“War Effort In Shambles As Hawks Turn On Each Other” At NATO Summit
Zeo Hedge, BY TYLER DURDEN, THURSDAY, JUL 13, 2023
Bloomberg is just out with a devastating behind-the-scenes account of a hot-headed Zelensky at the NATO summit in Vilnius, and the growing Western backlash in the face of his obvious frustration and what’s being seen as ingratitude for the steady flow of billions of dollars in arms to Kiev.
Apparently even the mainstream media agrees with our own assessment of the Ukrainian leader having thrown a “tantrum” as he complained about the “weak” and “absurd” NATO stance on Ukraine’s membership. The blistering tweet he issued in English while en route to Lithuania exposed cracks in the alliance, as Bloomberg highlights in the opening of its very revealing Wednesday piece:
Volodymyr Zelenskiy was running hot ahead of his sit-down with NATO leaders on Tuesday evening. The Ukrainian president had been angered earlier in the day by what he said was an “absurd” reluctance to give his country a clear timeline on membership.
That outburst in turn riled the partners who have funneled billions of dollars of weaponry and aid into Ukraine’s defense against the Russian invasion — the US had been given no warning before Zelenskiy unleashed his attack on social media.
As Bloomberg writes: “Over dinner in Vilnius, with US President Joe Biden back at his hotel, the other leaders delivered a clear message to Zelenskiy, according to one person who was present. You have to cool down and look at the full package, Zelenskiy was told.”
While it’s not quite yet a full on ‘hero to zero’ story… things are certainly sliding in that direction, given it’s unprecedented that the Ukrainian president who previously enjoyed rockstar status in Western capitals since the start of the invasion could be told to basically ‘cool it’!.
Bloomberg continues in reference to Zelensky: “He had, after all, been given a renewed commitment to eventual membership and new security guarantees from the Group of Seven nations. By the next day, the message appeared to be sinking in.” The publication was privy to some key Western leaders’ exact words, presenting the rare dressing down as follows [emphasis ZH]:
Whether we like it or not, people want to see gratitude,” UK Defense Secretary Ben Wallace told reporters the following morning. “You’re persuading countries to give up their stock” of weapons and ammunition, he added.
This account of the behind-the-scenes wrangling is based on interviews with more than a dozen diplomats and officials involved in the summit who asked not to be named discussing private conversations. NATO leaders were trying to thread a needle on Ukraine’s membership bid when they arrived in Vilnius: They were seeking language that looked like progress and that Ukraine could sell as progress but fundamentally didn’t leave them any closer to getting dragged into a war with nuclear-armed Russia.
Ultimately the hawks (mainly among the Baltic and Eastern Europe states) have lost at Vilnius. Ukrainian Foreign Minister Dmytro Kuleba has admitted “There was a lack of political will.” Thus it appears that Zelensky’s angry, desperate tweet lashing out at Western partners was a last ditch effort at shaming NATO into conceding to its demands of being immediately fast-tracked to membership.
Bloomberg reveals further, that “Crucially, it was the US and Germany that insisted on dialing back the commitment to Ukraine joining the alliance. Earlier drafts of the communique offered a clearer pathway to Ukraine eventually joining, but Biden and Chancellor Olaf Scholz were wary of going too far.”
“Their teams demanded changes in the final days before the summit, upsetting lots of the other European nations, as well as the Ukrainians.” Indeed Biden in a CNN interview at the start of the week confessed the obvious: that Ukraine’s admission into NATO with the war still going would automatically unleash war between nuclear-armed powers – a WW3 doomsday scenario. Hence the West is now telling Kiev: just stop.
In Zelensky’s next big NATO summit appearance Wednesday following a no doubt awkward evening, things were different as he belatedly “got the message”…
………………………………. The New York Times’ summation of precisely what fell short in the NATO communique explains: “NATO declared on Tuesday that Ukraine would be invited to join the alliance, but did not say how or when, disappointing its president but reflecting the resolve by President Biden and other leaders not to be drawn directly into Ukraine’s war with Russia.”
Indeed it’s being widely called more vague–and with greater possible restrictions, or “conditions”–than even what came out of the 2008 Bucharest summit.
Below is the offending part of the official Vilnius Summit Communiqué:
Issued by NATO Heads of State and Government participating in the meeting of the North Atlantic Council in Vilnius 11 July 2023:
“…………………………………………… We will be in a position to extend an invitation to Ukraine to join the Alliance when Allies agree and conditions are met.
But Zelensky is still holding out hope that one day– “After the war, Ukraine will be in NATO.”
However, President Biden has remained unmoved, and responded by explaining before reporters that Ukraine “will not be in NATO for a while”.
The geopolitical analysis news site Moon of Alabama observes correctly…
“Well. The little comedian seems disappointed. As if the whole play had not been obvious from the very beginning. Since 2008 the Ukraine was to be used as a tool to nag Russia. It is otherwise of little value. It will end up as a discarded rag while NATO will, in the end, again recognize the Russian Federation as the super power that that it is. NATO will have to relearn to listen to and negotiate with it.”
MofA then highlights the inevitable negative impact (to say the least) on Ukrainian morale: “Now lets wait and see what NATO’s climb down will do to the morale and motivations of the Ukrainian army and people.”
Update(1740): David Sacks agrees that for the hawks of NATO-land, the way things are going for the Ukrainian war effort and the West’s prior optimism and muscular support in general have reached a low-point.
Sacks writes below [emphasis ZH’s]…
Despite Biden’s best efforts to put a happy face on it, Vilnius will be remembered as the NATO Summit where tensions boiled over. Zelensky denounced the Alliance’s admission policy as “absurd” and disrespectful.
UK Secretary of Defense Ben Wallace chastised Zelensky for ingratitude. Lindsey Graham attacked the Biden administration for weakness. Ben Hodges criticized Jake Sullivan for lack of “strategic bravery.” Even NAFO mascot Adam Kinzinger no longer appears to be a “fella.”
The optics were even harsher than the words, with the NATO elites turning their backs on a frustrated Zelensky. Biden’s assurance that Zelensky is “stuck” with the U.S. may come as cold comfort to both nations now that the Ukrainian counteroffensive has failed to meet expectations, huge amounts of expensive Western armor lay in ruins smoldering on the battlefield, Ukrainian casualties are horrific, and the U.S. has run out of 155mm artillery shells to give, forcing America to debase itself by sending cluster bombs.
The war effort is increasingly a shambles and the War Party is starting to turn on each other. https://www.zerohedge.com/geopolitical/nato-leaders-tell-zelensky-cool-it-rare-dressing-down-summit
France detonated nearly 200 nuclear ‘tests’ in French Polynesia — now this activist is calling for accountability
By Bobby Macumber, Dan Smith and Alice Matthews for Stories from the Pacific, 14 July 23 https://news.google.com/articles/CBMiVGh0dHBzOi8vd3d3LmFiYy5uZXQuYXUvcGFjaWZpYy9udWNsZWFyLXRlc3RpbmctZnJlbmNoLXBvbHluZXNpYS1oaW5hLWNyb3NzLzEwMjU4NTkzMNIBAA?hl=en-AU&gl=AU&ceid=AU%3Aen
Hinamoeura Cross was seven years old when France tested its last nuclear bomb in 1996 in French Polynesia.
It was detonated deep underground on the atoll of Fangataufa, in a deep shaft drilled into volcanic rock, and sent a white shockwave into the air, visible on grainy television cameras at the time.
“I don’t have any memory of it,” Hina told Stories from the Pacific.
“I was growing up. I never learned about the consequences of nuclear bombs at school. I didn’t even know there had been so many.”
Three to five was the figure Hina had in mind when she was younger.
But in fact, by the time France finished its testing program on the atolls of Fangataufa and Moruroa, around 190 nuclear “tests” had been conducted.
Nuclear explosions had been conducted in lagoons, dropped from planes and suspended from helium balloons. After international pressure, testing moved underground.
The largest was codenamed Canopus, which was a two-stage thermonuclear test that exploded in 1968 while suspended from a balloon.
It was around 200 times more powerful than the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The combined effect of the testing was equivalent to a Hiroshima-sized nuclear bomb exploding in French Polynesia every week for 14 years, Hina said
“Today, our ocean is totally contaminated. It’s like a poison,” she said.
“I really feel that in my blood I have been poisoned because of those nuclear tests and we have so many thousands of Tahitian people who are sick … you can’t find a family without cancer.
“And it’s really hard because they don’t understand the consequences of the nuclear tests because they’re not aware today.”
Subjects in school touched on the nuclear bombs dropped in Japan, but Hina said nothing was taught about her country’s own more immediate history — and the health consequences.
France initially said only 10,000 people were at risk of radiation exposure as a result of the nuclear activity.
But a later investigation by a team of researchers from Princeton University, journalism group Disclose, and environmental group Interprt claimed 110,000 people were potentially exposed to toxic radiation.
Hina herself was diagnosed with Leukaemia at 24, while her grandmother, mother, aunt, and sister all had thyroid cancer.
And, she said, to add insult to injury, the compensation scheme in place was complex and “not at all impartial”.
There is one hospital and two clinics on the island of Tahiti, and many islanders are forced to fly to Paris for treatment.
“Today, it’s French Polynesia and all the population that pays for all this, the cost of the illness … and it costs a lot for us,” she said.
Calling a spade a spade — or a bomb a bomb
Hina’s diagnosis was a shock that jolted her into action.
Becoming an anti-nuclear activist, she started by posting articles and links online and eventually addressed the United Nations on the topic.
Now a newly elected member of Parliament in Tahiti, she’s pushing for better in-country medical treatment and to “educate and denuclearise Polynesian memories”.
It starts, she said, with “calling a spade a spade”. Nuclear tests were still nuclear bombs.
“The fact that there were no people that were being attacked … it was the same bomb,” she said.
“I really think that using the term test totally minimises the consequences.”
Another priority is getting France to acknowledge what happened and making her fellow Tahitians aware.
French Polynesia is of strategic importance to France, and Hina said the government was pushing to silence the fight.
“They don’t want to talk about the nuclear history. They don’t admit what happened.”
Hina also hopes to begin a foundation, allowing Polynesians to reclaim the nuclear narrative as well as advocate for anyone with radiation-related sickness to be treated in Polynesia.
Although chemotherapy has kept her leukaemia at bay thanks to an early diagnosis, not everyone is so lucky.
“I think it’s absolutely disgraceful that we don’t have a medical system that’s equal to the damage suffered by these 193 nuclear bombs,” she said.
“But I really thought that maybe if I have this courage, that will motivate other people to stand up and share their story, to speak about the cancers that we we have in our family, because … [many people] have cancer, but they don’t really realise the impact of the nuclear bombs.”
Nuclear power too expensive and slow to be part of Australia’s plans to reach net zero, study finds
Guardian, Lisa Cox 12 July 23
Nuclear power should not form part of Australia’s plans to reach net zero emissions because it is too expensive and slow, according to the final report of a project that models how Australia might meet its 2050 climate target.
The Net Zero Australia report, a partnership between major academic institutions and the management consultancy Nous Group, says the federal government has a major role to play in accelerating all options that could make a “material contribution” to achieving net zero.
The release of the report comes days after the opposition leader, Peter Dutton, ramped up calls for nuclear power in Australia and a debate about removing the legislative ban on nuclear power in Australia.
The report includes major investment in batteries, solar, onshore wind, pumped hydro and transmission. Among renewable options, offshore wind was found to have the most uncertain pipeline, with the report concluding first power from offshore wind projects needed to occur in 2030.
But the report concludes nuclear power should not be factored in to net zero plans and states that to “reduce renewable targets in the belief that nuclear will be deployed later at scale would create a material risk of not achieving net zero, or doing so at an excessive cost”.
Richard Bolt, principal at Nous Group, said: “Nuclear power should not be in our plans, because it’s too expensive and slow. ……………………………………………………………………….
The report was produced by the University of Melbourne, the University of Queensland, Princeton University’s Andlinger Center for Energy and the Environment, as well as Nous Group…………………… https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2023/jul/11/nuclear-power-too-expensive-and-slow-to-be-part-of-australias-plans-to-reach-net-zero-study-finds
Dutton wants Australia to join the “nuclear renaissance” – but this dream has failed before.
What stopped the nuclear noughties was a bigger problem: economics. Governments looking at nuclear saw the cost and time over-runs and decided it wasn’t worth it.
in Australia, promises to create a nuclear power industry from scratch based on as yet unproven technologies and in competition with cheap renewables is simply delusional.
The Conversation John Quiggin 11 July 23
Last week, opposition leader Peter Dutton called for Australia to join what he dubbed the “international nuclear energy renaissance”.
The same phrase was used 20 years ago to describe plans for a massive expansion of nuclear. New Generation III plants would be safer and more efficient than the Generation II plants built in the 1970s and 1980s. But the supposed renaissance delivered only a trickle of new reactors – barely enough to replace retiring plants.
If there was ever going to be a nuclear renaissance, it was then. Back then, solar and wind were still expensive and batteries able to power cars or store power for the grid were in their infancy.
Even if these new smaller, modular reactors can overcome the massive cost blowouts which inevitably dog large plants, it’s too late for nuclear in Australia. As a new report points out, nuclear would be wildly uncompetitive, costing far more per megawatt hour (MWh) than it does to take energy from sun or wind.
The nuclear renaissance that wasn’t
Early in the 21st century, the outlook for nuclear energy seemed more promising than it had in years. ……………………………………….
The time seemed right for a nuclear renaissance – especially in the United States. Between 2007 and 2009, 13 companies applied for construction and operating licenses to build 31 new nuclear power reactors. But all but two of these proposals stayed on paper.
The first, in Georgia, is expected to be completed this year after running way behind schedule and way over budget. The other project in South Carolina was abandoned in 2017 after billions of dollars had already been poured into it. The same disastrous cost and time blowouts have hit new reactors in France (Flamanville, 10 years behind schedule), Finland (Olkiluoto, which opened this year after a 14 year delay) and the UK (Hinkley Point C, still under construction with cost and time blowouts).
China has built a trickle of new nuclear plants, commissioning three or four a year over the last decade. China currently has about 50 gigawatts (GW) of nuclear power capacity. This pales into insignificance compared to the nation’s extraordinary expansion of solar, with 95-120 gigawatts of additional capacity expected this year alone.
Nuclear falls short on cost, not politics
What went wrong for nuclear? Despite the claims of some nuclear advocates, the renaissance in the 2000s did not fall short because of political resistance. Far from it – the renaissance had broad political support in key markets.
And, unlike in the 1970s where intense anti-nuclear sentiment was tied to fears of nuclear war, environmentalists in the 2000s had refocused on the need to stop burning carbon-based fuels. Anti-nuclear campaigns and protest marches were almost non-existent.
What stopped the nuclear noughties was a bigger problem: economics. Governments looking at nuclear saw the cost and time over-runs and decided it wasn’t worth it.
As megaproject expert Bent Flyvbjerg has shown, cost overruns like these are typical. First of a kind nuclear plants offer an extreme example of the problem. To date, no Generation III or III+ design has been produced at scales large enough to iron out the inevitable early problems.
At the same time, other energy sources were growing in importance.
In Australia, the writing was on the wall by 2007, when an inquiry found new nuclear power would struggle to compete with either coal or renewables. A string of subsequent inquiries have come to precisely the same conclusion.
Could it be different this time?
To make nuclear viable these days, advocates believe, means making it safe, cheap and easy to build. No more megaprojects. Instead, build small reactors en masse on factory production lines, ship them to where they are needed and install them in numbers matching the needs of the area.
Advocates hope the efficiency of factory production will offset the lower efficiency associated with smaller capacity. Ironically, off-site mass production and modular installation is the basis of the success of solar and wind.
To date, the most promising reactor design is NuScale’s VOYGR. It has yet to be produced and the US company has no firm orders. It does have preliminary agreements to build six reactors in Utah by 2030 and another four in Romania.
If all are built, that’s still less than the capacity of a single large Gen III plant. More strikingly, it’s about the same as the new solar capacity installed every single day (~710 MW) this year around the world.
Even with US government subsidies, NuScale estimates its power would cost A$132 per MWh. In Australia, average wholesale prices in the first quarter of 2023 ranged from $64 per MWh in Victoria to 114 per MWh in Queensland.
So why, then, is Australia’s opposition still talking about new nuclear? Dutton claims Australia’s future nuclear submarines to be built under the AUKUS deal are “essentially floating SMRs”. This is a red herring – while submarine reactors are small, they are not modular.
The simplest answer is political gain. Announcements like this yield political benefits at low cost.
The US, UK and France have decades of experience in nuclear power, even if failures outnumber successes. So yes, there is a slim chance the latest “nuclear renaissance” will succeed in these countries.
But in Australia, promises to create a nuclear power industry from scratch based on as yet unproven technologies and in competition with cheap renewables is simply delusional. https://theconversation.com/dutton-wants-australia-to-join-the-nuclear-renaissance-but-this-dream-has-failed-before-209584?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Exposing the lying claims of pro nuclear shill Zion Lights
2 Response to a July 2023 article by Zion Lights: https://nuclear.foe.org.au/zion-lights/
In Australia, for the same investment we can get three times more firmed renewable power (generation, not capacity) in one-third of the time compared to nuclear. The cost difference between nuclear and renewables is so vast that renewables are still cheaper even when transmission and storage are costed in. Perhaps the comparison is more nuclear-friendly in the UK, but I strongly suspect renewables+storage+transmission is still cheaper given the obscene costs of Hinkley Point (approx. A$50 billion for two reactors).
Specifically in Light’s latest article:
* Lights’ claims about the IPCC supporting nuclear power are dishonest, the IPCC maps out countless scenarios (including scenarios with nuclear reducing to zero) and its ‘analysis’ of pros and cons is generally reduced to dot-points.
* Lights’ claims about a “scientific consensus” in support of nuclear power are dishonest, e.g. the Climate Council, comprising Australia’s leading climate scientists, states that nuclear power reactors “are not appropriate for Australia and probably never will be”.
* Ignores profound impacts of catastrophic accidents.
* Ignores the repeatedly-demonstrated connections between nuclear power and weapons (in the UK and elsewhere).
* Light’s ‘millions of lives saved’ meme is dishonest because it assumes nuclear displaces nothing other than coal.
* Nonsense about warm water around nuclear plants providing a haven for sea-life is dishonest, she surely knows that water intake pipes kill fish by the thousands. (And she should know something about Irish opposition to radioactive discharges from Sellafield.)
* Glib, ignorant and/or dishonest claims about high-level nuclear waste: “spent fuel can be easily transported to another location, and even recycled”. The UK has given up on reprocessing (a polluting, multi-billion-dollar disaster) and has made near-zero progress on a deep underground repository and has wasted billions of pounds of taxpayers’ money in the process. The only operating deep underground repository in the world – WIPP in the US ‒ was disastrously mismanaged and under-regulated resulting in a chemical explosion in 2014.
* The UAE project came in under budget? Either Lights is ignorant or lying. The UAE project was years behind schedule and many billions of dollars over-budget.
And in other articles/interviews, even more unhinged nonsense, e.g.
* Lights saying climate change ‘could be solved overnight’ with nuclear. Seriously?
* Lights lying about her role in Extinction Rebellion.
* Lights getting sucked in by, and collaborating with, lunatic MAGA liar Michael Shellenberger.
Update: Lights deleted the above comments from the comments thread below her article, failed to address any of the substantive energy issues and failed to respond to the accusations of deceit.
TODAY. Zelensky mania ! But are cracks appearing in NATO?
Volodymyr Zelensky gave a stirring address to thousands of adoring fans in Vilnius, Lithuania.
He was at the top of his game – which is whipping up enthusiasm for the coming grand military defeat of Russia.
The NATO summit, though full of adoration for the sainted Zelensky, was just a little less unified in its holy purpose.
Perhaps hole -ey purpose would be more accurate
You see – while it is holy dogma now, that Ukraine must become part of NATO, -the hole in this dogma is becoming apparent. NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg spelled it out: Ukraine can join NATO only when Ukraine wins the war against Russia because “unless Ukraine prevails, there is no membership to be discussed at all.”
But of course – no problem!
But wait – there is a problem – Ukraine is not winning this war. That is a realisation that is slowly dawning on some European leaders.
There probably never has been such a media magician as Volodymyr Zelensky. He has put it over politicians, journalists, people world-wide, and especially the suffering people of Ukraine.
But will Biden, Macron, Sunak and the rest just dump Zelensky, when his magic bubble bursts, when it’s all over in Ukraine, and they are forced to accept a negotiated peace with Russia?
That eventual negotiation is better than the other alternative – World War 3.
Ukraine’s chances of victory in 2023 are ‘vanishingly small’
Premiered Jun 24, 2023 Ret. Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Davis elaborates on the current status of the Ukraine war and why a successful counteroffensive looks less likely.
Indonesia Warns Nuclear Weapons Put Southeast Asia a ‘Miscalculation Away’ From Disaster
Indonesia’s Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi urged nuclear weapons states to join ASEAN’s regional nuclear-free zone.
The Diplomat, By Edna Tarigan and Niniek Karmini, July 12, 2023
Indonesia’s top diplomat warned Tuesday of the threat posed by nuclear weapons, saying that Southeast Asia is “one miscalculation away from apocalypse” and pressing for world powers to sign a treaty to keep the region free from such arms.
Indonesian Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi raised the alarm ahead of a two-day summit of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), which started later Tuesday in Jakarta. The agenda would spotlight Myanmar’s deadly civil strife, continuing tensions in the South China Sea, and efforts to fortify regional economies amid the global headwinds set off by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.
Later in the week, the 10-nation bloc will meet Asian and Western counterparts, including U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, Russian Foreign Minister Sergey Lavrov, and Chinese foreign policy overseer Wang Yi.
The U.S.-China rivalry is not formally on ASEAN’s agenda but looms large over the meetings of the bloc, an often-unwieldy collective of democracies, autocracies, and monarchies, with some members split over allegiances either to Washington or Beijing.
“We cannot be truly safe with nuclear weapons in our region,” Marsudi told fellow ASEAN ministers. “With nuclear weapons, we are only one miscalculation away from apocalypse and global catastrophe.
In 1995, ASEAN states signed a treaty that declared Southeast Asia’s commitment to be a nuclear weapon-free zone, one of five in the world. However, Marsudi lamented that none of the world’s leading nuclear powers have signed on to the pact and called for renewed efforts to convince those states to sign up. “The threat is imminent, so we can no longer play a waiting game,” she said………………………………………………………………….more https://thediplomat.com/2023/07/indonesia-warns-nuclear-weapons-put-southeast-asia-a-miscalculation-away-from-disaster/
SCOTT RITTER: NATO Summit, a Theater of the Absurd
The scope and scale of the Ukrainian military defeat is such that the focus of many NATO members appears to be shifting from the unrealistic goal of strategically defeating Russia to a more realistic objective of bringing about a cessation to the conflict that preserves Ukraine as a viable nation state.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the NATO summit. However, his demands for NATO membership will not be met.
Normalizing failure might best describe the best that NATO can accomplish in Vilnius.
By Scott Ritter, Consortium News, July 10, 2023
The unfulfilled goals and objectives from last year’s meeting in Madrid loom over the Atlantic military alliance. When the membership meets in Vilnius this week, normalizing failure might best describe the most that can be accomplished.
The leaders of NATO’s 31 constituent member states have begun to assemble in Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, for the alliance’s 33rd summit, an event that has come to symbolize the military organization’s increasingly difficult task of transforming political will into tangible reality.
Since the Wales Summit of 2014, when NATO made Russia a top priority in the aftermath of the Russian annexation of Crimea, and the Warsaw Summit of 2016, when NATO agreed to deploy “battlegroups” on the soil of four NATO members (Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania and Poland) in response to perceived Russian “aggression” in the region, Russia has dominated the NATO agenda and, by extension, its identity.
The Vilnius summit promises to be no different in this regard.
One of the major issues confronting the NATO leadership is that the Vilnius summit operates under the shadow of last year’s Madrid summit, convened in late June in the aftermath of Russia’s initiation of military operations against Ukraine.
The Madrid summit came on the heels of Boris Johnson’s deliberate sabotage of a Ukrainian-Russian peace agreement that was supposed to be signed on April 1, 2023, in Istanbul, and the decision by the United States in May 2023 to extend to Ukraine military assistance exceeding $45 billion as part of a new “lend lease” agreement.
In short, NATO had opted out of a peaceful resolution to the Russia-Ukraine conflict and instead chose to wage war by proxy — with Ukrainian manpower being married with NATO equipment — designed to achieve what U.S. Ambassador to NATO Julianne Smith, in May 2022, called the “strategic defeat” of Russia in Ukraine.
The Madrid summit generated an official NATO statement which declared that “Russia must immediately stop this war and withdraw from Ukraine,” adding that “Belarus must end its complicity in this war.”
When it came to Ukraine, the Madrid statement was equally firm. “We stand in full solidarity with the government and the people of Ukraine in the heroic defense of their country,” it read………………
Confidently Seeking a ‘Strategic Defeat’
NATO, it seemed, was supremely confident in its ability to achieve the outcome it so very much wanted — the strategic defeat of Russia.
What a difference a year makes.
NATO assistance to Ukraine resulted in a successful counteroffensive which compelled Russia to withdraw from territory around the city of Kharkov, as well as abandon portions of the Kherson Oblast located on the right bank of the Dnieper River. Once the Russian defenses solidified and the Ukrainian attack stalled, NATO and Russia both began preparing for the next phase of the conflict……………………………….
NATO had placed high hopes on the Ukrainian army being able to carry out a counteroffensive against Russia which would achieve discernable results both in terms of territory re-captured and casualties inflicted on the Russian army. The results, however, have been dismal to date — tens of thousands of Ukrainian casualties and thousands of destroyed vehicles while failing to breach even the first line of the Russian defenses.
One of the challenges NATO will face in Vilnius is the question of how to recover from this setback. Many NATO countries are starting to exhibit “Ukraine fatigue” as they see their armories stripped bare and their coffers emptied in what, by every measurement, appears to be a losing cause.
The scope and scale of the Ukrainian military defeat is such that the focus of many NATO members appears to be shifting from the unrealistic goal of strategically defeating Russia to a more realistic objective of bringing about a cessation to the conflict that preserves Ukraine as a viable nation state.
Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky will attend the NATO summit. However, his demands for NATO membership will not be met — U.S. President Joe Biden himself has weighed in on the matter, saying this would not be possible while Ukraine is at war with Russia.
Face-Saving Gestures
There will be face-saving gestures from NATO, such as the creation of a NATO-Ukraine Council and talk of eventual post-conflict security guarantees. But the reality is Zelensky’s presence will do Ukraine more harm than good, since it will only accentuate the internal disagreement within NATO on the issue of Ukrainian membership and highlight NATO’s impotence when it comes to doing anything that can meaningfully alter the current trajectory on the battlefield, which is heading toward a strategic defeat for both Ukraine and NATO.
…………………………………………………………………. One can expect a plethora of rhetorical spin and posturing by the NATO membership, but the fact is the real mission of the Vilnius summit is how best to achieve a soft landing from the unfulfilled goals and objectives laid out last year in Madrid.
Normalizing failure might best describe the best that NATO can accomplish in Vilnius.
Any failure to try to stop the accumulation of debacles that represent the current NATO policy toward Ukraine will result in further collapse of the military situation in Ukraine, and the political situation in Europe, which, in their totality, push NATO closer to the moment of its ultimate demise.
This prospect does not bode well for those whose task it is to put as positive a spin as possible on reality. But NATO has long ago stopped dealing with a fact-based world, allowing itself to devolve into a theater of the absurd where actors fool themselves into believing the tale they are spinning, while the audience stares in dismay. https://consortiumnews.com/2023/07/10/scott-ritter-nato-summit-a-theater-of-the-absurd/—
USA cannot sell nuclear submarines to Australia
Good news on nukes: US can’t sell Australia nuclear subs, Pearls an Irritations, By Brian Toohey Jul 12, 2023
The good news is the US can’t sell Australia the three to five used Virginia class nuclear subs that the Albanese government has announced it will buy. Nor will it sell us any new ones.
The chief of US Naval operations Admiral Michael Gilday was recently reported from Washington as saying the US shipyards are only producing subs at a rate of about 1.2 a year. He says a minimum of two a year is needed to fill the Navy’s own requirements. Until then, he said, “We’re not going to be in a position to sell any to the Australians”. A senior Biden advisor, Kurt Campbell added there was also “a troublingly large number of submarines in drydock that needed to be back into the water quickly”.
If Albanese were genuinely a good friend of America, he would say, “We don’t want to deprive you of any nuclear submarines, so we’ll buy readily available conventional subs that serve our needs”. Instead of grabbing this chance to get out of an impossible commitment, he behaves as if everything is still on track.
Another reason to abandon the whole idea of getting US nuclear subs is that Campbell also said that if any were sold to Australia, they would not be “lost to America”. In other words, the US could use them whenever it liked under the policy the Defence minister, Richard Marles has announced of making Australia’s equipment “interchangeable” with the Americans. Contrary to Albanese and Marles’ claims, we can’t have a sovereign capability if we have to hand back US equipment we’ve just bought from it.
Selling Australia second hand subs is not feasible either, as it would reduce the total number available in the US fleet. At present, the US has 21 Virginia attack class submarines and 29 older Los Angeles class that make up its previous target of 50. Serious maintenance problems mean that only a quarter of the Virginia class are available for operational duties. As a result, only a quarter of the total fleet is operationally available at any one time…………………………………………………………
One big disadvantage of a US nuclear reactor is it uses weapons grade uranium fuel that has to be dismantled after the sub finishes its 33-year life. The fuel then has to be processed overseas, returned to Australia, buried in thick drums a minimum of 400 metres below stable rock and monitored for several hundred years.
These subs don’t even use nuclear propulsion. Instead, they are propelled by steam engines, like Puffing Billy. All the nuclear reactor does is heat the water to make the steam. It’s a glorified hot water system. Another big drawback is that hot water from the reactor is continuously expelled from a nuke, creating an infrared signature detectable from space. Other than at low speed, nukes leave an easily detected wake on the surface.
Worse, Rex Patrick, a former submariner and ex-Senator, has pointed out that once nuclear submarines go above a low speed, acoustic tiles on their hulls become loose and start to flap, making an easily detected noise, before some fall off.
It’s now widely accepted that advances in sensor technology and data processing will render oceans transparent by 2050. Large metal boats travelling underwater will be more easily detected and destroyed than smaller ones. But Vice Admiral Mead, who had 350 staff working on the best way to get nukes, said in an interview with the Guardian that the answer to this problem is to use small underwater drones controlled from a nuke at a safe distance. Underwater drones have a big future. However, it is much better to control them from a cheap platform rather than a massively expensive remote control device called a nuclear submarine that can’t risk being detected doing what it was purchased for.
The first of the eight we build in Adelaide might not be operationally available to almost 2050 and the last by 2070. This assumes nothing will change in the strategic outlook before then. No one knows what the future holds. Peace might have broken out if we take arms control seriously, or a war may start in response to fake intelligence about Taiwan. In the circumstances, we would be wise not to get big, expensive, easily detected submarines which will be increasingly useless.
This means choosing smaller modern conventional ones……………………………………………….
Figures Rex Patrick got from the Parliamentary research service show we could get 12 of these modern, high-quality conventional submarines for a project cost of $18 bn. This is a bargain compared to the government’s estimate of $368 bn for N subs. The next most expensive program is $16 bn for 72 F-35 trouble plagued fighter planes.
…………………………………………………… Nuclear subs also don’t have an impeccable safety record………………..
Australia doesn’t need to regularly deploy submarines into Southeast Asia, let alone up near China. Our subs are not needed because Japan, South Korea, Singapore and US all have submarines closer than us to China, the target. The Defence Strategic Review clearly recommends that Australia’s “northern approaches should be the primary area of military interest”. That’s where our submarines should mainly be deployed to dissuade an enemy entering waters where they could be sunk by one of our submarines……………………………………………………… more https://johnmenadue.com/good-news-on-nukes-us-cant-sell-australia-nuclear-subs/
TODAY. Nuclear power is SO IRRELEVANT – to climate! It’s almost funny, -but it’s NOT funny.
Today, Australia’s Prime Minister is in Germany, to joining several counties, including other big carbon polluters, in a “Climate Club” to preach about “zero carbon emissions by 2050”.
2050? It’s too late – big boys!
The Australian big boys, like those of USA – will pay lip service to a worthy principle – but it’s pointless, because Climate Change – better named as Global Heating – is upon us NOW.
The job now is to slow the Global Heating process down – by energy conservation, truly renewable energy. The job is also justice, fairness, global effort to help those most affected by the heat, floods, fires – now raging.
Oh and what about nuclear power? And those stupid little “small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs)”?
Well, one or two of them might be working commercially by 2050, having no effect on climate change.
But of course, that’s not the point, is it? Small nuclear reactors are for weaponry, for nuclear submarines etc. Those powerful blokes, (and a few token women) – they love weaponry, high-technology for killing people – war is such fun!
So they just lie about “SMRs to solve climate change”
Australia needs a nuclear power school to develop AUKUS capability: Navy chief.
Australian Navy Vice Admiral Mark Hammond says a nuclear power school should be developed out of Adelaide or Perth if Australia is serious about developing its sovereign AUKUS capability.
Mr Hammond believes a nuclear power school would help our nation reduce reliance on the US, according to Sky News host Amanda Stoker.
Failed Fukushima Fixes Falling Like Dominoes
CounterPunch BY JOHN LAFORGE, 6 July, 23
“……………………………………………………………………Tepco’s cost-avoidance on its sea wall was only the first in a string of failures that have followed like dominos. The corruption led in July 2022 to convictions of four top Tepco executives for negligence and a fine of $95 billion.
In the 12 years since the meltdowns, Tepco’s disaster response efforts, always heralded as fixes, have been a series of hugely expensive failures: the “advanced” wastewater filter system “ALPS” has failed; the buried “ice wall” groundwater barrier has failed; containers made for the radioactive sludge produced by ALPS have failed; and plans to deal with millions of tons of collected debris — now kept in plastic bags — are being fiercely resisted by Japanese citizens.
Tons of cooling water is still being poured every day into Fukushima’s triple reactor wrecks to keep the hot melted fuel from again running amok. Additionally, groundwater gushes through the reactors’ foundations’ countless cracks and breaks caused by the staggering earthquake into what’s left of the structures’ sub-floors. All this water becomes highly radioactive as it passes over and through three giant masses — totaling at least 880 tonnes — of melted and mangled uranium and plutonium fuel.
You read that right. Fukushima’s destroyed reactor No. 3 was using fuel made partly of plutonium (see below), and so plutonium contaminates not just the ground and cooling water running over the melted fuel, but the ALPS apparatus, its filters, the containers used to store the radioactive sludge extracted by ALPS, and of course the sludge itself. You would think that the word plutonium would appear occasionally in news coverage of this ongoing disaster.
Failed ALPS means million-tonne do-over
Tepco’s jerry-rigged system dubbed Advanced Liquid Processing System or ALPS has never worked as planned. As early as 2013 the machinery was stalled. “The ALPS system failed to reduce radioactive elements, as claimed by the owner,” Power Technology, reported June 2, 2021.
Tepco has repeatedly said ALPS would remove 62 radioactive materials — all but tritium and carbon-14 from the continuously expanding volume of wastewater. Documents on a government committee’s website show that of 890,000 tonnes of water held at Fukushima, 750,000 tonnes, or 84 percent, contain higher concentrations of radioactive materials than legal limits allow, according to Reuters, Oct. 11, 2018. Among the long-lasting and deadly isotopes picked up by the water runs that through melted fuel wreckage are cesium, strontium, cobalt, ruthenium, carbon-14, tritium, iodine, plutonium, and at least 54 others.
In a June 14 op/ed for the China Daily, Shaun Burnie, the Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia, reported that the ALPS “has been a spectacular failure” and noted that:
“About 70 percent or 931,600 cubic meters of the wastewater needs to be processed again (and probably many more times) by the ALPS to bring the radioactive concentration levels below the regulatory limit for discharge. Tepco has succeeded in reducing the concentration levels of strontium, iodine, and plutonium in only 0.2 percent of the total volume of the wastewater, and it still requires further processing. But no secondary processing has taken place in the past nearly three years. Neither Tepco nor the Japanese government [have] said how many times the wastewater needs to be processed, how long it will take to do so, or whether the efforts will ever be successful. Greenpeace reported on these problems and why the ALPS failed nearly five years ago, and none of these issues has been resolved.”
Consequently, Tepco says it will re-filter over 70 percent of the 1.37 million tonnes of wastewater stored in giant tanks on site. Approximately 875,000 tons of contaminated water must be put through the system again, a process that will leave behind more of the highly radioactive and corrosive waste sludge.
Hoping to slow the rush to dumping, Ryota Koyama, a professor at Fukushima Univ. in Japan, said in an interview with China Media Group last May, “If the Japanese government or the Tokyo Elec Power Co really wants to discharge contaminated water into the sea, they need to explain in more detail whether the nuclides have really been removed.”
Ice wall also melts
Tepco intended to reduce the volume of groundwater gushing into the reactor building foundations by digging a $350 million “ice wall” into the earth between the destroyed reactors and the mountains behind. The company placed 1,568 heavy pipes filled with coolant 90 feet deep. It was to freeze the ground to form a deep impenetrable barrier, diverting groundwater to either side of the destroyed six-reactor Fukushima complex and prevent it seeping inside. It has failed to do so, The Guardian reported. In 2016, the Times of London reported that the scheme had only a “minor impact” on the volume of groundwater rushing in, which at the time still averaged 321 tonnes a day. Tepco announced then that it would retrofit the system and fix the leaks, but Science/The Wire reported in January 2022 that the company had admitted that its ice wall was “partially” melting. About 150 tonnes per day still gushes in.
Filtered sludge burning through containers
The ALPS filter has produced over 4,000 large containers filled with highly radioactive slurry and sludge left from the treatment.
Like the use of the word “advanced” in the name of the failed ALPS machinery, the cylinders used for the caustic, highly radioactive sludge are called “High Integrity Containers” or HICs, but in fact they are made of plastic and have degraded far faster than Tepco anticipated.
By March 2, Tepco had filled 4,143 containers, according to the daily Asahi Shimbun. At 30 cubic feet each, the cylinders now store a total of about 124,290 cubic feet of the highly radioactive sludge that will soon require expensive repackaging and, eventually, isolation from the biosphere for thousands of years.
Over two years ago, on June 8, 2021, Japan’s Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) announced that 31 of the containers had “exceeded their lifespans” and were corroded badly enough by the harsh toxic material that they must be replaced. The NRA also warned that another 56 cylinders would need replacing within two years.
Japan’s Mainichi newspaper reported that the government regulators blamed Tepco for “underestimating the radiation the 31 plastic cylinders were exposed to.” The company then claimed it would start moving the contents to new containers.
The Asahi Shimbun reported April 27, 2023, that the HICs must be stored in concrete boxes that can block radiation evidently being emitted by the HICs. https://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/14883115
Rad waste to be dumped, deregulated
As early as next month, Japan intends to begin dispersing 1.37 million tonnes of contaminated wastewater into the Pacific Ocean. The government has steadfastly ignored fierce local and international opposition to the plan from the fishing community, marine scientists, Pacific Island nations, environmentalists, South Korea, and China. So far only South Korean politicians have suggested bringing international legal action against the dumping.
Since the 2011 meltdowns spewed radioactive materials broadly across Japan’s main island, some 14-million tonnes of cesium-contaminated soil, leaves, and debris have been scraped from the ground and stored in one-tonne bags. Citizens are struggling desperately prevent authorities from using the radioactive waste in road building or burning it in incinerators. The bags are currently stacked in tens of thousands of piles all over the region.
Even more protest was raised last February 10 when the NRA said it would allow Tepco to severely weaken its monitoring of the wastewater’s radioactivity. The NRA said would but the number of radioactive elements to be measured from 64 to 34.
The environment minister of Hong Kong — a coastal metropolis of 7.5 million people — charged in June that Japan is “violating its obligations under international law and endangering the marine environment and public health.” Minister Tse Chin-wan wrote in the daily Ta Kung Pao that Hong Kong would “immediately prohibit imports of seafood caught off the coast of Fukushima prefecture.”
Plutonium Spread Long Distances from Fukushima
Very few reports of the Fukushima catastrophic releases of radiation have mentioned plutonium contamination. Yet plutonium was used in fuel rods in Fukushima’s reactor number 3 which was destroyed by meltdown and several hydrogen explosions. Plutonium is one of the most toxic substances known to science, and fine particles are far more biologically hazardous than larger particles.
Following the March 14, 2011 explosion, experts worried about the release of extremely dangerous radioactive substances, and then a week later, on March 21 and 22, Tepco announced that it had detected plutonium in soil collected from its compound. (Fukushima Meltdown: The World’s First Earthquake-Tsunami-Nuclear Disaster, Takashi Hirose, Asahi Shimbun Publications, 2011, p. 51)
Now, studies published in the journals Science of the Total Environment, Nov. 15, 2020, and Chemosphere, July 2023, report that researchers found that cesium and plutonium “were transported over long distances,” and that deposits of them were recorded in “downtown Tokyo,” about 142 miles from the meltdowns.
According to the authors, very high concentrations of radioactive cesium were released during the accident as particles referred to as “cesium-rich micro-particles” (CsMPs). The researchers say CsMPs they found are mainly composed of silicon, iron, zinc, and cesium, and minor amounts of radioactive tellurium, technetium, molybdenum, uranium, and plutonium.
The studies, involving scientists from six countries and led by Associate Professor Satoshi Utsunomiya, a researcher at Kyushu University, found that “plutonium was included inside cesium-rich micro-particles that were emitted from the site.”
Radioactive CsMPs released from Fukushima are a potential health risk through inhalation. “Given the small size of the particles, they could penetrate into the deepest parts of the lung, where they could be retained,” Utsunomiya wrote. “The route of exposure of greatest concern is inhalation,” the authors reported, because plutonium, lodged in the lungs, can “remain for years.”
Utsunomiya summed up his team’s work saying, “It took a long time to publish results on particulate [plutonium] from Fukushima … but research on Fukushima’s environmental impact and its decommissioning are a long way from being over.”
John LaForge is a Co-director of Nukewatch, a peace and environmental justice group in Wisconsin, and edits its newsletter. https://www.counterpunch.org/2023/07/06/failed-fukushima-fixes-falling-like-dominoes/
Heatwaves: Why this (Northern) summer has been so hot
It is hot. Very hot. And we are only a few weeks into summer. Texas and
part of the south-west of the US are enduring a searing heatwave. At one
point, more than 120 million Americans were under some form of heat
advisory, the US National Weather Service said. That is more than one in
three of the total population.
In the UK, the June heat didn’t just break
all-time records, it smashed them. It was 0.9C hotter than the previous
record, set back in 1940. That is a huge margin. There is a similar story
of unprecedented hot weather in North Africa, the Middle East and Asia. No
surprise, then, that the European Centre for Medium-Range Weather forecasts
said that globally, June was the hottest on record. And the heat has not
eased. The three hottest days ever recorded were in the past week,
according to the EU climate and weather service, Copernicus.
These highs are in line with what climate models predicted, says Prof Richard Betts, climate scientist at the Met Office and University of Exeter.
“We should not be at all surprised with the high global temperatures,” he says. “This is all a stark reminder of what we’ve known for a long time, and we will see ever more extremes until we stop building up more greenhouse gases in the atmosphere.”
When we think about how hot it is, we tend to think about the air temperature, because that’s what we experience in our daily lives.
But most of the heat stored near the surface of the Earth is not in the atmosphere, but in the oceans. And we’ve been seeing some record ocean temperatures this spring and summer.
The North Atlantic, for example, is currently experiencing the highest surface water temperatures ever recorded.
That marine heatwave has been particularly pronounced around the coasts of the UK, where some areas have experienced temperatures as much as 5C above what you would normally expect for this time of year……………………………………………………………
Most of the extra heat trapped by the build-up of greenhouse gases has gone into warming the surface ocean, he explains. That extra heat tends to get mixed downwards towards the deeper ocean, but movements in oceans currents – like El Niño – can bring it back to the surface.
“When that happens, a lot of that heat gets released into the atmosphere,” says Prof Lenton, “driving up air temperatures.”
It’s easy to think of this exceptionally hot weather as unusual, but the depressing truth is that climate change means it is now normal to experience record-breaking temperatures.
Greenhouse gas emissions continue to increase year on year. The rate of growth has slowed slightly, but energy-related CO2 emissions were still up almost 1% last year, according to the International Energy Agency, a global energy watchdog.
And the higher the global temperature, the higher the risk of heatwaves, says Friederike Otto, a climatologist at the Grantham Institute of Climate Change at Imperial College London.
“These heatwaves are not only more frequent, but also hotter and longer than they would have been without global warming,” she says.
Experts are already predicting that the developing El Niño is likely to make 2023 the world’s hottest year.
They fear it is likely to temporarily push the world past a key 1.5C warming milestone.
And that is just the start. Unless we make dramatic reductions to greenhouse gas emissions, temperatures will continue to rise.
The Met Office said this week that record June temperatures this year were made twice as likely because of man-made climate change.
These rising temperatures are already driving fundamental and almost certainly irreversible changes in ecosystems across the world………………………………….
The world is effectively in a race.
It is clear we are speeding towards an ever hotter and more chaotic climate future, but we do have the technologies and tools to cut our emissions.
The question now is whether we can do so rapidly enough to slow the climate juggernaut and keep the impacts of global warming within manageable boundaries.
BBC 9th July 2023https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66143682
Terrible truths about nuclear energy exposed
“We are all seeing a global political agreement centred in the UN organisations, tie IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], the World Health Organisation… All the international agencies are whitewashing what is happening in Fukushima.
By Karl Grossman | 11 July 2023 https://independentaustralia.net/environment/environment-display/terrible-truths-about-nuclear-energy-exposed,17704
A NEW documentary titled The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story is a powerful, moving, informative film that is superbly made. Directed and edited by Philippe Carillo, it is among the strongest ever made on the deadly dangers of nuclear technology.
Australians featured in the film are Dr Helen Caldicott, former president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and John Keane, professor of politics at the University of Sydney. Carillo is a resident of the nation of Vanuatu, 1,750 kilometres northeast of Australia.
The documentary begins with the words of U.S. President John F Kennedy from 1961:
“Every man, woman and child lives under a nuclear sword of Damocles, hanging by the slenderest of threads, capable of being cut at any moment by an accident, or miscalculation or by madness.”
It then goes to the March 2011 disaster at the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan after it was struck by a tsunami. Its backup diesel generators kicked in but “did not run for long,” notes the documentary. That led to three of the six plant reactors exploding – and there’s video of this – “releasing an unpreceded amount of nuclear radiation into the air”.
“Fukushima is the world’s largest ever industrial catastrophe,” then says Professor John Keane. He says there was no emergency plan and, as to the owner of Fukushima, Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), with the accident its CEO “for five nights and days… locked himself inside his office”.
Meanwhile, from TEPCO, there was “only good news” with two Japanese government agencies also “involved in the cover-up” — the Nuclear Industry Safety Agency and the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry.
“Japanese media was ordered to censor information. The Japanese Government failed to protect its people,” the documentary relates.
Yumi Kikuchi of Fukushima, since a leader of the Fukushima Kids Project, recalls:
“On TV, they said that ‘it’s under control’ and they kept saying that for two months. The nuclear power plant had already melted and even exploded but they never admitted the meltdown until May. So, people in Fukushima during that time were severely exposed to radiation.”
Arnie Gundersen, a nuclear engineer and now a principal of Fairewinds Energy Education in Burlington, Vermont in the United States, speaks of being told by Naoto Kan, the Prime Minister of Japan at the time of the accident, that “our existence as a sovereign nation was at stake because of the disaster at Fukushima Daichi”.
Kan then appears in the documentary and speaks of “manmade” links to the disaster.
The documentary tells how Kan, following the accident, became “an advocate against nuclear power… ordered all nuclear power plants in Japan to shut down for safety” and for the nation “to move into renewable energy”.
Subsequently, “a nuclear advocate”, Shinzo Abe, became Japan’s Prime Minister.
Yoichi Shimatsu, a former Japan Times journalist, appears in the film and speaks of “the cruelty, the cynicism of this government”. He speaks of how in the accident’s aftermath, “nearly every member of Parliament and leaders of the major political parties”, along with corporate executives, “moved their relatives out of Japan”.
He says:
“Shanghai is the largest Japanese community outside Japan now… while these same people [had been] telling the people of Fukushima ‘go home’, ten kilometres from Fukushima, ‘go home, it’s safe’, while their families are overseas in Los Angeles, in Paris, in London and in Shanghai.”
“If it’s safe, why they left?” asks Kikuchi.
Gundersen says:
At Fukushima Daichi, the world is already seeing deaths from cancer related to the disaster…There’ll be many more over time. [There has been a] huge increase in thyroid cancer in the surrounding population.
Unfortunately, the Japanese Government is not telling us all the evidence. There’s a lot of pressure on the scientists and the medical community to distort the evidence so there’s no blowback against nuclear power.
There is a section in the documentary on the impacts of radioactivity which includes Dr Caldicott discussing the impacts of radiation on the body and how it causes cancer.
She states:
There is no safe level of radiation. I repeat, there is no safe level of radiation. Each dose of radiation is cumulative and adds to your risk of getting cancer and that’s absolutely documented in the medical literature.
The nuclear industry says, well, there are ‘safe doses’ of radiation and even says a little bit of radiation is good for you and that is called the theory of hormesis. They lie and they lie and they lie.
Maggie Gundersen, who was a reporter and then a public relations representative for the nuclear industry and, like her husband Arnie, became an opponent of nuclear power, speaks of how nuclear power derives from the World War II Manhattan Project program to develop atomic weapons and post-war so-called “Atoms for Peace” push.
Gundersen says in becoming a nuclear industry spokesperson, “the things I was taught weren’t true”. The notion, for example, that what is called a containment at a nuclear plant is untrue because radioactivity “escapes every day as a nuclear power plant operates” and in a “calamity” is released massively.
As to economics, she cited the claim decades ago that nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter”.
The president of Fairewinds Energy Education says:
Regarding the radioactive waste produced by nuclear power, she says “there is literally no technology” to safeguard it for the many years it remains lethal. “It does not exist.”
As to international oversight, the documentary presents the final version of the Report of the United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation issued in 2014 which finds that the radiation doses from Fukushima ‘to the general public during the first year and estimated for their lifetimes are generally low or very low… The most important effect is on mental and social well-being’.
Shimatsu says it is not only in Japan but on an international level that the consequences of radioactive exposure have been completely minimised or denied:
“We are all seeing a global political agreement centred in the UN organisations, tie IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency], the World Health Organisation… All the international agencies are whitewashing what is happening in Fukushima. We take dosimeters and Geiger counters in there, we see a much different story.”
In Germany, says Maggie Gunderson, “the politicians chose” to do a study to substantiate that no health impacts “happened around nuclear power plants… But what they found was the radiation releases cause significant numbers of childhood leukemia”.
A summary of that 2008 study comes on the screen. The U.S. followed up on that research, she says, but recently “the [U.S.] Nuclear Regulatory Commission said it was not going to do that study,” that “it doesn’t have enough funding; it had to shut it down”. She said the real reason was that it was producing “data they don’t want to make public”.
Beyond the airborne releases of radiation after the Fukushima accident, now, says the documentary, there is the growing threat of radioactivity through water that has and still is leaking from the plant as well as more than a million tons of radioactive water stored in a thousand tanks built at the plant site.
After the accident, TEPCO released 300,000 tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean. Now there is no land for more tanks, so the Japanese Government, the documentary relates, has decided, starting this year, to dump massive amounts of radioactive water over a 30-year period into the Pacific.
Arnie Gundersen speaks of the cliché that “the solution to pollution is dilution,” but with the radiation from Fukushima being sent into the Pacific, there will be “bio-accumulation” — with vegetation absorbing radiation, little fish eating that vegetation and intensifying it and bigger fish eating the smaller fish, further bio-accumulating the radioactivity. Already, tuna off California have been found with radiation traced to Fukushima. With this planned further and yet greater dispersal, thousands of people “in the Pacific basin will die from radiation,” he says.
Andrew Napuat, a member of the Parliament of Vanuatu, an 83-island archipelago in the Pacific, says in the documentary:
“We have the right to say no to the Japan solution. We can’t let them jeopardise our sustenance and livelihood.”
Vanuatu, along with 13 other countries, has signed and ratified the South Pacific Nuclear Free Zone Treaty.
As the documentary nears its end, Arnie Gundersen says that considering the meltdown at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania in 1979, the meltdown at the Chernobyl nuclear plant in Ukraine in 1986, and now the three Fukushima meltdowns in 2011, there has been “a meltdown every seven years roughly”.
He says:
“Essentially, once every decade the world needs to know that there might be an atomic meltdown somewhere.”
And, he adds:
“The nuclear industry is saying they want would like to build as many as 5,000 new nuclear power plants.”
(There are 440 in the world today.)
Meanwhile, he says:
“Renewable power is no longer alternative power. It’s on our doorstep. It’s here now and it works and it’s cheaper than nuclear.”
The cost of producing energy from wind, he says, is three cents a kilowatt hour, for solar, five cents and for new nuclear power plants, 15 cents. Nuclear “makes no nuclear economic sense”.
Maggie Gundersen says, with tears in her eyes:
“I’m a woman and I feel it’s inherent for us as women to protect our children, our grandchildren, and it’s our job now to raise our voices and have this madness stop.”
Philippe Carillo, who worked for 14 years in Hollywood and who since 2017 has lived in Vanuatu, has worked on several major TV documentary projects for the BBC, 20th Century Fox and French National TV as well as doing independent productions. He says he made The Fukushima Disaster: The Hidden Side of the Story to “expose the nuclear industry and its lies”.
His previous award-winning documentary, Inside the Garbage of the World, has made changes regarding the use of plastic.
The Fukushima Disaster, The Hidden Side of the Story can be viewed at Amazon (UK and U.S.), Apple TV, iTunes, Google Play and Vimeo on demand.
1 This month.
Australians deserve the truth
about
AUKUS – https://aukuspublicinquiry.com/
PETITION – To: Prime Minister Anthony Albanese and the Australian Labor Government
of the week – Australians for War Powers Reform (AWPR)
To see nuclear-related stories in greater depth and intensity
Antinuclear 