2022 News Articles
The nuclear arms race is back … and ever more dangerous now
Donald Trump has increased spending on America’s arsenal while ripping up cold war treaties. Russia and China are following suit.
BY SIMON TISDALL | theguardian.com
Imagine the uproar if the entire populations of York, Portsmouth or Swindon were suddenly exposed to three times the permissible level of penetrating gamma radiation, or what the nuclear physicist Ernest Rutherford termed gamma rays. The outpouring of rage and fear would be heard across the world.
That’s what happened to the roughly 200,000 people who live in the similarly sized northern Russian city of Severodvinsk on 8 August, after an explosion at a nearby top-secret missile testing range. Russia’s weather service, Rosgidromet, recorded radiation levels up to 16 times higher than the usual ambient rate.
Yet the incident has been met with surly silence by Russia. It was five days before officials confirmed a blast at the Nyonoksa range had killed several people, including nuclear scientists. No apologies were offered to Severodvinsk residents. There is still little reliable information. “Accidents, unfortunately, happen,” a Kremlin spokesman said. That callous insouciance is not universally shared. According to western experts, the explosion was caused by the launch failure of a new nuclear-powered cruise missile, one of many advanced weapons being developed by Russia, the US and China in an accelerating global nuclear arms race.
RCLC Does Not Represent The Taos Constituency
La Jicarita
BY KAY MATTHEWS | losalamosreporter.com
The Regional Coalition of LANL Communities has ties to some of the same people and businesses as that of the Rocky Flats Coalition, and this connection may well influence on-going cleanup at Los Alamos National Laboratory and the transfer of contaminated lands from Department of Energy responsibility, some of which has already occurred.
David Abelson of Crescent Strategies, brought in to facilitate the LANL Coalition back in 2011, was the executive director of the Rocky Flats Coalition of Local Governments, and several Washington-based D.C. businesses that advised the Rocky Flats Coalition are working with the LANL Coalition. They all assisted in the effort to convert Rocky Flats to a wildlife refuge, an outcome which required much lower standards for clean-up than, for example, human residency. This created a credibility gap that the mission of the RCLC is to lobby for cleanup of LANL.
Nuclear weapons are spreading. This plutonium scientist is trying to stop that
Siegfried Hecker serves as a scientific shuttle diplomat, building ties with rival nuclear researchers the world over.
BY STEPHEN SHANKLAND | cnet.com
When you think of efforts to pare down the world’s nuclear weapons stockpiles, maybe you imagine heads of state and uniformed generals sternly staring down their military rivals across a huge table.
Reality, though, looks very different.
Picture instead a white-haired, US weapons scientist sidestepping the summit meetings and heading directly to research labs in Russia, China, Pakistan and even North Korea to chat about physics and build the direct ties that may be more effective at establishing trust than edicts from the top brass.
Native American tribe claims nuclear waste can’t be stored on its land
To the Western Shoshone, most of Nevada isn’t Nevada. At least not in the current sense.
BY JOHN SADLER | lasvegassun.com
More than 150 years after the first treaty between the Western Shoshone and the federal government was signed, the two nations disagree on the outcome—the Shoshone say they never turned over their land.
The majority of the land in Nevada falls under the Shoshone’s historical claim. It includes the Nevada National Security Site (formerly Nevada Test Site), which has released hundreds of tons of fallout in its operational history. It also includes Yucca Mountain, which has been the center of a decades-long argument centered on the long-term storage of the nation’s nuclear waste.
The plan to turn the mountain into a nuclear waste facility drums up memories of past nuclear use of the land, and some members of the tribe are pushing back.
August 13 Robert Malley, President and CEO of the International Crisis Group, sits down with Joe Cirincione to discuss the current situation in Iran, which he sees as a 21st century ‘Guns of August.’
Robert served in the Obama administration as Special Assistant to the President, Senior Adviser to the President for the Counter-ISIL Campaign, and White House Coordinator for the Middle East, North Africa and the Gulf region. Michelle Dover hosts Early Warning with Ploughshares Fund Deputy Director of Policy Mary Kaszynski and Jessica Sleight, Program Director at Global Zero.
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Church Rock, America’s Forgotten Nuclear Disaster, Is Still Poisoning Navajo Lands 40 Years Later
Residents say they’ve been ignored even as they struggle with contaminated water and worry about having children.
BY SAMUEL GILBERT & RAMSAY DE GIVE | cnn.com
A BARBED-WIRE FENCE IN CHURCH ROCK, NEW MEXICO.
Early in the summer of 1979, Larry King, an underground surveyor at the United Nuclear Corporation’s Church Rock Uranium mine in New Mexico, began noticing something unusual when looking at the south side of the tailings dam. That massive earthen wall was responsible for holding back thousands of tons of toxic water and waste produced by the mine and the nearby mill that extracted uranium from raw ore. And as King saw, there were “fist-sized cracks” developing in that wall. He measured them, reported them to his supervisors, and didn’t think anything more of it.
A few weeks later, at 5:30 a.m. on July 16, 1979, the dam failed, releasing 1,100 tons of uranium waste and 94 million gallons of radioactive water into the Rio Puerco and through Navajo lands, a toxic flood that had devastating consequences on the surrounding area.
“The water, filled with acids from the milling process, twisted a metal culvert in the Puerco,” according to Judy Pasternak’s book Yellow Dirt: A Poisoned Land and the Betrayal of the Navajos. “
Sheep keeled over and died, and crops curdled along the banks. The surge of radiation was detected as far away as Sanders, Arizona, fifty miles downstream.” According to a Nuclear Regulatory Commission report, radioactivity levels in the Puerco near the breached dam were 7,000 times that of what is allowed in drinking water.
See NukeWatch’s 22-page formal comments on expanded plutonium pit production
“Until NNSA fully complies with the National Environmental Policy Act through the preparation of a programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium pit production, Nuclear Watch believes that any irreversible or irretrievable commitment of resources to either the expansion of pit production at the Los Alamos Lab or to the repurposing of the MOX Facility at the Savannah River Site is unlawful.“
NRDC Comments on NNSA’s Draft SA of 2008 CT PEIS
These comments by the Natural Resources Defense Council (NRDC) reiterate two fundamental points I have already made with co-counsel William N. Lawton of Meyer Glitzenstein & Eubanks, LLP in our May 17, 2019 letter to Department of Energy (DOE) Secretary James Richard Perry and National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Administrator Lisa Gorden-Hagerty
1) Given NNSA’s May 10, 2018 decision to expand plutonium pit production, the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA) clearly requires the agency to prepare a new programmatic environmental impact statement (PEIS) to supplement the 2008 Complex Transformation PEIS; and
2) Even if NNSA does not agree with the above, there is a 1998 court order that requires DOE to prepare a supplemental PEIS in the event NNSA’s proposed plans for future plutonium pit production extend beyond fabrication at LANL of 50 pits per year under “routine conditions,” or 80 pits per year under “multiple shift operations.”
The Ongoing Call for Nuclear Abolition at Los Alamos
The sick people who prevent gun control and support AK47s are the same people who support the building and maintenance of nuclear weapons, which put millions of people at risk from some unimaginable massacre to come.
AUGUST 9, 2019 | BY REV. JOHN DEAR | commondreams.org
REFLECTING ON THE 74th ANNIVERSARY OF HIROSHIMA
This week, we drove back up the remote New Mexico mountains to the “atomic city” for our annual peace vigil, sit in and rally. This was our 16th year in a row.
Jay Coghlan of NukeWatch New Mexico talked about the seriousness and stupidity of the Trump Administration’s decision last week to pull out of the Arms Control Treaty, a decision that has gotten lost in all the other bad news (see: www.nukewatch.org). Joni Arends of Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety New Mexico spoke of the latest shenanigans by the Labs, to bypass the legal oversight of its water purification system so that plutonium contaminated water can continue to poison the land (see: www.nuclearactive.org). Alicia from NukeWatch explained the latest progress with the U.N. treaty to outlaw nuclear weapons, organized by the 2017 Nobel Peace Prize winning group, the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (see: www.icanw.org).
VIEW MORE PHOTOS FROM THE EVENT
Radioactive pollution leaked through floor of South Carolina nuclear fuel plant
(Photo: Courtesy of High Flyer/The State)
BY SAMMY FRETWELL | greenvilleonline.com
Radioactive uranium has leaked through the floor at Westinghouse’s Bluff Road fuel factory, contaminating the soil in an area of Richland County with a nearly 35-year history of groundwater pollution from the plant.
The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission says the uranium, a toxic substance used to make nuclear fuel rods, seeped through a 3-inch hole in a concrete floor in part of the factory where an acid is used. The hole extends 6 feet into the ground, according to the NRC. The NRC learned of the leak July 12.
Are We Headed for Another Expensive Nuclear Arms Race? Could Be.
BY STEVEN ERLANGER | nytimes.com
BRUSSELS — After the recent death of the treaty covering intermediate-range missiles, a new arms race appears to be taking shape, drawing in more players, more money and more weapons at a time of increased global instability and anxiety about nuclear proliferation.
The arms control architecture of the Cold War, involving tens of thousands of nuclear weapons, was laboriously designed over years of hard-fought negotiations between two superpowers — the United States and the Soviet Union. The elaborate treaties helped keep the world from nuclear annihilation.
Pakistan downgrades diplomatic ties, suspends trade with India over Kashmir
Kashmir in lockdown as India plans to change state’s status
BY JESSIE YEUNG & SOPHIA SAIFI | cnn.com
Islamabad, Pakistan (CNN) Pakistan has announced it will downgrade diplomatic relations and suspend bilateral trade with India after New Delhi stripped the disputed state of Jammu and Kashmir of its special status. India’s High Commissioner will also be removed from the country, Pakistan’s Ministry of Foreign Affairs said in a statement Wednesday. It added that Islamabad will not send its own ambassador to New Delhi.
The series of announcements came after a National Security Committee meeting on Wednesday, where the office of Pakistan’s Prime Minister Imran Khan said that Islamabad would also review bilateral agreements with India and take the issue up with the United Nations and the UN Security Council.
TPNW is now officially halfway towards entry into force!
On August 6th, 1945 at 8:16 am, a nuclear bomb was dropped on the city of Hiroshima, killing over 140,000 people and wiping out most of the city. 74 years later, the bomb’s catastrophic consequences are still affecting people’s lives.
Today, tens of thousands of people have gathered in Hiroshima, and around the world, to commemorate the victims and echo the call of the Hibakusha – the survivors of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki – that such a thing must never happen again. And at the UN in New York, one such commemoration took a very special form today: Bolivia has just marked Hiroshima Day by depositing its ratification instrument for the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW). With this ratification, TPNW is now officially halfway towards entry into force!
Read more about this special moment
The Human Cost of the Hiroshima Bombing
PODCAST: Listen to the story of Kathleen Burkinshaw, the daughter of a survivor of the Hiroshima bombing. Kathleen reminds us that she and her mother are among the tens of thousands of people who view nuclear weapons in terms of the friends and family members they lost.
? New Podcast Alert ?: in memory of the 74th anniversary of the bombing of Hiroshima, Nukes of Hazard podcast host @NuclearWilson sat down with @klburkinshaw1, daughter of a #Hiroshima survivor, to discuss the human cost of the bombing. Listen here: https://t.co/iNs05KkbXc pic.twitter.com/YHm6py7Fnr
— Nukes of Hazard (@nukes_of_hazard) August 6, 2019
“For this week’s Press the Button, we mark the 74th anniversary of the Hiroshima bombing with a special edition episode.”
Listen and subscribe to Press the Button, a weekly podcast from Ploughshares Fund dedicated to nuclear policy and national security.
August 6th — Two interrelated issues are discussed: Should US policy today still reserve the right to use nuclear weapons first, and what happened when we did go first nearly three quarters of a century ago?
“To help answer these questions, we bring you the very best from a multitude of our earlier interviews. You’ll hear from nuclear historian Alex Wellerstein, former Obama deputy national security advisor Ben Rhodes, former RAND analyst and releaser of the Pentagon Papers Daniel Ellsberg, founding director of the Consortium on Gender, Security and Human Rights Carol Cohn, and Beatrice Fihn, executive director of the Nobel Peace Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Also featuring special guest Kingston Reif from the Arms Control Association, to discuss recent nuclear news on the Early Warning segment. Kingston talks about the INF Treaty withdrawal, no-first-use, and the latest from Iran..
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The Democratic Debates Need More Questions About Nuclear War
There is a remarkable incongruity between the existential danger of nuclear war and the absence of public discussion about preventing it. This disconnect is all too apparent today, as arms control and disarmament treaties are scrapped, nations embark on vast nuclear weapons buildups, and governments threaten nuclear war against one another.
SCOTT OLSON / GETTY IMAGES
BY LAWRENCE WITTNER |truthout.org
Meanwhile, the mass media routinely avoids these issues but, instead, focuses on movie stars, athletes, and President Donald Trump’s latest tweeted insults.
Do I exaggerate? Consider the following.
In May 2018, the Trump administration unilaterally withdrew from the laboriously constructed Iran nuclear agreement that had closed off the possibility of that nation developing nuclear weapons. The U.S. pullout was followed by the imposition of heavy U.S. economic sanctions on Iran, as well as by thinly veiled threats by Trump to use nuclear weapons to destroy that country. Irate at these moves, the Iranian government recently retaliated by exceeding the limits set by the shattered agreement on its uranium stockpile and uranium enrichment.
NNSA Weighing Whether Nuke Parts Delays Could Prevent Timely Deployment
EXCHANGE MONITOR | exchangemonitor.com
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) is still determining if problems with non-nuclear components will prevent the B61-12 gravity bomb and W88 Alt 370 submarine-launched ballistic missile warhead from entering service with the Air Force and Navy.
Arms Control Association – Statement on U.S. Withdrawal from the INF Treaty
“The loss of the landmark INF Treaty, which helped end the Cold War nuclear arms race, is a blow to international peace and security.”
Statement from Daryl G. Kimball, executive director | armscontrol.org | Media Contacts: Daryl G. Kimball, executive director, 202-463-8270 ext. 107; Kingston Reif, director for disarmament policy, 202-463-8270 ext. 104
“Russian noncompliance with the INF Treaty is unacceptable and merits a strong response. But President Trump’s decision to terminate the treaty will not eliminate Russia’s noncompliant 9M729 missiles — and is a mistake.
“Worst of all, blowing up the INF Treaty with no substitute arms control plan in place could open the door to a dangerous new era of unconstrained military competition with Russia.
Communities in the American Southwest Were Exposed to Nuclear Fallout. Can They Get Compensated?
Radiation epidemiology is a science of uncertainty.
BY: ARIA ALAMALHODAEI| motherjones.com
The atomic bomb was born in the desert. In the early hours of July 16, 1945, after a spate of bad weather, a 20-kiloton plutonium-based nuke referred to as “the gadget” detonated near Alamogordo, New Mexico. Firsthand testimonies of the test, codenamed Trinity, converge on the uncanny axis of awe and dread.
The Manhattan Project’s Chief of Field Operations, General Thomas Farrell, wrote that “the strong, sustained, awesome roar…warned of doomsday and made us feel that we puny things were blasphemous.”
The bomb produced a massive cloud column that drifted in several directions, dusting large swaths of the surrounding region with radioactive snow—fallout that settled on buildings, plants, and animals, and that continued to permeate the air as invisible particulate in the weeks and months that followed. Five years later, the Nevada Test Site was established to continue the work that Trinity set alight.
Although the mushroom cloud became the icon of American nuclear activity in the 20th century, the harms of these bombs did not fade with their dimming fireballs. No group in the US understands this better than the downwinders, communities throughout the American Southwest and beyond who were exposed to the fallout of the military’s domestic nuclear test program.
The INF Treaty Officially Died Today
Six months after both the United States and Russia announced suspensions of their respective obligations under the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty (INF), the treaty officially died today.
Federation of American Scientists | Posted on Aug.02, 2019 in Arms Control, Nuclear Weapons, Russia, United States by
The Federation of American Scientists strongly condemns the irresponsible acts by the Russian and US administrations that have resulted in the demise of this historic and important agreement.
In a they-did-it statement on the State Department’s web site, Secretary of State Michael Pompeo repeated the accusation that Russia has violated the treaty by testing and deploying a ground-launched cruise missile with a range prohibited by the treaty.
“The United States will not remain party [sic] to a treaty that is deliberately violated by Russia,” he said.
By withdrawing from the INF, the Trump administration has surrendered legal and political pressure on Russia to return to compliance. Instead of diplomacy, the administration appears intent on ramping up military pressure by developing its own INF missiles.
Today, 2 August 2019, the governments of the US and Russia have missed a troubling deadline: the end of the six-month notice period that began when both countries announced their withdrawal from the INF Treaty earlier this year. During this period, the decision could still be reversed if both parties went back to the negotiating table. Now that the deadline has passed, and both states can produce even more nuclear weapons, this time enabled to hit targets in the range of 500 and 5,500 kilometres. These weapons, optimised to destroy cities and wipe out civilian populations, put the whole world – and Europe in particular – at risk.
A nuclear treaty is about to vanish. Its demise should teach a lesson.
On Friday, a pillar of global security will expire.
BY EDITORIAL BOARD | washingtonpost.com
Perhaps no one will notice when the Intermediate-range Nuclear Forces Treaty of 1987 slips into oblivion; the threat of nuclear attack in just minutes that seemed so unnerving during the late 20th century has now faded into a distant memory, lost to complacency at the Cold War’s end. But the demise of the INF Treaty should teach a lesson.
Arms control, creating verifiable treaties to limit and reduce nuclear, chemical and biological weapons, had its mystique: obtuse concepts, exotic hardware and mind-bending negotiations. But at its core, arms control was about political willpower. In the case of the INF Treaty, President Ronald Reagan and Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev summoned enough of it to eliminate an entire class of deployed weapons, the ground-based missiles with a range of between 300 and 3,400 miles, and their launchers. The treaty made the world safer not only by removing a nuclear threat to Europe but also by introducing novel measures such as intrusive verification and on-site inspections.
If New START Dies, These Questions Will Need Answers
There’s little public indication that the Trump administration is thinking about several things that will happen if the last strategic arms agreement is allowed to expire.
BY VINCENT MANZO & MADISON ESTES | defenseone.com
A U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress bomber takes off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, for a routine training mission in the vicinity of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, Sept 23, 2018.
The Trump administration has articulated an ambitious new vision for nuclear arms control, one that includes China and seeks to limit more types of Russian systems. This vision appears to have little room for the New START agreement, which helped to cap U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and which is due to expire in 2021. And yet there is little in the public record to indicate how the administration would deal with various problems that would surface if New START is left to die.
Did Trump Just Threaten to Attack Iran With Nukes?
He said he could destroy Afghanistan but was signaling elsewhere. The scary part is there’s already a plan.
BY SCOTT RITTER | theamericanconservative.com July 25, 2019
On Monday during a press conference between Donald Trump and Pakistani Prime Minister Imran Khan, Trump spoke rather casually of having reviewed plans to annihilate Afghanistan.
“I could win that war in a week. I just don’t want to kill 10 million people,” Trump said. “I have plans on Afghanistan that if I wanted to win that war, Afghanistan would be wiped off the face of the earth, it would be gone. It would be over in, literally, in 10 days. And I don’t want to go that route.”
Trump’s seemingly blasé reference to a hypothetical mass murder on a scope and scale never seen in the history of mankind (it took Nazi Germany more than four years to kill six million Jews) was stunning. We know, given the state of play in Afghanistan, that it will never happen. But it wasn’t offhand. Such a policy of total destruction could also be seen as applying to Iran, and the potential for the use of nuclear weapons in the event of a U.S.-Iranian conflict is far from hypothetical. He knew exactly what he was doing.
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As we mark the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in a handful of days, we will rightly remember the horrors of nuclear war.
BY ZACK BROWN & ALEX SPIRE
For a brief fraction of a second on an early March morning in 1954, the United States summoned a second sun into existence above Bikini Atoll.
As the four-mile wide fireball bathed the Pacific seascape in its angry, white-red light, onlookers recognized something nearly divine—and unquestionably ominous. “It was a religious experience, a personal view of the apocalypse or transfiguration,” said one observer. Another remembered feeling “like you stepped into a blast furnace,” even though he was over thirty miles away.
This was the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, one of several dozen nuclear detonations the United States carried out in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. At 15 million tons of TNT—one thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—it was the largest explosion ever set off by Americans.
Yukiya Amano, Head of the I.A.E.A. Nuclear Watchdog Group, Dies at 72
BY MEGAN SPECIA & DAVID E. SANGER | nytimes.com July 22, 2019
Yukiya Amano, a Japanese diplomat who played a central role in inspecting Iran’s compliance with the landmark 2015 nuclear deal as the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency in Vienna, has died, the organization announced on Monday. He was 72.
The agency, part of the United Nations, did not cite a cause of death or say when and where he died, but word had begun to spread last week that Mr. Amano had planned to step down from his position as director-general after nearly a decade because of an unspecified illness. He was two years into a third term as the agency’s leader.
His death left the agency leaderless at a critical moment: just as Iran is edging away from the nuclear agreement and beginning carefully calibrated violations of the limits on how much nuclear material it can produce, and at what level of purity.
Inside the Secret Campaign to Export U.S. Nuclear Tech to Saudi Arabia
Industry coalition’s push to win over the Trump administration is concerning officials on Capitol Hill who are fearful that it could threaten U.S. national security.
ERIN BANCO | thedailybeast.com
When President Donald Trump took the stage in the East Room of the White House earlier this month to give his first speech on the environment, nuclear energy executives and industry leaders held their breath. They exchanged text messages with fellow colleagues during the speech’s broadcast, wondering aloud to one another if Trump had taken the bait.
Since the fall of 2016, the executives have built an underground coalition along with academics, technology experts and well-connected politicos, including some lobbyists, to get the president and his administration to support—even promote—an American nuclear energy comeback. The industry has declined in recent years due mostly to the closing of critical nuclear infrastructure and plants. Between 2010 and 2018, only one new nuclear power plant came online in the United States.
Thank you to those who submitted comments in the NNSA’s EIS “scoping” for the proposed Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP) at the Savannah River Site. The PBP remains unauthorized and unfunded.
“Despite requests by many, NNSA denied extending the comment period. Though the comment period ended on July 25, there is still time to submit late comments. (See Federal Register notice of June 10.)
Special thanks are due to the experts at Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri-Valley CAREs and the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) for submitting extensive comments pertaining to the question of “need” for new pits for new nuclear weapons.
It is of note that we enlisted groups that don’t traditionally work on nuclear weapons or DOE issues to engage the scoping process, including the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Conservation Voters of South Carolina and the League of Women Voters of South Carolina. Plus, there were a flurry of individual comments in the last few days.
Comments included the lack of need for new pits for the W87-1-style warhead, the issue of pit reuse and the need for a “nuclear non-proliferation risk assessment” on the production of new pits for new nuclear weapons.
Sheep Fire Burns on Idaho National Laboratory Land
Listen and subscribe to Press the Button, a weekly podcast from Ploughshares Fund dedicated to nuclear policy and national security.
July 22 — This episode features Alex Wellerstein, historian of science at the Stevens Institute of Technology and creator of NUKEMAP – a website that allows you to simulate the effects of a nuclear weapons anywhere in the world. He talks in depth about the decision to drop the Bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the effectiveness of nuclear deterrence, on the debate about the Bomb’s use after Trinity and much more.
Also featuring a guest appearance by WAND’s Caroline Dorminey.
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In Budget Deal, White House And Congress Overpay For The Pentagon
The newly proposed two-year budget deal between the White House and Congress has one major flaw. It vastly overpays for the Pentagon.
At $738 billion for Fiscal Year 2020 and $740 billion for Fiscal Year 2021, the agreement sets the table for two of the highest budgets for the Pentagon and related work on nuclear warheads at the Department of Energy since World War II. The proposed figures are higher than spending at the height of the Vietnam and Korean Wars, and substantially more than the high point of the Reagan buildup of the 1980s. And the Fiscal Year 2020 and Fiscal Year 2021 numbers are only slightly less than spending in 2010, when the United States had 180,000 troops in Iraq and Afghanistan, roughly nine times the number currently deployed.
A Path Toward Renewing Arms Control
LAWRENCE J. KORB | thebulletin.org
At the late June G-20 meeting in Osaka, Japan, US President Trump and Russian President Putin met to discuss a number of issues, including Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Ukraine, and arms control. While all of these are important, none is more urgent at the current time than arms control because we are on the brink of a new arms race that could be an existential threat not only to these two nuclear super powers but to humanity.
Fewer Inspections for Aging Nuclear Plants, Regulators Propose
BY CORAL DAVENPORT | nytimes.com
WASHINGTON — A new report by staff members of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, which oversees the safety of the nation’s 59 aging nuclear power plants, recommends that the commissioners significantly weaken or reduce safety inspections of the plants.
Edwin Lyman, the acting director of nuclear safety programs for the Union of Concerned Scientists, was highly critical of the proposal. “That’s bad because it could impair the ability of the N.R.C. to see larger patterns of violations at a plant,” he said, and called the proposal “a PR stunt. They’re doing it to make these things sound better.”
The report, published Tuesday, comes after a yearlong consultation and public meeting process, including views from the Nuclear Energy Institute, which lobbies on behalf of the nuclear power plant industry and has long sought weaker safety rules. It also comes amid a broader push by the Trump administration for reduced regulations on industry.
When Radioactive Wastes Aren’t Radioactive Wastes
With Congress Limiting What Can Be Dumped at Nuke Sites, the Energy Department May Just Redefine What It’s Dumping
JILLIAN S. AMBROZ. | dcreport.org
The U.S. Department of Energy wants to redefine what constitutes high-level radioactive waste, cutting corners on the disposal of some of the most dangerous and long-lasting waste byproduct on earth—reprocessed spent fuel from the nuclear defense program.
The agency announced in October 2018 plans for its reinterpretation of high-level radioactive waste (HLW), as defined in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act (NWPA) of 1982, with plans to classify waste by its hazard level and not its origin. By using the idea of a reinterpretation of a definition, the DOE may be able to circumvent Congressional oversight. And in its regulatory filing, the DOE, citing the NWPA and Atomic Energy Act of 1954, said it has the authority to “interpret” what materials are classified as high-level waste based on their radiological characteristics. That is not quite true, as Congress specifically defined high-level radioactive waste in the Nuclear Waste Policy Act, and any reinterpretation of that definition should trigger a Congressional response.
