Antinuclear

Caitlin Johnstone: US Rejects Moscow’s Offer to Talk

“It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control“

“Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.”

It’s inexcusable that these direct peace negotiations are not already underway. The recent escalation of this war makes peace talks more necessary, not less

 https://consortiumnews.com/2022/10/13/caitlin-johnstone-us-rejects-moscows-offer-to-talk/ By Caitlin Johnstone CaitlinJohnstone.com 14 Oct 22

Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov said on Tuesday that Moscow was open to talks with the U.S. or with Turkey on ending the war in Ukraine, claiming that U.S. officials are lying when they say Russia has been refusing peace talks.

Reuters reports:

“Lavrov said officials, including White House national security spokesman John Kirby, had said the United States was open to talks but that Russia had refused.”

“This is a lie,” Lavrov said. “We have not received any serious offers to make contact.”

Lavrov’s claim was given more weight when U.S. State Department Spokesman Ned Price dismissed the offer for peace talks shortly after it was extended, citing Russia’s recent missile strikes on Kyiv.

We see this as posturing,” Price said at a Tuesday press briefing.

“We do not see this as a constructive, legitimate offer to engage in the dialogue and diplomacy that is absolutely necessary to see an end to this brutal war of aggression against the people and the state, the Government of Ukraine.”

This is inexcusable. At a time when our world is at its most perilous moment since the Cuban Missile Crisis according to many experts as well as the president of the United States, the U.S. government has no business making the decision not to sit down with Russian officials and work toward de-escalation and peace.

They have no business making that call on behalf of every terrestrial organism on this planet whose life is being risked in these games of nuclear brinkmanship. The fact that this war has escalated with missile strikes on the Ukrainian capital makes peace talks more necessary, not less.

This rejection is made all the more outrageous by new information from The Washington Post that the U.S. government does not believe Ukraine can win this war and refuses to encourage it to negotiate with Moscow.

“Privately, U.S. officials say neither Russia nor Ukraine is capable of winning the war outright, but they have ruled out the idea of pushing or even nudging Ukraine to the negotiating table,” WaPo reports. “They say they do not know what the end of the war looks like, or how it might end or when, insisting that is up to Kyiv.”

These two points taken together lend even more credibility an argument I’ve been making from the very beginning of this war: that the U.S. does not want peace in Ukraine, but rather seeks to create a costly military quagmire for Moscow just as U.S. officials have confessed to trying to do in Afghanistan and in Syria.

Which would explain why U.S. Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin said the U.S. goal in Ukraine is actually to “weaken” Russia, and also why the empire appears to have actively torpedoed a peace deal between Ukraine and Russia in the early days of the conflict.

This proxy war has no exit strategy. And that is entirely by design.

Many have been calling for the U.S. to abandon its policy of actively sustaining this war while avoiding peace talks.

“President Biden’s language, we’re about at the top of the language scale, if you will,” former Joint Chiefs of Staff Chairman Mike Mullen told ABC’s This Week on Sunday regarding the president’s recent remark that this conflict could lead to “Armageddon.”

“I think we need to back off that a little bit and do everything we possibly can to try to get to the table to resolve this thing,” Mullen said, adding, “As is typical in any war, it has got to end and usually there are negotiations associated with that. The sooner the better as far as I’m concerned.”

“One thing the United States can do is… drop the position, the official position, that the war must go on to weaken Russia severely, meaning no negotiations,” Noam Chomsky argued in a recent appearance on Democracy Now.

“Would that open the way to negotiations, diplomacy? Can’t be sure. There’s only one way to find out. That’s to try. If you don’t try, of course it won’t happen.”

“It is time for the United States to supplement its military support for Ukraine with a diplomatic track to manage this crisis before it spirals out of control,” said the Quincy Institute’s George Beebe following the Monday missile strikes on Kyiv, calling it “a major escalation in the war” that was bound to “bring the world closer to a direct military collision between Russia and the United States.”

“The Americans have to come to an agreement with the Russians. And then the war will be over,” Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban said at an event on Tuesday, adding that “anyone who thinks that this war will be concluded through Russian-Ukrainian negotiations is not living in this world.”

October 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

France’s national embarrassment: half of its nuclear reactors to remain out of action for months

France’s nuclear reactors will not work as normal any time soon. The
trouble will persist well into next year. when edf, the French energy giant,
warned in May that nuclear-electricity production this year would be lower
than previously forecast because half its reactors were out of action, the
timing could not have been worse.

Thanks to its nuclear industry, France is
usually Europe’s biggest net exporter of electricity. The closures turned
the country into a net power importer for the first time, just as the
continent faced an energy crunch. When in September edf then announced that
even by 2024 output would still be well below normal levels, the problem
became a national embarrassment.

France’s current nuclear troubles are
partly due to routine maintenance of the country’s 56 reactors, half of
which are about 40 years old. Each ageing reactor needs periodically to be
shut down, on a rotating basis, for inspection. During the pandemic,
scheduled maintenance was interrupted by lockdowns. The real crunch,
though, came after corrosion issues were detected in late 2021 at one
pressurised-water reactor. By this September no fewer than 25 reactors were
out of action: ten for routine maintenance, the rest for corrosion analysis
or repairs.

Economist 13th Oct 2022

https://www.economist.com/europe/2022/10/13/frances-nuclear-reactors-will-not-work-as-normal-any-time-soon

October 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Across Europe, USA and NATO to hold a show of their nuclear weapons

NATO’s annual nuclear exercise gets underway, NATO News, 14 Oct. 2022

Air forces from across NATO will exercise nuclear deterrence capabilities involving dozens of aircraft over north-western Europe starting on Monday (17 October 2022). The exercise, which runs until 30 October, is a routine, recurring training activity and it is not linked to any current world events. [Ed. oh yeah! Pull the other leg!]…………………………..

Exercise “Steadfast Noon” involves 14 countries and up to 60 aircraft of various types, including fourth and fifth generation fighter jets, as well as surveillance and tanker aircraft. As in previous years, US B-52 long-range bombers will take part; this year, they will fly from Minot Air Base in North Dakota. Training flights will take place over Belgium, which is hosting the exercise, as well as over the North Sea and the United Kingdom. …………………………………

 NATO’s goal is a safer world for all; we seek to create the security environment for a world without nuclear weapons.“ [Ed. Whaa aa t?]  https://www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/news_208399.htm

October 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

October 14 Energy News — geoharvey

Opinion: ¶ “XPeng’s Flying Car Looks Super Cool, But What Kind Of Future Does It Have?” • XPeng got a lot of headlines this week for the first global public flight of XPeng Aeroht’s XPeng X2 flying car. It was a fun event and you can watch a video of the milestone here. Seeing the […]

October 14 Energy News — geoharvey

October 14, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

“Is Port Augusta a proposed transport corridor for radioactive waste” Rally at Port Augusta 15 October

Paul Waldon Fight to stop a nuclear waste dump in South Australia 13 Oct 22

Remember when Department Of Energy, informed unsuspecting residents of Santa Fe, their town was on a designated radioactive waste transport corridor for shipments of atomic waste to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) near Carlsbad, resulting in the escalation of the number of anti nuclear waste activists pushing for a change.

Port Augusta is the crossroad at the top of the gulf, so will the port be a radioactive transport route, and will there be “another” radioactive spill like the one before that struggled to get a mention. The question has been put to the Department of Industry, Innovation and Science, “Is Port Augusta a proposed transport corridor for radioactive waste,” and all we have heard is a deafening silence from the department, the same department that claimed there was public consultation.

Moreover, Saturday the 15th of October is the day of the rally, I say Saturday is a day of opportunity the inform the community their town is not as safe as they my think!

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Facing the Warmongers: An Assange Update

Australian Independent Media ,October 11, 2022, by: Dr Binoy Kampmark

On the latest slimed path Julian Assange has been made to trod, a few things have presented themselves. The rusty sword of Damocles may be suspended above him (he, we are informed, has contracted COVID-19), but there are those, in the meantime, willing to defend him with decent conviction against his dispatch to the United States, where he is certain to perish.

From the side of decent conviction and steadfastness came the October 8 protests across a number of cities, attended by thousands. A human chain numbering some 7,000 persons formed around the Houses of Parliament in London demanding the release of the WikiLeaks publisher from Belmarsh Prison.

Then there was the Boadicea-like performance that his wife is becoming famous for. On the ideologically dry-cured medium of Piers Morgan’s Uncensored Program, a taster of that vengeance US justice is famous for could be gathered from an encounter between Stella, and the trumpeting warmonger and failed Trump advisor, John Bolton.

Bolton, it should be remembered, was the only evidence that President George W. Bush, dyslexic and reformed drunk, had a mild sense of humour. Sending that man to the United Nations as US ambassador was the equivalent of appointing a randy, murderous fox to guard unsuspecting chickens. That appointment had it all: resentment, masochism and disgust for that concept known as international law.

There is much to say that former President Donald Trump, for all his insufferable foibles, insoluble perversions and naggingly vicious pettiness, never embarked on the eschatological murderous destiny that Bolton believes the US is destined for. The messianic types always find some higher meaning for death and sacrifice, as long they are not the ones doing it. The difference between the suicide bomber and the deskbound scribbler keen on killing is one of practice, not conviction. Both believe that there is a higher meaning written in blood, inscribed in the babble of post-life relevance and invisible virtue. For us humble folk, life is good enough, and should be preserved.

According to Bolton, the 175 years Assange might receive for exposing the abundant dirty laundry known as US foreign policy and imperial violence was hardly sufficient. He would, naturally, get a “fair trial” in the United States (never explain the ideologically self-evident), though absolute fairness was dependent on him receiving 176 years. “Well, I think that’s a small amount of the sentence he deserves.” With such a fabulous nose for justice, Bolton shares common ground with the commissars and gauleiters.

Unsurprisingly, Stella Assange had a view markedly at odds with such an assessment. Her husband was being pursued, “For receiving information from a source and publishing it, and it was in the public interest. It was US war crimes in Iraq and Afghanistan, and he revealed tens of thousands of civilian deaths that had not been acknowledged before………………………

Stella, aflame with purpose and aware of her brief, also reminded the audience who she was talking to. Bolton, she shot with acid fury, “sought to undermine the international legal system, sought to ensure that the US is not under the International Criminal Court’s jurisdiction.”

Then came the well fashioned grenade, pin removed. “And if it was, Mr Bolton might in fact be prosecuted under the ICC [International Criminal Court]. He was one of the chief cheerleaders of the Iraq war, which Julian then exposed through these leaks, so he has a conflict of interest.”

There have been other befouling episodes that can only be of concern to Assange and his family. It has now come to light that security officials, in Australia’s Parliament, were under “significant pressure” to seize books from the Assange delegation during their August visit to Canberra. A letter to Greens Senator David Shoebridge by the Department of Parliamentary Services explained that it was all linked to a protest.

The nature of the bureaucrat’s tone is to mock the valuable and diminish the relevant. In the considered view of the Secretary of the Department of Parliamentary Services, Rob Stefanic, “I appreciate that Assange’s family may not have viewed the screening procedure in a positive light, but having reviewed the processes followed by security staff, I am confident they performed their duties with respect and due diligence.” Such reasoning would suffice for most police states, where bureaucrats sup at the same table with the security wonks.

The Department, it transpired, had tripped up. The claim about the protest was inaccurate, as neither Assange’s father, John Shipton, nor his brother, Gabriel, had attended any protests. “It is apparent that there are factual inaccuracies in the letter to Senator Shoebridge and the secretary will be writing to correct the record.”

The world has turned full circle. Those opening the cabinet of secrets are considered the nasty tittle-tattles, who simply revealed the fact that daddy fiddled and mummy drank. In this world, homicidally excited types like Bolton revel in expressing unsavoury views in the open; those who expose the bankruptcy of such views are to be punished. We await the next grotesquery with resigned disgust. Aust more https://theaimn.com/facing-the-warmongers-an-assange-update/

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Nuclear Power Isn’t Clean — It Creates Hellish Wastelands of Radioactive Sewage

If you want to remove plutonium from a radioactive wasteland, what do you do so that it doesn’t create another radioactive wasteland? And what does that say about the 90,000 tons of high-level waste sitting at more than 50 U.S. commercial reactor sites?

If you want to remove plutonium from a radioactive wasteland, what do you do so that it doesn’t create another radioactive wasteland? And what does that say about the 90,000 tons of high-level waste sitting at more than 50 U.S. commercial reactor sites?

Harvey Wasserman, Truthout October 12, 2022,

Joshua Frank’s brilliant Atomic Days, from Haymarket Books, takes us deep into the horrific clogged bowels of the failed technology that is nuclear power.

Frank’s excursion into the radioactive wasteland of the Hanford Nuclear Reservation, in eastern Washington State’s Columbia River Valley, is the ultimate real-world nightmare.

Unfortunately, it serves as a wailing siren for what faces us with the atomic wastes from our commercial reactors, now joined at the toxic hip to the global weapons industry.

“Like a ceaseless conveyer belt,” Frank writes, “Hanford generated plutonium for nearly four long decades, reaching maximum production during the height of the Cold War.”

It is now, he says “a sprawling wasteland of radioactive and chemic sewage … the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet.”

Current cost estimates to clean up the place, says Frank, “could run anywhere between $316 and $662 billion.”

But that depends on a few definitions, including the most critical: What does it mean to “clean up” a hellhole like Hanford? If you want to remove plutonium from a radioactive wasteland, what do you do so that it doesn’t create another radioactive wasteland? And what does that say about the 90,000 tons of high-level waste sitting at more than 50 U.S. commercial reactor sites?

To put it in perspective, we spend $2.6 billion each year just to preserve Hanford as it is. The clean-up estimate, according to Frank, has roughly tripled in the past six years, leaving us to believe that in another six years it could easily be over $6 trillion.

The environmental consequences are colossal. As Frank abundantly documents, Hanford is an unfathomable mess. Giant tanks are leaking. Plutonium and other apocalyptic substances are rapidly migrating toward the Columbia River, which could be permanently poisoned, along with much more. Local residents have been poisoned with “permissible permanent concentration” of lethal isotopes on vegetables, livestock, and in the air and drinking water.

Such exposures have even included a deliberate experiment known as the “Green Run” in which Hanford operatives “purposely released dangerous amounts of radioactive iodine.”

Such emissions are especially damaging to embryos, fetuses and small children, whose thyroids can be easily destroyed (as we are now seeing at Fukushima). But back then the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers wanted to know how fallout would flow in wind currents.

The product was a “death mile” stretching from the Columbia River basin to the ocean, filled with casualties of radioactive poisoning.

After decades of devastating leaks from defective storage tanks, the Los Angeles Times reported that more radioactivity was stored at Hanford “than would be released during an entire nuclear war.”

Thousands of such tanks at Fukushima may soon be given a governmental green light to dump their poisons in the Pacific, with potentially apocalyptic results.

At Hanford, “the waste was so hot it would boil … for decades to come,” i.e., right up to the present day, writes Frank.

Despite official denials, Frank documents a terrifying range of catastrophic leaks into the soil, water tables and streams throughout the reservation. By 1985, he writes, “despite $7 billion spent over the previous ten years, no progress had been made in ridding the aging tanks” of their deadly offal.

To this day “Hanford remains the most complex environmental mess in the United States,” riddled with problems that provide huge profits for corporations that land clean-up contracts and then fail to deliver, exceeding the complexity even of the infamous waste dump at West Valley, New York, and the highly radioactive fallout zone at Santa Susana, California, just north of Los Angeles.

But Hanford’s not alone. Frank also takes us to Chelyabinsk, the site of a Soviet era disaster, and to another wasteland around Kyshtym. Like the 1000-square-mile “dead zone” around Chernobyl, Hanford is full of areas where human life is perilous at best. ………………………………………………….. more https://truthout.org/articles/nuclear-power-isnt-clean-it-creates-hellish-wastelands-of-radioactive-sewage/

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Plutonium and high-level nuclear waste

About plutonium and the “reprocessing” or “recycling” of used nuclear fuel. Gordon Edwards, 12 Oct 22

Plutonium is less than 1/2 of one percent of the used nuclear fuel, but it is a powerful source of energy that can be used for military or civilian purposes (nuclear bomb or nuclear reactors). To get the plutonium out of the used fuel is a very messy operation. The places where reprocessing has been done on a large scale are among the most radioactively contaminated sites in the world. Although NWMO says that plutonium use  is not on their agenda, it is included, in writing, as one of their options. Today, in New Brunswick, government funding is going to Moltex Corp. to proceed with plans that require plutonium use. Chalk River is just beginning to build a billion-dollar brand new research facility that will be dealing with plutonium as a priority. A large nuclear industry mural painted on the walls of the Saskatoon Airport states that reprocessing used fuel to get the plutonium out is the last step in the “Nuclear Fuel Cycle”.

(1) Nuclear fuel can be handled with care before it goes into a nuclear reactor. But used nuclear fuel will never be handled by human hands again, at least for several centuries, because of the hundreds of newly-created radioactive materials inside each fuel bundle. These are (a) the broken pieces of uranium atoms that have been spit, (b) the newly-created “transuranic” (heavier than uranium) materials that are produced, and (c) the so-called “activation products” (non-radioactive materials that have been de-stabilized and so are now radioactive).  See “Nuclear Waste 101” https://youtu.be/wD2ixadwXW8

(2) Radioactivity is not a thing, but a property of certain materials that have unstable atoms. Most atoms are stable and unchanging. Radioactive atoms are unstable. Each radioactive atom is like a tiny little time bomb, that will eventually “explode” (the industry uses the word “disintegrate”). When an atom disintegrates it gives off projectiles that can damage living cells, causing them to develop into cancers later on. These projectiles are of four kinds: alpha particles, beta particles, gamma rays, and neutrons. These damaging emissions are called “atomic radiation”. No one knows how to turn off radioactivity, so they remain dangerous while they exist.

(The danger lasts for tens of millions of years)

(3) Used nuclear fuel is so radioactive that it can give a lethal dose of gamma radiation and neutrons to any unshielded humans that are nearby. Even the “30-year old” used fuel that  NWMO wants to transport to a “willing host community” is still far too dangerous to be handled without massive shielding and robotic equipment. The job of repackaging the used fuel bundles requires the use of shielded “hot cells” — which are specially constructed airtight rooms with thick windows (4 to 6 feet thick) and large robot arms like those used in outer space to protect the workers from being overexposed to radiation.  Any damage to the outer metal coating on the fuel bundles will allow radioactive materials to escape from inside the fuel in the form of radioactive gasses, vapours, or dust. That’s why the hot cells have to be air-tight,  and why these rooms themselves will eventually become radioactive waste. 

See https://youtu.be/g8EPo8BntPQ (below)

(3) Nuclear proponents often point out that the used nuclear fuel – the stuff that NWMO wants to “bury” underground – still has a lot of energy potential and could be “recycled”. That’s because one of the radioactive materials in the waste, called “plutonium”, can be used to make atomic bombs or other kinds of nuclear weapons, and it can also be used as a fuel for more nuclear reactors. But to get plutonium out of the fuel bundles they have to be dissolved in some kind of acid or “molten salt”, turning the waste into a liquid form instead of a solid form. This allows radioactive gasses to escape from the fuel, and makes it much more difficult to keep all the other radioactive materials (now in liquid form) out of the environment of living things. Any plutonium extraction technology is called “reprocessing”.

4) Although NWMO says that reprocessing is not their intention, it has always been considered a possibility and has never been excluded. It is stated in all NWMO documentation that reprocessing remains an option. Once a willing host community has said “yes” to receive all of Canada’s used nuclear fuel, the government and industry can then decide that they want to get that plutonium out of the fuel before burying it.  That means opening up the fuel bundles and spilling all the radioactive poisons into a gaseous or liquid medium so they can separate the plutonium (and maybe a few other things) from all the rest of the radioactive garbage. Canada has built and operated reprocessing plants in the 1940s and 1950s at Chalk River. AECL tried but failed to get the government to build a commercial-scale reprocessing plant in the late 1970s. Canada did some experimental reprocessing in Manitoba, when AECL built the “Underground Research Laboratory” to study the idea of a DGR for used nuclear fuel in the 1980s and 1990s.  Read http://www.ccnr.org/AECL_plute.html . 

(5) The big reprocessing centres in the world include Hanford, in Washington State; Sellafield, in Northern England; Mayak, in Russia; La Hague, in France; and Rokkasho, in Japan. There is also a shut-down commercial reprocessing plant at West Vallay, New York.  These sites are all environmental foul-ups requiring extremely costly and dangerous cleanups. 

HANFORD: over $100 billion needed to clean up the sitehttps://www.seattletimes.com/seattle-news/hanfords-soaring-cost-of-radioactive-waste-cleanup-is-targeted-as-nw-governors-seek-more-funding/

SELLAFIELD: over 200 billion pounds ($222 billion) for cleanuphttps://www.theguardian.com/environment/2022/sep/23/uk-nuclear-waste-cleanup-decommissioning-power-stations

MAYAK: severe environmental contamination but no cost estimateshttps://bellona.org/news/nuclear-issues/radwaste-storage-at-nuclear-fuel-cycle-plants-in-russia/2011-12-russias-infamous-reprocessing-plant-mayak-never-stopped-illegal-dumping-of-radioactive-waste-into-nearby-river-poisoning-residents-newly-disclosed-court-finding-says

LA HAGUE: widespread contamination, no detailed dollar figure providedhttps://ejatlas.org/conflict/la-hague-center-of-the-reprocessing-of-nuclear-waste-france

ROKKASHO: years of cost overruns and delays – $130 billion for starters

https://www.neimagazine.com/news/newsjapans-rokkasho-reprocessing-plant-postponed-again-8105722

WEST VALLEY: only operated for 6 years, about $5 billion in cleanup costhttps://www.ucsusa.org/resources/brief-history-reprocessing-and-cleanup-west-valley-ny

(6) Newer reprocessing technologies are smaller and use different approaches – but basically, any time you are going to open uo the fuel bundles, you are “playing with fire” and it is much harder to keep all the radioactive pioisons in check once they are out of the fuel bundle.

Read http://www.ccnr.org/paulson_legacy.html

(7) My feeling is that any “handling” or “repackaging” or “reprocessing” of used nuclear fuel should NOT be done in a remote community that does not have the economic or political “clout” to demand that things be done properly. If It is to be dine at all, this should be done back in the major population centres where the reactors are located and people living there can raise a fuss if things are not done safely.  

(8) Also, my feeling is that the fuel should not be moved at all until the reactors are all shut down. The radioactive wastes can be very well packaged and carefully guarded where they are. Since NWMO will only move 30-year old used fuel, there will ALWAYS be 30 years worth of unburied waste right at the surface, right beside the reactors, ready to suffer a catastrophe of some sort, no matter HOW fast they bury the older fuel. In fact, the nuclear indusrtry does not really want to “get rid” of nuclear waste at all, but just move some of the older stuff out of the way so that they can keep on making more. The best place to take the waste is where there are no reporters or TV broadcasters or influential wealthy people to blow the whistle if things go badly. Maybe I’m a little over-suspicious, but given the history of waste management, you can’t be too careful.

9) In Germany, they buried radioactive waste in an old salt mine as a kind of DGR for a very long time. When radioactive contamination kept leaking into the ground water and the surface waters, the nuclear scientists in charge did not tell the government or the public for almost 10 years. Then, when it became clear that the environment was being severely affected, the German government decided to take all the waste OUT of the DGR – a difficult and dangerous operation that will take 15-30 years and cost over 3.7 billion euros ($5 billion Canadian equivalent.) 

Read https://www.neimagazine.com/features/featureclearing-out-asse-2/

Any potential willing host community would be well advised to insist that all “handling” of individual fuel bundles, of any kind whatsoever, whether repackaging or reprocessing, should not be part of the plan for the willing host community to accept. But it would have to be in writing and legally enforceable.

Of course the decision is entirely up to the willing host community, not me – and hopefully, not the industry either.

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Young girls up to 10 times more vulnerable to ionizing radiation, especially girls up to 5 years old.

Nuclear Radiation Risk Impacts One Group Far More Than Any Other. Young girls could be up to 10 times more vulnerable to nuclear radiation thanother members of society, with girls aged up to five twice as likely to develop cancer as boys of the same age.

Understanding the risk posed by radiation exposure has been catapulted into public consciousness since
February, when Russia invaded Ukraine. Talk of nuclear war has simmered ever since, with rhetoric ramping up on October 6 when President Joe Biden warned of “Armageddon,” despite the U.S. having no new intelligence that Russian President Vladimir Putin was planning a nuclear strike.

Today, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission bases its evaluations of the impact of ionizing radiation on the public, and thus its decisions on nuclear licensing and regulation, on a subset of data which describes the “Reference Man.”

The Reference Man, as defined by the International Commission on Radiological Protection, is 20 to 30 years old, weighs 154 pounds, is 5 foot and 6 inches tall, and is Caucasian with a Western European or North American lifestyle. This one-size-fits-all approach describes only a small subset of society.

 Newsweek 10th Oct 2022

https://www.newsweek.com/newsweek-com-nuclear-radiation-risk-impacts-one-group-more-other-1750413

 MSN 10th Oct 2022

https://www.msn.com/en-us/health/other/nuclear-radiation-risk-impacts-one-group-far-more-than-any-other/ar-AA12NEDl

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Growing the economy – but growth of what?

Michael Jacobs: Liz Truss dreams of growth – but even if she pulls it off, it won’t help Britain. Fifty years ago, the landmark report The Limits to Growth warned that, unless the composition of growth was
radically changed, its environmental impacts would lead to ecological and social collapse within 100 years.

Many of the projections made by The Limits to Growth have proved prescient. Yet it is also true that developed economies have been able to “uncouple” growth from some environmental
impacts. Over the past 20 years, the UK and others have notably seen rising GDP accompanied by falling greenhouse gas emissions.

Economists have described this as “green growth”, and many have argued that this, rather than growth per se, should be governments’ goal. Some environmentalists argue that environmental sustainability does not allow for any economic growth. Only the “degrowth” of western economies, they claim, is compatible with ecological salvation (and indeed, wellbeing). Others claim that GDP could still grow in a radically greener form. But in present circumstances this is a rather arcane dispute.

Both sides agree that some parts of the economy must degrow, notably the fossil fuel sector and fossil-intensive industries, while growth is clearly needed in others, such as renewable energy and the “care economy” of health, education, social care and childcare. The real question is therefore not “growth or
not?”, but “growth of what?”

 Guardian 10th Oct 2022

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/oct/10/liz-truss-dreams-growth-income-stall-gdp

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

WE ARE ON A PATH TO NUCLEAR WAR

WAR ON THE ROCKS, JEREMY SHAPIRO, 12 Oct 22, In war, nothing is inevitable and not much is predictable. But the war in Ukraine has a direction that observers can see and that we should name. What began as a criminal Russian aggression against Ukraine has become a proxy war between Washington and Moscow. The two sides are locked in an escalatory cycle that, along current trends, will eventually bring them into direct conflict and then go nuclear, killing millions of people and destroying much of the world. This is obviously a bold prediction and certainly an unwise one to make — in part because if I’m right, I’m unlikely to be around take credit for it. 

President Joe Biden has named this danger, to great criticism, apparently because he believes that acknowledging the danger increases the chances of avoiding such a terrible outcome. Indeed, much can change the current trajectory, but doing so will require purposeful action by both sides specifically intended to avoid direct confrontation. At the moment, neither side seems willing or politically able to take such steps. On the contrary, in Russia nuclear threats are a prominent part of the Russian war strategy. In the United States, commentators condemn those who even name this danger, fearing that doing so will weaken Western resolve. Any mention of such considerations on Twitter, where it is always 1938, inevitably provokes accusations of appeasement and references to Neville Chamberlain.

Despite the opprobrium, not naming the danger is unlikely to reduce it. Think tank analysts prefer instead to talk in terms of “scenarios,” wherein we can bury the most likely outcome amongst a few other less likely possibilities. Such exercises are useful for planning purposes, and they appropriately reflect our general inability to predict events on the ground. But scenarios also serve to hide the relative likelihood of the various outcomes. Here I present just the central scenario of nuclear escalation. I take as a starting point that, although we may experience long periods of relative stalemate and we may never arrive at such a horrific outcome, uncontrolled escalation is the path that we are currently on.

Testing the Red Lines

No rational or even sane leader plans to start a nuclear war. And for all of the Russian regime’s risk taking, it does not show signs of suicidal tendencies. The essence of the problem is more insidious than mere insanity: Once an escalatory cycle begins, a series of individually rational steps can add up to a world-ending absurdity. In Ukraine, both sides have publicly pledged that they cannot lose this war. They hold that doing so would threaten their very way of life and the values that they hold most dear. In the Russian case particularly, a loss in Ukraine would seem to threaten regime survival and even the territorial integrity of the country. 

As the war has moved against the Russians, they have drawn numerous red lines to warn the West against escalation. The Russians called the provision of long-range rocket systems near the Russian border “intolerable,” warned against the admission of Sweden and Finland to NATO, and threatened that any attack on Crimea would “ignite judgment day.” In each case, the crossing of these Russian red lines by Ukraine, the United States, or Europe generated some sort of response but fell well short of Russian threats.  

As Russian red lines have proven very pink, they are increasingly questioned in the West. Numerous Western commentators now assert that Russia is a paper tiger and dismiss Russian nuclear threats as “bluster.” The most recent Russian red line warns against the provision of long-range missile systems to Ukraine. The Russian government says that if the United States crosses this line, it would become “a direct party to the conflict.” Given all of the red lines already crossed, however, it is doubtful that U.S. decision-makers see such threats as very meaningful.

The problem that the Russians have had in their signaling is that their decision to escalate likely revolves around the progress that the Ukrainians make on the ground, not on any discrete action (such as the provision of new weapons systems) that the West might take. The likelihood of escalation, in other words, has stemmed from developments on the battlefield, not from the crossing of some arbitrary red line. Experts on the Russian military have long suspected that Russian nuclear signaling is an elaborate bluff meant to instill fear and caution in a weak-willed Western enemy. But events in Ukraine and the possibility of a catastrophic military loss may have changed that calculation. Nobody really knows. It is likely that the Russians don’t know either.

What is clear is that both sides have consistently escalated in Ukraine when they fear that they might lose. The United States and its European partners have continually upped their military assistance to Ukraine, in both quality and quantity, regardless of red lines. Under the pressure of war, they decided to deliver weapons and intelligence that just a few months ago they believed carried too great an escalation risk to provide. They have similarly incrementally increased economic sanctions to the degree that they now appear intended to permanently weaken Russia and destroy the Russian regime, as Biden has said is necessary to end the war. 

The Russians have consistently responded to battlefield setbacks with their own escalations including energy cut-offs to Europe, increased bombing of civilian targets, and recently through the formal annexation of four Ukrainian provinces and the partial mobilization of Russian manpower reserves. This last step carries obvious risks for the Russian regime, as the multiple protests against it across Russia testify, but the leadership preferred those domestic risks to losing the war.

In taking these escalatory steps, both sides have also increased the domestic and geopolitical costs of compromise, thus increasing the incentive for further escalations. Thus, for example, the Russian annexations are intended to signal to foreign and domestic audiences that the occupied parts of Ukrainian territory will now be defended as if they were Russia itself. But it is not just a signal, it also genuinely reduces Russia’s ability to back down and abandon these provinces. This is essence of an escalatory cycle — it contains a logic of its own wherein previous escalations make future ones more likely.

Of course, wars have often escalated but no war since 1945 has ended in nuclear use. Nuclear powers have at times considered their use for warfighting, notably in Korea in 1953 and in Israel in 1973, but have always stepped back from the brink.  In the current situation, both sides have many more steps to take before direct confrontation: ………………………………………………………………………..

This is only a scenario. None of it is inevitable, of course. But this is the path that we are currently on and the likelihood of it coming to pass grows by the day as one side or the other becomes more desperate. The consequences of this path are deeply ruinous. It should be named.  https://warontherocks.com/2022/10/the-end-of-the-world-is-nigh/

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Crimean Bridge Attack: Ukraine’s Sabotage Teams Take Orders From Washington, Senior Official Reveals

 https://sputniknews.com/20221010/crimean-bridge-attack-ukraines-sabotage-teams-take-orders-from-washington-senior-official-reveals-1101698419.html Ilya Tsukanov, 12 Oct 22, The 19-km bridge linking the Crimean Peninsula to the Russian mainland sustained serious damage following the detonation of a truck bomb on one of its road sections on Saturday morning. Ukrainian officials boasted to US media that Kiev was responsible.

Ukrainian officials keep their US counterparts abreast of Kiev’s sabotage ops and other anti-Russian actions, Sergey Pashinsky, the head of the Association of Ukraine’s Defense Enterprises, accidentally revealed.

“We are planning several operations. My position is: we must and are obliged to inform our American partners about them. And those operations which I am conducting right now – I have the opportunity to conduct operations myself, I http://cut channels this is also the CIA http://cut have their own intentions. Because I understand that the US also carries responsibility for them and has the right to veto all of our operations,” Pashinsky said, speaking to infamous Russian pranksters Vladimir ‘Vovan’ Kuznetsov and Alexei ‘Lexus’ Stolyarov, who posed as US officials.

Pashinsky clarified that he has been in charge of some major Ukrainian military actions, including operational planning on Zmeiny (‘Snake’) Island – the small but strategically significant island situated off the western coast of Romania in the Black Sea, and which saw heavy fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces earlier this year.

“I planned the Zmeiny Island operation, I carried it out personally [using] Ukrainian Bohdan and French Caesar [howitzers]. Yes, this was my operation in its entirely,” the official said.

Pashinsky indicated that operations against a piece of infrastructure like the Crimean Bridge became possible only once the US gives the green light.

“As soon as you tell me that the US approves the sabotage of the Crimean Bridge, the situation can move forward. [Laughs]. A verbal message is enough for me. We don’t want to take responsibility of this scale for ourselves, while Mr. Zelensky – I don’t know, I don’t even want to know about this situation,” Pashinsky said.

“The Crimean Bridge is an important artery, but on the other hand I think you know [Vladimir] Putin better than I do. That is, who can analyze Putin’s actions in the event of sabotage against the Crimean Bridge? Who?” the official asked.

The pranksters did not clarify whether the interview with Pashinsky was conducted before or after Saturday’s sabotage attack.

Two senior Ukrainian officials told the New York Times on Sunday that Ukrainian intelligence were behind the attack on the bridge, one of them grading the success of the attack as “excellent” and saying that the operation “showed the failure of the Russian system to guarantee the security even of the most significant and sacred targets.”

Ukrainian officials also publicly gloated over the act of terror, with presidential advisor Mikhail Podolyak saying the bridge attack was only “the beginning” and that “everything illegal must be destroyed” and “everything stolen must be returned to Ukraine.”

“Today was not a bad day and mostly sunny on our state’s territory. Unfortunately, it was cloudy in Crimea. Although it was also warm,” President Vladimir Zelensky said in a sarcasm-laden address to the nation on Saturday night.

Russia launched a series of missile strikes deep into Ukraine on Monday in the wake of the bridge attack after confirming Ukrainian special forces’ involvement, with the strikes targeting Ukrainian energy infrastructure and military command and communications posts across the country. President Putin warned that strikes would be followed up if Ukrainian attacks against Russian infrastructure continue.

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Ukraine held talks with Britain for destruction of Crimean bridge

 https://apa.az/en/europe/ukraine-held-talks-with-britain-for-destruction-of-crimean-bridge-382809—15 August 2022,

Deputy of the Rada Goncharenko announced negotiations with Wallace on the destruction of the Crimean bridge, APA reports.

Ukraine held talks with British Defense Secretary Ben Wallace on a plan to destroy the Crimean Bridge at the NATO summit in June, Verkhovna Rada deputy Oleksiy Goncharenko said.

The parliamentarian drew attention to the statement of expert Igor Korotchenko, who said on the air of the Rossiya 1 TV channel that, according to some information, the plan for striking the bridge was allegedly being developed under the personal supervision of the head of the British military department.

“Ben Wallace and I discussed the plan to destroy the Crimean bridge back in June,” Goncharenko wrote, posting a photo from the talks, which, in addition to him and the head of the British Ministry of Defense, shows British Prime Minister Boris Johnson.

In July, Aleksey Arestovich, an adviser to the head of Vladimir Zelensky’s office, said that Ukraine could attack the Crimean Bridge as soon as the first technical opportunity appeared.

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment

Joshua Frank’s book Atomic Days shows the nuclear industry’s only real role – it is essential for the USA’s ‘permanent war economy’

As the atomic energy business is increasingly priced out of the electricity market by wind, solar, batteries, and increased efficiency and conservation, we will likely see the nuclear power industry increasingly admitting to what it always was — a necessary servant of the nuclear weapons industry.

Nuclear Power Isn’t Clean — It Creates Hellish Wastelands of Radioactive Sewage, Harvey Wasserman, Truthout October 12, 2022,

“……………………………..To put the nuclear power industry in a larger context, Frank guides us through the “permanent war economy” birthed during WWII, and discusses Franklin Roosevelt’s ambivalent relations with the “Malefactors of Great Wealth” who often stood in the way of making the U.S. the “Arsenal of Democracy,” and who once even plotted to kill him.

With the decision to build an A-Bomb, the giant Bechtel Corporation used the 120-square-mile reservation at Hanford to produce 103.5 metric tons of plutonium, perhaps the deadliest substance known to humanity.

But there was no effective solution for what might happen to the place in the aftermath. The Waste Treatment Plant meant to “vitrify” rad wastes into glass began construction in 2002, with plans to open in 2011. It has become, in both cost and area, “the largest single construction operation taking place anywhere in the United States,” now with an estimated price tag of $41 billion and a projected opening in 2036.

With “a string of bungled jobs under its belt,” Bechtel’s failed “Big Dig” in Boston — a much-vaunted tunnel from Logan Airport to downtown — reflected its work at Hanford when a collapse killed a 39-year-old woman and resulted in $357.1 million settlement exempting management from criminal prosecution.

As the U.S.’s fourth-largest privately held company, Bechtel spending $1.8 million on D.C. lobbying in 2019-20 was par for the course. The payback, Frank writes, comes in the tragic diseases suffered by Hanford workers like Abe Garza and Lawrence Rouse, usually amid terse, well-funded official denials. Researchers like Karen Wetterhahn and veterans like Victor Skaar have joined Vietnam victims of Agent Orange in being victimized by exposures they were repeatedly assured were “safe.” Whistleblowers like Ed Bricker were even subjected to intense spying and sabotage by close associates he was deceived into accepting as friends.

Meanwhile activists like Russell Jim of the Yakama Tribe began to force “an immeasurable amount of transparency” around the Hanford disaster. Their decades of hardcore community organizing came with a growing demand for accountability that has changed the political atmosphere surrounding the cleanup.

The debate has carried into the use of commercial atomic power.

Because of Hanford’s nuclear presence, five atomic reactors were constructed in Washington State, promising electricity that would be “too cheap to meter.”

But like the soaring costs of plutonium production and clean-up, the Washington Public Power System plunged into the biggest public bankruptcy in U.S. history, due to massive delays and cost overruns. Only one of the nukes now operates.

Sadly, some self-proclaimed climate activists have fallen into the atomic pit, arguing that in the face of the acute threat of climate change, nuclear power should be pursued as a way to lower emissions.

But they all ignore the big lesson Joshua Frank teaches us about Hanford: All the rhetoric in the world can’t cover for the physical realities of dealing with atomic radiation. And atomic fires burning at 571 degrees Fahrenheit will never cool the planet. The mines, the mills, the fuel fabrication, the reactors themselves, the waste dumps, all that horrendous multitrillion-dollar paraphernalia — they together comprise the most lethal and expensive technological failure in human history.

Many reactor promoters have long vehemently denied any connection between their “peaceful atom” and the scourge of war, but anti-nuclear activists have exposed the falsity of those claims. For example, the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament, a British advocacy organization that opposes both nuclear weapons and the building of new nuclear power facilities, writes:

The civil nuclear power industry grew out of the atomic bomb programme in the 1940s and the 1950s. In Britain, the civil nuclear power programme was deliberately used as a cover for military activities…. The development of both the nuclear weapons and nuclear power industries is mutually beneficial. Scientists from Sussex University confirmed this once again in 2017, stating that the government is using the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to subsidise Trident, Britain’s nuclear weapons system.

As the atomic energy business is increasingly priced out of the electricity market by wind, solar, batteries, and increased efficiency and conservation, we will likely see the nuclear power industry increasingly admitting to what it always was — a necessary servant of the nuclear weapons industry.

Fittingly, the only future for atomic reactors will be as a bottomless pit for ecological suicide and massive public subsidies — exactly like Hanford.

Indeed, for readers truly interested in the future of atomic energy, take a good look at how it plays in Joshua Frank’s Atomic Days. Then ask how soon we can cover the whole damn place with solar panels.  https://truthout.org/articles/nuclear-power-isnt-clean-it-creates-hellish-wastelands-of-radioactive-sewage/

October 13, 2022 Posted by Christina Macpherson | Uncategorized | Leave a comment