free Julian Assange have been ignored by the British and U.S. governments. And all decisions and opinions of highly respected UN bodies like the UN Working Group on Arbitrary Detention (UNWGAD) or the UN Special Rapporteur on Torture from 2016 to 2022, Nils Melzer, have been completely ignored by the British government, if not ridiculed, as occurred with the UNWGAD decision.
Now that Judge O’Connor has rejected our request to access those documents, in particular the correspondence between the U.S. and the U.K., the oversight role that the Fourth Estate should play also risks being severely undermined. And yet we are not alone in our call for public scrutiny.
In addition to the authoritative report by Nils Melzer and our FOIA battle, recently a British Labour member of Parliament, John McDonnell, has also submitted a FOIA request to the CPS, full of detailed questions which were just answered by the Crown Prosecution Service.
Speaking to Il Fatto Quotidiano, John McDonnell told us: “It’s become clear that there must now be an independent inquiry into the role of the CPS in relation to the case of Julian Assange. We need full openness and transparency”.
The role of the Crown Prosecution Service in the Assange case
The mainstream media continues to beat the drums of war while voices of truth and reason are being silenced, writes Dr William Briggs.
JOHN PILGER, in highlighting the manipulation of our media, called on people to ‘speak up’.
The drive to war and the demonisation of China have seen many people speak up and speak out. That same manipulated media has muffled those voices and pushed dissent to the margins. Journals and websites like this one are increasingly becoming almost samizdat publications. The mainstream media has played an important role, not only in silencing dissident voices but in convincing the public that there is little effective opposition.
A glance at the anti-AUKUS website shows that over 1,000 individuals and more than 200 organisations have thus far lent their support for a rational and sane response to the rising threat of war with China and obscene military spending.
There are many important voices among the signatories but their voices are not regularly heard in our media. Their words do not appear in the major daily newspapers, regardless of how well-credentialed they might be. Our former Prime Minister, Paul Keating, has effectively been relegated to the sidelines for voicing a position that does not fit with the official line.
And, while the collective wisdom of so many is ignored, the war-mongers of the Australian Strategic Policy Institute (ASPI) are given free rein.
‘In so many ways, the product of ASPI is critically important, not only in informing the Australian public, but those of us in government who seek to play a role in this space.’
Marles states that the Australian public must be informed. He recognises this to be ‘critically important’ but there is an unhealthy degree of censorship that is impossible to ignore. The information that the public is allowed to see, hear and read is the information that is filtered. There is a strong sense of creeping authoritarianism in all of this………………………………………..
The intellectuals, essayists, poets and novelists that might speak up and speak out remain, either silent or silenced by the mainstream media. It is not that they are not there. It is not that many thousands of ordinary people do not share the view that things are terribly wrong. The media has played and is playing a bad role. It is media in name only. It has abandoned any semblance of independence. It is so hard to speak out if you are kept captive; if ideas are filtered and disinformation passes for truth.
Pilger rightly calls on those with a conscience to speak out. What needs to be remembered is that the marketplace for ideas has shrunk……………………..Truth has become the property of those who control the media.
Pilger has been sidelined. Film-maker David Bradbury, twice nominated for an Academy Award, is now touring his latest documentary, The Road to War, screening it wherever an audience can be found. Even so, its circulation and therefore its audience remains limited.
American vengefulness would see WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange die in prison. Successive Australian governments have behaved equally badly, but the USA calls the shots. Assange’s crime? To report the truth. The truth, however, is not what Richard Marles is thinking of when he talks of the ‘critical importance’ of informing the public.
…………………………John Pilger’s call, for us all to speak up, has never had more urgency. The decades since the end of WWII and the proclamation of the U.S.-inspired rules-based order have seen millions die in American-led wars.
The bombs could not discriminate between combatants and the innocent. As many as one in seven of those killed in Hiroshima were not Japanese but Korean, amounting to roughly 20,000 people, many of whom were forcibly transported from their homes and interred in labor camps. The bombs killed Javanese, Dutch, British, Australian, American, and other prisoners of war. The U.S. survey estimated that over 90 percent of the 200 doctors and 1,800 nurses in Hiroshima were dead or injured, as well as half the personnel and patients at the teaching hospital at Nagasaki. One of the few numbers we know with precision is that, at minimum, the United States killed 4,412 schoolchildren in Hiroshima (a figure we know because teachers kept precise data on their students who were assigned to work crews around the city).
U.S. leaders must take responsibility for past nuclear atrocities.
Foreign Policy, JUNE 10, 2023,
On May 18, U.S. President Joe Biden traveled to Hiroshima, Japan, planning to meet with G-7 leaders—as well as survivors of the nuclear bombs—to discuss, among other things, reducing the risk of nuclear war. He followed in the footsteps of former U.S. President Barack Obama, who visited Hiroshima in his final year as president. In a short speech, Obama mourned the dead—but he did not express regret and, his advisors insisted, he did notapologize. Instead, Obama looked forward to a future that would come to see Hiroshima and Nagasaki “as the start of our own moral awakening.”
Biden and his administration have proven to be uncommonly committed to atoning for past domestic acts of violence and racism that still weaken the moral foundations of the United States. Interior Secretary Deb Haaland has announced a major investigation into ethnic cleansing in federal boarding schools for Native Americans, and the president has reaffirmed the government’s apology for its racist internment of Japanese Americans during the second world war. “That’s what great nations do,” Biden said in a speech commemorating the Tulsa Race Massacre, “come to terms with their dark sides.”
The United States has never had a similar moral awakening on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. On the 75th anniversary of the atomic bombing of Hiroshima, Biden, then a candidate for president, wrote that “the scenes of death and destruction … still horrify us.” For too long, U.S. presidents have used passive language to refer to the bombings, evading responsibility for the act. White House spokesman John Kirby continued this tradition when he said that Biden would “pay his respects to the lives of the innocents who were killed in the atomic bomb that was dropped on Hiroshima.” The language helps Americans think of the bombings as something that happened to cities rather than as something their government did to people.
At Hiroshima, Biden said nothing about the bomb. He did not meet with bomb survivors as planned and did not deliver remarks when visiting the peace memorial. U.S. National Security Advisor Jake Sullivan stressed that Biden would be one of several leaders paying respects and it was not “a bilateral moment.”
After his trip, Biden—and the U.S. government—should begin to atone for the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, in word and in deed. A moral awakening on nuclear weapons requires that we confront not only the facts of the bombings that killed uncountable thousands of Japanese civilians, but also the policies and principles that still echo in U.S. nuclear weapons policy today.
When Hiroshima was destroyed on Aug. 6, 1945, the city contained more than eight civilians for each soldier. Though a group of senior advisors had recommended that the bomb be aimed at “a military target surrounded by workers’ houses,” they did not issue orders to strike a specific target. The crew of the Enola Gay aimed the atomic bomb at Aioi Bridge, a visible landmark at the center of Hiroshima. The bomb detonated directly over nearby Shima Hospital. By November, the bomb had killed 90 percent of people who had been within one kilometer of its detonation. By the next year, more than one-third of the civilians who had been in the city during the bombing were dead. Nearly as many had been injured and would have to wait hours or days for care. More than 90 percent of the city’s doctors and nurses were killed and only three of 45 civilian hospitals were usable.
Survivors describe burned figures stumbling away from the city center, their skin hanging from their bodies, begging for water, some carrying blackened infants or their own body parts. Hospitals, churches, schools, firehouses, and public utilities all collapsed or succumbed to the flames. While two military headquarters near the center of the city were destroyed, the airfield, ordinance depots, heavy industry, and navy units clustered around the port received less damage. The fire did not reach them. If the bomb were to have been aimed at the city’s military targets, it would have been dropped two miles to the south.
The intended target of the second atomic bomb was Kokura, a city to the north that contained a military arsena………………
The bomb missed its intended target by three-quarters of a mile and detonated over the Urakami Valley, a residential area that included schools, a prison, a prisoner-of-war camp, a medical college, and a cathedral that served a large population of Catholics in the neighborhood. A half mile to the north and south, at the edges of the damage, there were two arms factories. Some of Nagasaki’s pregnant women and elderly residents had been moved to the valley precisely because it did not contain military factories.
……………. when the first plutonium bomb was ready in only three days, military personnel managing the operation on Tinian Island followed their orders to drop the bomb as soon as it was available. When he learned of Nagasaki, Truman ordered a halt to further use of nuclear weapons, saying, according to accounts of a cabinet meeting, he didn’t like the idea of killing “all those kids.”
………………………. We will never know precisely how many died in the two cities. In 1951, U.S. survey teams estimated that at least 104,000 died; in 1981, a detailed study led by Japanese researchers estimated that 210,000 civilians had died. Most other estimates fall between these figures. In most estimates, the wounded meet or exceed the dead. More than 90% of those seriously injured by the bomb had died by mid-September—but for all of those who survived, the effects of the bomb would continue. Thousands have suffered from injury, trauma, social stigma, and increased rates of miscarriage, birth defects, leukemia, and solid cancersfor decades.
The bombs could not discriminate between combatants and the innocent. As many as one in seven of those killed in Hiroshima were not Japanese but Korean, amounting to roughly 20,000 people, many of whom were forcibly transported from their homes and interred in labor camps. The bombs killed Javanese, Dutch, British, Australian, American, and other prisoners of war. The U.S. survey estimated that over 90 percent of the 200 doctors and 1,800 nurses in Hiroshima were dead or injured, as well as half the personnel and patients at the teaching hospital at Nagasaki. One of the few numbers we know with precision is that, at minimum, the United States killed 4,412 schoolchildren in Hiroshima (a figure we know because teachers kept precise data on their students who were assigned to work crews around the city).
The United States’ bombs also killed American citizens in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. It is not known how many Americans died in the two cities, but before the war more U.S. immigrants had arrived from Hiroshima than any other Japanese prefecture and so were linked to the city by familial ties. After the war, as many as 3,000 Japanese-Americans returned home to the United States as victims of the atomic bombs. Furthermore, around 1,000 Japanese bomb victims would later move to the United States and become U.S. citizens. Many never identified themselves—but others organized to demand recognition and compensation from the U.S. government for medical expenses.
…………….Americans who were injured in Japan when their government dropped a nuclear bomb on them received neither recognition nor compensation.
The United States also did not provide medical care to Japanese atomic bomb victims. The Atomic Bomb Casualty Commission, established to research the effects of radiation on the human body to inform Cold War U.S. civil defense procedures, maintained a policy of not providing medical treatment to the victims. M. Susan Lindee writes, “The United States would not apologize atone for the use of atomic weapons in Japan, and it would therefore not provide medical treatment to the survivors of the bombings who were the subjects of American biomedical research.” Initially, the commission refused to share its data with Japanese physicians treating patients……..
China and Russia account for 70% of new nuclear plants
Exports used as diplomatic card while Western nations fall behind
NAOYUKI TOYAMA, Nikkei staff writerJune 11, 2023
TOKYO — Russia and China are building up an outsized presence in the field of nuclear power, with the countries accounting for nearly 70% of reactors under construction or in planning worldwide.
…………………Notably, 33 of the reactors are being constructed or planned outside each respective country. Russia has the largest number of overseas reactors with 19, and despite growing opposition from Europe and the U.S. following its invasion of Ukraine, it maintains a strong global influence in nuclear power.
In April, Russian President Vladimir Putin participated remotely in a ceremony to mark the arrival of the first fuel at the under-construction Akkuyu nuclear power plant in Turkey………
Russia’s nuclear power diplomacy is extending to other countries as well. In May, Rosatom began full-scale construction on Unit 3 of the Dabaa nuclear plant in Egypt, the country’s first.
Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban met with Rosatom officials this month to discuss the company’s plans to build a new nuclear power plant in the country’s south. Hungary opposes sanctions the European Union has imposed on Rosatom.
“Many developing countries take a positive view of Russia,” Kacper Szulecki of the Norwegian Institute of International Affairs told British scientific journal Nature Energy. Russia’s acceptance of spent nuclear fuel is also attractive to emerging countries.
Meanwhile, China is deepening its engagement with Pakistan………………………………..
China also plans to build a nuclear plant in Argentina…………………………………
The U.S., Japan and Europe are hoping to catch up using small modular reactors (SMRs), considered fourth-generation technology………………………………………..
Another issue is nuclear fuel. Uranium enrichment has become the weak link for Western nations. Enrichment facilities are limited, and Russia is the global leader for that process. In April, the U.S., the U.K., France, Canada and Japan formed a nuclear fuel alliance. While the aim is to shut out Russian fuel from Western reactors, doing so will not be easy.
[Lee Kyong-hee] Fallout from Fukushima radioactive wastewater, By Korea Herald, Jun 8, 2023
“………………….. quoting a diplomatic source, the reports say that President Yoon Suk Yeol vowed to make all-out efforts to remove public concerns in Korea about the wastewater discharge when he met Japanese lawmakers in March during his visit to Tokyo for a summit with Prime Minister Fumio Kishida.
Many Koreans were caught off guard, and this administration’s purported stance is further proof that their president is bent on fence-mending with an unrepentant government at whatever cost.
Yoon has neither confirmed nor denied the reports. Transparency is not a priority of his administration, though his search for avenues of rapprochement with Japan is clear.
As Yoon remains tight-lipped, we can only guess his views about the rationality of the discharge and whether he grasps the potential risks. Hence a confrontation with the main opposition Democratic Party of Korea is underway, each side blaming the other for spreading malicious rumors lacking scientific basis.
Amid the accusations, the science community also has misgivings. Seo Kyun-ryeol, a professor emeritus at Seoul National University’s Department of Nuclear Engineering, is an outspoken critic. He is among several scientists who question the contaminated water filtration process and cautions that sea currents will ultimately bring some of discharged wastewater to Korea’s shores.
…………………….public mistrust is understandable, given TEPCO’s history; a Japanese government investigation report in 2012 said TEPCO had failed to meet initial safety requirements.
………………………. Seo says, “There is no guarantee that all of the system’s many filters for different isotopes will work perfectly all of the time, given the condition and quantity of the water, let alone the period of time required.”
The SNU professor highlights the potential hazards associated with cesium, strontium and plutonium, which were released from the reactors due to the disaster. “These substances not only enter the bloodstream but also penetrate the muscles, bones and brain, leading to the development of solid cancers and tumors,” he said.
Seo has raised concerns that marine life and ocean currents can carry harmful radioactive isotopes across the Pacific. He warns of the potential risks to entire marine ecosystems, from the deep-sea organisms up to invertebrates, fish and marine mammals through the food chain, eventually reaching humans.
Naturally, among the most vocal critics of the ocean discharge is the Pacific Islands Forum, an organization representing 18 island nations. They have already suffered from nuclear tests by the United States and European countries. Their concerns are reasonable as most of their populations are coastal residents who depend on the ocean for their livelihoods.
The International Atomic Energy Agency is expected to release its final assessment later this month before Japan embarks on its plan. The root of the problem, as contended by Ken Buesseler, a marine radiochemist and advisor to the Pacific Islands Forum, is that Japan is moving already with a plan which has not proven workable.
Masashi Goto, a retired nuclear engineer who designed reactor containment vessels for Toshiba for many years, bemoans the “safety culture” he encountered in the industry. In a presentation marking the 10th year after the Fukushima accident, he said, “Risks can be expressed in terms of their potential for damage or probability of occurrence. Many unlikely scenarios run the risk of horrendous consequences.”
Goto’s views concerning the decommissioning of a nuclear reactor are worth heeding. “TEPCO claims to have a decommissioning schedule that can be completed within the next 30 to 40 years, but this is completely unrealistic. Given the severity of what happened and the current state of the reactors, in practice we are looking at a process lasting anywhere from 100 to 200 years.”
“What is the number one priority? It’s the same question that was thrust upon the citizens of Japan 10 years ago. Do we prioritize the economy and convenience at any cost, or do we choose to live modestly in safety and free from worry?” he asked.
All said, Japan should suspend the planned release of the wastewater. Heeding the concerns of the international community, it may well consider other possible options, such as long-term storage and processing through half-lives of isotopes or cement-based solidification. https://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20230607000843
Julian Assange’s fate lies in the hands of an appeal judge who is a close friend of Sir Alan Duncan – the former foreign minister who called Assange a “miserable little worm” in parliament.
Lord Chief Justice Ian Burnett, the judge that will soon decide Julian Assange’s fate, is a close personal friend of Sir Alan Duncan, who as foreign minister arranged Assange’s eviction from the Ecuadorian embassy.
The two have known each other since their student days at Oxford in the 1970s, when Duncan called Burnett “the Judge”. Burnett and his wife attended Duncan’s birthday dinner at a members-only London club in 2017, when Burnett was a judge at the court of appeal.
Now the most powerful judge in England and Wales, Burnett will soon rule on Assange’s extradition case. The founder of WikiLeaks faces life imprisonment in the US. ……………………………….
Duncan served as foreign minister for Europe and the Americas from 2016-19. He was the key official in the UK government campaign to force Assange from the embassy.
As minister, Duncan did not hide his opposition to Julian Assange, calling him a “miserable little worm” in parliament in March 2018.
In his diaries, Duncan refers to the “supposed human rights of Julian Assange”. He admits to arranging a Daily Mailhit piece on Assange that was published the day after the journalist’s arrest in April 2019.
Duncan watched UK police pulling the WikiLeaks publisher from the Ecuadorian embassy via a live-feed in the Operations Room at the top of the Foreign Office.
He later admitted he was “trying to keep the smirk off [his] face”, and hosted drinks at his parliamentary office for the team involved in the eviction.
Duncan then flew to Ecuador to meet President Lenín Moreno in order to “say thank you” for handing over Assange. Duncan reported he gave Moreno “a beautiful porcelain plate from the Buckingham Palace gift shop.”
An envoy of Pope Francis visited Kiev in search of ways to end the conflict
The only end to the conflict that Kiev considers acceptable is the Ukrainian “peace formula,” President Vladimir Zelensky told the Holy See envoy Cardinal Matteo Zuppi in a meeting on Tuesday.
“Ukraine welcomes the willingness of other states and partners to find ways to achieve peace, but since the war is on our territory, the formula for achieving peace can only be Ukrainian,” Zelensky said after meeting the papal emissary in Kiev.
Zelensky added that he discussed the situation in Ukraine and the humanitarian cooperation with the Vatican “within the framework of the Ukrainian peace formula,” and urged the Holy See to join the efforts to pressure Russia.
Zuppi arrived in Ukraine on Monday, in what the Vatican called a “search for paths to a just and lasting peace.” In addition to Zelensky, he met with other Ukrainian officials, including parliamentary commissioner for human rights Dmitry Lubinets.
“The results of these talks, like those with religious representatives as well as the direct experience of the atrocious suffering of the Ukrainian people as a result of the ongoing war, will be brought to the Holy Father’s attention,” the press office of the Holy See said in a statement on Tuesday evening.
This is the second time in two months that Zelensky has declined an offer by Pope Francis to mediate in the conflict with Russia. After his meeting with the pontiff at the Vatican last month, the Ukrainian president told Italian media outlets that Kiev was only interested in its own vision of peace.
“It was an honor for me to meet His Holiness, but he knows my position: the war is in Ukraine and the [peace] plan must be Ukrainian,” Zelensky told talk show host Bruno Vespa.
The “peace formula” in question is a list of Zelensky’s demands first revealed
The “peace formula” in question is a list of Zelensky’s demands first revealed in November 2022, ranging from Russia’s withdrawal from all territories Ukraine claims – including Crimea and the Donbass – payment of reparations, war crimes trials for the Russian leadership, and Ukraine’s membership in NATO.
Moscow has rejected Zelensky’s “peace platform” as delusional. Russia understands that any peace talks will not be held “with Zelensky, who is a puppet in the hands of the West, but directly with his masters,” Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov told reporters last month.
In the early hours of Tuesday, June 6, video footage circulated of a destroyed dam in southern Ukraine with large swaths of water flowing through. The Kakhovka dam—located about 70 kilometers upstream of the city of Kherson—is a critical piece of infrastructure, hosting a hydroelectric power plant and managing a reservoir that supplies water for drinking, irrigation, and cooling of the upstream six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant—Europe’s largest.
It was unclear on Tuesday what or who caused the breach in the dam, which is under Russian control, although it was hard not to blame Russia given the timing of the attack, which happened one day after Ukraine reportedly launched its long-awaited spring counteroffensive. Both countries denied responsibility and have blamed each other throughout the day. Ukraine said Russia was responsible for the explosion of an engine room of the hydroelectric plant, in part to prevent Ukrainian troops from crossing the Dnipro River downstream, while Russia said Ukrainian forces conducted a sabotage attack. Russia’s defense minister Sergei Shoigu made the acrobatic suggestion that because Ukraine wanted to transfer some military units and equipment from Kherson to other parts of the front to help with its counteroffensive, making the river wider downstream would make it easier to defend Kherson with fewer forces.
A third scenario being advanced on Tuesday was that the dam might have suffered from a structural failure after the water level of the Kakhovka reservoir had reached a 30-year high, leading it to be at beyond-design storage capacity since May. No evidence of any of those scenarios had emerged on Tuesday night…………
The destruction of the dam caused immediate life-threatening flooding and evacuation of thousands of people living downstream of the dam along the Ukrainian-controlled right bank of the Dnipro River. Early satellite imagery was showing large areas being flooded a few hours only after the breach. While the water was quickly rising to dangerous levels downstream, the water level in the upstream Kakhovka Reservoir was dropping, which could have severe nuclear safety implications for the nearby plant.
The Kakhovka Reservoir serves as the Zaporizhzhia plant’s ultimate heat sink, an essential safety function of removing the radioactive decay heat generated by the fuel inside the shutdown reactors and spent fuel pools. The plant has a cooling pond that pumps its water from the Kakhovka Reservoir. According to the director general of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), Rafael Mariano Grossi, the water level of the Kakhovka Reservoir was dropping on Tuesday at a rate of 5 centimeters per hour, adding that “water in the reservoir was at around 16.4 meters at 8 am. If [it] drops below 12.7 meters, then it can no longer be pumped.” This would theoretically leave operators with about three days to pump as much water as possible to fill up the pond. But local Ukrainian military officials estimated that the water level was dropping at the much higher rate of about 15 centimeters per hour; leaving only 24 hours for the operators to do so.
Commenting on Twitter, Edwin Lyman, a nuclear safety expert at the Union of Concerned Scientists, described the situation at the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant as a “slow-motion disaster.” “The impact on the plant is something we are going to see unfold over time,” Lyman further explained to the Bulletin. “There is a grace period to address this problem, but it’s not infinite.”………………………………………………
In his statement, Grossi said that there was “no immediate risk to the safety of the plant.” But that is “assuming nothing else happens,” Lyman told the Bulletin. “The plant is stable for now, but it is becoming increasingly more vulnerable.” Grossi conceded that “it is vital that this cooling pond remains intact.”
AUKUS dinner guests at the Cosmos Club, Washington: US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro; Republican Congressman Rob Wittman; Labor MP Meryl Swanson; Australian ambassador, Kevin Rudd; Liberal senator James Paterson; ex-Minister for Defence, lobbyist Christopher Pyne. (Photo: Pyne & Partners)
Declassified Australia reveals the feast for lobbyists, US defence contractors and hangers-on which is the AUKUS $370bn submarines deal, Kelly Tranter reports.
The defence lobbying firm Pyne & Partners – chaired by the former Australian Defence Minister Christopher Pyne – co-hosted an AUKUS reception and dinner in Washington at the swanky Cosmos Club on Embassy Row, with Northrop Grumman Corporation, on 3 April 2023.
Northrop Grumman is one of the largest defence companies in the world, and is the parent company to spin-off Huntington Ingalls, the US’s largest naval shipbuilder and one of the builders of the Virginia-class submarines destined to come to Australia.
The meeting was ‘private’ even though it concerned Australian defence contracts and arrangements and was attended by the Australian Ambassador and two Australian MPs, and senior US defence officials. Without public disclosure of what happened at the gathering, the Australian public once again is left in the dark.
However, Declassified Australia has been able to prise open the locked shutters on the private event to shine in some needed light. With hundreds of billions of dollars at stake through the AUKUS submarine deal, what calibre of people could be expected to attend such an event and what could possibly be their interest?
Documents produced pursuant to Freedom of Information (FOI) laws, by this writer, confirm that Australia’s Ambassador to the USA, Kevin Rudd, was invited to provide a speech, the contents of which journalists had previously reported to be ‘off the record’.
Declassified Australia has obtained the Ambassador’s briefing notes – though somewhat redacted due to national security considerations, ‘for the security of the Commonwealth’ and to avoid ‘damage to the defence, or international relations, of the Commonwealth’.
Rudd’s address was scheduled to follow those of the US Secretary for Navy, Carlos Del Toro, and Congressional Representative Rob Wittman. Rudd was allowed a period of five minutes for his remarks, ‘in between the main course and dessert’.
Congressman Wittman was among a bipartisan group of members of the US House of Representatives who in January sent a letter to President Joe Biden expressing support for the AUKUS deal. He unsurprisingly welcomed the huge AUKUS submarine spend as ‘a unique opportunity to leverage the support and resources possible under AUKUS to grow our industrial base to support both US and Australian submarine construction’.
In January he also was suggesting sending a jointly operated US submarine to Australia, saying, “I think it would be dual-crewed. I think too, that the command of the submarine would be a dual command”. These remarks, of course, raise sovereign control issues.
Another claim to fame of Representative Wittman was being named in a September 2022 analysis by The New York Times as one of at least 97 members of Congress who bought or sold stock, bonds or other financial assets that intersected with their congressional work or reported similar transactions by their spouse or a dependent child.
Rob the insider trader
Although the Times noted that U.S. lawmakers are not banned from investing in any company, including those that could be affected by their decisions, the report confirmed that Congressman Wittman traded shares of three defence contractors while he was a member of the House Armed Services Committee, which incidentally included the AUKUS event co-sponsor, Northrop Grumman
The Congressman’s response to the media revelation was to say: “I have consistently believed members of Congress should not improperly benefit from their role, and I support measures to avoid conflicts of interest.” He went on to say, “This is why I relinquish all control of my investment decisions to my financial adviser to use third-party investment managers who implement trades at their own discretion without my consultation or input,” which, he noted, is allowed under House ethics rules.
The new FOI documents confirm that Congressman Wittman is currently the Vice Chair of the US House Committee on Armed Services, Chair of the Tactical Air and Land Forces Committee and Seapower and Projection Forces Subcommittee, is on the House Select Committee on Strategic Competition between the US and the Chinese Communist Party (sic), and is on the Energy and Mineral Resources Subcommittee of the US Congress.
The FOI documents reference that, ‘Rep Rob Wittman was first elected to serve the first congressional district of Virginia in December 2007. His district is adjacent to Naval Base Norfolk as well as the major shipbuilding facilities in Newport News, Virginia – including one of the shipyards that builds Virginia-class attack submarines (Huntington Ingalls). Many of his constituents are employed either by the shipyards themselves, or by the supporting industry in the region.’
So it’s all just hunky-dory that through his investment advisor he can invest to profit from the success of defence contractors.
As to Secretary of the Navy, The Hon Carlos Del Toro, the FOI document suggests under the sub-heading, ‘Industrial collaboration’, that Ambassador Rudd was specifically tasked to ‘seek Toro’s ongoing support and endorsement’, and to recognise that ‘we continue to work with the US government agencies to overcome barriers to industrial base, supply chain and technology collaboration’.
China’s military modernisation program and its operation of nuclear-powered submarines, including both nuclear and conventionally armed, are mentioned in Ambassador Rudd’s ‘briefing notes’ obtained under FOI, along with this acknowledgement:
‘We do not oppose any nation’s right to invest in and develop defence capabilities. However, a lack of transparency around military capabilities can fuel insecurity.’
Transparency debacle
The stated concern about lack of transparency is at odds with the Australian government’s own lack of transparency to Australian citizens in relation to the entire AUKUS deal. They have yet to make signed copy of the agreement publicly available.
As to the effect of AUKUS on Australia’s defence sovereignty, Rudd’s briefing notes confirm Australia’s generous desire to ‘ease pressure on the US supply chains’ and provide the US submarines with their long-desired Indian Ocean naval base:
‘Australia will build new maintenance and repair capabilities that will directly benefit US submarines rotating through HMAS Stirling [naval base near Perth]’.
The language of the FOI document – ‘aligning national priorities’, ‘collective strength’, ‘mutual strategic benefit’, ‘deeper cooperation’ – all seems to be geared towards a fully integrated strategic and industrial base with little room for Australia’s sovereign defence issues.
And what does it say when a private Australian defence lobbyist funds eight-day international trips for the attendance of two Australian ‘non-Defence’ politicians to a private Washington event it is co-hosting with one of the largest defence companies in the world? And what does it say when the lobbyist invites a US guest speaker who trades in defence company stocks while holding political defence offices? And what does it say when input by senior US military officials and by our own ambassador to the US, until this FOI application, we’re not even permitted to see?
Transparency and integrity of decision-making in relation to AUKUS ought not be shrouded in lavish invitation-only discussions where private interests eye-off the billions in potential profits — and where Australia’s future is on the table.
This story was first published by Declassified Australia
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