Ex-Westinghouse VP sentenced to jail in $9 billion nuclear heist of SC ratepayers
“In both the SC and GA cases, the state governments helped pave the way for the financial mismanagement of the projects by legislating that state electric ratepayers be responsible to pay for the nuclear construction in their monthly bills many years ahead of receiving a single watt of utility services.”
Beyond Nuclear | November 21, 2024 beyondnuclear.org
On November 20, 2024, the ex-Westinghouse Electric Corporation Vice President, who once headed the company’s AP1000 advanced reactor global marketing division, Jeffrey Alan Benjamin was sentenced in the District of South Carolina Federal Court to one year and a day in prison and a $100,000 fine for his role to defraud the South Carolina Public Utility Commission (PUC) and state electric ratepayers out of billions of dollars following the 2017 abandonment of the V.C. Summer units 2 & 3 nuclear plant construction project.
The US Justice Department had originally charged Westinghouse’s senior global nuclear project manager with 16 federal felony counts including conspiracy to commit wire and mail fraud by withholding and providing false financial information to South Carolina regulators and state customers while the V.C. Summer AP1000 pressurized water reactor project was financially collapsing from skyrocketing cost overruns and mounting construction delays. After years of legal wrangling, Benjamin entered into a guilty plea deal to a single “information felony charge” for “aiding and abetting the failure to keep accurate corporate records.”
Arms Control Association: Putin’s Decision to Lower Threshold for Nuclear Use Is Irresponsible and Dangerous
“Because nuclear war would affect all people, Russia’s dangerous behavior demands a global response.”
Statement by Daryl G. Kimball, Executive Director, Arms Control Association | November 19, 2024 armscontrol.org
(Washington, D.C.) — As foreshadowed by an earlier statement by Russian President Vladimir Putin, the Kremlin issued a decree that revises Russian policies regarding the employment of nuclear weapons in war in a way that further blurs the threshold for Russian use of nuclear weapons and adds significant uncertainty to the already unsteady balance of nuclear terror between Russia and the United States and other members of the NATO alliance.
The new doctrine includes language that asserts that Russia “reserves the right” to use nuclear weapons to respond to a conventional-weapons attack that creates a “critical threat” to its “sovereignty and territorial integrity,” whereas the previous doctrine, which was issued in 2020, only reserves the right to use nuclear weapons if an attack on Russia threatens “the very existence of the state.”
Santa Fe New Mexican: Santa Fe County commissioners grill federal official over LANL legacy cleanup
Santa Fe County commissioners on Tuesday pressed an official from the Environmental Management Los Alamos Field Office on legacy waste cleanup, including the status of a toxic chromium plume under the area’s canyons.
By Santa Fe New Mexican | November 13, 2024 santafenewmexican.com
The U.S Energy Department office is in charge of the cleanup of the legacy contamination of radioactive and chemical materials and waste resulting from operations during the Manhattan Project and the Cold War at Los Alamos National Laboratory. Jessica Kunkle, manager of the Los Alamos field office, briefed the commissioners in a presentation at the urging of Commissioner Anna Hansen.
At one point, Kunkle noted remediated land known as the “Middle DP Road Cleanup” site had been turned over to Los Alamos County for “continued economic development.” In January, the Department of Energy announced radiologically contaminated materials, including metal items, debris and glass, had been removed from the site, which is located in Los Alamos’ industrial district a little east of downtown.
‘Help us,’ UN nuclear watchdog chief tells Iran ahead of visit
– Grossi seeks more monitoring cooperation at nuclear sites
– Iran enriching uranium to 60%, close to bomb-grade
– IAEA board of governors to meet next week in Vienna
By Richard Valdmanis, Reuters | November 12, 2024 reuters.com
BAKU, Nov 12 (Reuters) – U.N. atomic watchdog chief Rafael Grossi appealed to Iran’s leadership on Tuesday to take steps to resolve longstanding issues with his agency a day before he arrives in the Iranian capital for crunch talks over its nuclear programme.
The International Atomic Energy Agency head has for months sought progress with Iran on issues including a push for more monitoring cooperation at nuclear sites and an explanation of uranium traces found at undeclared sites.
But little has come from Grossi’s efforts and with the return of President-elect Donald Trump, who is widely expected to restore a maximum-pressure policy on Iran, Grossi’s trip on Wednesday should provide indications of how Iran wants to proceed in the coming months.
“I am far from being able to tell the international community … what is happening. I would be in a very difficult position. So it’s like they (Iran) have to help us, to help them to a certain extent,” Grossi told Reuters on the sidelines of the COP29 climate summit in Baku.
DOE’s 2037 Deadlines for SRS: Realistic or Illusory?
The Department of Energy’s (DOE) Savannah River Site (SRS) has two major milestones to achieve by 2037. One is legally binding, the other is a commitment that remains negotiable.
By Don Moniak, The Aiken Chronicles | November 12, 2024 aikenchronicles.com
Surplus Weapons Plutonium
DOE is legally bound to removing 9.5 metric tons of surplus military plutonium to another state. While any state will do, the plan is to ship the plutonium in a diluted waste form to the underground transuranic waste dump in New Mexico known as the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP).
This commitment is enshrined in the $600 million Settlement Agreement between the State of South Carolina and the federal government; more commonly known as “The Plutonium Settlement.”
Any failure of DOE/SRS to remove all or part of the 9.5 metric tons* of surplus plutonium (Pu) metals and powders will trigger new financial penalties that could be worth billions of dollars to South Carolina. The potential penalties involve two formulas.
First, the percentage of the 9.5 tons remaining on January 1, 2037 will be multiplied by $1.5 billion. Thus, five tons remaning could yield the state $7.5 billion, if the agreement is enforced.
Second, $1 million per day, but only up to $100 million per year, will be awarded to the State for any plutonium not removed after January 1, 2037; and for each year thereafter.
However, the loophole is that the agreement cannot be enforced until 2042 if DOE/SRS has removed more than half, or 4.75 MT, of surplus Pu by 2037.
The surplus Pu is currently being converted to a more stable waste form via a process called “dilute and dispose.” Plans to increase production through the development of a second glovebox processing line remain as tentative as the funding that is required—in this case upwards of $880 million.
Why America Can’t Afford A New Nuclear Buildup In 2025
“The real test of Trump’s stance on all-things nuclear will be his approach to the Pentagon’s multi-year effort to build a new generation of nuclear-armed missiles, bombers, and submarines, plus new warheads to go with them, a plan that some experts suggest could cost up to $2 trillion in the next three decades.
The nuclear plan has already been plagued by major cost overruns, including an 81% increase in the projected cost of the new intercontinental ballistic missile, dubbed the Sentinel, and developed and produced by Northrop Grumman. The cost overrun prompted a government review of the program, but the assessment ended up pronouncing that the program was too important to cancel.”
By William Hartung, Forbes | November 11, 2024 forbes.com
Donald Trump’s return to power raises serious questions about the future of the U.S. nuclear arsenal. His statements on nuclear weapons have been all over the map, but a 2017 review by Anthony Zurcher of The Guardian of Trump’s statements since the 980s concluded that “his thoughts on atomic weaponry reflect a certain strain of Cold War arms-race enthusiasm and diplomatic brinkmanship.” And in 2016, after he was challenged when he said ‘possibly, possibly” nuclear weapons could be used, Trump went on to say that if they weren’t to be used, “Then why are we making them?” On the flip side, he has also called nuclear war “the ultimate catastrophe.” It’s unclear what his administration’s nuclear policy will be in 2025.
As for his actions in office during his previous term, Trump pulled the U.S. out of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA), which by all objective accounts had been working to stop Tehran’s pursuit of a nuclear weapon. And in 2019, the Trump administration withdrew from the Intermediate Nuclear Forces in Europe treaty (INF), which had banned ground-based ballistic missiles and cruise missiles in the range of between 500 and 5,500 kilometers.
…
The review of the Sentinel was a missed opportunity. Former secretary of defense William Perry has called ICBMs “some of the most dangerous weapons we have,” because the president would have only a matter of minutes to decide whether to launch them on warning of attack, increasing the risk of a nuclear confrontation sparked by a false alarm.
Families living in shadow of Cold War facility blame government for their cancer, death
“Do you believe the Department of Energy; our own government is telling the truth?” asked Duane Pohlman.
“Nobody believes that. If you do, you’re a fool,” said Guy Reynolds.”
PIKETON, Ohio (WKRC) – In the communities surrounding the Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant (PORTS), a decommissioned Cold War-era facility near Piketon that enriched uranium for nuclear reactors and atomic weapons, cancer has become a devastating reality for many families, leaving a trail of grief and loss.
By Duane Pohlman WKRC | November 4 local12.com
THE FAMILIES AND FACES OF FALLOUT:
Guy Reynolds survived melanoma and is keenly aware of the tragic cancer landscape in the area he calls home.
“Seems like anybody who dies, they die from cancer,” Reynolds said.
Heather Blanton, a 42-year-old mother from Piketon who’s battling stage four metastatic breast cancer, explained that there’s no hope for her recovery.
“It’s terminal,” Heather said.
Joanne Ross of Piketon lost her 13-year-old son Aaron to kidney cancer in 1994 and still mourns his loss every day.
“I’ll always be his mother,” Ross said.
Shawna Houston, who now lives in Hillsboro, watched her 15-year-old son Garrett suffer and die from acute myeloid leukemia on March 4, 2016, 11 months after he was first diagnosed.
“It’s something I don’t wish on any parent,” said Houston.
MORUROA FILES: Investigation into French nuclear tests in the Pacific
Poisoned legacy
Leukemia, lymphoma, cancer of the thyroid, lung, breast, stomach … In Polynesia, the experience of French nuclear tests is written in the flesh and blood of the inhabitants. Strontium has eaten into bones, cesium has eaten away at muscles and genitals, iodine has seeped into the thyroid.
The story of this largely unknown health disaster began on July 2, 1966. On that day, the army carried out the Aldebaran fire, the first of the 193 tests fired from the nuclear atolls of Moruroa and Fangataufa until 1996. The first , also, of a series of tests among the most contaminating in the history of the French nuclear program: the tests in the open air. Between 1966 and 1974, the military carried out 46 such explosions.
Disclose and Interprt, in collaboration with the Science & Global Security program at Princeton University (USA), investigated the consequences of atmospheric testing in French Polynesia for two years. With the help of thousands of declassified military documents, hundreds of hours of calculations and dozens of unpublished testimonies, this investigation demonstrates for the first time the extent of the radioactive fallout that struck the inhabitants of this vast territory as the ‘Europe.
According to our calculations, based on a scientific reassessment of the doses received, approximately 110,000 people were infected, almost the entire Polynesian population at the time. Modelling toxic clouds to support, we also unveil how the French authorities have concealed the true impact of nuclear testing on the health of Polynesians for more than fifty years.
On February 18, 2020, the National Institute for Health and Medical Research (Inserm) published, at the request of the Ministry of Defense, a report on “the health consequences of nuclear tests” in French Polynesia. According to this expertise, its authors felt that they could not “make a solid conclusion” to the existence of “links between the fallout from atmospheric nuclear tests and the occurrence of radiation-induced pathologies”. And the college of experts stressed the need to “refine the estimates of doses received by the local population and by civilian and military personnel”. This is precisely what we have endeavored to do in this investigation.
Why the World Needs a New UN Study on the Effects of Nuclear War
“Given that the United States relies on a strategy of nuclear deterrence, which seeks to obtain security by threatening nuclear war, it seems obvious that this country should want to fully understand the risks it is running.”
On the persistence of U.S. nuclear deterrence policy: bostonreview.net/articles/the-extortionists-doctrine/
“Nuclear-armed states do not run these risks alone. The rest of the world can be affected by nuclear war via radioactive fallout, environmental changes such as nuclear winter, and disruption of the global economic system. Almost any nuclear war would be a global problem.”
By Laura Grego, Union of Concerned Scientists | October 29 blog.ucsusa.org
Coming up for a vote in early November is a resolution advanced by the Ireland and New Zealand delegations to the United Nations (UN) to commission a critical new scientific study on the effects of nuclear war. The study, which would be the first under UN auspices in more than 30 years, would be run by an independent scientific panel of 21 members and would examine the physical effects and societal consequences of a nuclear war on local, regional, and planetary scales. It would be comprehensive in its scope, including the climate, environmental, and radiological effects of nuclear war and how these would impact public health, global social and economic systems, agriculture, and ecosystems over periods of days, weeks, and decades.
By Zia Mian, Scientific American | October 28 scientificamerican.com
At the United Nations, an effort is underway in the General Assembly to establish an international panel of scientists to assess, communicate and advance our current knowledge of the effects of nuclear war. The effort would lead to a more fully informed and inclusive global debate on how much and how little everyone—including the nuclear armed states themselves—actually know of the catastrophic large-scale long-term human, environmental, ecological, economic and societal impacts of using nuclear weapons. Ideally, the findings could build a basis for action toward the total elimination of nuclear weapons worldwide and secure a safer future for people and our planet.
Everyone, not just scientists and their respective professional societies, in all nations, including the nuclear-armed states and their allies, should speak in support of this effort to build a shared understanding of the risks posed by nuclear war plans and nuclear deterrence threats.
In September the U.N.’s member states overwhelmingly agreed on the Pact for the Future, which declares: “A nuclear war would visit devastation upon all humankind.” But it has been over 30 years since the last report by the U.N. on this threat.
BOSTON REVIEW: The Extortionist’s Doctrine
“Thus massive second strike—the key to deterrence defined as the practice of preventing nuclear war by discouraging a first strike—somersaults into the perceived position of a first strike.
‘The bar of deterrence,’ [former head of US Strategic Command] Butler writes, ‘ratchets higher, igniting yet another cycle of trepidation, worst-case assumptions and ever-mounting levels of destructive capability.'”
By Elaine Scarry, The Boston Review | October 2024 bostonreview.net
The key structure of the doctrine of nuclear deterrence is audible in the September 4, 2024, speech by U.S. Deputy Under Secretary of Defense Cara Abercrombie: “Any nuclear attack by the DPRK against the United States or its allies and partners is unacceptable and will result in the end of that regime.” The doctrine, which the United States has embraced since the Cold War, aims to prevent an adversary from launching a nuclear weapon by assuring that any first strike will be followed by a retaliatory second strike, whose effects will equal or exceed the original damage and may eliminate the adversary altogether. This annihilating reflex of deterrence is equally audible in the quiet words of the Department of Defense in its web page on “America’s Nuclear Triad,” its sea-based, land-based, and air-based delivery platforms: “The triad, along with assigned forces, provide 24/7 deterrence to prevent catastrophic actions from our adversaries and they stand ready, if necessary, to deliver a decisive response, anywhere, anytime.”
Framed wholly as defensive and preventative (and from day to day, largely successful in deflecting our attention from the actual first use stance the country has had for nearly eighty years), deterrence would almost have the aura of peacekeeping, were it not the mental platform undergirding our fourteen Ohio-class submarines (each able to singlehandedly destroy one of Earth’s seven continents), four hundred land-based ICBMs, and sixty-six B-52 and B-2 stealth bombers.
Although the physical act of unbuilding the nuclear architecture is easily within reach—it would take at most four weeks to dismantle all the nuclear triggers throughout the world, a decisive because disabling first step—the mental architecture of deterrence is the major impediment to doing so.
Searchlight NM: Plutonium just had a bad day in court
In a major decision whose consequences are still being assessed, a federal judge declared that plutonium pit production — one ingredient in the U.S. government’s $1.5 trillion nuclear weapons expansion — has to be performed in accordance with the nation’s strongest environmental law
“…The court found that the agencies charged with reviving the nuclear weapons complex have not properly evaluated the perils that could come with turning out plutonium pits at two different sites, thousands of miles apart. For the plaintiffs in this case — which include Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition — Lewis’s decision to intervene is a milestone.”
“We’ve had a pretty significant victory here on the environmental front,” said Tom Clements, the director of Savannah River Site Watch. “Nonprofit public interest groups are able to hold the U.S. Department of Energy accountable.”
Over the past twenty-plus years, there have been four attempts by NNSA to expand pit production through the NEPA process. All failed. According to Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, this string of defeats could have led to the NNSA’s circumvention of the NEPA process during this round of planning for pit production. Adhering to the rules of the NEPA process, he added, “benefits both the public and the government.”
By , Searchlight New Mexico | October 17, 2024 searchlightnm.org
Most Americans don’t seem aware of it, but the United States is plunging into a new nuclear arms race. At the same time that China is ramping up its arsenal of nuclear weapons, Russia has become increasingly bellicose. After a long period of relative dormancy, the U.S. has embarked on its own monumental project to modernize everything in its arsenal — from bomb triggers to warheads to missile systems — at a cost, altogether, of at least $1.5 trillion.
Los Alamos National Laboratory plays a vital role as one of two sites set to manufacture plutonium “pits,” the main explosive element in every thermonuclear warhead. But as a recent court ruling makes clear, the rush to revive weapons production has pushed environmental considerations — from nuclear waste and increases in vehicular traffic to contamination of local waterways, air and vegetation — to the wayside.
OPINION: Nevada has already passed the test
“A return to explosive nuclear testing in the United States would almost certainly trigger a return to explosive nuclear testing in Russia, China and probably other nuclear-armed states.
…America’s nuclear veterans and local downwinders understand all too well the health risks of radiation exposure from above ground nuclear explosive testing conducted until 1963.”
By Ernest J. Moniz, The Nevada Independent | October 16, 2024 thenevadaindependent.com
Many Nevadans remember the days when the United States was driven by necessity to conduct explosive nuclear tests of America’s nuclear arsenal. By testing, we sought to prove the designs of our nuclear weapons and impress on any potential adversary the futility of striking America or our allies. Today, we are long past the point when explosive nuclear testing is required to ensure their effectiveness, and our adversaries well understand their power. Ignoring these essential facts would put us at peril.
Since the first nuclear weapon test explosion in New Mexico in 1945, the United States conducted more than 1,000 such tests. Nine hundred and twenty-eight of those, or 90 percent, have been conducted in Nevada, the last in 1992, more than 30 years ago.
Now, voices from outside Nevada are making the case for a resumption of nuclear explosive testing in the desert, just 65 miles from Las Vegas. That case is not justified by science or military necessity, especially when a resumption of U.S. nuclear testing could trigger an even more precarious nuclear arms race abroad and endanger the physical and economic health of Nevadans at home.
New Interactive Series from The New York Times: “The Price” of New U.S. Nuclear Weapons
The output at Rocky Flats, which at one point during the Cold War hit 1,000 pits per year, dwarfs the modern ambitions of Los Alamos. Still, the new production is expected to generate levels of radiological and hazardous waste that the lab has not experienced. This comes on top of the contamination already present, which the government estimates will cost some $7 billion to clean up.
“We’re endangering our community for an unnecessary arms race that puts us all at risk,” says Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, a Santa Fe-based watchdog.
By W.J. Hennigan | Photographs by An-My Lê – THE NEW YORK TIMES October 10, 2024 nytimes.com
Opinion: America Is Updating Its Nuclear Weapons. The Price: $1.7 Trillion Over 30 Years.
Letter To the Editor in Response to the Article Above by Dr. Ira Helfand:
Re “The Staggering Cost of America’s Nuclear Gamble,” by W.J. Hennigan (Opinion, “At the Brink” series, Oct. 13):
Mr. Hennigan says, almost in passing, that “nuclear weapons do deter our adversaries.”
There is a lot to unpack in these six words. There certainly are situations in which one country’s nuclear weapons do deter its adversaries. Russia’s threats to use its nuclear weapons have clearly deterred the United States and NATO from doing more to support Ukraine.
But does deterrence guarantee that these weapons will not be used? Because a failure of deterrence will cause a catastrophe beyond reckoning.
A nuclear war between the United States and Russia could kill hundreds of millions of people in the first afternoon, and the ensuing climate disruption and famine could kill three-quarters of humanity over the next two years. Is there any conceivable benefit that can be derived from possessing these weapons that is worth running this terrible risk?
There have been many near misses already during the nuclear weapons era, crises where certain countries actually began preparations to launch nuclear weapons.
As former Defense Secretary Robert McNamara pointed out, we have not survived this far into the nuclear era because we knew what we were doing. Rather, as McNamara put it, “It was luck that prevented nuclear war.”
The idea that deterrence makes us safe is a dangerous myth. As our highest national security priority, we should be actively seeking a world without nuclear weapons. We don’t know if such an effort can succeed; we have never tried. We do know what will happen if deterrence fails.
Ira Helfand
Northampton, Mass.
The writer is a former president of the International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, which received the 1985 Nobel Peace Prize.
Santa Fe County commissioners object to environmental finding on LANL power line
“‘This is sacred land. We have alternatives. There are other ways to do this,’ said Commissioner Camilla Bustamante. ‘I couldn’t be in more support of finding an alternative to taking a power line and putting a scar on something that is not equal to just any other physical location.'”
By Cormac Dodd, Santa Fe New Mexican | October 8, 2024 santafenewmexican.com
The Energy Department just made one plutonium pit. Making more is uncertain
Coinciding with NNSA’s announcement of the first diamond-stamped pit, a US District Court ruled that the Energy Department and the NNSA violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to properly consider alternatives before proceeding with pit production, requiring the agency to conduct a programmatic environmental impact assessment.
This was a victory for transparency and the community groups—among them, Savannah River Site Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition—who, for years, have been asking for such an assessment.
By Dylan Spaulding, The Bulletin of Atomic Scientists | October 10 thebulletin.org
Two conflicting developments arose this month in US efforts to produce new plutonium pits for its nuclear weapons: The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) announced it had produced a warhead-ready pit—the explosive core of a nuclear weapon—for the first time in decades, and a federal court ruled that NNSA will be required to consider the cumulative environmental and health impacts of its pit production program.
Overshadowing these events is a vigorous debate over the necessity for new pits at all. Previous analyses have found that plutonium pits have viable lifespans well beyond the expected service life of the current stockpile, whereas production of pits for new weapons is part of a sweeping US nuclear modernization that raises concern over the future of arms control and any possibility for stockpile reductions at a time of deteriorating international relations.
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Judge finds plutonium production plans violated environmental laws
Both sides of the case are ordered to present a joint plan to address violations by Oct. 25
One of the plaintiffs, Jay Coghlan, the executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico called that a “pretty large hurdle to overcome,” for both parties. It’s unclear what happens if the parties fail to present a joint solution.
Source NM | October 8 sourcenm.com
U.S. energy officials illegally neglected to study impacts to the environment in efforts to increase plutonium production for nuclear weapons in New Mexico and South Carolina, a federal judge has ruled.
South Carolina District Court Judge Mary Geiger Lewis sided with environmental, anti-nuclear proliferation and community groups last week who sued the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), which oversees the nuclear weapons stockpile as part of the U.S. Department of Energy.
The U.S. is investing billions into restarting the manufacture of plutonium “pits,” the grapefruit-sized spheres developed for nuclear weapons. The federal government halted its manufacturing program at the Rocky Flats Plant in Colorado in 1989 after an FBI raid due to safety concerns and environmental crimes.
The stated goal has been to produce 80 pits per year starting in 2030, split between Savannah River facility proposed in South Carolina and at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. The project has faced safety concerns and delays. The Government Accountability Office, a federal watchdog agency, found the NNSA had no comprehensive timeline or cost estimate for pit production, but estimates it’s in the tens of billions of dollars.
Community, environment and anti-nuclear groups brought the lawsuit in 2021, alleging that the NNSA failed to consider alternatives to its two-site proposal and violated the law by not reviewing or changing its last analysis from 2008, when it approved the decisions to move forward in 2020.
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U.S. Nuclear Weapons Sites Violated Rules, Judge Finds
In a statement Jay Coghlan, the director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico and a co-plaintiff in the lawsuit, said, “These agencies think they can proceed with their most expensive and complex project ever without required public analyses and credible cost estimates.”
By , Newsweek | October 4 newsweek.com
A federal judge ruled this week that some nuclear weapons sites in the U.S. do violate environmental regulations.
On Thursday, a federal judge ruled that the National Nuclear Security Administration violated environmental regulations by failing to adequately assess the environmental impact of its plan to expand plutonium pit production at facilities in South Carolina and New Mexico.
The case involves a lawsuit that targeted a 2018 plan to establish two plutonium pit production sites—one at South Carolina’s Savannah River and the other at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico. Plaintiffs argued the plan was based on an outdated environmental impact study, which failed to properly assess the implications of simultaneous production at both locations. They also insisted the plan weakened safety and accountability measures for the multibillion-dollar nuclear weapons program and its associated waste disposal.
In the ruling on Thursday, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis said, “Defendants neglected to properly consider the combined effects of their two-site strategy and have failed to convince the court they gave thought to how those effects would affect the environment.”
‘Significant Victory’: Court Rules Planned Plutonium Pits for New Nukes Violate US Law
“Public scrutiny is especially important because the activities at issue here, by their very nature, result in the production of dangerous weapons and extensive amounts of toxic and radioactive waste,” a plaintiffs’ lawyer said.
By Olivia Rosane, CommonDreams | October 3 commondreams.com
In what advocates called a major win for frontline communities and the rule of law, a U.S. district court judge ruled on Monday that the federal government could not move forward with producing plutonium pits—”the heart and trigger of a nuclear bomb“—at two proposed sites in New Mexico and South Carolina.
Instead, Judge Mary Geiger Lewis agreed with a coalition of nonprofit community groups that the Department of Energy (DOE) and the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) violated the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) by failing to fully consider alternatives to producing the pits at New Mexico’s Los Alamos National Laboratory and South Carolina’s Savannah River Site (SRS). Now, the federal government must conduct a full environmental impact statement of how pit production would work at sites across the U.S.
“This is a significant victory that will ensure NEPA’s goal of public participation is satisfied,” attorney for the plaintiffs Ben Cunningham, of the South Carolina Environmental Law Project, said in a statement. “Public scrutiny is especially important because the activities at issue here, by their very nature, result in the production of dangerous weapons and extensive amounts of toxic and radioactive waste. I hope the public will seize the upcoming opportunity to review and comment on the federal agencies’ assessment.”
The Bulletin – Nowhere to hide: How a nuclear war would kill you — and almost everyone else.
“The impacts of nuclear war on agricultural food systems would have dire consequences for most humans who survive the war and its immediate effects.
The overall global consequences of nuclear war—including both short-term and long-term impacts—would be even more horrific causing hundreds of millions—even billions—of people to starve to death.”
By François Diaz-Maurin, Design by Thomas Gaulkin | Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists | October 20 thebulletin.org
This summer, the New York City Emergency Management department released a new public service announcement on nuclear preparedness, instructing New Yorkers about what to do during a nuclear attack. The 90-second video starts with a woman nonchalantly announcing the catastrophic news: “So there’s been a nuclear attack. Don’t ask me how or why, just know that the big one has hit.” Then the PSA video advises New Yorkers on what to do in case of a nuclear attack: Get inside, stay inside, and stay tuned to media and governmental updates.
But nuclear preparedness works better if you are not in the blast radius of a nuclear attack. Otherwise, there’s no going into your house and closing your doors because the house will be gone. Now imagine there have been hundreds of those “big ones.” That’s what even a “small” nuclear war would include. If you are lucky not to be within the blast radius of one of those, it may not ruin your day, but soon enough, it will ruin your whole life.
Today is the 10th Annual International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons
Today, September 26th, 2024, marks a significant milestone—the 10th annual UN-designated International Day for the Total Elimination of Nuclear Weapons. This day, established to promote global nuclear disarmament, saw a high-level meeting at the United Nations. During the event, UN Secretary-General António Guterres delivered a powerful message, urging nuclear-armed states to
“stop gambling with humanity’s future.”
He emphasized the urgent need for countries to honor their disarmament obligations and, as a critical first step, commit to never using nuclear weapons under any circumstances. Guterres also called for maximum transparency from nuclear-weapon states in all matters related to their arsenals.
The push for nuclear disarmament is not only a global concern but also resonates deeply on a local level. Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, has been a vocal advocate for eliminating nuclear weapons. As the leader of an archdiocese in a state that houses key nuclear facilities, including the Los Alamos National Laboratory, Wester has taken a moral stand against the existence and potential use of nuclear arms. His 2022 pastoral letter, Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament, highlighted the ethical and spiritual necessity of eliminating these weapons, emphasizing their devastating potential and the grave responsibility to protect future generations from such destruction.
As we reflect on the long, devasting history of the nuclear weapons complex, leaders like Archbishop Wester remind us that the path to a world without nuclear weapons is not just a political or strategic issue but also a profound moral imperative. Through sustained international cooperation and local advocacy, the vision of a nuclear-free world might one day become a reality.
Plutonium Found in Los Alamos at Levels Comparable to Chernobyl Spark Public Outrage
Extreme contamination in Acid Canyon raises concerns over public safety and environmental health.
ZME Science | September 20, 2024 zmescience.com
A new study has revealed alarming levels of plutonium contamination near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the site where the first atomic bomb was developed. Radioactive contamination at Los Alamos may sound unsurprising but cleanup efforts by the U.S. government during the 1960s supposedly reduced it to safe levels. Today, the region welcomes many hikers and outdoor enthusiasts who embark on its trails.
The findings have led researchers and watchdog groups to call for immediate federal action. However, the government maintains that the area is safe for recreational use.
The contamination is concentrated in Acid Canyon, a site that once served as a dumping ground for nuclear waste from the Los Alamos National Laboratory. Michael Ketterer, a Northern Arizona University scientist and lead researcher on the project, described the situation as unprecedented in his decades-long career.
“What I found here in Acid Canyon is pretty much the most extreme plutonium contamination scenario . . . in an off-site, uncontrolled environmental setting that I’ve ever seen in my career,” Ketterer told the New Mexico Political Report, adding that the contamination levels are comparable to those found near the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in Ukraine.
A Hidden Legacy of Contamination
Acid Canyon’s contamination stems from its history as a disposal site for radioactive waste from 1943 until 1963. The Los Alamos National Laboratory, under the direction of the Department of Defense, piped liquid nuclear waste into the canyon. Over the years, the site has been the focus of cleanup efforts. But Ketterer’s recent findings suggest that those efforts may not have been sufficient at all.
New study makes harrowing discovery in soil near birthplace of atomic bomb: ‘One of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across’
The radioactive material could be absorbed by plants and eventually endanger the rest of the food chain.
The Cooldown | September 20, 2024 thecooldown.com
A new study has made a troubling discovery about the health of ecosystems near Los Alamos, New Mexico, where the atomic bomb was born.
Scientists measured plutonium levels in recreational areas near the nuclear site and found they were similar to those detected at the Chernobyl nuclear disaster site in Ukraine.
What’s happening?
According to the Guardian, a Northern Arizona University research team discovered “extreme concentrations” of plutonium in the soil, plants, and water near Los Alamos.
Michael Ketterer, a NAU scientist and the study’s lead researcher, told the outlet that plutonium concentrations near New Mexico’s Acid Canyon — a popular hiking and recreational spot — were some of the highest he’d ever encountered in public spaces in the U.S. throughout his career.
“This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” he told the Guardian, adding that the radioactive material is “hiding in plain sight.”
Meanwhile, the Department of Defense recently unveiled plans to increase production of plutonium pits — a critical part of nuclear weapons — at the Los Alamos site.
Editorial: US Catholics must face up to the nuclear threat, and act
“The silence, given the time, treasure and human resources devoted to the continued development of nuclear weapons, has been deafening. It amounts to a chilling complicity of the nation’s largest Christian community in a mega-death industry.”
National Catholic Reporter | September 17, 2024 ncronline.org
“We can no longer deny or ignore the dangerous predicament we have created for ourselves. We need to start talking about it with one another, all of us, and figure out concrete steps toward abolishing nuclear weapons and ending the nuclear threat.”
—Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament“
Wester wrote those words in January 2022, a haunting call with a certain biblical resonance coming as they did from a place that doesn’t have a high profile on the ecclesial landscape. It was fitting, then, that a significant step in engaging a public conversation occurred recently at the University of New Mexico — where activists and religious leaders, including Wester and Cardinal Robert McElroy of San Diego, dared to engage with the unthinkable.
New Mexico, as the locale where the nuclear threat was born and where it continues to grow to dimensions beyond imagination, is at the heart of an existential global threat that poses a searing moral question for both church and state. In each realm we are forced to ask as we develop the means to destroy the world: Who are we?
The government is clear in where it is headed and how we define ourselves. Despite the history of hundreds of thousands of gruesome civilian deaths caused by the first uses of nuclear weapons at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan, we have continued unabated in our quest to develop and refine weapons infinitely more destructive than those primitive examples.
The church was less clear, but is changing. Catholic teaching has steadily increased its objections over the decades until it finally, under Pope Francis, now unambiguously condemns even possession of nuclear weapons.
New Mexico forum highlights Catholic views on nuclear disarmament, deterrence
Archbishop John Wester of Santa Fe participated in the forum and said efforts to eliminate nuclear weapons can progress when “reasonable and good-willed people enter into a critical conversation.” These are the kinds of discussions Wester sought to stimulate after the 2022 release of his 52-page pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament,” that challenges conventional political thinking that possessing nuclear weapons serves as a deterrence to potential attacks from other nuclear powers.
Wester wrote that the Archdiocese of Santa Fe has a special responsibility to support the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons since New Mexico hosts two of the nation’s three nuclear weapons laboratories, the Los Alamos and Sandia National Laboratories. Additionally during World War II, he said, “much of the land for the Los Alamos Lab was seized from Native American ancestral lands and Hispanic homesteaders without adequate compensation, continuing the legacy of colonialism, racism and systemic violence.”
National Catholic Reporter | September 12, 2024 ncronline.org
Tina Cordova has made it her life’s work to shed light on the negative health effects plaguing the people of New Mexico after the U.S. military detonated the world’s first atomic bomb at the Trinity test site July 16, 1945. To grasp the severity of the radiation exposure, Cordova says, “it’s important to understand our way of life.”
New Mexicans in that era relied on rivers and creeks as their main water source, and they ate what they cultivated from the soil. The radiation fallout from the detonation contaminated those sources. “We were maximally exposed,” says Cordova, who was raised in a town 45 miles from where the Trinity bomb was detonated.
Nevadans form anti-nuclear testing coalition amid resumption calls
| September 13, 2024 reviewjournal.com
While Nevada once was a site of the country’s nuclear testing and continues to play a critical role in the maintenance of nation’s nuclear stockpile, some Silver State residents are raising the alarm….
Fate of interim storage at Supreme Court could be decided by October
The Fifth Circuit Court in 2023 ruled that the Atomic Energy Act, which created the NRC, did not give the agency the authority to license storage of spent fuel away from the reactors that created it.
The Exchange Monitor | September 6, 2024 exchangemonitor.com
Supreme Court justices were scheduled Sept. 30 to consider requests to overturn a ban on the private interim storage of spent nuclear fuel, according to a notice published Wednesday.
The two requests stem from a 2023 decision in a lawsuit filed by Texas in the U.S. Fifth Circuit Court of Appeals that voided a Nuclear Regulatory Commission license issued to Interim Storage Partners (ISP), a joint venture of Orano USA and Waste Control Specialists.
According to the dockets in both cases, NRC and ISP petitions for high-court review were to be distributed to the nine Supreme Court justices on Sept. 30.
After the justices review the petitions in what is officially called a conference, they will decide whether to hear arguments from attorneys, decide the case based only on briefs filed with the high court since June, or let the Fifth Court ruling stand.
New Mexico pushes feds to send more nuclear waste from Las Alamos to WIPP
“‘Los Alamos National Laboratory must now immediately get to work and fill the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant with legacy waste. All excuses have been voided,’ [NMED Secretary] Kenney said. ‘This is the culmination of years of effort by the Environment Department, with this consent order being one more step in holding the Department of Energy accountable.'”
Carlsbad Current-Argus | September 6, 2024 currentargus.com
New Mexico officials ordered the federal government to remove Cold War-era nuclear waste away from Los Alamos National Laboratory and dispose of some of it at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
Biden’s ‘new’ nuclear strategy and the super-fuse that sets it off
The military is already upgrading warheads capable of fighting a war with both China and Russia simultaneously
“Although any technically accurate assessment of the physical consequences of the large-scale use of nuclear weapons instantly shows that “winning” a nuclear war has no meaning, the United States has strenuously emphasized the development of nuclear weapons technologies that could only make sense if their intended purpose is for fighting and winning nuclear wars.
The super-fuze is exactly that kind of technology.”
Responsible Statecraft | August 29, 2024 responsiblestatecraft.org
The New York Times reported last week that President Biden has approved a secret nuclear strategy refocusing on Chinese and Russian nuclear forces.
According to the paper, the new nuclear guidance “reorients America’s deterrent strategy” to meet “the need to deter Russia, the PRC (China) and North Korea simultaneously.”
However, Biden’s approval of this strategy is no more than a tacit acknowledgment of a two-decade-long U.S. technical program that has been more than just a “slight modernization” of weapons components, but a dramatic step towards the capability to fight and win nuclear wars with both China and Russia. In other words, there is nothing really “new” here at all, save the very public nature of the strategy’s acknowledgement.
In the face of all of this, Chinese and Russian leaders will have no choice but to implement countermeasures that further increase the already dangerously high readiness of their nuclear forces. This includes intensified worst-case planning that will increase the chances of nuclear responses to false warnings of attack.
The technical source of this vast improvement in U.S. nuclear firepower is a relatively new super fuse or “super fuze” that is already being fitted onto all U.S. strategic ballistic missiles. This fuse more than doubles the ability of the Trident II Submarine Launched Ballistic Missiles (SLBMs) carrying W-76 100kt warheads to destroy Chinese and Russian nuclear-tipped Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs) in hardened silos.
The currently (not fully loaded) U.S. Trident Submarine force carries about 890 W-76 100kt and 400 W-88 475kt warheads. The 400 W-88 warheads have been outfitted with the super-fuze and were originally supposed to have the combination of accuracy and yield to destroy Russian silo-based ICBMs before they are launched. But there are not enough W-88s to attack both Russian and Chinese silo-based ICBMs before they can be launched.
THE GUARDIAN: Plutonium levels near US atomic site in Los Alamos similar to Chornobyl, study finds
Much of the land near the atomic bomb’s birthplace was converted to recreational areas, but toxic waste remains
The Guardian | August 26, 2024 theguardian.com
Soil, plants and water along popular recreation spots near Los Alamos, New Mexico, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, are contaminated with “extreme concentrations” of plutonium, a new study has found, but calls for the federal government to act have been dismissed.
Michael Ketterer, a Northern Arizona University scientist and lead researcher on the project, said the plutonium levels in and around New Mexico’s Acid Canyon were among the highest he had ever seen in a publicly accessible area in the US during his decades-long career – comparable to what is found in Ukraine at the site of the Chornobyl nuclear disaster.
The radioactive isotopes are “hiding in plain sight”, Ketterer said.
“This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” he said.
The paper comes on the heels of the US Department of Defense announcing it will ramp up production of plutonium pits, a core component of nuclear weapons, at Los Alamos. Meanwhile, the US Senate approved a defense bill with expanded funding for those exposed to the government’s radioactive waste. Local public health advocates say they are outraged by the exclusion of the Los Alamos region from the benefits.
Research: Plutonium Levels at Los Alamos Rival Chernobyl’s
Hikers use the New Mexico recreation area without being aware of contamination
, NEWSER | August 26, 2024 newser.com
Los Alamos Researcher Warns of Plutonium in Rec Areas
The federal Atomic Energy Commission turned over New Mexico land around its national laboratory decades ago to Los Alamos County without restricting its use, despite its past as the site where the atomic bomb was developed. Much of it was developed for recreational use. Researchers say there’s a problem: They’ve detected “extreme concentrations” of plutonium in the area, which hikers and others aren’t aware of when they head down a trail, the Guardian reports. “This is one of the most shocking things I’ve ever stumbled across in my life,” said Michael Ketterer of Northern Arizona University, the project’s lead researcher.
Plutonium levels detected around Acid Canyon were among the highest Ketterer said he’s seen in a publicly accessible area in the US, and are comparable to those at the site of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster in Ukraine. People using the trails aren’t in immediate danger, he said, while warning that plutonium can get into water supplies that eventually reach the Rio Grande. It also can enter the food chain through plants or spread widely in ash during a wildfire. The Department of Energy issued a statement saying that the levels were “very low and well within the safe exposure range.” Public health advocates want warning signs to go up for recreational users.
Mapping by a local public health advocacy group, Nuclear Watch New Mexico, that used public records also showed high plutonium levels at sample sites throughout the area, per the Guardian. The research shows “New Mexico will forever be saddled with a radioactive isotope that has a 24,000-year half-life,” said Tina Cordova of the Tularosa Basin Downwinders Consortium advocacy group. Ketterer said cleanup—removing the contamination—isn’t practical, per the AP. “It really can’t be undone,” he said.Canyon.
People Harmed by Radiation Exposure Can Forget About Any Federal Compensation
Speaker Mike Johnson killed a proposal to provide benefits to victims of America’s nuclear program.
“It’s really tough to have people say, ‘Nope, sorry that’s too expensive. It wasn’t too expensive to poison you, but it’s too expensive to fix what we did and you aren’t worth it.'”
By Katherine Hapgood, Mother Jones | August 21, 2024 motherjones.com
It wasn’t a difficult choice for Linda Evers, after graduating high school in 1976, to take a job crushing dirt for the Kerr McGee uranium mill, just north of her hometown Grants, New Mexico. Most gigs in town paid $1.75 an hour. This one offered $9 an hour.
She spent seven years working in New Mexico’s uranium mines and mills, driving a truck and loading the ore crusher for much of the late 1970s and early ’80s, including through her pregnancies with each of her children. “When I told them I was pregnant,” Evers, now 66, recalled, “they told me it was okay, I could work until my belly wouldn’t let me reach the conveyor belts anymore.”
Both children were born with health defects—her son with a muscle wrapped around the bottom of his stomach and her daughter without hips. Today, Evers herself suffers from scarring lungs, a degenerative bone and joint disease, and multiple skin rashes. All of which doctors have attributed to radiation exposure.
“We never learned about uranium exposure or any of that. They were killing us. And they knew they were killing us.”
Scientist says there’s legacy plutonium contamination in Los Alamos
‘Extreme plutonium contamination scenario’ identified in research from , soil, water and plant samples taken in Acid Canyon arroyos
, SOURCE NM | August 16, 2024 sourcenm.com
Los Alamos, the Atomic City, is facing a legacy of its nickname.
High levels of plutonium present in samples taken in July from soil, plants and water in Los Alamos’ Acid Canyon may be the oldest contamination in the state, predating the 1945 Trinity Site atomic test, said Michael Ketterer, an analytical chemist and retired professor of chemistry from Northern Arizona University.
“There are some references to contamination being introduced into Acid Canyon starting in 1943,” he said Thursday. “It is very logical to me that this is some of the earliest produced material.”
The legacy plutonium contamination estimated to have lasted into the 1960s is still impacting the land, water and potentially human health, he said in a presentation hosted by Nuclear Watch NM.
“What I’ve found here in Acid Canyon, my friends, is I’d say pretty much the most extreme plutonium contamination scenario I’ve seen in an offsite, uncontrolled environmental setting,” Ketterer said, alluding to thousands of plutonium samples he’s analyzed in his 20-year career.
He said that contamination levels surpass samples he took at private properties around the former plutonium pit production site in Rocky Flats, Colorado.
One concern, which he said warrants immediate federal or state environment protection intervention, was the levels of plutonium contamination in water flows in Acid Canyon.
Scientist describe levels of plutonium near Los Alamos ‘alarmingly high’
LOS ALAMOS, N.M. (KRQE) – New findings from a study aimed at researching how much plutonium is in the ground and water near Los Alamos National Laboratory, have the lead scientists concerned.
“I’m just trying to show New Mexicans what the truth is here,” said Dr. Michael Ketterer, Professor Emeritus of Chemistry and Biochemistry at Northern Arizona University. Over the last few months, Dr. Ketterer has collected and analyzed plutonium levels from a trailhead at Acid Canyon in Los Alamos, NM.
“I see a lot of things to be concerned about here,” Dr. Ketterer said.
In his study, Dr. Ketterer says he found “alarmingly high results” of plutonium contamination. Though radiation levels are not high enough to hurt people walking the trail, advocates with Nuclear Watch New Mexico worry about what could happen if a fire broke out, warning that the smoke inhaled could lead to lung cancer.
“Were Acid Canyon to burn in a wildfire, and we know that threat is all too real, that could be dangerous in the form of respirable plutonium that is released to the air through wildfire,” said Jay Coghlan, Executive Director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“We can’t really predict where it’s going to go and how bad it’s going to be,” added Dr. Ketterer about the possibility of a fire happening in the area.
Copyright 2024 Nexstar Media Inc
Watchdog group reports ‘extreme contamination’ of plutonium at Los Alamos open space
The legacy of environmental waste is “hiding in plain sight” at a popular open space in the heart of Los Alamos that became a dumping ground during the Manhattan Project, according to testing results a nuclear watchdog group released Thursday.
By Daniel J. Chacón [email protected], Santa Fe New Mexican | August 15, 2024 santafenewmexican.com
Soil, plant and water samples collected in July from Acid Canyon — yes, Acid Canyon — revealed “extreme contamination,” including detections of what Nuclear Watch New Mexico said is some of the earliest plutonium produced by humankind.
“What I found here in Acid Canyon [is] pretty much the most extreme contamination scenario I’ve seen in an off-site, uncontrolled environmental setting,” Michael Ketterer, a professor emeritus of chemistry and biochemistry at Northern Arizona University, said during a virtual briefing.
Ketterer, who collected the samples in July with the help of the watchdog group, said he’s analyzed tens of thousands of plutonium samples in a decadeslong career.
“This is way, way, way, way, way at the top end of the charts in terms of how much,” he said. “This is extreme contamination.”
Ketterer said he would compare it to “Chernobyl proximity samples” and samples close to Palomares, Spain, after a B-52 bomber carrying hydrogen bombs collided with a refueling plane in 1966 and coated the seaside town in radioactive dust.
“Hundreds of samples from near Rocky Flats do not come close at all,” he said, referring to a former nuclear weapons production facility in Colorado.
Nuclear News Archive – 2022
In the Pacific, Outcry Over Japan’s Plan to Release Fukushima Wastewater
“Next year in spring, [Japan] plans to begin releasing the water into the Pacific after treatment for most radioactive particles…”
By Pete McKenzie, NEW YORK TIMES | December 30, 2022 nytimes.com
The proposal has angered many of Japan’s neighbors, particularly those with the most direct experience of unexpected exposure to dangerous levels of radiation.
SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN – OUR VIEW – Getting rid of plutonium pits — so many questions
A Department of Energy proposal to dilute and dispose of plutonium waste at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad is ready for public comment — the draft environmental impact statement, all 412 pages of it, has been released.
“Stay alert for notices of meetings and time for public comment. There’s no guarantee informed opposition will change plans by agencies intent on certain action, but speaking up beats staying quiet. Oh, and think about this: before rushing full speed ahead to produce even more plutonium pits, it’s time to at least try to find a way to dispose of the waste we’ve already created.”
[NukeWatch will provide sample comments and make it as easy as possible to participate in the public comment process for the WIPP Permit and Plutonium Waste Disposal plans]
SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | December 24, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
The public can weigh in, whether in writing or by showing up for public hearings that will take place early next year.
Buckle up. This is going to be a contentious discussion.
The U.S. wants to be rid of 34 metric tons of plutonium bomb cores, or pits, stored at the Pantex Plant in Amarillo. The pits are Cold War legacies; because WIPP is restricted in the type of waste it can take, before disposing of it, the material must be diluted. Thus, the term, dilute and dispose. The Department of Energy’s decision about the waste was announced two years ago, but with no details.
At one point the Energy Department wanted to turn Cold War plutonium into a mixed oxide fuel for use in commercial nuclear plants. That would have happened at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, but billions in cost overruns and delays hamstrung the effort, and the Trump administration killed the project in 2018.
It chose the dilute-and-disposal plan.
The draft statement fleshes out just what would happen to prepare the pits for disposal — in a facility, we might point out, that currently is seeking a renewal of its hazardous waste permit from the state of New Mexico. WIPP is open, but state Environment Department Secretary James Kenney and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham want more oversight of waste disposal at the plant.
That back and forth is separate from the Energy Department dilute-and-disposal proposal, but the permit discussion provides context for the coming fierce debate.Continue reading
Exposed: The Most Polluted Place in the United States
A new book investigates the toxic legacy of Hanford, the Washington state facility that produced plutonium for nuclear weapons.
“Bechtel is a privately owned corporation and we’re spending billions of dollars paying this company to not get the job done. It’s a big mess.”
By Tara Lohan, The Revelator | December 21, 2022 ecowatch.com
The most polluted place in the United States — perhaps the world — is one most people don’t even know. Hanford Nuclear Site sits in the flat lands of eastern Washington. The facility — one of three sites that made up the government’s covert Manhattan Project — produced plutonium for Fat Man, the atomic bomb dropped on Nagasaki during World War II. And it continued producing plutonium for weapons for decades after the war, helping to fuel the Cold War nuclear arms race.
Today Hanford — home to 56 million gallons of nuclear waste, leaking storage tanks, and contaminated soil — is an environmental disaster and a catastrophe-in-waiting.
It’s “the costliest environmental remediation project the world has ever seen and, arguably, the most contaminated place on the entire planet,” writes journalist Joshua Frank in the new book, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.
It’s also shrouded in secrecy.
Frank has worked to change that, beginning with a series of blockbuster investigations published in Seattle Weekly a decade ago. Atomic Days offers an even fuller picture of the ecological threats posed by Hanford and its failed remediation.
The Revelator spoke with him about the environmental consequences, the botched cleanup operation, and what comes next.
Why is the most polluted place in the country so little known?
We have to understand what it was born out of, which was the Manhattan Project. There were three locations picked — Los Alamos [N.M.], Oak Ridge [Tenn.] and Hanford — to build the nuclear program.
New Mexico Presses US to Develop Other Nuclear Waste Sites
State wants full waste inventory, limits to disposal
WIPP, open since 1999, mining new panels
BLOOMBERG NEWS | December 20, 2022 news.bloomberglaw.com
New Mexico will be “unwavering” in sticking to proposed new conditions on a federal underground nuclear waste repository, a state official said, including one that revokes the facility’s permit should Congress expand its disposal limit.
The state is demanding the Energy Department and its site contractor, Nuclear Waste Partnership LLC, furnish an accurate inventory of all remaining wastes awaiting clean-up and emplacement at the site and an annual report detailing the agency’s progress toward siting another repository in another state.
Clean Energy or Weapons? What the ‘Breakthrough’ in Nuclear Fusion Really Means
From Tri-Valley CAREs: On NIF, Nuclear Weapons and Fusion Hype
“On December 13, the Department of Energy (DOE) and Livermore Lab held a press conference and, with maximum hoopla, announced that an experiment at the National Ignition Facility earlier that month had achieved fusion “ignition”.
Physicist MV Ramana, who is currently with the University of British Columbia and was previously at Princeton’s Nuclear Futures Laboratory and its Program on Science and Global Security, wrote this article for a science and tech magazine. For more information on what did and did not happen at NIF, we highly recommend it:”
Clean Energy or Weapons? What the ‘Breakthrough’ in Nuclear Fusion Really Means
SCIENCE – THE WIRE | December 19, 2022 science.thewire.in
- On December 13, the US Department of Energy announced that the National Ignition Facility had reached a “milestone”: the achievement of “ignition” in nuclear fusion earlier in the month.
- While the step has been described as a milestone in clean energy, generating electricity commercially or at an industrial scale through fusion is likely unattainable in any realistic sense – at least within the lifetimes of most readers of this article.
- The main utility that the facility offers nuclear weapons designers and planners is by providing a greater understanding of the underlying science and modernizing these weapons.
The Guardian [Letters]: Nuclear fusion ‘holy grail’ is not the answer to our energy prayers
Dr Mark Diesendorf questions the claim that nuclear fusion is safe and clean, while Dr Chris Cragg suspects true fusion power is a long way off. Plus letters from Dick Willis and Martin O’Donovan
“It is great news that scientists have succeeded in getting more energy out of fusion than they put in. It brings to mind a quote from a past director of the Central Electricity Generating Board: ‘One day you may get more energy out of nuclear fusion than you put in, but you will never get more money out than you put in.’” – Martin O’Donovan (Ashtead, Surrey)
THE GUARDIAN: LETTERS | December 19, 2022 theguardian.com
You report on the alleged “breakthrough” on nuclear fusion, in which US researchers claim that break-even has been achieved (Breakthrough in nuclear fusion could mean ‘near-limitless energy’, 12 December). To go from break-even, where energy output is greater than total energy input, to a commercial nuclear fusion reactor could take at least 25 years. By then, the whole world could be powered by safe and clean renewable energy, primarily solar and wind.
The claim by the researchers that nuclear fusion is safe and clean is incorrect. Laser fusion, particularly as a component of a fission-fusion hybrid reactor, can produce neutrons that can be used to produce the nuclear explosives plutonium-239, uranium-235 and uranium-233. It could also produce tritium, a form of heavy hydrogen, which is used to boost the explosive power of a fission explosion, making fission bombs smaller and hence more suitable for use in missile warheads. This information is available in open research literature.
The US National Ignition Facility, which did the research, is part of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, which has a history of involvement with nuclear weaponry.
Dr Mark Diesendorf
University of New South Wales
The Energy Department’s fusion breakthrough: It’s not really about generating electricity
“Because of how the Energy Department presented the breakthrough in a news conference headlined by Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm, news coverage has largely glossed over its implications for monitoring the country’s nuclear weapons stockpile. Instead, even many serious news outlets focused on the possibility of carbon-free, fusion-powered electricity generation—even though the NIF achievement has, at best, a distant and tangential connection to power production.”
By John Mecklin, THE BULLETIN OF ATOMIC SCIENTISTS | December 16, 2022 thebulletin.org
This week’s headlines have been full of reports about a “major breakthrough” in nuclear fusion technology that, many of those reports misleadingly suggested, augurs a future of abundant clean energy produced by fusion nuclear power plants. To be sure, many of those reports lightly hedged their enthusiasm by noting that (as The Guardian put it) “major hurdles” to a fusion-powered world remain.
Indeed, they do.
The fusion achievement that the US Energy Department announced this week is scientifically significant, but the significance does not relate primarily to electricity generation. Researchers at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory’s National Ignition Facility, or NIF, focused the facility’s 192 lasers on a target containing a small capsule of deuterium–tritium fuel, compressing it and inducing what is known as ignition.
New trend: long-term investments in the nuclear weapons industry are dropping
The report “Risky Returns” provides an overview of investments in 24 companies heavily involved in the production of nuclear weapons for the arsenals of China, France, India, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States in 2022. Overall, the report finds that 306 financial institutions made over $746 billion available to these companies, in loans, underwriting, shares or bonds. US-based Vanguard remains the largest single investor, with $68,180 million invested in the nuclear weapon industry.
By ICAN | December 15, 2022 icanw.org
While the total value of investments in the 24 nuclear weapon producers was higher than previous years, this is also attributed to share price variances through a turbulent year in the defence sector. Some nuclear weapon producers also produce conventional weapons and saw their stock values rise, likely resulting from the announcements by NATO states that they would significantly increase defence spending. Yet the report found no increase in the number of investors in the nuclear weapon producers.
Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America
A new book is out about Hanford, by Joshua Frank, co-editor of Counterpunch, Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America.
Once home to the United States’s largest plutonium production site, the Hanford Nuclear Reservation in Washington state is laced with 56 million gallons of radioactive waste. The threat of an explosive accident at Hanford is all too real—an event that could be more catastrophic than Chernobyl.
Continue reading
Fallout from a nuclear past: A new book explores the human toll of “nuclear colonization” in New Mexico
Of the three waves of colonization New Mexico has undergone — Spanish, American and nuclear — the latter is the least explored. And for author Myrriah Gómez, there were personal reasons to reveal the truth about how “nuclear colonization” has altered the state’s past and continues to shape its future.
By Alicia Inez Guzmán Searchlight New Mexico | December 2022 searchlightnm.org
Gómez, an assistant professor at the University of New Mexico, is the author of “Nuclear Nuevo México,” a book that explores the history of the Los Alamos National Laboratory and the fundamental tension of living in its shadow. Its publication this month by the University of Arizona Press couldn’t be timelier: Los Alamos is currently preparing to build plutonium “pits” that act as triggers in nuclear weapons, putting the lab front and center in an ongoing national debate about nuclear impacts.
“If Spanish colonialism brought Spanish colonizers and U.S. colonialism brought American colonizers,” as Gómez writes in her book, “then nuclear colonialism brought nuclear colonizers, scientists, military personnel, atomic bomb testing, and nuclear waste among them.”
Ukraine still fears another Chernobyl-size disaster at Europe’s largest nuclear plant
“Why did they say it was safe to go outdoors? Why did they build it so close to Kyiv?…Why was it all such a secret?” – Yuriy Samoilenko, chief environmental inspector at Kyiv’s city hall at the time of the Chernobyl meltdown.
By JULIAN HAYDA, NPR | December 11, 2022 npr.org
CHERNOBYL, Ukraine — Sophia Arkadiyivna remembers when the Soviet Union built the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant in 1977, just 20 miles from the village where she served as mayor.
After years of atomic energy powering big Russian cities like Moscow, Leningrad and Voronezh, the USSR was finally ready to expand the technology to other Soviet republics like Ukraine. Soviet propaganda promised easier jobs and cleaner air.
“We didn’t have a reason to distrust the government. They showed us how good things could be,” she says.
Or so she thought at the time. It didn’t take long for Arkadiyivna to turn skeptical.
Nuclear waste permit ‘more stringent’ New Mexico says as feds look to renew for 10 years
NMED Cabinet Secretary James Kenney said the State wanted a permit with stronger regulations moving forward, to better protect people and the environment from the impacts of nuclear waste disposal.
“It will be more stringent, full stop,” Kenney said. “The conditions were adding to it are designed to add more accountability to the whole complex that are sending waste to WIPP.”
By Adrian Hedden, Carlsbad Current-Argus | December 10, 2022 currentargus.com
Tougher rules for a nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad could be on the way as New Mexico officials sought “more stringent” regulations as the federal government sought to renew its permit with the state for the facility.
The State sought new requirements to prioritize nuclear waste from within New Mexico for disposal, called for an accounting of all of the waste planned for disposal in the next decade and regular updates on federal efforts to find the location for a new repository as conditions of the permit.
The Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is owned by the U.S. Department of Energy which holds a permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) that must be updated every 10 years.
The facility sees transuranic (TRU) nuclear waste from DOE facilities around the country disposed of via burial in an underground salt formation about 2,000 feet beneath the surface.
The Bizarre Mystery of the Only Armed Nuke America Ever Lost
The lost nuke has never been found—only the pilot’s helmet was recovered, and the government kept it secret for years.
Matthew Gault, Vice News | 2022 vice.com
In the early days of the Cold War, the United States wanted to make sure it could launch a retaliatory strike against the Soviet Union as quickly as possible if it launched a nuclear strike. The goal was 15 minutes. This was before the advent of submarines that launch ballistic missiles and intercontinental ballistic missile silos. From 1960 until 1968, America maintained that 15-minute ability to pepper the globe with nukes by putting pilots on 24-hour alert. For more than a decade, hundreds of U.S. pilots criss-crossed the planet in planes loaded with nuclear bombs. To keep up with brutal hours, many of the pilots and crew took amphetamine.
As noted in Task & Purpose, the U.S. military had 32 nuclear accidents during the Cold War, and six of the weapons are still unaccounted for. Every story of a Broken Arrow—the military term for a missing nuke—is harrowing, but what happened off the coast of Japan in 1965 was especially frightening.
On December 5, 1965, U.S. Navy Lt. Douglas Webster was supposed take an A-4E Skyhawk loaded with a nuclear bomb into the sky. On the USS Ticonderoga aircraft carrier, stationed in the Philippine Sea about 70 miles from Okinawa, Japan, the crew loaded the weapon onto the vehicle and Webster got into the cockpit. The crew then pushed the plane to an elevator that would bring it up to the flight deck.
Watch a brief YouTube Clip about this event:
Making the Case That Nuclear Weapons Are Immoral: An Interview With Archbishop John C. Wester
If nuclear weapons are ever eliminated, it will be the result of actions big and small at every communal level, from international leaders to civil society.
Arms Control Association | December 2022 armscontrol.org
The Reverend John C. Wester occupies a unique role in this continuum as the Roman Catholic archbishop of Santa Fe, whose archdiocese is home to the Los Alamos and Sandia national nuclear laboratories and site of the first Manhattan Project nuclear tests. In January, Wester issued a pastoral letter, “Living in the Light of Christ’s Peace: A Conversation Toward Nuclear Disarmament,” which called for the abolition of nuclear weapons and declared that the archdiocese “must be part of a strong peace initiative.” He had a compelling basis for action: In 2021, Pope Francis shifted the church’s position from accepting deterrence as a legitimate rationale for nuclear weapons to decrying the possession of nuclear weapons as “immoral.” Even with the pope’s admonition, however, Wester is finding his peace initiative slow going. He discussed his efforts with Carol Giacomo, editor of Arms Control Today. This interview has been edited for length and clarity.
ARMS CONTROL TODAY: You often tell the story of visiting Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 2017. It almost seems like an epiphany. How did that trip and other forces, including serving as the top Roman Catholic Church official in Santa Fe, home to Los Alamos and Sandia, propel you to take on the mission of eliminating nuclear weapons?
Archbishop John C. Wester: Until I came here to Santa Fe, I was pretty much like I believe most people are, lulled into a false sense of complacency.
Where Are All the Nuclear Bunkers?
Many of these shelters, which are marked by a characteristic yellow sign, were not specifically designed for such purposes and may not have provided sufficient levels of protection against radiation.
ARISTOS GEORGIOU, Newsweek | November 22, 2022 newsweek.com
Since Russia launched its invasion of Ukraine in late February, concerns over the potential use of nuclear weapons have grown. Specially designed bunkers may provide some degree of protection to people in the event of a nuclear attack.
But where are all the nuclear bunkers in the United States and who are they for?
During the Cold War, the U.S. government constructed a number of bunkers around Washington, D.C., and elsewhere that were designed to provide a safe haven for high-ranking members and staff during a nuclear attack on the country.
Nuclear watchdog accuses ex-environment official of conflicting interests after she accepts LANL job
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said there’s a long list of Environment Department officials who went to work for the lab or the agencies that manage it.
He noted Chris Catechis, acting director of the state Resources Protection Division, is going to work for the lab just weeks after Stringer took a job with the nuclear security agency.”
BY SCOTT WYLAND, THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | November 28, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
A nuclear watchdog group wants a state commission to nullify its decision on a permit for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s radioactive liquid waste treatment facility, arguing the panel’s former chairwoman backed a ruling favorable to the lab while she sought a job with the federal agency that oversees it.
Strong earthquake rattles remote West Texas desert
Many of these shelters, which are marked by a characteristic yellow sign, were not specifically designed for such purposes and may not have provided sufficient levels of protection against radiation
BY TEXAS | November 16, 2022 spectrumlocalnews.com
MENTONE, Texas (AP) — A strong earthquake shook a sparsely populated patch of desert in West Texas on Thursday, causing tremors felt as far away as the Mexican city of Ciudad Juárez. The magnitude 5.3 earthquake struck around 3:30 p.m., according to Jim DeBerry, a meteorologist with the National Weather Service in the West Texas city Midland. He said the strength of the quake means it likely caused damage in the remote oil patch and scrubland, but none had been reported so far.
DeBerry said the epicenter was about 23 miles (37 kilometers) south of Mentone, a tiny community south of the New Mexico state line and 95 miles (153 kilometers) west of Midland.
State Rep. Eddie Morales, Jr., whose district includes Mentone, said he spoke with local authorities and there were no reported injuries. He said via Twitter that state officials will be “inspecting roads, bridges and other infrastructure as a precaution.”
DeBerry said there were reports of people feeling vibrations from the quake 200 miles (515 kilometers) west in the border city of Ciudad Juárez and as far south as Terlingua, a small community near the Rio Grande and Big Bend National Park.
Russia-US nuclear disarmament talks postponed
Officials from the two countries were due to meet in the Egyptian capital of Cairo from November 29 to December 6.
ALJAZEERA | November 28, 2022 aljazeera.com
Nuclear disarmament talks between Russia and the United States set to take place this week have been postponed, according to Moscow’s foreign ministry and the US Embassy.
Officials from the two countries were due to meet in the Egyptian capital of Cairo from November 29 to December 6 to discuss resuming inspections under the New START nuclear arms reduction treaty, which had been suspended in March 2020 due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
After decades as a nuclear powerhouse, France makes its play in offshore wind
EDF says the 480-megawatt Saint-Nazaire Offshore Wind Farm would help to “support the French State’s energy transition goals.”
By Anmar Frangoul | November 25, 2022 cnbc.com
A facility described as “France’s first commercial-scale offshore wind project” is fully operational, multinational utility EDF said this week.
The news represents a significant step forward for the country’s offshore wind sector, with more projects set to come online in the years ahead.
In a statement Wednesday, EDF said the 480-megawatt Saint-Nazaire Offshore Wind Farm would help to “support the French State’s energy transition goals, which include targets to generate 32% of its energy from renewable sources by 2030.” EDF’s majority shareholder is the French state.
Gov. Lujan Grisham demands President Biden block nuclear waste site in southeast New Mexico
Nuclear waste storage in southeast New Mexico drew the ire of Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham, who called on President Joe Biden via a Wednesday letter to block such a project near Carlsbad and Hobbs for perceived threats to nearby residents and implications of environmental racism.
“New Mexico has grave concerns for the risk this proposed storage site would pose to our citizens and communities, our first responders, our environment, and to New Mexico’s agriculture and natural resource industries,” Lujan Grisham wrote.
CALRSBAD CURRENT ARGUS | Carlsbad Current-Argus | November 18, 2022 currentargus.com
Holtec International proposed the project, which would store up to 100,000 metric tons of spent nuclear fuel rods on the surface in a remote area near the Eddy-Lea county line, after being recruited by a consortium of local leaders in the area known as the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance.
The Alliance provided the land, about 1,000 acres amid the oilfields of the Permian Basin, and worked with Holtec to promote the project and seek public support.
But Lujan Grisham, her administration and elected officials both at the state government and in Congress became opposed to the project, frequently voicing their disapproval in the years since.
Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could start a race for nukes, Austin says
The Defense secretary painted a bleak picture for the world, alluding to a scenario in which autocrats will race to acquire the bomb if Russia isn’t repelled.
“Austin further warned that “Putin may resort again to profoundly irresponsible nuclear saber-rattling” as the war drags on and if Ukrainian forces continue their gains against Russian troops.”
POLITICO | & ALEXANDER WARD, November 19, 2022 politico.com
HALIFAX, Nova Scotia — Russia’s invasion of Ukraine could entice autocrats around the world to race to develop nuclear weapons, Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin said Saturday, potentially sparking a dangerous era of nuclear proliferation.
Moscow has threatened to use tactical nuclear weapons against Ukraine several times over the past nine months, leading to a flurry of phone calls this month between U.S., European and Russian officials trying to tamp down tensions.
A day before he leaves for a multi-day swing through the Indo-Pacific, Austin painted a bleak picture for the world, alluding to a scenario in which autocrats will race to acquire the bomb if Putin isn’t successfully repelled.
Watchdog agency grills LANL, nuclear officials on lab safety
[NukeWatch would amend this headline to add “‘lightly’ grills” – The DNFSB was asking tough questions, but DOE and the LANL contractors were not forthcoming with those answers.]
“Much of the discussion involved complex, technical subjects. But board Chairwoman Joyce Connery said a basic complaint is the lack of response the board has gotten at times when raising concerns in letters sent to the lab and nuclear security agency.”
THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | November 16, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
A federal watchdog agency on Wednesday grilled top officials from Los Alamos National Laboratory and the agency that oversees nuclear weapons about ongoing safety concerns and how they aim to resolve them as the lab gears up to produce an unprecedented number of warhead triggers.
The Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board, an independent organization within the executive branch, questioned lab Director Thom Mason and National Nuclear Security Administration head Jill Hruby about safety issues that could prove important as the lab moves toward making 30 bomb cores, known as pits, per year by 2026.
The board provides recommendations and advice to the president and the secretary of energy regarding public health and safety issues at Department of Energy defense nuclear facilities.
The daylong hearing was held at the Santa Fe Community Convention Center. It is the first time in several years the safety board has held a public hearing in the Santa Fe area.
Continue reading
A Clear Case of Disqualification of NMED Deputy Cabinet Secretary Stephanie Stringer – Concerned Citizens For Nuclear Safety
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has provided evidence to CCNS and Honor Our Pueblo Existence (HOPE) that Stephanie Stringer, a New Mexico Environment Department Deputy Cabinet Secretary and Chair of the New Mexico Water Quality Commission, made adjudicatory decisions against the non-governmental organizations while she was applying for NNSA employment.
CONCERNED CITIZENS FOR NUCLEAR SAFETY | November 17, 2022 nuclearactive.com
This is the second time NNSA has hired an adjudicatory decision-maker during an ongoing proceeding addressing the groundwater discharge permit, DP-1132, for the Radioactive Liquid Waste Treatment Facility at Los Alamos National Laboratory. http://nuclearactive.org/wp-content/uploads/2019/06/190606-CCW-Petition-for-Mandamus-2019-06-06.pdf , see ¶¶ 14 – 24.
This time, Stephanie Stringer, after applying for the NNSA job, demonstrated her bias by not recusing herself from the matter. She voted against the NGOs in the requested permit review before the Water Quality Control Commission.
New study reveals ‘shocking’ number of deaths in southern Ohio county
“PORTS is a massive complex that dominates the landscape in Pike County and, for people in the communities that surround it, so do cancer and death.”
OHIO, LOCAL12 NEWS | | November 16, 2022 local12.com
ANOTHER SOMBER MOMENT IN THE CEMETERY
PIKE COUNTY, Ohio (WKRC) – On a crisp, sun-drenched day, the shadow of sadness followed Larry Farmer as he made a now-routine somber walk at Mound Cemetery in Piketon, Ohio.
Larry comes there three-to-four times a month to visit his son.
“I come in here and talk to Zach,” Larry said, at a spot overlooking a tombstone with etched pictures of his son smiling in his baseball uniform.
AN ALL-AMERICAN STORY
Zach Farmer was an All-American baseball pitcher at Piketon High School and rising start at Ohio State, when his dreams of making it to the big leagues were cut down by acute myeloid leukemia.
He died in 2015, just eight days after he turned 21.
“You’re never going to find peace,” Larry said as he recalled the pain of losing his son.
Russia and US to hold first nuclear talks since Ukraine war
“While the U.S. has cut off most contacts with Russia over the invasion, some channels remain. In Moscow, officials have called for a resumption of broader strategic dialogue, including on a possible successor treaty to New START. The U.S. has said that’s not possible until the inspections resume.”
PONCA CITY NEWS | November 12, 2022 poncacitynews.com
Russia said it will hold talks with the U.S. from late November to early December in Cairo about inspections of atomic weapons sites under the New START treaty, a first step toward reviving broader arms-control talks suspended since the Russian invasion of Ukraine.
The consultations in the Egyptian capital will last about a week, Russian Deputy Foreign Minister Sergei Ryabkov said Friday, according to state news service RIA Novosti.
The Guardian – Letters: nuclear power is not the only option (UK Opinions)
THE GUARDIAN | November 13, 2022 theguardian.com
I do not share your enthusiasm for the “good news” that Sizewell C is believed to be safe from Jeremy Hunt’s budgetary cuts (“Britain can’t afford to waver over nuclear power – soon it will be too late”, Editorial). “On a freezing cold, windless, winter’s evening”, Britain’s grid will indeed need an alternative power source to wind or solar, but why is it assumed that only nuclear can provide an alternative base load? And at the cost of how many billions? And how many decades of lead time?
Geothermal could do the job faster, more safely and cheaply – for about a quarter of the cost. Geothermal power plants operate already in the United States, Italy and Iceland. And nothing is more certain and regular than the tide twice a day; sea turbines already operate in tidal flows off Orkney and Shetland and are another safe source of energy baseload. Let us not be blinkered by nuclear.
Wendy Fowler
Carnac-Rouffiac, France
Sweden to spurn nuclear weapons as NATO member, foreign minister says
Sweden plans to declare nuclear weapons cannot be stationed on its territory when the country joins the NATO military alliance, following in the footsteps of its Nordic neighbors, the Swedish foreign minister told local news agency TT on Friday.
REUTERS | November 11, 2022 reuters.com
Sweden and Finland applied to join NATO earlier this year in a move triggered by Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. So far, the application has been ratified by 28 of NATO’s 30 countries.
Sweden’s supreme commander raised eyebrows this month when he recommended that the government should not insert any red lines in the final negotiations with NATO, such as bans against permanent alliance bases or nuclear weapons on Swedish soil.
However, Foreign Minister Tobias Billstrom said Sweden would join Denmark and Norway in unilaterally declaring that it would not allow nuclear weapons in Sweden.
“It is still the long-term Moderate Party position,” he told TT. “We have never intended to change the conditions for the application submitted by the previous government,” he said.
A Moderate Party-led alliance won the September general election, ending eight years of Social Democratic rule in Sweden.
US warns Australia against joining treaty banning nuclear weapons
“Australia must ‘make sure that we are able to be good nuclear stewards from cradle to grave’.” – Defence Minister of Australia Richard Marles
THE GUARDIAN | Daniel Hurst November 6, 2022 theguardian.com
The US has warned Australia against joining a landmark treaty banning nuclear weapons, saying the agreement could hamper defence arrangements between the US and its allies.
But New Zealand said it was “pleased to observe a positive shift” in Australia’s position in a United Nations vote and “would, of course, welcome any new ratifications as an important step to achieving a nuclear weapon-free world”.
Sullivan has held talks with Putin aides amid nuclear fears: WSJ
“White House national security adviser Jake Sullivan has held talks with top aides to Russian President Vladimir Putin amid rising tensions between Washington and Moscow in recent weeks, according to the Wall Street Journal.
“After a series of setbacks in Ukraine, Putin has signaled that he was willing to use nuclear weapons to defend Russia, causing Biden to warn of a nuclear ‘Armageddon.’”
THE HILL | BRAD DRESS | November 6, 2022 thehill.com
U.S. officials and allies told the news outlet that Sullivan has been in talks with Yuri Ushakov, a foreign-policy adviser to Putin, as well as Nikolai Patrushev, head of Russia’s security council.
It’s unclear how many times Sullivan has spoken with the officials, but the conversations have been focused on preventing escalation of the war as fears of Russia using nuclear weapons have been rising, according to the Wall Street Journal.
Expanded WIPP mission? No shortcuts
“This “bait and switch” tactic, where WIPP is marketed with one mission in mind, then greatly expanded decades later, contradicts DOE’s professed dedication to a consent-based process that, in their own words, “focuses on the needs and concerns of people and communities.”
This expansion represents such a dramatic change in WIPP’s core mission that its managers must reassess safety issues and negotiate a new social contract with the public before moving forward.”
MY VIEW: Santa Fe New Mexican, By Dennis McQuillan and Rodney Ewing | October 29, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
The U.S. Department of Energy proposes a dramatic expansion of the type and amount of radioactive waste for burial at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant. In March, community groups rallied outside the state Capitol protesting this planned expansion, and Gov. Michelle Lujan Grisham sent the Department of Energy a letter in April that cited “ongoing frustration among New Mexicans regarding the lack of meaningful and transparent public engagement from the DOE on waste clean-up, shipments, and long-term plans for the WIPP.”
While it may seem too late to protest a facility that has operated for decades, citizen activists are right to object, and the governor is right to demand the Department of Energy address the concerns of state citizens.
Nuclear injustice: How Russia’s invasion of Ukraine shows the staggering human cost of deterrence
“Even a “limited” regional nuclear war could kill millions or even billions, disrupt global climate, and lead to mass starvation. Nuclear winter would not stop at the borders of nuclear perpetrator states—the entire global population would bear the costs of catastrophic deterrence failure or accidents.
Complicating the setting, it would most likely be future generations that would have to cope with the devastating consequences, which makes necessary action today appear to be a less pressing concern.
After all, why should today’s decision-makers—particularly in democracies, and nuclear-armed ones at that—care more about future voters than their current electorates?”
THE BULLETIN| Franziska Stärk & Ulrich Kühn October 29, 2022 thebulletin.org
The global nuclear order—built on policies of nuclear deterrence, nonproliferation, and disarmament—is unjust. Russia’s war against Ukraine proves that the distribution of the costs and benefits of nuclear deterrence is particularly discriminatory. The current situation is a painful reminder that nuclear weapons are to global security what fossil fuels are to a green economy: a costly legacy of past generations thwarting justice and sustainability efforts in the long-term.
It is time for nuclear scholars, policy makers, and the general public to (re)politicize the ongoing and future negative effects of this Nuclear Injustice and push for fundamental change in the role of nuclear weapons in the world. They can do so by making Nuclear Injustice front and center at all relevant conferences and actively engaging in the debate about the nuclear lessons learned from the war in Ukraine.
LANL remains key part of U.S. nuclear weapons plan
“Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, said given the reported problems the lab and Savannah River are grappling with, the review might be trying to add “wiggle room” to production goals.
“It’s interesting how vague the Nuclear Posture Review is on both the rate and timing of pit production,” Coghlan said.”
BY SCOTT WYLAND, THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | October 27, 2022 santafenewmexican.com
Los Alamos National Laboratory received only a brief mention in the Biden administration’s much-awaited update of the country’s nuclear strategy, but it’s clear the Pentagon views …
Department of Energy Official Reveals More Delays in Plans for New Plutonium Pit Facility at DOE’s Savannah River Site
“A lawsuit remains before a federal judge in South Carolina in which the plaintiffs – SRS Watch, Nuclear Watch New Mexico (Santa Fe, NM) and Tri-Valley CAREs (Livermore, CA) – have demanded that a programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) on pit production be prepared. The PEIS would analyze impacts of pit production at all DOE sites, including heretofore unanalyzed disposal of plutonium by-product waste (transuranic waste) from pit production in the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in New Mexico.”
By Savannah River Site Watch | October 5, 2022 einpresswire.com
SRS Pit Plant would Fabricate Plutonium Pits (Cores) for New and Old Nuclear Weapons; Schedule Delays, Cost Increases Mounting, with Cost Nearing $12 Billion
Our prediction that the unneeded SRS plutonium pit plant would continue to face significant delays and substantial cost increases is sadly being proven true”
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, US – A facility proposed to make the key plutonium component for new U.S. nuclear warheads faces another substantial delay, according a U.S. Department of Energy official at a nuclear meeting this week in South Carolina. The delay of construction of the Plutonium Bomb Plant, proposed to make plutonium “pits” at the U.S. Department of Energy’s sprawling 310-square-mile Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, SC, could push the price tag to $11.5 billion or higher.
Archbishop renews call for dialogue on ridding world of nuclear weapons
“Congress should have the courage to begin to help lead us toward a future world free of nuclear weapons…In particular, I call upon the New Mexican congressional delegation to end their support for unneeded, exorbitantly expensive plutonium pit production for nuclear weapons. ”
Catholic News Service | October 23, 2022 osvnews.com
ALBUQUERQUE, N.M. (CNS) — The world still has not learned “the essential lesson” of the Cuban Missile Crisis that “the only way to eliminate the nuclear danger is through careful, universal, verifiable steps to eliminate nuclear weapons,” said Archbishop John C. Wester of Santa Fe, New Mexico.
“It is the very nature of these weapons that the possession of any nuclear weapons is an existential danger to all,” he said. “And Pope Francis has been explicitly clear that ‘the possessing of nuclear weapons is immoral.’”
He renewed his call “for dialogue on the existential issue of eliminating nuclear weapons” and said New Mexico’s congressional delegation should help lead this dialogue,” given that the federal government spends billions in the state on weapons production while New Mexico “remains mired at the bottom of numerous socioeconomic indicators.”
Group behind Jana Elementary radioactive study says tipster led them into their investigation
Investigators arrived in St. Louis on Aug. 15, 2022. The study was released in mid-October with the results of radioactive lead found at Jana Elementary School.
Boeing’s Weak Santa Susana Cleanup Triggers Lawsuit
Sweetheart Deal Negotiated Behind Closed Doors Violates CEQA Mandates
PRESS RELEASE
Thursday, October 6, 2022
Contact
Jeff Ruch, PEER, [email protected] (510) 213-7028
Melissa Bumstead, Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab [email protected] (818) 233-0642
Denise Duffield, Physicians for Social Responsibility, [email protected] (310) 339-9766
Lawrence Yee [email protected]
Oakland — The Newsom administration’s backroom deal with the Boeing Co. to dramatically weaken cleanup standards at the profoundly polluted Santa Susana Field Laboratory violates the public involvement and transparency requirements of the California Environmental Quality Act (CEQA), charges a lawsuit filed today by community and public health groups. The suit would open the cleanup agreement to public scrutiny and force the state agencies and the Boeing Co. to justify a cleanup methodology that leaves 90% of the contamination onsite.
Filed today in Ventura County Superior Court by Parents Against Santa Susana Field Lab, Physicians for Social Responsibility (LA Chapter), and Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility (PEER), the suit would, if successful, vacate both the cleanup agreement and an accompanying promise to free Boeing from toxic stormwater discharge requirements.
“This suit does not prevent cleanup from beginning immediately but instead aims to ensure it continues until it is fully completed,” stated Pacific PEER Director Jeff Ruch, noting that under a prior Consent Order, the cleanup was supposed to have been completed back in 2017. “This lawsuit is about having this cleanup done right and well beyond the outrageous ‘rip and skip’ deal that Boeing wrangled behind closed doors.”
After repeatedly promising to enforce a 2007 legally binding cleanup agreement with Boeing, the Newsom administration secretly negotiated an 800-page agreement that “supersedes” the prior order by substantially relaxing key cleanup requirements, allowing hundreds of times higher levels of toxic chemicals than previously permitted, and leaving much of the contamination onsite.
Nuclear News Archives – 2021
Will Construction be Delayed on the New Shaft at WIPP?
“The Environment Department “should be equally considerate towards the judicial review process as it was in the administrative permit modification process, to ensure the courts have sufficient time to review objectively the facts and arguments associated with the appeal.” – Steve Zappe, a member of the Environment Department who worked on WIPP for 17 years.”
Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety | December 23, 2021
Two appeals have been filed in the New Mexico Court of Appeals to challenge the decision by New Mexico Environment Department Secretary James Kenney to approve the new shaft at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP). Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety filed the second appeal on November 29th. On November 9th, Southwest Research and Information Center and Cynthia Weehler had filed the first appeal. Visit: env.nm.gov/opf/docketed-matters/, scroll down to HWB 21-02 – APPEAL: Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: Class 3 Permit Modification Request, “Excavation of a New Shaft and Associated Connecting Drifts.
SRIC and Weehler also asked Secretary Kenney for a stay, that is, a delay, of shaft construction until the Court of Appeals rules on their appeal. On the stay motion, Secretary Kenney can grant, or deny, or take no action. If he does not grant the stay, or if he takes no action by January 10th, a stay motion then could be filed with the Court of Appeals. Visit: env.nm.gov/opf/docketed-matters/ , scroll down to HWB 21-02 –Waste Isolation Pilot Plant: Class 3 Permit Modification Request, “Excavation of a New Shaft and Associated Connecting Drifts.
Unfortunately, key documents are missing, including the SRIC/Weehler Motion for Stay Pending Appeal, the Hearing Officer’s Report and the Secretary’s Final Order.
The stay motion was supported by three affidavits. Cynthia Weehler stated that she purchased her home near U.S. Highway 285 knowing that the WIPP Permit anticipated that shipments to WIPP would end in 2024. Now, the WIPP expansion plan that requires the new shaft “would result in thousands of additional shipments coming near my house for many decades.” She is very concerned that accidents could result in health effects and “such shipments will reduce my property values.”
Kathleen Wan Povi Sanchez, an Elder from the Tewa Pueblo of San Ildefonso and among the founding mothers of Tewa Women United, stated in her affidavit that an increase in waste transportation near two schools located on New Mexico Highway 502 would endanger the health of Pueblo children in attendance. Further, “The WIPP expansion plan would result in thousands of new shipments using [] Highway 502 for decades transporting plutonium from the Pantex Plant near Amarillo, Texas to [Los Alamos National Laboratory], and from [Los Alamos] to the Savannah River Site, followed by shipments from that site to WIPP.”
Some LANL plutonium stored in vulnerable containers
An anti-nuclear group said this type of plutonium isn’t explosive but would be hazardous to breathe.
It’s possible the lab made this type of plutonium a lesser priority while ramping up pit production, and now it plans to take big shipments, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for the nonprofit Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
“That’s a huge amount to accept,” Kovac said. “Now they’re asking NNSA to say that’s OK.”
BY SCOTT WYLAND, THE SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN | December 23, 2021 santafenewmexican.com
Los Alamos National Laboratory wants to store high heat-emitting plutonium in uncertified containers that, if breached in a fire or an earthquake, could expose workers and the public to hazardous doses of radiation, according to a government watchdog’s report.
The lab’s primary contractor seeks a waiver to store large quantities of plutonium-238 in unapproved containers that, if breached, could expose the public to 83 to 378 rem, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board said in a December report, referring to the unit that measures radiation absorbed in living tissue.
US Still Doesn’t Know How and Where It Will Store Its Growing Pile of Nuclear Waste
The estimated cost of handling the degrading radioactive material is rising steadily — $512 billion at last count.
“DoE is now running up against a statutory limit for how much waste it can store in the space, so it recently changed its counting method to exclude space between storage drums as storage space. New Mexico regulators approved the change but the matter is being challenged in court.
“They knocked a third out of it with a slight of hand. That will allow them a lot more waste,” complains Scott Kovac, operations & research director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico (NWNM), a local anti-nuclear group.”
BY , EARTH ISLAND JOURNAL | December 23, 2021 earthisland.org
A nuclear watchdog group wants a state commission to nullify its decision on a permit for Los Alamos National Laboratory’s radioactive liquid waste treatment facility, arguing the panel’s former chairwoman backed a ruling favorable to the lab while she sought a job with the federal agency that oversees it.
U.S. Urges Japan Not to Join Nuclear Ban Treaty Meeting
“Germany’s move [planning to to attend the meeting as an observer] has put Japan — which has stated it aspires to a world free of nuclear weapons as the only country to have suffered the devastation of atomic bombings — in the spotlight. Both countries are key U.S. allies that rely on American nuclear forces for protection.”
© KYODO NEWS | December 20, 2021
The United States has urged Japan not to attend as an observer the first meeting of signatories to a U.N. treaty banning nuclear weapons, according to U.S. government sources, reflecting Washington’s opposition to the pact.
The Japanese government has suggested it will come into line with the United States and take a cautious approach to the issue, the sources said. Prime Minister Fumio Kishida told a parliamentary committee on Thursday that Tokyo has no “concrete plans” to attend the meeting as an observer.
The sources said the U.S. administration of President Joe Biden made the request to Japan through diplomatic channels after German political parties announced Nov. 24 that the deal for the new ruling coalition included taking part as an observer at the meeting scheduled for March in Vienna.
Maybe because of the request, Kishida also suggested last week that participation in the meeting would be premature “before building a relationship of trust with President Biden.”
Archbishop calls for nuclear disarming
At least 125 people were present for the service, many bearing roses in honor of the Lady of Guadalupe. Among them was Karen Weber, who said it’s “highly symbolic” for Wester to speak out on the “abolishment of nuclear weapons.”
SANTA FE NEW MEXICAN By Robert Nott [email protected]
Looking up at the sky as a young teen one day in Daly City, Calif., Archbishop John C. Wester had one thought as he saw military planes overheard.
Were they ours, or were they Russian planes?
The year was 1962, perhaps the first time nuclear war between the two superpowers seemed likely to erupt as the Cuban Missile Crisis played out and students were taught to prepare for an atomic attack by diving under their desks at schools.
“I don’t think going under our desks was very helpful,” Wester said Sunday in Santa Fe, moments before issuing a call for the world to rid itself its nuclear weapons.
Now, some 60 years later, he said he wants to do more to end the threat of an atomic war. Wester spoke and prayed during a 30-minute prayer service and ceremony at the Shrine of Our Lady of Guadalupe before he unveiled a sign bearing an image of Pope Francis and a quote uttered by the pope in Hiroshima in 2020: “The possession of nuclear arms is immoral.”
Wester said “our archdiocese needs to be facilitating, encouraging an ongoing conversation” about nuclear disarmament.
Why Los Alamos lab is working on the tricky task of creating new plutonium cores
“While the labs work on relearning high-stakes industrial techniques for terrifying weapons, it is estimated that most of the existing warheads will remain fully functional for at least 100 years after first manufacture. Given an arsenal of hundreds of deployed warheads, the stakes of failure to modernize are that, in the event of the worst war humanity has ever known, some warheads might fail to detonate, letting millions live.”
BY KELSEY D. ATHERTON | POPULAR SCIENCE popsci.com December 18, 2021
Plutonium pits, the potent hearts of modern nuclear weapons, degrade over time. As these cores decay, so too does the certainty that they will work as designed when detonated. Los Alamos National Laboratory, the organization that grew out of the Manhattan Project to design and equip the nuclear arsenal of the Cold War, is advancing towards its goal of manufacturing 30 new plutonium pits to go inside nuclear bomb cores by 2026.
The project is both a specific manufacturing challenge, and an opening for the United States to newly consider how many warheads it needs on hand to achieve its stated strategic objectives.
Inside a nuclear warhead, a plutonium pit is crucial to setting off the sequence of reactions that make a thermonuclear explosion. Inside the pit is a gas, like deuterium/tritium, and around the pit is chemical explosive. When the chemical explosive detonates, it compacts the plutonium around the gas until the core is dense enough to trigger a fission reaction. What makes a warhead thermonuclear, as opposed to just atomic, is that this is combined in the same warhead with a uranium core, which creates a fusion explosion.
Hundreds of Scientists Ask Biden to Cut the U.S. Nuclear Arsenal
The letter argued that “by making clear that the United States will never start a nuclear war, it reduces the likelihood that a conflict or crisis will escalate to nuclear war.” And it would demonstrate, they argued, that the United States was committed to the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, which obliges the nuclear-armed states to move toward reducing their arsenals.
Written By: Jesus Jiménez © 2021 The New York Times Company The New York Times | December 17, 2021
Nearly 700 scientists and engineers, including 21 Nobel laureates, asked President Joe Biden on Thursday to use his forthcoming declaration of a new national strategy for managing nuclear weapons as a chance to cut the US arsenal by a third and to declare, for the first time, that the United States would never be the first to use nuclear weapons in a conflict.
The letter to Biden also urged him to change, for the first time since President Harry S. Truman ordered the dropping of the atomic bomb over Hiroshima, the American practice that gives the commander in chief sole authority to order the use of nuclear weapons. The issue gained prominence during the Trump administration, and the authors of the letter urged Biden to make the change as “an important safeguard against a possible future president who is unstable or who orders a reckless attack.”
Today I had the honor of delivering a letter on nuclear weapons issues to @POTUS signed by 697 scientists & engineers, including 21 Nobel laureates & 69 members of the National Academies. It recommends four steps to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war: https://t.co/o9ktgLlOxd pic.twitter.com/stjn9BJCCu
— Stephen Young (@StephenUCS) December 16, 2021
Politico-Opinion | Congress Approved $778 Billion for the Pentagon. That Means We Can Afford Build Back Better.
Some senators say Biden’s social and climate bill costs too much, but comparing it to the military spending plan they just passed suggests otherwise.
This week, the families of 61 million children received their final payments under the expanded Child Tax Credit. This credit has kept 10 million children above the poverty line, but it is expiring as the Senate delays a vote to renew it through the Build Back Better Act.
Instead, on the same day these last payments went out, the Senate voted to approve a $778 billion military spending budget — four times as much as the annual cost of the entire Build Back Better plan. Yet we’ve heard endlessly about how it’s Build Back Better that needs to be gutted so we can skimp and save.
Germany’s Baerbock pushes for nuclear disarmament
German Foreign Minister Annalena Baerbock called for a “new momentum” to nuclear disarmament as she met with her Swedish counterpart with an eye toward a review of a non-proliferation treaty.
Germany and Sweden have paired up to find ways to get the world’s nuclear powers to move toward committing to disarmament. The foreign ministers met in Stockholm to plot the way forward ahead of next month’s review of the Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT).
Baerbock has been in talks with her Swedish counterpart Ann Linde and met with the Stockholm Initiative, a group of 16 countries seeking to get rid of nuclear weapons.
“Our joint goal is clear: a world free of atomic weapons,” Baerbock said during a press conference with Linde.
“Our message to the review conference will be clear: Nuclear weapons countries have to push ahead with nuclear disarmament,” read a statement from the initiative, calling for an irreversible, transparent end to nuclear weapons subject to oversight.
Protesters Denounce French Push to Label Nuclear as Sustainable Energy
“By taking the lead of the toxic alliance between fossil gas and nuclear (energy) at a European level, Emmanuel Macron clearly sides with the polluters’ camp. Nuclear is not a green energy: it produces radioactive waste that piles up across the country”
By Reuters | December 14, 2021
PARIS (Reuters) – Demonstrators unfurled a banner declaring “Gas & nuclear are not green” outside France’s foreign ministry on Tuesday in protest at a government drive to label nuclear energy and fossil gas as sectors for climate-friendly investment.
One of the about 20 protesters, wearing a mask of President Emmanuel Macron, chained himself to a gas bottle and a nuclear barrel outside the ministry’s headquarters in Paris. Another held a banner that read “Macron shame on you.”
The European Union is preparing a rulebook on climate friendly investments, which from next year will define which activities can be labelled as green in sectors including transport and buildings.
The EU’s aim is to restrict the green investment label to climate-friendly activities, steer cash into low-carbon projects and stop companies or investors making unsubstantiated environmental claims.
NEW Y-12 CONTRACTORS HAVE HISTORY OF NUCLEAR SAFETY FAILURES, MILLIONS IN PENALTIES AND FINES FOR VIOLATIONS
“The public deserves an explanation,” said Ralph Hutchison, coordinator of the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance. “Given the persistent criticality safety problems at Y-12, it is astonishing that the National Nuclear Security Administration has turned the management over to Fluor and Amentum, two companies that have racked up millions of dollars in fines in the last two decades for nuclear safety violations.”
immediate release: December 13, 2021
more information: Ralph Hutchison 865 776 5050 / [email protected]
According to the web site goodjobsfirst.com, which tracks violations in government contracting, AECOM, parent company of Amentum, has been penalized more than $167 million for 114 violations since 2000. Fifty-one of those violations were safety related, for a total of $4.5 million in penalties and fines; of that total, $3,866,250 was assessed for nuclear safety violations.
“From the beginning of October to mid-November, the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board documented nine nuclear safety incidents at Y-12, an average of more than one a week,” Hutchison said. “Unfortunately, this is not an anomaly—Y-12 is consistently plagued by nuclear safety issues, many of them from legacy activities or the ongoing degradation of the buildings used to manufacture nuclear weapons components.
“And the equally sad truth is that contractors at Y-12 have a history of failing to aggressively address issues as they arise. An outside assessment delivered in October noted that Consolidated Nuclear Services declared some cases ‘closed’ even though the actual problem had not been corrected and the cases were, in fact, still open.
Pilgrim Nuclear Plant Will Not Release Contaminated Water In 2022
By CBSBoston.com Staff December 7, 2021
PLYMOUTH (CBS) – The company managing the shutdown of the Pilgrim Nuclear Plant now says it will not release contaminated water into Cape Cod Bay in 2022 as planned.
Holtec International planned to discharge the water sometime early next year.
But in a statement on Monday, they promised to store the water on site through 2022 and search for other options to get rid of it.
“We appreciate and understand the public’s questions and concerns and remain committed to an open, transparent process on the decommissioning of Pilgrim Station focused on the health and safety of the public, the environment, and on-site personnel,” Holtec said in a statement.
Pilgrim went offline in 2019.
House Passes $768 Billion Defense Policy Bill
“I support having by far the strongest military in the world and the good-paying defense jobs in my district that protect our troops,” said Representative Andy Levin, Democrat of Michigan. “But I cannot support ever-increasing military spending in the face of so much human need across our country.”
By: The New York Times | December 7, 2021
WASHINGTON — The House on Tuesday overwhelmingly passed a $768 billion defense policy bill after lawmakers abruptly dropped proposals that would have required women to register for the draft, repealed the 2002 authorization of the Iraq war and imposed sanctions for a Russian gas pipeline, in a late-year drive to salvage a bipartisan priority.
The legislation, unveiled hours before the vote, put the Democratic-led Congress on track to increase the Pentagon’s budget by roughly $24 billion above what President Biden had requested, angering antiwar progressives who had hoped that their party’s control of the White House and both houses of Congress would lead to cuts to military programs after decades of growth.
Instead, the measure provides significant increases for initiatives intended to counter China and bolster Ukraine, as well as the procurement of new aircraft and ships, underscoring the bipartisan consensus on Capitol Hill for continuing to spend huge amounts of federal money on defense initiatives, even as Republicans lash Democrats for spending freely on social programs.
Energy Department to spend $15.5M to upgrade route from Los Alamos lab to waste site [WIPP]
“Essentially blessing what DOE was going to have to do anyway in order to expand nuclear weapons activities and waste disposal,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico. “And once again demonstrated the subservience of our state government to the nuclear weapons industry here in New Mexico.”
By Scott Wyland [email protected] Santa Fe New Mexican December 6, 2021 santafenewmexican.com
The N.M. 4 and East Jemez Road intersection in the far northwestern corner of Santa Fe County will be improved as part of a $15.5 million upgrade of routes on which Los Alamos National Laboratory transports nuclear waste to an underground disposal site in Southern New Mexico.
The U.S. Energy Department will spend $3.5 million to improve the intersection, which lies just outside Los Alamos County, and another $12 million to upgrade routes it owns and uses mostly to ship transuranic waste — contaminated gloves, clothing, equipment, soil and other items — to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant near Carlsbad.
REPORT: BIT BY BIT, THE NOOSE IS TIGHTENING AROUND THE NUCLEAR WEAPONS INDUSTRY
Human beings are not necessarily destined to annihilate ourselves.
“…the actual danger of nuclear conflict is now greater than at any point in history.”
By Jon Schwarz THE INTERCEPT December 5, 2021 theintercept.com
FOR YEARS, the Dutch organization PAX has been issuing reports detailing the Armageddon that’s hiding in plain sight. The business of nuclear weapons — and it is in fact a business — does not for the most part take place in secret underground lairs. It is all around us, conducted by corporations and banks that might otherwise make cellphones or cornflakes or autonomous vacuum cleaners.
PAX’s newest paper, “Perilous Profiteering,” should be front-page news around the world. Why it is not is an interesting question.
Nuclear war is still a threat to humanity. It’s true that it’s generally vanished from popular culture and our imagination since the end of the Cold War 30 years ago. What almost no one knows, however, is that many serious observers believe that the actual danger of nuclear conflict is now greater than at any point in history.
The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists invented its Doomsday Clock in 1947 to express how close the world was to self-destruction. It was initially set at seven minutes to midnight. Since then it has varied, being set both closer to and further away from midnight. But today, in 2021, it is the closest it’s ever been: 100 seconds to midnight. The publication’s reasoning can be read here.
Or take it from such anti-peaceniks as former Secretaries of State Henry Kissinger and the late George Shultz. Together they warned for years of the tremendous danger of nuclear war and called for “a world free of nuclear weapons.”
‘Not in my backyard’: The thorny issue of storing German nuclear waste
“Germany is to shut down its last nuclear reactors next year. However, the country still has no place to store the 27,000 cubic metres of highly radioactive material it has already produced, with the amount set to grow as power stations are decommissioned and dismantled. German authorities have set a deadline of 2031 to find a permanent storage location – but for now, the waste is being stored in temporary locations, much to the anger of local residents.”
One dead, three injured after gas leak at Spanish nuclear plant
A fault in the plant’s fire prevention system caused the gas leak, which was not linked to any radioactive material, the regional fire service posted on Twitter.
MADRID, Nov 24 (Reuters) – One person has died and three have been taken to hospital after a carbon dioxide leak at the Asco nuclear power plant in the Spanish region of Catalonia, local emergency services said on Wednesday.
Shortly afterwards, the fire service said it was preparing to leave the site after checking over the extractor fans with the plant’s staff and ensuring the systems were working properly.
The three people taken to hospital suffered light injuries from carbon dioxide inhalation, emergency services said.
Iran nuclear talks resume with upbeat comments despite skepticism
Russia’s envoy to the talks, Mikhail Ulyanov, said on Twitter they “started quite successfully.” Asked he if was optimistic, Iran’s top negotiator, Ali Bagheri Kani, told reporters: “Yes, I am.”
Vienna, Austria EU, Iranian and Russian diplomats sounded upbeat as Iran and world powers held their first talks in five months on Monday to try to save their 2015 nuclear deal, despite Tehran taking a tough stance in public that Western powers said would not work.
“I feel extremely positive about what I have seen today,” Enrique Mora, the EU official chairing the talks, said after the meeting — the seventh round of talks aimed at reviving a deal under which Iran limited its disputed uranium enrichment program in return for relief from US, EU and UN economic sanctions.
“They have accepted that the work done over the first six rounds is a good basis to build our work ahead,” he said. “We will be of course incorporating the new political sensibilities of the new Iranian administration.”
Nuclear power is never safe or economical
“I hope Sen. Durbin changes his mind about promoting nuclear energy. The real carbon-free sources of electricity are wind and solar.”
I cannot disagree more with the assertion by Sen. Dick Durbin in a recent Sun-Times op-ed that nuclear power is a necessary and viable way to combat climate change.
Electricity production by nuclear power is not, and can never be made, safe and economical.
When nuclear power plants were first touted in the 1950s as a new and safe method for producing electricity, it was said the electricity would be “too cheap to meter.” This is pure nonsense! If it was so safe, why weren’t any power plants built and put on line until passage of the Price-Anderson Act? The law has been amended a number of times and greatly limits the liability of operators of nuclear power plants.
Anything paid out beyond the limits set in Price-Anderson would take years of lawsuits.
Sen. Durbin wrote “It is past time for Congress to step up and develop a comprehensive, consent-based plan to store nuclear waste.” That’s an understatement. Nuclear waste is stored within a half-mile of Lake Michigan at the now-closed Zion nuclear power plant. Why is it close to the source of our drinking water? Because there is nowhere to ship it! Plans to ship such waste to a depository in Yucca Mountain in the southwest fell through when some improperly stored barrels burst into flames, releasing large amounts of high-level radioactive material.
Who does the senator think will agree to a “consent-based plan” when there is no known method of safely storing these dangerous materials for thousands of years, the time it takes for radioactive decay to make it safe for the environment?
Sen. Durbin argued that “we must ensure the nuclear fleet remains safe and economical,” but nuclear power has never been economical. As far as I know, the last time a permit was approved for a new nuclear plant was during the Obama administration. That plant in Georgia is only about half complete, although it was to be finished by now and the cost is already double the initial estimate.
The current “fleet,” as Sen. Durbin called them, of nuclear power plants were designed and engineered to last about 30 to 40 years. Most of our country’s plants are near that age. Their internal systems are constantly bombarded by radioactive particles, making the metal in the systems more brittle and prone to failure every year. Subsidizing them is a waste of taxpayer money and a dangerous gamble with our lives.
I hope Sen. Durbin changes his mind. The real carbon-free sources of electricity are renewables: wind and solar.
George Milkowski, West Ridge
Letters to the Editor: Nuclear energy may not emit carbon, but it isn’t ‘clean’
To the editor: Steven Chu and Ernest Moniz are both professors who served as U.S. Energy secretary. They have more science credentials than most mortals. I am none of those things.
Yet, I was concerned when I read in their piece advocating for the continued use of the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant past the planned 2025 decommissioning that they referred to the electricity it produces as “clean.”
I recognize that they did so in order to differentiate nuclear from energy sources that emit carbon dioxide. However, the lack of carbon emissions notwithstanding, can nuclear energy truly be called clean?
There is the not-so-small matter of spent nuclear fuel. Where does it go? Where will it go? It’s currently in a cooling pool on-site. Owner Pacific Gas and Electric has requested permission to develop a dry cask storage system on-site; it did not estimate how long the spent fuel would be stored there.
Spent fuel is radioactive for a very long time. Whichever way you store it, if anything compromises the containment, the danger is released.
Carbon emissions or none, it is misleading to refer to nuclear energy as clean, especially when it comes to its impact on the environment.
Elise Power, Garden Grove
..
To the editor: I was energized by the piece on the Diablo Canyon nuclear plant. It reminded me of the sad situation at our local San Onofre Nuclear Generating Station.Continue reading
Pilgrim nuclear plant may release 1M gallons of radioactive water into bay. What we know
“Diane Turco, of Harwich, the director of Cape Downwinders, a citizen group that was at the forefront of the effort to close Pilgrim, called any option that included sending radioactive water into the bay “outrageous” and “criminal.” Turco said she has no confidence in the decommissioning process.
“The process has been to allow radioactivity into the environment,” she said. “The answer should be no you can’t do that.””
PLYMOUTH — One of the options being considered by the company that is decommissioning the closed Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station is to release around one million gallons of potentially radioactive water into Cape Cod Bay.
The option had been discussed briefly with state regulatory officials as one possible way to get rid of water from the spent fuel pool, the reactor vessel and other components of the facility, Holtec International spokesman Patrick O’Brien said in an interview Wednesday. It was highlighted in a report by state Department of Environmental Protection Deputy Regional Director Seth Pickering at Monday’s meeting of the Nuclear Decommissioning Citizens Advisory Panel in Plymouth.
“We had broached that with the state, but we’ve made no decision on that,” O’Brien said.
As of mid-December, Holtec will complete the process of moving all the spent fuel rods into casks that are being stored on a concrete pad on the Pilgrim plant site in Plymouth. After that, O’Brien told the panel, the removal and disposal of other components in those areas of the facility will take place and be completed sometime in February.
What to expect as Iran nuclear talks resume next week
“New round of talks unlikely to produce breakthrough but will shed light on posture of new Iranian government, analysts say.”
“We’re going to find out how different these [Iranian] hardliners are from previous hardliners; we’re going to find out if they’re going to be a little softer,” said Negar Mortazavi, an Iranian-American journalist and analyst.
“And we’re also going to find out if the Americans have really realised that they missed an opportunity, and that they should change their position to some extent.”
Proponents of the deal, including Mortazavi, have criticised US President Joe Biden for not moving with urgency to restore the agreement in the first months of his administration, when a more moderate Iranian government headed by former President Hassan Rouhani was in charge.
Six rounds of talks in Vienna between April and June failed to forge a path back into the agreement.
“That golden window of opportunity was short, and the Biden team completely missed it,” Mortazavi told Al Jazeera.
A spin on Kirtland Air Force Base’s (which shares runways with the ABQ International Airport) true mission from the ABQ Journal: “Air Force lab injects $2B into NM’s economy”
The Kirtland Air Force Lab is dedicated to militarizing space, not improving the lives of New Mexico citizens.
As stated by the Arms Control Association in an April 2021 article titled Apes on a Treadmill in Space:
“The United States should recognize that a pattern of continued militarization of space is insufficient to provide the stability on which its economy and its armed forces depend, so the tools of diplomacy and international law should be marshalled too.”
Air Force Research Laboratory spending on space and “directed energy” technology like lasers and microwaves boosted the local economy by nearly $2 billion over the past three years, according to a new economic impact report.
Risk of quakes caused by oil, gas in New Mexico rising
“The occurrence of smaller earthquakes began to increase in 2017, when oil and gas boomed in the region, up to about three per day recently. In 2021, records show the region was on track for more than 1,200 earthquakes with magnitudes of 1 to 4.”
CARLSBAD, N.M. (AP) — Multiple earthquakes were felt earlier this fall in West Texas, leading regulators in that state to designate a seismic response area and call for less wastewater from oil and gas development to be injected in disposal wells.
As more seismic activity was reported closer to the state line, officials in New Mexico have been watching closely and gathering data. Some officials are concerned that as Texas limits the injection of produced water as a means to curb the seismic activity, that could affect producers in New Mexico.
Moscow says U.S. rehearsed nuclear strike against Russia this month
“Against this backdrop, Russo-Chinese coordination is becoming a stabilising factor in world affairs,” said Russian Defence Minister Sergei Shoigu.
By Andrew Osborn and Phil Stewart (Reuters)
MOSCOW/WASHINGTON, Nov 23 (Reuters) – Russia’s defence minister on Tuesday accused U.S. bombers of rehearsing a nuclear strike on Russia from two different directions earlier this month and complained that the planes had come within 20 km (12.4 miles) of the Russian border.
But the Pentagon said its drills were announced publicly at the time and adhered to international protocols.
Moscow’s accusation comes at a time of high tension with Washington over Ukraine, with U.S. officials voicing concerns about a possible Russian attack on its southern neighbour – a suggestion the Kremlin has dismissed as false.
Moscow has in turn accused the United States, NATO and Ukraine of provocative and irresponsible behaviour, pointing to U.S. arms supplies to Ukraine, Ukraine’s use of Turkish strike drones against Russian-backed separatists in eastern Ukraine, and NATO military exercises close to its borders.
Explainer: Will Germany’s next government ditch U.S. nuclear bombs?
“Germany can, of course, decide whether there will be nuclear weapons in (its) country, but the alternative is that we easily end up with nuclear weapons in other countries in Europe, also to the east of Germany,” NATO Secretary-General Jens Stoltenberg said.
BERLIN, Nov 22 (Reuters) archivemd.com
Perilous Profiteering: The companies building nuclear arsenals and their financial backers
PAX and ICAN have released the latest Don’t Bank on the Bomb report “Perilous Profiteering: The companies building nuclear arsenals and their financial backers“, which names the 338 investors backing 25 nuclear weapon producing companies and the size of their investments. This report is also the first time we were able to find information on Russian and Chinese investments.
The report also found three clear signs that financial institutions are starting to see nuclear weapons as risky business, and are leaving them behind:
• From 2019 to 2021, the total amount made available for nuclear weapons producing companies dropped by an impressive $63 billion, and the total number of financial institutions willing to invest in nuclear weapons producing companies went down too.
• Nuclear weapons producing companies, despite billion dollar contracts, have debt. But investors are moving away. So instead, they’re borrowing from wherever they can to raise cash. In other words: producing weapons of mass destruction has become extremely unattractive.
• 127 financial institutions stopped investing in companies producing nuclear weapons this year!
Of course, we still have a lot of work to do to hold these profiteers accountable. Banks, insurers, asset managers and pension funds still made $685 billion available for the companies producing nuclear weapons (like Northrop Grumman, which has $24 billion in outstanding contracts).
Our banks, insurers, and pension funds have no business investing in companies that choose to be involved in illegal weapons of mass destruction, and we need to tell them. Read the key findings of the report HERE.
Federal inspection of Pilgrim plant finds only ‘minor’ violations
A federal inspection of the decommissioned Pilgrim Nuclear Power Station in Plymouth that began in July and stretched through September found “no violations of more than minor significance,” the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission said.
Colin A. Young, State House News Service PATRIOT LEDGER NEWS patriotledger.com
The inspection included “an evaluation of the safety screening, safety review, onsite management review, engineering change processes, the fire protection program, maintenance program, and the available results for site radiological and non-radiological characterization,” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission said. The agency also conducted “a review and observation of the independent spent fuel storage installation (ISFSI) dry cask activities.”
Inspectors visited Pilgrim at least five times during the announced quarterly inspection to observe Holtec Decommissioning International’s activities “as they relate to safety and compliance with the commission’s rules and regulations” and the conditions of the company’s license.
“Based on the results of this inspection, no violations of more than minor significance were identified,” the Nuclear Regulatory Commission wrote in the inspection report.
The Plymouth nuclear plant, which employed about 600 people and had been generating about 680 megawatts of electricity per year since coming online in 1972, permanently ceased operations May 31, 2019.
Holtec has estimated that it can complete decommissioning work by the end of 2027.
WIPP: Judge upholds change in how nuke waste is counted. Could keep site open to 2050
“We know it’s part of expanding WIPP. We know what DOE is doing but DOE doesn’t want to publicly admit it and the Environment Department doesn’t want to deal with it…The reason the laws have always put limits on WIPP is that the DOE was supposed to be finding locations for other repositories. There is no other repository and that’s why they don’t want to have a limit on what goes into WIPP.” — Don Hancock, nuclear waste program director at Southwest Research and Information Center.
Adrian Hedden Carlsbad Current-Argus November 15, 2021 currentargus.com
A New Mexico appellate judge upheld a change in how the volume of nuclear waste disposed of at the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant is counted, shifting the repository from being halfway to capacity to only a third full.
In 2018, the U.S. Department of Energy requested to modify its WIPP operating permit with the New Mexico Environment Department (NMED) to change how it counts the amount of waste toward the facility’s statutory limit of 6.2 million cubic feet of transuranic (TRU) waste consisting of clothing materials and equipment irradiated during nuclear activities.
The change was intended to count the inner volume of the waste as opposed to the volume of the outer containers that hold the waste, seeking to avoid counting air between the waste itself and waste drums.
NMED approved the permit modification request (PMR) in 2019, but Albuquerque-based watchdog groups Southwest Research and Information Center and Nuclear Watch New Mexico immediately appealed the decision.
UN experts review plans for release of Fukushima plant water
The plan has been fiercely opposed by fishermen, local residents and Japan’s neighbors, including China and South Korea.
ASSOCIATED PRESS courthousenews.com
TOKYO (AP) — A team from the U.N. nuclear agency arrived in Japan on Monday to assess preparations for the release into the ocean of treated radioactive water from the wrecked Fukushima nuclear plant.
The six experts on the team from the International Atomic Energy Agency are to meet with Japanese officials and visit the Fukushima Daiichi plant to discuss technical details of the planned release, Japanese officials said.
The government and the plant’s operator, Tokyo Electric Power Company Holdings, announced plans in April to start gradually releasing the treated radioactive water in the spring of 2023 to allow for the removal of hundreds of storage tanks to make room for facilities needed for the destroyed plant’s decommissioning.
Australia Could Push To Acquire Retired US Navy Los Angeles Class Nuclear Submarines
“The rules for transferring a nuclear-powered vessel to a foreign power are uncharted waters…”
U.S., UK aid to Australia’s acquisition of nuclear submarines “sheer act of nuclear proliferation”: Chinese envoy
“This literally turns existing precedence and practice on their heads in order to extend traditionally northern hemisphere cooperation to Australia and bolster its role in countering an increasingly assertive China.” https://thebulletin.org
The recently signed Australia–United Kingdom–United States defense agreement, or AUKUS, calls for the United States and Britain to share nuclear-submarine technology with Australia. Although the agreement was light on details of what, when, and how, plans apparently are for Australia to eventually build at least eight nuclear-powered attack submarines. In the interim, former Australian Prime Minister Tony Abbott is now advocating for Australia to obtain used nuclear submarines to get the sharing started so as to spin up the Royal Australian Navy’s submarine capabilities and nuclear know-how. Australia has never had a nuclear power plant of any kind.
Speaking last Friday at a Wilson Center event in Washington, D.C., Abbott suggested that, in the short term, Australia should consider leasing or purchasing one or more existing U.S. submarines to develop Australia’s capability to operate nuclear-powered submarines.
Abbott has posed the question, “Might it be possible for Australia to acquire a retiring [Los Angeles] class boat or two and to put it under an Australian flag and to run it, if you like, as an operational training boat?” Abbott added that he’d make a similar proposal for British nuclear-powered submarines “were I in London.”
COP26: Fossil fuel industry has largest delegation at climate summit
“There are more delegates at COP26 associated with the fossil fuel industry than from any single country, analysis shared with the BBC shows.”
Campaigners led by Global Witness assessed the participant list published by the UN at the start of this meeting.
They found that 503 people with links to fossil fuel interests had been accredited for the climate summit.
These delegates are said to lobby for oil and gas industries, and campaigners say they should be banned.
“The fossil fuel industry has spent decades denying and delaying real action on the climate crisis, which is why this is such a huge problem,” says Murray Worthy from Global Witness.
“Their influence is one of the biggest reasons why 25 years of UN climate talks have not led to real cuts in global emissions.”
About 40,000 people are attending the COP. Brazil has the biggest official team of negotiators according to UN data, with 479 delegates.
The UK, which is hosting the talk in Glasgow, has 230 registered delegates.
U.S. ‘very bullish’ on new nuclear technology, Granholm says
“These advanced nuclear reactors, and the existing fleet, are safe,” Granholm says. “We have the gold standard of regulation in the United States.”
Actually…According to a UCS report, if federal regulators require the necessary safety demonstrations, it could take at least 20 years—and billions of dollars in additional costs—to commercialize such reactors, their associated fuel-cycle facilities, and other related infrastructure.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) may have to adapt some regulations when licensing reactor technologies that differ significantly in design from the current fleet. Lyman says that should not mean weakening public health and safety standards, finding no justification for the claim that “advanced” reactors will be so much safer and more secure that the NRC can exempt them from fundamental safeguards. On the contrary, because there are so many open questions about these reactors, he says they may need to meet even more stringent requirements.
GLASGOW, Scotland — In an interview at the U.N. Climate Change Conference, Secretary of Energy Jennifer Granholm told Yahoo News on Friday that the Biden administration is “very bullish” on building new nuclear reactors in the United States.
“We are very bullish on these advanced nuclear reactors,” she said. “We have, in fact, invested a lot of money in the research and development of those. We are very supportive of that.”
Nuclear energy is controversial among environmental activists and experts because while it does not create the greenhouse gas emissions that cause climate change, it has the potential to trigger dangerous nuclear meltdowns and creates radioactive nuclear waste [not a small issue].
Al Jazeera Infographic: The World Nuclear Club
While 32 countries generate atomic energy, nine have nuclear weapons and seven countries have both.
Nuclear warheads per country
Nine countries possessed roughly 13,150 warheads as of August 2021, according to the Federation of American Scientists. More than 90 percent are owned by Russia and the US.
At the peak in 1986, the two rivals had nearly 65,000 nuclear warheads between them, making the nuclear arms race one of the most threatening events of the Cold War. While Russia and the US have dismantled thousands of warheads, several countries are thought to be increasing their stockpiles, most notably China.
According to the Pentagon’s 2021 annual report (pdf), China’s nuclear warhead stockpile is expected to more than triple and reach at least 1,000 by 2030.
The only country to voluntarily relinquish nuclear weapons is South Africa. In 1989, the government halted its nuclear weapons programme and in 1990 began dismantling its six nuclear weapons. Two years later, South Africa joined the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) as a non-nuclear country.
With the 26th UN Climate Change Conference over, nations are making plans to move to green energy in a bid to tackle global warming.
But nuclear energy is a particular sticking point. While it is the largest source of low-carbon electricity in OECD countries, some nations have spoken out against the categorisation of nuclear energy as climate-friendly.
Across the globe, 34 countries harness the power of splitting atoms for generating electricity or for nuclear weapons. (Al Jazeera)
Global nuclear energy
Nuclear energy provides roughly 10 percent of the world’s electricity. Of the 32 countries with nuclear power reactors, more than half (18) are in Europe. France has the world’s highest proportion of its electricity – at 71 percent – coming from atomic power.
Up until 2011, Japan was generating some 30 percent of its electricity from nuclear reactors; however, following the Fukushima disaster, all nuclear power plants were suspended for safety inspections. As of 2020, just 5 percent of Japan’s electricity came from nuclear power, according to the World Nuclear Association.
Nuclear power constitutes some 20 percent of the United States’ electricity. About 60 percent of the country’s energy comes from fossil fuels, including coal, natural gas and petroleum, with the remaining 20 percent coming from renewable sources – wind, hydro and solar.
Flooding and Nuclear Waste Eat Away at a Tribe’s Ancestral Home
The federal government allowed a stockpile of spent fuel on a Minnesota reservation to balloon even as a dam project whittled down the amount of livable land.
Interviews and documents obtained by The New York Times show how the state of Minnesota and the federal government ignored warnings about potential dangers posed to the tribe as they kept allowing the amount of waste stored on the reservation to expand and did little to address annual flooding that harms the tribe’s economy.
“I mean, this is a classic environmental justice fact pattern,” said Heather Sibbison, chair of Dentons Native American law and policy practice at Dentons Law Firm. “We have a minority community, a disadvantaged community, bearing the brunt of two huge infrastructure projects that serve other people.”
For decades, chronic flooding and nuclear waste have encroached on the ancestral lands in southeastern Minnesota that the Prairie Island Indian Community calls home, whittling them to about a third of their original size.
Two years after the tribe received federal recognition in 1936, the Army Corps of Engineers installed a lock-and-dam system just to the south along the Mississippi River. It repeatedly flooded the tribe’s land, including burial mounds, leaving members with only 300 livable acres.
Decades later, a stockpile of nuclear waste from a power plant next to the reservation, which the federal government reneged on a promise to remove in the 1990s, has tripled in size. It comes within 600 yards of some residents’ homes.
With no room to develop more housing on the reservation, more than 150 tribal members who are eager to live in their ancestral home are on a waiting list.
Cody Whitebear, 33, who serves as the tribe’s federal government relations specialist, is among those waiting. He hopes he can inherit his grandmother’s house, which is on the road closest to the power plant.
“I never had the opportunity to live on the reservation, be part of the community,” said Mr. Whitebear, who began connecting with his heritage after the birth of his son, Cayden. “In my mid-20s I had the desire to learn about my people and who I am and who we are.”
Proposed plutonium shipments concern New Mexico lawmakers
“The agency has said little overall about its plans, despite the potential hazards, said Cindy Weehler, who co-chairs the watchdog group 285 ALL.”
A panel of state lawmakers expressed concerns Friday about plans to truck plutonium shipments through New Mexico, including Santa Fe’s southern edge, and will send letters to state and federal officials asking for more information on the transports.
Two opponents of the shipments — a Santa Fe County commissioner and a local activist — presented the Department of Energy’s basic plan to the Legislature’s Radioactive and Hazardous Materials Committee, provoking a mixture of surprise and curiosity from members.
Several lawmakers agreed transporting plutonium is more hazardous because it is far more radioactive than the transuranic waste — contaminated gloves, equipment, clothing, soil and other materials — that Los Alamos National Laboratory now ships to the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant, an underground disposal site near Carlsbad.
Nuclear Power Is COP26’s Quiet Controversy
“We have to get everything done in the next 25 years…The idea that you’re going to scale up a technology you don’t even have yet, and it’s going to be commercially viable [in that time], just seems to me like la la land.” — Tom Burke, co-founder of climate think tank E3G.
BY ALEJANDRO DE LA GARZA time.com
In the midst of the COP26 climate talks yesterday, U.S. and Romanian officials stepped aside for a session in the conference’s Blue Zone, establishing an agreement for U.S. company NuScale to build a new kind of modular nuclear power plant in the southeastern European country. The company’s plants—designed to be quickly scaled up or down based on need—are intended to be quicker and cheaper to build than the traditional kind, with some considering them to be a promising alternative for countries seeking to wean themselves off fossil fuels.
NuScale CEO John Hopkins sees the agreement as part of a broader recognition that nuclear power has a big role to play as the world decarbonizes. “I’ve seen a significant shift here,” Hopkins said, speaking to TIME from Glasgow yesterday. “It used to be the only thing really discussed was renewables, but I think people are starting to be a little more pragmatic and understand that nuclear needs to be in the mix.”
But others at COP26 aren’t convinced that NuScale’s small reactors can help avoid climate catastrophe. Some point to the fact that NuScale has yet to build a single commercial plant as evidence that the company is already too late to the party.
US Government Works to ‘Cocoon’ Old Nuclear Reactors
Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work.
Hanford watchdogs generally agree with this process, said Tom Carpenter, director of the Seattle-based watchdog group Hanford Challenge.
“Nobody is raising any concerns about cocooning,” Carpenter said. “We’re all worried about the tank waste that needs immediate and urgent attention.” The bigger question is whether future generations will be willing to pay the massive costs of Hanford cleanup, he said.
By November 4, 2021 abcnews.go.com
SPOKANE, Wash. — Costs to clean up a massive nuclear weapons complex in Washington state are usually expressed in the hundreds of billions of dollars and involve decades of work.
But one project on the Hanford Nuclear Reservation is progressing at a much lower price.
The federal government is moving forward with the “cocooning” of eight plutonium production reactors at Hanford that will place them in a state of long-term storage to allow radiation inside to dissipate over a period of decades, until they can be dismantled and buried.
“It’s relatively non-expensive,” Mark French, a manager for the U.S. Department of Energy, said of cocooning. “The cost of trying to dismantle the reactor and demolish the reactor core would be extremely expensive and put workers at risk.”
The federal government built nine nuclear reactors at Hanford to make plutonium for atomic bombs during World War II and the Cold War. The site along the Columbia River contains America’s largest quantity of radioactive waste.
Is it green, or forever toxic? Nuclear rift at climate talks
“Whether we decide to go on with the nuclear energy or not…We will need to find a solution for the management of that nuclear waste” that humankind has already produced.” — Audrey Guillemenet, geologist and spokesperson for one of France’s underground waste repositories.
By November 4, 2021 apnews.com
SOULAINES-DHUYS, France (AP) — Deep in a French forest of oaks, birches and pines, a steady stream of trucks carries a silent reminder of nuclear energy’s often invisible cost: canisters of radioactive waste, heading into storage for the next 300 years.
As negotiators plot out how to fuel the world while also reducing carbon emissions at climate talks in Scotland, nuclear power is a central sticking point. Critics decry its mammoth price tag, the disproportionate damage caused by nuclear accidents, and radioactive leftovers that remain deadly for thousands of years.
But increasingly vocal and powerful proponents — some climate scientists and environmental experts among them — argue that nuclear power is the world’s best hope of keeping climate change under control, noting that it emits so few planet-damaging emissions and is safer on average than nearly any other energy source. Nuclear accidents are scary but exceedingly rare — while pollution from coal and other fossil fuels causes death and illness every day, scientists say.
U.S. Discloses Nuclear Stockpile Numbers
The Biden administration has publicly released the total number of nuclear weapons in the U.S. stockpile, a sharp reversal of the previous administration’s refusal to do so for the past three years.
By: Shannon Bugos ARMS CONTROL ASSOCIATION armscontrol.org
“Today, as an act of good faith and a tangible, public demonstration of the U.S. commitment to transparency, we will present data which documents our own record of continued progress toward the achievement of the goals” of the 1968 nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty (NPT), said Bonnie Jenkins, undersecretary of state for arms control and international security, on Oct. 5.
The U.S. stockpile of nuclear warheads was at 3,750 as of September 2020, according to the administration document. This number captures active and inactive warheads, but not the roughly 2,000 retired warheads awaiting dismantlement. The document lists stockpile numbers going back to 1962, including the warhead numbers from the years when the Trump administration refused to declassify the information.
Jellyfish Keep Attacking Nuclear Power Plants
Jellyfish are continuing to clog the cooling pipes of nuclear power plants around the world.
Jellyfish are continuing to clog the cooling intake pipes of a nuclear power plant in Scotland, which has previously prompted a temporary shutdowns of the plant.
The Torness nuclear power plant has reported concerns regarding jellyfish as far back as 2011, when it was forced to shut down for nearly a week—at an estimated cost of $1.5 million a day—because of the free-swimming marine animals.
In a short comment to Motherboard, EDF energy, which runs the Torness plant, said that “jellyfish blooms are an occasional issue for our power stations,” but also said that media reports claiming the plant had recently been taken offline because of jellyfish are “inaccurate.” “[There were] no emergency procedures this or last week related to jellyfish or otherwise,” a spokesperson said.
Like many other seaside power plants, the Torness plant uses seawater to prevent overheating. While there are measures in place to prevent aquatic life from entering the intake pipes, according to the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, they are no match for the sheer number of jellyfish that come during so-called “jellyfish blooms.”
Art and “un-forgetting”: How to honor the atomic dead
“The hibakusha narrative has expanded over time to include victims beyond the city limits of Hiroshima and Nagasaki—and as far away as the Navajo Nation, which still suffers the radiation effects of uranium mining; the Marshall Islands, where the United States conducted so many nuclear tests that, on average, the equivalent of 1.6 Hiroshima-size bombs was detonated every day for 12 years; Kazakhstan, where the Soviet Union tested its nuclear weapons for four decades; and other places around the world adversely affected by the development and maintenance of nuclear weapons.”
Noguchi himself considered the term hibakusha to include the victims of nuclear weapons worldwide; he changed the name of his proposed “Memorial to the Dead of Hiroshima” to the more inclusive “Memorial to the Atomic Dead.”
By Molly Hurley | November 26, 2021 thebulletin.org
As I eagerly await Spotify’s year-end report on my most-played songs of 2021, I wonder which ones will remind me of my summer in New York City—of off-pitch Karaoke Television with friends, or the distinct “popping” sound of a pigeon being run over by a taxi not more than two feet in front of me. Though I thrived amid the frenzied surprises of the city, I also found sudden moments of quiet solemnity while sketching inside the many art museums of the Big Apple. One of those museums was the Noguchi Museum, established in 1985 by its namesake Isamu Noguchi, a Japanese-American sculptor who is also well known for his landscape architecture and modern furniture designs such as the iconic Noguchi table.Continue reading
HIDDEN AGENDA: The unspoken argument for more nuclear power
Nuclear power is so slow and expensive that it doesn’t even matter whether or not it is ‘low-carbon’ (let alone ‘zero-carbon’). As the scientist, Amory Lovins, says, “Being carbon-free does not establish climate-effectiveness.” If an energy source is too slow and too costly, it will “reduce and retard achievable climate protection,” no matter how ‘low-carbon’ it is.
By Linda Pentz Gunter beyondnuclearinternational.org
So here we are again at another COP (Conference of the Parties). Well, some of us are in Glasgow, Scotland at the COP itself, and some of us, this writer included, are sitting at a distance, trying to feel hopeful.
But this is COP 26. That means there have already been 25 tries at dealing with the once impending and now upon us climate crisis. Twenty five rounds of “blah, blah, blah” as youth climate activist, Greta Thunberg, so aptly put it.
So if some of us do not feel the blush of optimism on our cheeks, we can be forgiven. I mean, even the Queen of England has had enough of the all-talk-and-no-action of our world leaders, who have been, by and large, thoroughly useless. Even, this time, absent. Some of them have been worse than that.
Not doing anything radical on climate at this stage is fundamentally a crime against humanity. And everything else living on Earth. It should be grounds for an appearance at the International Criminal Court. In the dock.
‘Ignored for 70 years’: human rights group to investigate uranium contamination on Navajo Nation
Boost for advocates’ group is step further in decades-long fight against mining pollution
By: Cody Nelson THE GUARDIAN theguardian.com
Rita Capitan has been worrying about her water since 1994. It was that autumn she read a local newspaper article about another uranium mine, the Crownpoint Uranium Project, getting under way near her home.
Capitan has spent her entire life in Crownpoint, New Mexico, a small town on the eastern Navajo Nation, and is no stranger to the uranium mining that has persisted in the region for decades. But it was around the time the article was published that she began learning about the many risks associated with uranium mining.
“We as community members couldn’t just sit back and watch another company come in and just take what is very precious to us. And that is water – our water,” Capitan said.
To this effect, Capitan and her husband, Mitchell, founded Eastern Navajo Diné Against Uranium Mining (Endaum). The group’s fight against uranium mining on their homeland has continued for nearly three decades, despite the industry’s disastrous health and environmental impacts being public knowledge for years.
Capitan’s newest concerns are over the Canadian mining company Laramide Resources, which, through its US subsidiary NuFuels, holds a federal mining license for Crownpoint and nearby Church Rock. Due to the snail’s pace at which operations like this can move, Laramide hasn’t begun extraction in these areas, but is getting closer by the day.
An Unearthly Spectacle: The Untold Story of the World’s Biggest Nuclear Bomb
Take a minute to visit the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists website to read this brilliant photo essay on the Tsar Bomba by Associate Professor and Director of the Science and Technology Studies program at the Stevens Institute of Technology Alex Wellerstein. His first book, Restricted Data: The History of Nuclear Secrecy in the United States, was published by the University of Chicago Press in April 2021.
By Alex Wellerstein October 29, 2021 thebulletin.org
In the early hours of October 30, 1961, a bomber took off from an airstrip in northern Russia and began its flight through cloudy skies over the frigid Arctic island of Novaya Zemlya. Slung below the plane’s belly was a nuclear bomb the size of a small school bus—the largest and most powerful bomb ever created.
At 11:32 a.m., the bombardier released the weapon. As the bomb fell, an enormous parachute unfurled to slow its descent, giving the pilot time to retreat to a safe distance. A minute or so later, the bomb detonated. A cameraman watching from the island recalled:
A fire-red ball of enormous size rose and grew. It grew larger and larger, and when it reached enormous size, it went up. Behind it, like a funnel, the whole earth seemed to be drawn in. The sight was fantastic, unreal, and the fireball looked like some other planet. It was an unearthly spectacle! [1]
The flash alone lasted more than a minute. The fireball expanded to nearly six miles in diameter—large enough to include the entire urban core of Washington or San Francisco, or all of midtown and downtown Manhattan. Over several minutes it rose and mushroomed into a massive cloud. Within ten minutes, it had reached a height of 42 miles and a diameter of some 60 miles. One civilian witness remarked that it was “as if the Earth was killed.” Decades later, the weapon would be given the name it is most commonly known by today: Tsar Bomba, meaning “emperor bomb.”
Designed to have a maximum explosive yield of 100 million tons (or 100 megatons) of TNT equivalent, the 60,000-pound monster bomb was detonated at only half its strength. Still, at 50 megatons, it was more than 3,300 times as powerful as the atomic bomb that killed at least 70,000 people in Hiroshima, and more than 40 times as powerful as the largest nuclear bomb in the US arsenal today. Its single test represents about one tenth of the total yield of all nuclear weapons ever tested by all nations.[2]
At the time of its detonation, the Tsar Bomba held the world’s attention, largely as an object of infamy, recklessness, and terror. Within two years, though, the Soviet Union and the United States would sign and ratify the Limited Test Ban Treaty, prohibiting atmospheric nuclear weapons testing, and the 50-megaton bomb would fall into relative obscurity.
“What’s Yours Is Mine”
“The federal government knew, from at least the early 1950s, of severely harmful health effects from uranium mining, but it kept that information from the Diné, as Navajo people call themselves.”
The wheels of justice can move exceedingly slowly, if at all, and it often depends on whether an aggrieved group has much political recognition or clout. Issues linked to mainstream religious freedom can speed their way to the Supreme Court’s shadow docket in record time, while religious and environmental justice issues for Native Americans can simmer on the system’s back burner for a lifetime.
The sprawling Navajo reservation, located in parts of Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico, is the largest and most populous Native American reservation, almost 28,000 square miles. Its Four Corners area (the three states plus Colorado) is rich in radioactive uranium ore. From 1944 to 1986, nearly four million tons of uranium ore were extracted from the reservation under leases with the Navajo Nation. Many Navajo worked the mines, often living and raising families close by.
Reactor at Japan’s nuclear power plant suspended over counter-terrorism demands: Reports
The third reactor at Japan’s Mihama nuclear power plant was suspended by the operator, the Kansai Electric Power company, over inability to enhance counter-terrorism infrastructure in time, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported on Sunday.
Tokyo [Japan], October 24 (ANI/Sputnik): The third reactor at Japan’s Mihama nuclear power plant was suspended by the operator, the Kansai Electric Power company, over inability to enhance counter-terrorism infrastructure in time, the Japanese public broadcaster NHK reported on Sunday.
All the required measures to strengthen security are expected to be completed in September 2022, and the reactor might resume operations in mid-October of that year, the outlet said, citing the operator.
The reactor was restarted on June 23, 2021, after more than 40 years of work. The law limits the maximum lifespan of reactors to 40 years, but if additional requirements are met, a reactor can work more. Mihama’s third reactor was stopped for a decade after the Fukushima earthquake and tsunami, which in 2011 claimed over 15,000 lives, displaced thousands of people and caused a meltdown at the power plant. (ANI/Sputnik)
Groups Fire Back at Feds’ Move to Dismiss Plutonium Pit Lawsuit
Federal agencies continue to reject a full review of the public safety and environmental risks of producing nuclear bomb cores at multiple DOE sites.
Jay Coghlan, director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, commented, “The government has yet to explain to American taxpayers why it will spend more than $50 billion to build new plutonium pit bomb cores for new-design nuclear weapons when we already have thousands of existing pits proven to be reliable for a century or more. This has nothing to do with maintaining the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile and everything to do with building up a new nuclear arms race that will threaten the entire world.”
/ EIN PRESSWIRE October 26, 2021
AIKEN, SOUTH CAROLINA — Public interest groups shot back at the U.S. Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Administration’s attempt to suppress a lawsuit seeking a comprehensive environmental review of the agencies’ plans to produce large quantities of nuclear bomb cores, or plutonium pits, at DOE sites in New Mexico and South Carolina.
U.S. nuclear envoy visits S. Korea amid N. Korea missile tension, stalled talks
The U.S. envoy for North Korea arrived in South Korea on Saturday amid stalled denuclearization talks and tension over Pyongyang’s recent missile tests.
Special Representative Sung Kim’s visit came days after North Korea fired a new submarine-launched ballistic missile (SLBM), which prompted criticism from Washington and calls for a return to talks aimed at denuclearizing the North in return for U.S. sanctions relief.
Kim, after talks in Washington with South Korean and Japanese counterparts on Tuesday, urged North Korea “to refrain from further provocations and engage in sustained and substantive dialogue.”
Pyongyang so far has rejected U.S. overtures, accusing the United States and South Korea of talking diplomacy while ratcheting up tensions with their own military activities.
On Thursday, the North said the United States was overreacting to its self-defensive SLBM test and questioned the sincerity of Washington’s offers of talks, warning of consequences.
Arriving in South Korea, Kim said he looks forward to having “productive follow up discussions” with his counterpart, without elaborating.