“What does nuclear deterrence look like in Europe now that NATO is unsure whether the U.S. will be a committed partner? NPR speaks with Paul Cormarie, analyst with the Rand Corporation.”
Russia’s president, Vladimir Putin, says he supports a 30-day ceasefire with Ukraine in theory. But he adds that Ukraine would need to accept further conditions before a deal could be finalized. Now, in the interim, European leaders are discussing ways to discourage future Russian aggression. French President Emmanuel Macron has proposed using France’s nuclear capabilities as a deterrent to Russian threats. But what does nuclear deterrence look like in Europe if NATO is unsure if the U.S. will be a committed partner?
“The money was intended to retain and maintain payroll for Hanford site workers assigned to the nuclear reservation in Eastern Washington and also a few Department of Veterans Affairs workers during the COVID-19 pandemic.”
“Within 48 hours of BNL receiving the Paycheck Protection Program loan at least $453,000 had been spent to pay off Stevenson’s personal and family debts, according to an indictment.
That included $100,000 transferred to Stevenson’s father and $48,600 to a family trust, according to court documents.
Much of the rest of the money was used to pay off credit card debt, according to the indictment.
The federal government later forgave the loan, which cleared it from having to be repaid.
BNL and Stevenson later applied for and received another Paycheck Protection Program loan of nearly $820,000.”
Mar. 11—A former Hanford nuclear site subcontractor and its owner will pay a total settlement of just over $1.1 million to resolve accusations they defrauded the federal government through a COVID pandemic loan program.
On Wednesday, U.S. Judge Stanley Bastian in Yakima sentenced BNL Technical Services, owned by Wilson Pershing Stevenson III, to pay nearly $494,000 restitution to the federal government, as proposed in a settlement agreement.
That is in addition to $611,000 Stevenson, of Nashville, Tenn., already agreed to pay in a civil settlement to resolve his liability in the case.
Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester's UN Speech on the Immorality of Nuclear Weapons at the 3rd TPNW MSP
We had the honor of joining the Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester, in attending the third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons last week, March 3-7 in New York City. The archbishop gave mass to several different groups (see photos below) and spoke at the UN headquarters as part of Civil Society.
Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester blessing protesters against nuclear weapons on Ash Wednesday. They are across the street from the United Nations for the Third Meeting of State Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.Santa Fe Archbishop John Wester with Kazakh artist Karipbek Kuyukov at the United Nations for the Third Meeting of State Parties to the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons.. Kuyukov was born without arms near a Soviet nuclear weapons testing site. He paints with a brush held between his teeth.
In New York City this week? Join Pax Christi members and friends at Mass with Archbishop John Wester (Santa Fe NM) on Tuesday, March 4, 6 pm, at the Church of Our Saviour, 59 Park Avenue at 38th Street. Use this link to RSVP. #TPNW #3MSP #nucleardisarmamentwww.dorothydayguild.org/WesterMass25
“The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons dates back to a time before the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine,” the Foreign Office told dpa in Berlin on Tuesday. “The intention and ambition of the treaty no longer reflect the current reality in security policy.”
The treaty was signed in 2017 and came into force in 2021. There are currently 94 signatories and 73 states parties, according to the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN).
Germany does not possess nuclear weapons but is allied with three nuclear powers in NATO: the United States, France and the United Kingdom.
Berlin is not a signatory to the prohibition treaty, but it participated in previous conferences as observers.
Today the United States Supreme Court heard arguments in the case of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission vs. Texas. At issue is whether the NRC exceeded its authority when it approved licenses for proposed “consolidated interim storage facilities” for high-level radioactive waste, and this includes highly irradiated “spent” fuel from nuclear power plants.
Two consolidated interim storage facilities are planned for western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended specifically prohibits private “interim” storage of federal spent nuclear fuel, and disallows the Department of Energy from taking title to the waste unless a permanent geologic repository is licensed, built and opened. The law intended to prevent private “interim” storage of federal radioactive waste because interim storage is much less robust than permanent storage, and would double the risk of accident or attack during transport, since consolidated “interim” storage means the waste has to be moved twice, once to the CISF and again to a permanent repository.
In 1958, a US Air Force incident led to the loss of a 7,600-pound Mark 15 nuclear bomb off Tybee Island, near Savannah, Georgia. Wikimedia Commons
Throughout history, the idea of misplacing a nuclear weapon may sound like a plot twist in an espionage novel. The United States has experienced more than a handful of such incidents. Known as “Broken Arrows,” these events typically refer to any accidents involving nuclear weapons that do not pose an immediate risk of triggering a nuclear war.
For decades, details remained hidden behind top-secret clearances. However, unclassified records reveal that the U.S. military has had a surprising number of mishaps, with some bombs still unaccounted for to this day.
What are broken arrows?
The Department of Defense defines a “Broken Arrow” as any incident involving a U.S. nuclear weapon or warhead that results in accidental launching, firing, detonating, theft, or loss of the weapon. From 1950 to 1980, official sources cite 32 Broken Arrow incidents, but there may have been more, given the secrecy surrounding nuclear matters.
“The United States and other nuclear powers are now moving closer to resuming nuclear weapons tests, decades after testing ended. This highly disturbing trend must be halted.”
Since the atomic age, 2,056 nuclear weapons have been detonated, 528 of them above the ground. The United States and Soviet Union accounted for about 85% of these tests. The explosive power of atmospheric tests equaled 29,000 Hiroshima bombs. Airborne radioactive fallout circled the globe, re-entered the environment through precipitation, and entered human bodies through food and water.
Cold War bomb testing was part of a massive increase in the number of nuclear weapons, which peaked at more than 60,000. After nuclear war was barely avoided during the Cuban missile crisis, public pressure convinced leaders to ban all above-ground tests in 1963 — a treaty that has never been violated.
The test ban treaty was a huge achievement for peace, beginning eased tensions between nuclear nations. It also was a landmark for public health. A study by St. Louis residents and scientists found an enormous buildup of radioactive strontium-90 levels in baby teeth — 63 times higher in children born in 1963 compared to those born in 1950.
“The case pits the nuclear industry’s push for CISFs against the interests of fossil fuel companies which object to high-level radioactive waste dumped in their drilling/fracking areas, the state governments of Texas and New Mexico, which have passed laws prohibiting importation of nuclear waste to their states, and cities along the transport routes which object to it being shipped through their jurisdictions. Their amicus briefs in the case are posted here.”
For immediate release
MEDIA ALERT for Wednesday, March 5, 2025 WASHINGTON, D.C.,
WHAT?Wednesday morning, March 5, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Nuclear Regulatory Commission vs. Texas. At issue in the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the U.S.) proceeding is whether the NRC exceeded its authority when it approved licenses for proposed “consolidated interim storage facilities” for high-level radioactive waste including highly irradiated “spent” fuel from nuclear power plants. Two CISFs are planned for western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended specifically prohibits private “interim” storage of federal spent nuclear fuel, and disallows the Department of Energy from taking title to the waste (which would be necessary for DOE to transport it to CISFs), unless and until a permanent geologic repository is licensed, built and opened to receive the waste. The law intended to prevent private “interim” storage of federal radwaste, which is much less robust than permanent storage, and would double the risk of accident or attack during transport, since consolidated “interim” storage necessitates moving the waste twice, once to the CISF and again to a permanent repository. The NRC approved recent CISF license applications despite the law, saying it anticipated Congress would change it in the future. But the federal Fifth Circuit court ruled that the NRC didn’t have that authority. If the Supreme Court strikes that ruling down, it could open the floodgates for thousands of shipments of spent fuel from nuclear power plants across the US, through many states, to CISFs in Texas and New Mexico.
Nuclear waste is piling up at power plants around the country, and we have no idea where to put it. Many states are aggressively fighting plans for new storage facilities.
But northwest Colorado is quietly opening the door.
KUNC’s investigative reporter Scott Franz recently traveled around rural Colorado talking with people about what nuclear waste storage could do for the local economy – and also interviewing folks who are dead set against that idea.
Workers pose with a new train car designed to carry highly-radioactive nuclear waste from power plants around the country. An economic development group in northwest Colorado is entertaining the idea of pursuing a storage facility for the waste.
It has been barely a month since Inauguration day, but it is apparent that Donald Trump is determined to reshape U.S. foreign policy, radically alter alliance relationships, and upend Washington’s approach toward key adversaries, like Russia, in ways that are not yet clear.
And here at home, Trump’s brash assertion of executive power is putting our nation’s democratic institutions and the rule of domestic law at risk, in part by altering or dismantling key government departments,agencies and functions, all without congressional approval.
All of this makes our mission to provide reliable information and sound policy solutions even more important and difficult.
The Arms Control Association has a clear and focused strategy to reduce the dangers posed by nuclear weapons and other WMD. Many of these priorities are outlined in this ACA-organized January 28 communication to all members of Congress that was endorsed by 16 of our partner organizations and leaders.
Like many others, however, we are still sorting out how to adjust to and contend with the post-Inauguration political dynamics.
But we must and we will, because critical, weapons-related security decisions lie ahead:
So long as Russia’s assault on Ukraine continues, there is still a heightened risk of nuclear weapons use, and there are narrowing prospects for a deal to maintain limits on the U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals after New START expires in one year.
Although Trump has decried exorbitant military expenditures, the authors of Project 2025, the 920-page manifesto crafted by the Heritage Foundation and others, want the United States to spend even more than the current $756 billion ten-year price tag for nuclear modernization in order to increase the size and diversity of the U.S. arsenal. China and Russia are watching and will surely respond to any U.S. nuclear buildup.
Project 2025 also calls for preparing to resume U.S. nuclear explosive testing for the first time since 1992. Should the United States do so, it would open the door to nuclear testing by other states, unravel the CTBT, and blow apart the global nonproliferation system at a time of increasing nuclear danger.
Since Trump withdrew from the 2015 Iran nuclear deal, Tehran has expanded its capacity to produce weapons-grade nuclear material and reduced international inspectors’ access. Trump says he wants a nuclear deal; Iran’s president says he wants a nuclear deal. But time is short. Without a deal to scale back tensions and Iran’s nuclear capacity, we could see renewed international sanctions by October, Iranian withdrawal from the NPT, and/or an attempt by Israel to bomb Iran’s nuclear sites.
How exactly the second Trump administration and the new Congress will try to navigate all these nuclear-related challenges ahead is not yet clear — but if Project 2025 becomes the blueprint for U.S. nuclear weapons policy, we are in big trouble.
But, it may also be possible to steer us toward a safer course.
Trump wants to initiate denuclearization talks with Russia and China
“There’s no reason for us to be building brand new nuclear weapons. We already have so many,” Trump said from the White House.
“You could destroy the world 50 times over, 100 times over. And here we are building new nuclear weapons, and they’re building nuclear weapons, and China’s building nuclear weapons.” The number of nuclear weapons the United States and Russia can have is established by New START, which expires in 2026. Without a new agreement, nuclear states could begin to build up their arsenals for the first time since the Cold War. “Hopefully, there’ll never be a time when we need those weapons,” Trump said. “That’s going to be a very sad day, that’s going to be probably oblivion.”
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The Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) has recently embarked on the “new Manhattan Project” — a hiring spree and multibillion dollar expansion to build plutonium bomb cores for nuclear weapons.
The Times is writing about this new mission and how the lab is keeping workers safe, reporting accidents and environmental contamination and making needed upgrades to key facilities, including in Technical Area 55, the heart of bomb core production.
Have you or someone you know worked at TA-55 or another “hot site” and experienced a workplace accident or been exposed to plutonium, beryllium or another radioactive or toxic substance on the job? What safety measures were in place? Were there follow-up health assessments?
In this Site-Wide EIS we’re given three options: Expanded nuclear weapons programs (hypocritically called the no action alternative), then we’re presented with yet more expanded nuclear weapons programs, and the third alternative is even more expanded nuclear weapons programs. What we really need is a genuine alternative in this Site-Wide, and I hope that citizens will repeatedly bring this up. We need a TRUE ALTERNATIVE in which the US begins to show global leadership towards nuclear disarmament that it promised to in the Non-Proliferation Treaty, and that should be reflected in the sitewide which shows just passive maintenance of the stockpile. We don’t need Pit Production because it’s for NEW designs – NOT to ensure the safety and reliability of the existing stockpile. The US, for our own national security and global security, we need to lead the world towards global nuclear disarmament – and this Site-Wide EIS does the opposite.
The hearings in Santa Fe and Los Alamos on February 11 and February 13, 2025, respectively, both had virtual participation options. The attendees online and in person were equally vehement in protesting the “rigged game” we’re given with this SWEIS and decrying the fact that there is no alternative besides increased nuclear weapons production.
And read an exceprt from the Archbishop of Santa Fe, John Wester’s comments:
“As we all know, we’re in an accelerating new nuclear arms race that’s made even more dangerous because of artificial intelligence, multiple nuclear actors and hypersonic delivery systems. It’s an already scary situation that has become even scarier, and what concerns me is that Los Alamos and Santa Fe play a key role in naturally fostering and promoting this new nuclear arms race – a race which I believe is an affront to all that is good and holy, all from our perspective that God has placed in us to live in harmony with one another. Nuclear weapons pose one of the greatest threats to that harmony. I think it’s important to know what I’m learning more and more about is that expanded plutonium pit production is not simply to maintain the safety and reliability of our existing so-called deterrence. I think it’s important that people are aware that it’s really for new design nuclear weapons for this new particular armed race. I think it’s important that that people recognize that deterrence is not the way to go. In that light, I would say obviously for me is a Catholic Bishop, Pope Francis I think has really changed the whole moral landscape of looking at nuclear weapons. On the 70th anniversary of the Hiroshima atomic bombing, Pope Francis declared that the very possession of nuclear weapons is immoral. As Catholics this was an extremely important shift there. The 1983 United states conference of Catholic Bishops did allow for deterrence – it was promoting disarmament but made caveats for deterrence. But Pope Francis has taken that off the table in saying that even possessing nuclear weapons is immoral, it’s unethical. One of the main reasons for this church’s shift on this was that the nuclear weapons powers really have failed in their pledge in 1970 when they joined the Non-Proliferation Treaty. The TPNW came about because of that failure, and so it seems to me then based on what Pope Francis said, that if possessing nuclear weapons is immoral, then expanding plutonium pit cores and modernizing our weapons systems in order to be more involved in the new nuclear arms race is also immoral. This policy is unethical. Now I want to be careful here, I am not saying that anyone working at Los Alamos or Sandia or Lawrence Livermore in California, I’m not judging them or saying there are immoral – that’s a different matter in one’s conscience. I’m saying that the policy is involved and the Pope said that nuclear weapons themselves are intrinsically immoral. I think that’s an important thing to keep in mind, that that we need to be moving toward disarmament and that if we’re not, if that’s not our trajectory, rather if it’s just to build up our defenses, then that’s an immoral buildup.”
“Nuclear Watch New Mexico hosted a workshop on February 6 on the newly released Draft Sitewide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) to present information and elicit discussion on this NEPA process that Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuke Watch, referred to as a “rigged game” at the beginning of the workshop. What that means will become evident as I review the part of the workshop I attended.”
Archbishop John Wester, an outspoken critic of nuclear weapons proliferation under the guise of nuclear deterrence instead of disarmament spoke briefly to open the discussion. Quoting Pope Francis, he said, “possessing nuclear weapons is immoral.” He then said, “Pit production is immoral.” His only qualification is that it’s the policy that’s immoral, not the people who promote it. We’ve failed to uphold already existing treaties and failed to implement new ones. He’ll be going to the United Nations in March for a meeting, Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons, and to Japan in August to meet with his partners in the World Without Nuclear Weapons.
Coghlan explained that next week the Department of Energy (DOE) and the semi-autonomous National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) will hold public hearings, as required by NEPA, on the LANL SWEIS, in Santa Fe, Española, and Los Alamos. He cautioned that while we should all be “cynical” about the process, we need to go ahead and protest the fact that all three alternatives provided in the SWEIS expand pit production, just at different amounts. The process is rigged because the DOE and NNSA failed to update a 2008 Environmental Impact Statement before pit production began at LANL (the other nuclear facility, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina, is slated to produce 50 pits a year but is completely unprepared for pit production).
The guest speaker was Dylan Spaulding, Senior Scientist for the Union of Concerned Scientists…
We here at NukeWatch will dearly miss Ken’s weekly presence at the corner vigil to protest Nuclear Weapons in Santa Fe.
Locally, Ken was co-founder of the Santa Fe Chapter of Veterans for Peace and an active member of Santa Feans for Justice in Palestine. Ken worked with the local chapter of US Combatants for Peace and the Justice Council of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation in Santa Fe where he was also an enthusiastic baritone and co-founder of the NM Peace Choir.
A Celebration of Ken’s life will be held Friday, April 4 beginning at 12 noon at the corner of Sandoval and West Alameda, (Santa Fe’s weekly vigil to protest Nuclear Weapons), followed by lunch and a hybrid service at the UU Congregation, 107 West Barcelona Street, Santa Fe, NM.
For those wanting to pay tribute to Ken, please consider planting a tree through A Living Tribute (https://shop.alivingtribute.org/) or make a donation in his memory to the Santa Fe Joan Duffy Chapter of Veterans for Peace https://www.vfp-santafe.org/
Ken was a lifelong, passionate defender of peace. Read more:
As the Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration awaits its marching orders from the President Donald Trump (R) administration, the Los Alamos National Laboratory is now saying it will get to an annual plutonium pit production goal of 30 “ASAP.”
“”The risk is significant,” says Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists. The talk of testing comes at a time when nuclear weapons are resurgent: Russia is designing nuclear weapons to attack satellites and obliterate seaports; China is dramatically expanding its nuclear arsenal; and the U.S. is undergoing a major modernization of its nuclear warheads. After years of declining nuclear stockpiles, the world looks poised to begin increasing the number and types of nuclear weapons being deployed.”
FRENCHMAN FLAT, Nev. — In the middle of a dry lakebed northwest of Las Vegas sits a lone section of a bridge, its steel girders bent like spaghetti. Nearby are other oddities — a massive bank vault with no bank for miles; the entrance of an underground parking garage with no lower levels; and domes of rebar and concrete that have been ripped open, leaving their insides exposed to the desert sky.
A half-mile from here, on the morning of May 8, 1953, an Air Force bomber dropped a Mk-6D nuclear bomb from a height of 19,000 feet above the desert floor. It exploded with a yield of 27 kilotons of TNT — creating a shockwave that warped the bridge. The test, code-named “Encore,” was one of several conducted here to see what, if anything, in the civilian world could survive a nuclear blast (the answer is, apparently, not much). Continue reading
“The National Nuclear Security Administration and environmental plaintiffs settled a lawsuit that could put a pause on plutonium pit production efforts at Savannah River Site if approved.”
The agreement, made public Jan. 16, would leave Los Alamos National Laboratory as the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA) sole pit factory until an environmental impact statement is completed as part of the National Environmental Protection Act (NEPA). The process is expected to take at least two-and-a-half years, according to the document.
Until a record of decision is issued from the environmental review, NNSA is enjoined from installing classified equipment or introducing nuclear material at the Savannah River plant, according to a press release from the citizen groups. Actual pit production at Savannah River is not expected before the 2030s, according to NNSA.
The plaintiffs alleged in the lawsuit from 2021 that NNSA and DOE would violate NEPA by producing plutonium pits at Los Alamos and Savannah River Site without conducting a proper environmental review. A federal judge agreed with the plaintiffs in September, but instigated months of back and forth between both parties by forcing them to agree to a solution themselves.
The settlement requires NNSA to produce a new programmatic environmental impact statement within two-and-a-half years. Until that is complete in a process that would include public hearings nationwide and public comment on the draft of the statement, NNSA would not be able to process nuclear material at Savannah River’s plutonium facility.
The plaintiffs in the suit include environmental watch group Savannah River Site Watch of South Carolina; Tom Clements, director of Savannah River Site Watch; The Gullah Geechee Sea Island Coalition, a group representing the interests of some descendants of enslaved Africans dwelling on the lower Atlantic coast; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, N.M.; and the Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, of Livermore, Calif.
“Plaintiffs including Savannah River Site Watch, South Carolina Environmental Law Project Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tri-Valley CAREs forced NNSA to halt construction on many phases of its plutonium pit facility near Aiken, SC, to hold public scoping meetings, solicit public comments, and produce a Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement within thirty months.”
Last week U.S. District Judge Mary Lewis Geiger, South Carolina, faulted the Department of Energy and the National Nuclear Security Agency for ignoring the National Environmental Protection Act and rushing plans to fabricate plutonium pit bombs at Savannah River Site, near Aiken, South Carolina.
Newly designed plutonium pits will serve as “triggers” for the next generation of nuclear warheads mounted atop Sentinel, the next generation of intercontinental ballistic missile, and for new submarine-launched nuclear weapons. Combined, these projects comprise major components in the trillion-dollar “modernization” of the U.S. strategic deterrence force. Continue reading
Distrust over the federal government’s ability to build a permanent repository played a critical role in committee’s decision to kill controversial ‘temporary’ storage bill.
In addition to being flooded with emails and phone calls from constituents opposed to warehousing the deadly, radioactive material, several lawmakers on the panel were not convinced that a “temporary” storage facility would, in fact, be temporary. They noted that the federal government has tried and failed for decades to establish a permanent nuclear waste repository that would give some legitimacy to the “temporary” storage concept.
Despite growing support for nuclear energy nationally and here in Wyoming, there are simply too many concerns to entertain the possibility of opening the state to the country’s growing stockpile of spent nuclear fuel waste, some lawmakers say.
In addition to being flooded with emails and phone calls from constituents opposed to warehousing the deadly, radioactive material, several lawmakers on the panel were not convinced that a “temporary” storage facility would, in fact, be temporary. They noted that the federal government has tried and failed for decades to establish a permanent nuclear waste repository that would give some legitimacy to the “temporary” storage concept.
In 2024, humanity edged ever closer to catastrophe. Trends that have deeply concerned the Science and Security Board continued, and despite unmistakable signs of danger, national leaders and their societies have failed to do what is needed to change course. Consequently, we now move the Doomsday Clock from 90 seconds to 89 seconds to midnight—the closest it has ever been to catastrophe. Our fervent hope is that leaders will recognize the world’s existential predicament and take bold action to reduce the threats posed by nuclear weapons, climate change, and the potential misuse of biological science and a variety of emerging technologies.
In setting the Clock one second closer to midnight, we send a stark signal: Because the world is already perilously close to the precipice, a move of even a single second should be taken as an indication of extreme danger and an unmistakable warning that every second of delay in reversing course increases the probability of global disaster.
In regard to nuclear risk, the war in Ukraine, now in its third year, looms over the world; the conflict could become nuclear at any moment because of a rash decision or through accident or miscalculation. Conflict in the Middle East threatens to spiral out of control into a wider war without warning. The countries that possess nuclear weapons are increasing the size and role of their arsenals, investing hundreds of billions of dollars in weapons that can destroy civilization. The nuclear arms control process is collapsing, and high-level contacts among nuclear powers are totally inadequate given the danger at hand. Alarmingly, it is no longer unusual for countries without nuclear weapons to consider developing arsenals of their own—actions that would undermine longstanding nonproliferation efforts and increase the ways in which nuclear war could start.
Despite the Senate passing this bill, the House of Representatives failed to pass the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act (RECA) reauthorization before its expiration deadline in the 118th Congress.
“In New Mexico and across the country, thousands sacrificed to contribute to our national security. Today, individuals affected by nuclear weapons testing, downwind radiation exposure, and uranium mining are still waiting to receive the justice they are owed,” Sen. Luján said.
“It is unacceptable that so many who have gotten sick from radiation exposure have been denied compensation by Congress. Despite having passed RECA legislation twice through the Senate with broad bipartisan support, and securing the support of the previous administration, I was disheartened that Speaker Johnson refused a vote on RECA to help victims. This Congress, I am proud to partner with Senator Hawley again to extend and expand RECA. RECA is a bipartisan priority and I am hopeful that we will once again get it through the Senate and hope the Speaker commits to getting victims the compensation they are owed.”
President Trump while addressing the World Economic Forum in Davos on Thursday said that he wants to hold talks with Russia and China about reducing nuclear weapon stockpiles.
Trump during his first term failed to bring China into negotiations to extend a nuclear arms treaty with Russia, called New START, which places key limits on deployed nuclear weapons and expires February 2026.
U.S. and Russian participation in the treaty effectively froze during the Biden administration, as Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to impose costs on Washington for supporting Ukraine militarily.
Today, Jan. 27 is a National Day of Remembrance for Downwinders. Nuclear testing by the U.S. government started in New Mexico with the Trinity Test in July 1945, and the Crossroads Series of three tests followed in the Pacific in 1946. The United States took part in nuclear testing as part of the escalating Cold War arms race, and nuclear weapons proliferated. Americans working and living downwind from nuclear testing sites became sick and killed by the radiation exposure generated from the aboveground atomic tests in Nevada, which began on January 27, 1951 and ended on July 17, 1962. With each nuclear test, radioactive fallout spread globally. Of course, downwinders are not only American. At the so-called “Pacific Proving Grounds” in the Marshall Islands, 67 nuclear weapons were detonated between 1945 and 1962.
“It became a site of unimaginable destruction that did not stop at the blast zones. The radioactive fallout spread across the Pacific, settling on many islands like ours.” — Guam Senator Therese Terlaje
Seven of the top 10 adult cancers on Guam are now recognized as compensable for radiation exposure by the federal government, the senator noted.
Russia Nuclear Update a project based at the MIT Security Studies Program that produces fact-based visual content on the threats posed by nuclear weapons, has shared a fantastic set of content that highlights the vital role that Black leaders have played in arms control and nuclear disarmament in celebration of Martin Luther King Jr. Day and Black History Month.
“50 Faces of Black Leaders” honors the many contributions of civil rights and other leaders who opposed nuclear war. This video content is provided in vertical and horizontal formats and is free of charge.
The individuals featured in this series include both contemporary figures like Ambassador Bonnie Jenkins, and past generations, including Coretta Scott King, Bayard Rustin, and iconic artists.
Nonprofit public interest groups have reached an historic settlement agreement with the Department of Energy’s semi-autonomous nuclear weapons agency, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA). This is the successful result of a lawsuit against NNSA over its failure to complete a programmatic environmental impact statement on the expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores, as required by the National Environmental Policy Act (NEPA). This agreement and a joint motion to dismiss have been submitted to Judge Mary Lewis Geiger of the Federal District of South Carolina. Should the Court enter the dismissal and retain jurisdiction to enforce the settlement, the agreement will go into effect.
This lawsuit was first filed in June 2021 by co-plaintiffs Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, SC; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, NM; Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment (CAREs), based in Livermore, CA; and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia. NNSA promptly moved to have the case dismissed which in February 2023 Judge Lewis rejected, calling her decision “not a close call.”
In September 2024, Judge Lewis ruled that DOE and NNSA had violated NEPA by failing to properly consider alternatives before proceeding with their plan to produce plutonium pits, a critical component of nuclear weapons, at the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) in New Mexico and, for the first time ever, at the Savannah River Site (SRS) in South Carolina. The Court found that the plan’s purpose had fundamentally changed from NNSA’s earlier analyses which had not considered simultaneous pit production at two sites. Judge Lewis directed the Defendants and Plaintiffs to prepare a joint proposal for an appropriate remedy which fostered additional negotiations.
The National Nuclear Security Administration and anti-nuclear advocates have reached agreement in a lawsuit over the National Environmental Protection Act that could temporarily halt plutonium pit production efforts at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina.
If approved, the proposed agreement, reached Thursday, would leave Los Alamos National Laboratory as the agency’s only pit production site until a far-reaching environmental impact statement can be completed, which is expected to take at least 2½ years.
Nuclear Watch New Mexico and other groups around the country alleged in a 2021 lawsuit the federal government had violated the National Environmental Protection Act in the course of deciding to produce plutonium pits, the trigger device for nuclear weapons, at both Los Alamos National Laboratory and the Savannah River Site.
Despite the name, even the no action plan means growth for LANL — just a smaller amount. Given already-approved projects, the lab’s footprint is estimated to grow 4% under the no action plan and include increased demands for water and energy.
That has Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico, feeling like the process is “rigged” — and too late, given that the plan to restart pit production was approved before a site-wide environmental impact statement was drafted to weigh the impacts.
“It’s a choice between expanded nuclear weapons programs, yet more expanded nuclear weapons programs, or far more expanded nuclear weapons programs,” Coghlan said. “And all the while, these are for new designs. None of this is to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, extensively tested stockpile. It’s this is all about new design nuclear weapons.”
As Los Alamos National Laboratory takes on a starring role in a plan to update the U.S. nuclear arsenal, the National Nuclear Security Administration is looking at what future operations of the lab might look like for the environment.
On Friday, NNSA released a draft site-wide environmental impact statement about LANL’s ongoing operations, the first since 2008. In the 17 years since, LANL’s budget has more than doubled and hundreds of new employees have been added, according to the statement.
The draft statement includes three visions for LANL’s future: a no action plan, a plan to modernize operations and a plan to expand operations. NNSA’s preferred choice is to grow operations; questions sent to the agency were not immediately returned.
NNSA’s Preferred Future for the Lab is Radically Expanded Nuclear Weapons Programs
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) has finally released its Draft Site-Wide Environmental Impact Statement (SWEIS) for Continued Operation of the Los Alamos National Laboratory. This is more than two years after it was first announced and sixteen years after the last site-wide EIS. During that time the Lab has become more and more a nuclear weapons production site for the new global nuclear arms race. Accordingly, the central point of the new draft LANL SWEIS is “NNSA has identified the Expanded Operations Alternative as the preferred alternative for the continuing operations of LANL.” Draft LANL SWEIS, page S-13.
As policy background, the draft LANL SWEIS pays lip service to the 1970 NonProliferation Treaty (NPT):
“In Article VI of the NPT, treaty parties “undertake to pursue negotiations in good faith on effective measures relating to cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date and to nuclear disarmament…” The U.S. takes this commitment seriously and has emphasized dedication to both the long-term goal of eliminating nuclear weapons and the requirement that the U.S. has modern, flexible, and resilient nuclear capabilities that are safe and secure, until such a time as nuclear weapons can prudently be eliminated from the world.” P. 1-7.
Left unsaid is that no nuclear power, including the United States, has ever even tried to enter into good faith negotiations toward nuclear weapons disarmament, pledged to more than a half-century ago. Instead, all nuclear weapons states are now engaged in massive “modernization” programs to keep nuclear weapons forever, leading to today’s accelerating nuclear weapons arms race. Also, very much left unsaid is the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, ratified by 73 countries, nearing its fourth anniversary since it went into effect.
After 20 Years Los Alamos Lab Still Doesn’t Know Size of Plume At Present Rate Cleanup Will Take More Than a Century
On December 30, 2024, in the middle of the holiday season, the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) posted the report Independent Review of the Chromium Interim Measures Remediation System to its largely unknown Legacy Cleanup Electronic Public Reading Room. This report attempts to address the Lab’s extensive contamination of the region’s deep groundwater aquifer by a large plume of hexavalent chromium, whose potentially serious human health effects (including cancer) was the subject of the popular movie Erin Brockovich.
LANL’s chromium contamination plume is at least one mile long, a half mile wide and 100 feet thick.[1] It is commonly regarded as the Lab’s most serious environmental threat. One drinking water supply well for Los Alamos County has been shut down because of the plume. Lab maps of the contamination depict it as abruptly stopping at the border of San Ildefonso Pueblo, which is highly unlikely.
The bottom line of the newly released chromium report is:
“…at this time the plume is not sufficiently characterized to design a final remedy… data gaps and uncertainties need to be addressed before committing to an alternative or final remedy.”
This is a full two decades after the chromium plume was first reported.
“At the present rate of extraction … that’s going to take more than a century to complete,” said Jay Coghlan, executive director of Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The group is advocating for additional measures to speed cleanup, including pumping or trucking treated groundwater uphill, flushing the contamination at the source and installing more monitoring wells to better understand the size and depth of the plume.
“Weapons programs have doubled,” Coghlan said. “In that [time], the length of time to clean up, cost to clean up, keeps rising.”
An independent review team is recommending federal and state agencies resume pumping, treating and re-injecting water from a plume of carcinogenic contaminants that is reaching toward San Ildefonso Pueblo.
But two decades after the plume’s discovery near Los Alamos National Laboratory, questions remain about how wide and deep the plume extends — and those questions could delay additional cleanup steps.
“Data gaps and uncertainties need to be addressed before committing to an alternative or final remedy,” the review panel stated in its final report, released this week.
“It constitutes a clear violation of multiple U.N. Security Council resolutions and poses a serious threat to peace and stability on the Korean Peninsula and the international community,” Seoul’s foreign ministry said.
The nuclear envoys of South Korea, the United States and Japan condemned North Korea’s latest missile launch in their phone talks Monday, vowing close coordination against any future provocations by the recalcitrant regime.
Lee Jun-il, director general for Korean Peninsula policy, discussed the North’s launch of an intermediate-range ballistic missile with his U.S. and Japanese counterparts, Seth Bailey and Akihiro Okochi, respectively, Seoul’s foreign ministry said.
The South’s military said the North fired a suspected hypersonic missile into the East Sea, marking its first provocation this year ahead of U.S. President-elect Donald Trump’s inauguration.
The launch also coincided with bilateral talks between U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken and Foreign Minister Cho Tae-yul in Seoul.
On a recent Wednesday, ten students filed into a classroom at Northern New Mexico College, in the town of Española, to learn about the dangers of nuclear radiation. The students ranged in age from nineteen to forty-four. Most of them were in a program designed to train radiation-control technicians to work at Los Alamos National Laboratory, the birthplace of the atomic bomb, which is once again rapidly expanding to supply the nation with nuclear weapons.
Los Alamos was built in secret during the Second World War—J. Robert Oppenheimer directed the lab there as part of the Manhattan Project. The town hovers high above the Española valley, on a handsome mesa called the Pajarito Plateau. Originally, the only way to access the enclave was through two gates. Today, it accepts visitors but remains a company town, housing many of the lab’s scientists and high-level staffers. The community has a population of about thirteen thousand, and boasts one of the nation’s densest concentrations of millionaires. In New Mexico, such wealth is rare. Española, which sits on the Rio Grande and is a twenty-five-minute drive away, has a median household income of fifty thousand dollars, a poverty rate approaching twenty per cent, and an entrenched fentanyl crisis.
As we look back on 2024, Nuclear Watch New Mexico hopes you had a wonderful year. We wish you peace and prosperity. Given uncertain times ahead, we are confident that by working together we can meet the enourmous challenges that are in store for us in 2025.
Together, we can resist provocative nuclear weapons programs that are helping to fuel a new arms race. A prime example is the expanded production of plutonium “pit” bomb cores at both the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) and the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. NukeWatch NM is leading the effort to compel legally required public review of the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) most expensive program ever (but has no credible cost estimates). New pit production is not needed because it is for new weapons designs, not to maintain the safety and reliability of the existing, extensively tested nuclear stockpile.
Together we can watchdog LANL cleanup. Please join us next year for public hearings where we will oppose LANL’s plans to “cap-and-cover” existing radioactive and toxic wastes, leaving them permanently buried in unlined pits and shafts as a perpetual threat to groundwater.
We ask for your help in compelling the Department of Energy to stop expansionof the Waste Isolation Pilot Plant (WIPP) in southern New Mexico. WIPP’s mission is fundamentally changing from cleanup to direct support of the new arms race as the dump for new radioactive plutonium wastes from expanding nuclear weapons production. See how to make a difference at https://stopforeverwipp.org/home
Together, we can make progress toward a future nuclear weapons-free world! With deep appreciation, we thank those who have already contributed. If you haven’t given yet, please know that your support is vital to our ongoing work. Your generous tax deductible donation can be mailed to Nuclear Watch NM, 903 W. Alameda #325, Santa Fe, NM 87501, or made online at nukewatch.org/donate/
Our sincere gratitude and best wishes for the coming year,
Jay Coghlan, Executive Director Scott Kovac, Research Director Sophie Stroud, Digital Content Manager
P.S.: If you’re so inclined, please go to https://www.armscontrol.org/acpoy/2024 to vote for the 2024 Arms Control Person(s) of the Year. Savannah River Site Watch, Tri-Valley CAREs, the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition, the South Carolina Environmental Law Project and NukeWatch NM are nominees for their lawsuit to compel the NNSA to complete a nation-wide programmatic environmental impact statement on expanded plutonium pit production.
This article is part of the Opinion series At the Brink, about the threat of nuclear weapons in an unstable world. Read the opening story here.
SEE VIDEO OF THE RECENT ELECTION NIGHT VANDENBERG MISSILE LAUNCH FROM OUR FRIENDS AT TRI-VALLEY CARES: Note: This content is not part of the original NYT article.
On October 25, 2024, two administrative judges ruled that the federal government’s approval of a plan to expand Daneros Mine had violated the law. The judges ordered the attorneys in the case to provide more information so that the judges can determine what the remedy should be.
The Interior Board of Land Appeals issued an order that the plan to expand the mine violated the law because it failed to include an adequate monitoring and response plan to detect and manage groundwater from a perched aquifer below the surface of the mine, and that water from the aquifer could potentially leak into the underground mine and become contaminated through contact with uranium ore or other harmful materials. That’s important because the mine sits fewer than 25 miles as water flows from the Colorado River, on which 40 million people rely.
After six years, there’s a speck of light at the end of the tunnel for a legal case challenging Daneros uranium mine, a controversial uranium mine on public lands near Bears Ears National Monument.
Perched below the towering walls of Wingate Mesa above Red Canyon and Fry Canyon, the Daneros Mine site and lands around it were proposed for inclusion in Bears Ears National Monument by the five tribes of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition in 2015. When Bears Ears was designated in 2016, Daneros ended up outside the monument’s boundaries, but only by about three miles.
Uranium-ore hauling raises concerns about the risk of accidents and contamination. And uranium mining itself has a history of contaminating water, air, and land.
Gratitude to the Norwegian Nobel Committee for Recognizing the Cries and Witness of those Who Suffered the Effects of the Atomic Bombings
Nagasaki, Hiroshima, Japan; Santa Fe, NM; Seattle, WA – December 10, 2024 – As founding diocesan bishops of the Partnership for a World Without Nuclear Weapons, we are grateful to The Norwegian Nobel Committee for awarding Nihon Hidankyo this year’s Nobel Peace Prize.
For far too long, the cries of all those who have suffered the effects of the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki have been muted by the false narrative that countries need to build their nuclear weapon capacity to “keep the peace.” In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The Hibakusha of Nihon Hidankyo have been giving witness for decades to the folly of nuclear weapons and to the threat that they pose to human civilization as we know it.
We congratulate the Nihon Hidankyo for earning this year’s peace prize. May their call for the elimination of nuclear weapons be heard ever more clearly and change many people’s hearts in our war-torn world. May the souls of the victims of the atomic bombings rest in peace and rejoice in our work together for peace.
ARCHBISHOP JOHN C. WESTER of Santa Fe ARCHBISHOP PAUL D. ETIENNE of Seattle ARCHBISHOP PETER MICHIAKI NAKAMURA of Nagasaki BISHOP ALEXIS SHIRAH of Hiroshima ARCHBISHOP EMERITUS JOSEPH MITSUAKI TAKAMI of Nagasaki
The bill would bar funding for the Pentagon-led Nuclear Weapons Council, and would prevent it from assisting with the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency under the Energy Department.
Airman 1st Class William Ray removes the screws holding the nose point of a Minuteman III intercontinental ballistic missile to the rest of the reentry system inside a payload transporter at F.E. Warren Air Force Base, Wyo. (Senior Airman Brandon Valle/U.S. Air Force)
WASHINGTON ― House appropriators on Tuesday approved a spending bill that would block plans from defense hawks to give the Pentagon a stronger hand in crafting nuclear weapons budgets.
The House Appropriations Committee passed their Energy-Water bill, which contained the provision, by a voice vote. The $49.6 billion spending bill contained $13.7 billion for nuclear weapons accounts ― a $1.2 billion increase over fiscal 2020 that’s still $1.9 billion less than the president’s request.
Lead Republicans voiced opposition to the bill, arguing that Democrats had not consulted with Republicans on pandemic emergency funds in the bill and that Democrats included policy riders the White House will seek to cut. The top Republican on the House Energy and Water Development, and Related Agencies Subcommittee, Rep. Mike Simpson of Idaho, said the bill “still shortchanges funding for the nuclear weapons program.”
“While I acknowledge the increase above last year, we must also acknowledge that the threats we face today are not the same threats we faced in the years immediately following the end of the Cold War,” he said. “We must adequately fund the activities necessary to maintain a safe, reliable and effective stockpile.”
The bill would bar funding for the Pentagon-led Nuclear Weapons Council, and would prevent it from assisting with the budget of the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semiautonomous agency under the Energy Department.
The Senate Armed Services Committee’s version of the annual defense policy bill would allow the council to edit the budget request after the Energy Department crafts it and before the request is submitted to the White House budget office. The move was seen as giving the Pentagon extra sway to boost warhead programs and nuclear weapons laboratories.
Its introduction came after Energy Secretary Dan Brouillette clashed with SASC Chairman Jim Inhofe, R-Okla., who backed a budget request for the larger number than Brouillette sought.
The Energy-Water spending bill contains language ordering no funds “may be used in furtherance of working through the Nuclear Weapons Council to guide, advise, assist, develop, or execute a budget for the National Nuclear Security Administration.”
Separately, the proposed bill would ban the Trump administration’s reported plan to resume nuclear weapons testing. The bill would prohibit funding “to conduct, or prepare to conduct, any explosive nuclear weapons test that produces any yield.”
“Critically, the bill would prevent the Trump administration from using any funds to carry out its dangerous and short-sighted plan to resume nuclear testing,” House Appropriations Committee Chairwoman Nita Lowey, D-N.Y., said in a statement.
The Trump administration was reportedly discussing whether a “rapid test” could aid it in negotiations with Russia and China, as the White House seeks a trilateral nuclear weapons pact.
The defense appropriations bill introduced Tuesday would also bar funding for explosive nuclear weapons tests.
SANTA FE – Seven non-governmental organizations are asking the New Mexico Environment Department and the Department of Energy for the resumption of semi-annual presentations covering the production of plutonium pits at Los Alamos National Laboratory.
The public participation provisions are contained in a 2005 settlement agreement. The settlement was reached after the same seven organizations objected to the issuance of an air emissions permit for the proposed Chemistry and Metallurgy Research Replacement Project.
At the same time, a New Mexico Environment Department draft air emissions permit is being prepared for public review and comment on releases from the lab and manufacturing facilities. The organizations said they are working to ensure those provisions public meetings covering construction at the weapons-component production facilities and a dedicated website are included in the air permit.
Today, in the context of the Black Lives Matter protests, TomDispatch regular Andrew Bacevich considers the all-American version of “extreme materialism” that Martin Luther King called out more than half a century ago. And when it comes to the overwhelming urge to get one’s hands on the goods, among the looters of this moment two groups are almost never mentioned: the Pentagon and the police.
Yet, in 1997, the Department of Defense set up the 1033 program as part of the National Defense Authorization Act to provide thousands of domestic police forces with “surplus” equipment of almost every imaginable militarized kind. Since then, thanks to your tax dollars, it has given away $7.4 billion of such equipment, some of it directly off the battlefields of this country’s forlorn “forever wars.” For items like grenade launchers, mine-resistant armored vehicles, military rifles, bayonets, body armor, night-vision goggles, and helicopters, all that police departments have to fork over is the price of delivery. The Pentagon has, in fact, been so eager to become the Macy’s of militarized hardware that, in 2017, it was even willing to “give $1.2 million worth of rifles, pipe bombs, and night vision goggles to a fake police department,” no questions asked. That “department” proved to be part of a sting operation run by the Government Accountability Office (GAO). “It was like getting stuff off of eBay,” a GAO official would say. Only, of course, for free.
“There are currently over 13000 nuclear weapons on this planet of which over 9000 are in military stockpiles. This software should help you answer the question: what will happen if Russia and United States or India and Pakistan use their arsenals?
The goal of this project is to build a realistic simulation and visualization of large-scale nuclear conflicts with a focus on humanitarian consequences
There are a lot of interlocking systems and processes in a nuclear conflict: the command and control system, locations and movement of forces, weapons delivery systems and humanitarian consequences. By simulating the most relevant of these systems you should be able to tell a credible story about how nuclear conflicts play out and what are the consequences.”
At least, that’s part of the goal of the Nuclear War Simulator, developed by Ivan Stepanov and released for download June 28. Built on the Unity3D engine, the simulator incorporates sheaves and sheaves of public data about yields, flight trajectories, and calculated armageddon.
Stepanov’s project specifically draws inspiration from the NUKEMAP made by Alex Wellerstein, a historian of science at Stevens Institute of Technology. Wellerstein’s tool lets people pick an existing warhead, toggle some settings, and then place the blast over a target area, rendering in concentric colored circles the salient details about what kind of effect would hit what people, where.
“[Nuclear War Simulator] was made to help you answer the question: what will a war between Russia and United States or India and Pakistan look like and what are the consequences for the world, your country and your family?” writes Stepanov.
To capture this fuller feeling of human impact, the simulation includes a population density grid, to render an impact not just in terms of blast radii, but in the deaths and injuries that can easily number in the millions.
“As the first wave of the pandemic continues and case numbers spike in a range of states, oversight structures designed to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse when it comes to defense spending are quite literally crumbling before our eyes. Combine weakened oversight, skewed priorities, and a Pentagon budget still rising and you’re potentially creating the perfect storm for squandering the resources needed to respond to our current crisis.
The erosion of oversight of the Pentagon budget has been a slow-building disaster, administration by administration, particularly with the continual weakening of the authority of inspectors general. As independent federal watchdogs, IGs are supposed to oversee the executive branch and report their findings both to it and to Congress.”
Representative Barbara Lee. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
n response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington has initiated its largest spending binge in history. In the process, you might assume that the unparalleled spread of the disease would have led to a little rethinking when it came to all the trillions of dollars Congress has given the Pentagon in these years that have in no way made us safer from, or prepared us better to respond to, this predictable threat to American national security. As it happens, though, even if the rest of us remain in danger from the coronavirus, Congress has done a remarkably good job of vaccinating the Department of Defense and the weapons makers that rely on it financially. Continue reading
“Many commenters stated that the storage could be permanent because there is no disposal site. They reminded the NRC that this is why the law requires that a permanent repository be selected before the designation of an interim facility like Holtec, and this has not been done.“
On Tuesday, June 23rd, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) held a webinar and invited telephone comments on the Draft Environmental Impact Statement (DEIS) for a nuclear waste storage facility that Holtec proposes to build halfway between Carlsbad and Hobbs. Holtec applied for a license to store all of the nation’s most radioactive spent fuel from commercial nuclear power plants. Over twenty years, Holtec proposes to ship 10,000 canisters to the site by railroads, passing through more than forty states. https://www.nrc.gov/waste/spent-fuel-storage/cis/holtec-international.html, scroll down to Environmental Impact Statement.
In 2012, officials in Eddy and Lea counties announced that a private company would submit a license application in March 2013. In December 2015, Holtec told the NRC that it would submit the license application in June 2016, so that the facility could begin operating in 2020. The application was submitted in March 2017, and stated that NRC’s license would be issued in 2019 and that construction would begin by March 2020. https://wethefourth.org/
The state Environment Department has fined the U.S. Department of Energy $304,000 over missed deadlines at Los Alamos National Laboratory in documenting waste shipments, a problem state officials said was part of a longtime pattern of delayed reporting.
The agency cited the Energy Department, the lab and the lab’s contracted operator, Triad National Security LLC, for eight violations dating back to 2017 — in most cases for being a year or more late in recording deliveries of mixed waste.
All violations occurred under former Republican Gov. Susana Martinez, who had pressed for more lax waste management during her tenure. They also occurred under a previous lab operator, Los Alamos National Security LLC. Triad took over management of the lab in November 2018.
“This has been a recurring issue that had not been addressed by the past administration,” said Maddy Hayden, a spokeswoman for the Environment Department, explaining why the lab was being cited now for the older violations.
Under state Environment Secretary James Kenney, the agency wants to be clear on its expectations for compliance and accountability going forward, Hayden said.
The New Mexico Environment Department has notified the Department of Energy National Nuclear Security Administration and Triad National Security at Los Alamos National Laboratory a civil penalty of $303,600 under the Hazardous Waste Act in connection with the repeat violations of the 1995 Federal Facility Compliance Order.
The amount was calculated using the NMED Hazardous Waste Bureau’s Civil Penalty Policy dated March 2017.
NMED claims NNSA and Triad repeatedly failed to submit waste shipment information for waste containers within 45 days as required for eight shipments involving some 20 containers from the Waste Treatability Group.
The containers allegedly contained radioactive material described as 10-100 nanocuries per gram, halogenated organic liquid, activated or inseparable lead, or solids with heavy metals.
NNSA spokesperson Toni Chiri said in an email late Thursday that the information for the containers identified by the NMED resulted from administrative discrepancies that were identified, self-reported, and corrected by LANL.
More radioactive material has been found on a former Los Alamos National Laboratory site where low-income housing is being built.
Debris containing two forms of uranium was discovered last month in Los Alamos County, just south of where a utility crew found enough low-level radioactive waste in February to fill three drums.
Crews removed another three drums of contaminated debris, including glass shards, wood and metal objects, from the second site, according to state and federal officials. Other unearthed material remains isolated at the site until it can be analyzed and properly disposed of.
NM Environment Department Hazardous Waste Bureau Chief Kevin Pierard said the widespread waste at the site represents “a substantial risk to human health and the environment”.
Workers in February at the DP Road site where contaminated waste was found on property turned over to Los Alamos County. Photo by Maire O’Neill/losalamosreporter.com
New Mexico Environment Department officials are unhappy with the Department of Energy’s response to the discovery in February of contamination at the Middle DP Road Site in Los Alamos. NMED has given DOE 30 days to provide a schedule of preliminary screening plan (PSP) activities that “indicates that DOE understands the seriousness of this matter” including a timeframe for implementation for its implementation.
In a letter signed by NMED Hazardous Waste Bureau Chief Kevin Pierard and sent to DOE Los Alamos NNSA and Environmental Management Field Office managers, DOE has been asked to include the basis for the current delay and limitations in implementation of the PSP “to ensure full transparency and understanding of why this important risk to public health is not being addressed in a more timely manner”.
In April 7, 2020, NMED directed DOE to develop and implement a PSP that would include sampling and investigation activities and a schedule for implementing those activities.
“Although DOE agreed to develop a PSP, it did not provide a schedule for development and implementation of a PSP. DOE stated that it intends to complete tasks associated with Section X of the Consent Order ‘as soon as practicable’,” the letter states.
Pierard notes that based on information provided to NMED since the discovery of the Middle DP Road Site on February 14, “contamination appears to be widespread”.
MOX Project Wasted Vast Sums of Money on Stockpiling Huge Amounts of Equipment that Project Managers Knew would be Obsolete when the Project Began Operation – Investigations Needed
Savannah River Site Watch For Immediate Release June 16, 2020 https://srswatch.org/ Contact: Tom Clements, Director, SRS Watch
Columbia, SC – The announced sale of surplus equipment from the failed plutonium fuel (MOX) project at the Savannah River Site exposes the lack of financial and managerial accountability with the project, according to the non-profit public-interest group conducting public interest oversight of the site.
A review of the surplus property posted on the website of one of the sales companies reveals a host of things are being offered at rock-bottom, give-away prices: transformers, switchboards, control panels, electrical supplies, HVAC equipment, valves and an assortment of other materials. But no plutonium gloveboxes, furnaces to produce plutonium oxide or plutonium pellet presses seem to be offered for sale.
A May 22 Washington Post story reported that in mid-May top national security officials discussed resumption of full-scale US nuclear explosive testing. The next day, the Abolition 2000 Global Network to Eliminate Nuclear Weapons was holding, virtually, its annual meeting.
The meeting released a statement, co-authored by Burroughs (see previously circulated press release). It begins:
“Resumption of nuclear explosive testing is absolutely unacceptable. Even discussing nuclear testing again is dangerously destabilizing.” The statement also observes: “This episode comes in the context of ongoing upgrading of nuclear forces by the world’s nuclear-armed states. It is supported by extensive laboratory research and experimentation which in part serves as a substitute for functions once served by nuclear explosive testing.”
Since the Washington Post story, there have been no further signals of returning to full-scale nuclear explosive testing. But at a minimum the White House discussion demonstrates that the option remains alive. Senator Ed Markey and numerous co-sponsors including Senator Chuck Schumer have introduced legislation that would prohibit the expenditure of funds on conducting nuclear test explosions with any yield. A parallel bill (H.R.7140) has been introduced in the House.
A regional watchdog group said the development plans raise some questions.
Technical Area 36, where commercial, industrial and mixed-use complexes would be built, was formerly a firing site where uranium and beryllium were detonated in the open air, so some toxic residue probably lingers there, said Scott Kovac, research and operations director for Nuclear Watch New Mexico.
The site is also across the road from Area G, where massive legacy waste produced during the Cold War is buried, Kovac said. Contaminants might be released into the air if that old disposal area is excavated, he said.
Los Alamos County has requested 3,074 acres in White Rock from the U.S. Energy Department to use for building housing, stores, offices, light industry and schools. Santa Fe New Mexican Courtesy photo
Within this clifftop community once shrouded from public view, it’s no secret the Los Alamos area needs more housing for future growth.
Los Alamos County wants the U.S. Energy Department to turn over 3,074 acres in White Rock at no cost so the land can be used for housing, stores, offices, light industry and schools.
To sweeten the deal, Los Alamos National Laboratory would be able to use part of the land to build support facilities and enhance its operations.
Less than 10 percent of the land would be developed — 275 acres — and most of that would be for housing, which county officials say is needed for the lab’s growing workforce and to create a larger pool of workers living in town to help attract other businesses.
Department of Energy officials recently notified the New Mexico Environment Department that more radioactive waste was found on DP Road on May 18, in addition to radioactive waste that was discovered in February in the same general area.
The new waste was discovered 80 feet south of a parcel of land located approximately halfway down DP Road on the right side, heading eastbound. The land the new waste was discovered on was transferred from the Department of Energy to Los Alamos County in 2018.
Samples collected by Triad National Security identified the waste as containing Uranium 234 and Uranium 238. Officials aren’t sure of the level of radioactivity as the material is still being tested by Los Alamos National Laboratory.
Highlights: The decision on the second pit production facility can wait. NNSA could announce its decision to move forward on building a pit-production facility in South Carolina as early as September. Based on the above context, this decision should be delayed for a number of reasons:
1. Since the Savannah River Site staff has no experience with pit production, the facility would have to be designed and the staff trained by the Los Alamos group. But the Los Alamos group has not yet demonstrated that that it can design and staff its own pit production facility.
2. Within a decade, we should have a new lower limit on the functional lives of the legacy pits. If they will indeed last for at least 150 years, as the Livermore experts concluded, then there will be no need for a large production facility to replace them anytime soon. The Los Alamos facility, if it can be made operational, should be sufficient for some decades.
3. The argument for producing additional warheads with insensitive high explosive for the Minuteman III replacement is very weak, and the debate over the need to produce new pits for a warhead to replace the W-76, the most numerous warhead in the US operational stock (about 1,500) cannot be made until NNSA and Defense Department are ready to discuss what pit they would use in the W93.
The troubled Mixed-oxide Fuel Fabrication Facility project at the Savannah River Site is proposed to be transformed into a plutonium pit production facility. Photo (c) Timothy Mousseau, 2019.
The National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA), the organization within the Energy Department that is responsible for producing and maintaining US nuclear warheads, is moving forward with a plan to build a plutonium-pit-production factory at DOE’s Savannah River Site in South Carolina. “Pits” are the form of the plutonium in the fission trigger “primaries” of US two-stage nuclear warheads.
On May 28, 24 non-governmental organizations, including Livermore’s Tri-Valley CAREs, signed onto a letter that was delivered to Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi and Senate Minority Leader Charles Schumer. The letter was in response to recent reports that senior White House officials had discussed conducting the first U.S. nuclear weapon test explosion since 1992.
““A U.S. nuclear test blast would certainly not advance efforts to rein in Chinese and Russian nuclear arsenals or create a better environment for negotiations. Instead, it would break the de facto global nuclear test moratorium, likely trigger nuclear testing by other states, and set off a new nuclear arms race in which everyone would come out a loser.” — Daryl Kimball, executive director of the Arms Control Association
The Senate Armed Services Committee has advanced an amendment aimed at reducing the amount of time it would take to carry out a nuclear test.
The amendment, offered by Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Ark.), would make at least $10 million available to “carry out projects related to reducing the time required to execute a nuclear test if necessary,” according to a copy of the measure obtained by The Hill on Monday.
The amendment was approved in a party-line, 14-13 vote during the committee’s closed-door markup of the National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) last week, a congressional aide said.
TENNESSEE NUCLEAR WEAPONS FACILITY CONTINUES TO BE PLAGUED BY SAFETY PROBLEMS
SAFETY BOARD: OAK RIDGE NUCLEAR STORAGE FACILITY UNSAFE
NNSA AND CONTRACTOR CONSPIRE TO DOCTOR SAFETY RECORDS
The safest building at the Y-12 National Security Complex in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, is not safe enough. That is the conclusion of the Defense Nuclear Facilities Safety Board in an April 21, 2020, Staff Report on the storage of reactive materials at the Highly Enriched Uranium Materials Facility (HEUMF). The Staff Report was released on June 1, 2020, accompanied by a letter from Safety Board Chair Bruce Hamilton to Dan Brouillette, Secretary of Energy.
Faced with three separate discoveries of highly enriched uranium that posed an undetermined safety risk because it was pyrophoric, the contractor at Y-12, Consolidated Nuclear Services, without characterizing the materials, decided to re-categorize all the materials as not pyrophoric. NNSA agreed and took the additional step of ordering the contractor to revise the Documented Safety Analysis for the HEUMF to incorporate the material types into the facility safety basis. Neither action was justified, according to the Safety Board, and neither was sufficient to assure worker safety.
“The original tree huggers, a group of women of color, inspired generations of would-be tree huggers through their sacrifice, and their story illustrates what it means for an influential history to get erased from a movement; for leadership and contributions to get largely ignored. Though parts of this history might still be known to some, it is valuable for these histories to be taught, celebrated and acknowledged continuously—so we’re all aware that people of color have been leading environmental efforts throughout history, and still do.”
When you hear the term “tree hugger,” what—or who—do you see? What image, or images, pop into your head?
It likely starts with the vague idea of folks who are often—and perhaps overly—passionate about protecting nature.
But then, if you expand it, what do they look like? Is it a man or a woman? Are they white? Do they look like, say, Leonardo DiCaprio and Mark Ruffalo if they were out living the #vanlife together? As touching as that movie might be, it presents an all-too-familiar picture for what we might all imagine when we think of tree huggers.
“There are some new designs, but they are not demonstrably greater, so we are still dealing with the same exact issues,” said Samuel Hickey, a research analyst with the Center for Arms Control and Non-Proliferation. “And realistically, we have a much better solution to the accumulation of spent nuclear fuel, and that is dilution and permanent geological disposal of waste.”
Also at issue is the potential that reprocessing of nuclear waste could undercut efforts to promote nonproliferation abroad.
The Orano La Hague nuclear reprocessing facility in northern France. The U.S. nuclear power industry is eyeing the potential to reuse nuclear waste as fuel in the next generation of reactors. Orano
The nuclear industry’s push for the next generation of reactors is spurring a renewed look at reusing nuclear waste as reactor fuel, rather than burying it.
The implications of such a move have the potential to upend decades of nuclear waste management and global nonproliferation strategies. It also highlights a debate about safety and cost issues from recycling — longtime concerns that advocates say can be overcome. Continue reading
The 27-page document, signed June 4 by DOE Senior Adviser for Environmental Management William (Ike) White, directs managers at the agency’s 16 nuclear cleanup sites to make a list of missed contract milestones and a “path forward” for finishing the work on an adjusted schedule. The documents should lay out the impact of delays on contractor fees. No date for submission or approval of such plans is listed.
The Energy Department’s Office of Environmental Management will cut contractors some slack when it comes to work deadlines missed because of the COVID-19 pandemic, according to a policy that became official last week.
The nuclear cleanup office “will continue to evaluate COVID-19 impacts on the ability of contractors to perform required work,” according to the formal “COVID-19 Remobilization Framework and Site-Specific Template.”
In the next few days, the latest quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to become public. It will make headlines even if it doesn’t contain any news.
BRUSSELS — The European Union’s top diplomat said Tuesday that since the United States has already withdrawn from an international agreement curbing Iran’s nuclear ambitions, it can’t now use its former membership of the pact to try to impose a permanent arms embargo on the Islamic Republic.The accord, which Iran signed with the U.S., Britain, Germany, France, China and Russia in 2015, has been unraveling since President Donald Trump pulled Washington out in 2018 and reinstated sanctions designed to cripple Tehran under what the U.S. called a “maximum pressure” campaign.
U.S. Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations Kelly Craft have said that extending a permanent U.N. backed arms embargo against Iran is now a top priority for Washington. Continue reading
Robert Richter’s IN OUR HANDS is about a magical day, June 12, 1982, when one million people took to the streets of New York to peacefully protest for an end to the nuclear arms race. It remains the largest single peace demonstration in US history.
“It understood that spent fuel remains hazardous for millions of years, and that the only safe long-term strategy for safeguarding irradiated reactor fuel is to place it in a permanent repository for deep geologic isolation from the living environment,” Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear, is worried that Holtec could become permanent.
The meeting was designed to allow public comment on a proposed Consolidated Interim Storage Facility by Holtec International.
A planned nuclear waste repository near Carlsbad was challenged in federal court, as opponents sought to appeal a decision by the federal government to reject contentions to the project that would see spent nuclear fuel rods stored temporarily at a location near the Eddy-Lea county line.
Beyond Nuclear filed its appeal on June 4 in the U.S. Court of Appeal for the District of Columbia, questioning the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission’s April 23 decision to reject challenges to Holtec International’s application for a license to build and operate a consolidated interim storage facility (CISF) that would hold nuclear waste at the surface until a permanent, deep geological repository was available to hold the waste permanently.
A watchdog group has filed a federal lawsuit that contends Holtec International’s application to create an underground storage site for commercial nuclear waste could leave taxpayers holding the bag.
The group Beyond Nuclear argues Holtec International has an illegal provision in its license application that would allow the federal government to take ownership of spent fuel from nuclear reactors before the proposed $3 billion storage facility is built in Southern New Mexico.
That violates a federal law aimed at preventing public agencies from being stuck with massive waste if a company like Holtec decides not to follow through with construction, said Diane Curran, an attorney representing Beyond Nuclear, based in Washington, D.C.
“It’s an end run around the federal statute,” Curran said.
The Nuclear Regulatory Commission twice rejected the group’s efforts to challenge Holtec’s application. Holtec plans to lease 1,000 acres from the Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance — a consortium of local governments — to construct an underground site that could hold as much as 173,000 metric tons of high-level radioactive waste.
Watch the full video of Chain Reaction: Securing Our Future, live-streamed June 8, 2020
Chain Reaction is Ploughshares Fund’s annual gala, gathering leaders in our field, devoted partners, and new advocates to generate a nexus of ideas, opportunities, and strategies to advance nuclear policy and promote the elimination of nuclear weapons. Enjoy the full video of Chain Reaction: Securing Our Future, live-streamed via Zoom on June 8, 2020.
Our speakers were right. The threats to our security—whether from nuclear weapons, from COVID-19, from police brutality, from systematic racism, from climate change—are real, and the consequences are dire.
The last major treaty limiting U.S. and Russian nuclear might hangs in the balance as the Trump administration pushes to replace it with a long-shot arms-control pact that also includes China five months before the U.S. presidential election.
The New START accord, which restricts the number of deployed strategic nuclear warheads and certain launch platforms, is set to expire in February. If the Trump administration declines to extend it and the caps disappear, the United States and Russia will be left without any significant limits on their nuclear forces for the first time in decades.
Russia has said it is willing to extend New START unconditionally. But the Trump administration has balked, saying the treaty signed by President Barack Obama in 2010 is outdated, insufficient and overly advantageous for Moscow.
In addition to wanting a broader pact that covers China, the Trump administration is seeking better verification mechanisms and limits on all Russian nuclear weapons, many of which are particularly risky and fall outside the parameters of New START.
Russia has confirmed that it will open talks with the US this month on extending a major nuclear disarmament treaty but warned that Washington’s insistence on including China could scuttle efforts.
The deputy foreign minister Sergei Ryabkov will meet the US envoy Marshall Billingslea in Vienna on 22 June to begin negotiations on New Start, which expires in February.
Donald Trump has withdrawn from a number of international agreements but voiced a general interest in preserving New Start, which obliged the US and Russia to halve their inventories of strategic nuclear missile launchers.
In the next few days, the latest quarterly report on Iran’s nuclear program by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) is expected to become public. It will make headlines even if it doesn’t contain any news.
A mega-row is emerging between the United States and its major European allies — Britain, Germany and France — over Washington’s decision to stop issuing waivers so that foreign companies can help Iran’s civil nuclear activities. In a joint statement on Saturday, the three European countries said: “We deeply regret the U.S. decision.”
Petitioner charges the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knowingly violated U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act and up-ended settled law prohibiting transfer of ownership of spent fuel to the federal government until a permanent underground repository is ready to receive it.
[WASHINGTON, DC – June 4, 2020] Today the non-profit organization Beyond Nuclear filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requesting review of an April 23, 2020 order and an October 29, 2018 order by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), rejecting challenges to Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance’s application to build a massive “consolidated interim storage facility” (CISF) for nuclear waste in southeastern New Mexico. Holtec proposes to store as much as 173,000 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated or “spent” nuclear fuel – more than twice the amount of spent fuel currently stored at U.S. nuclear power reactors – in shallowly buried containers on the site.
A Eunice resident, Gardner has spent the past few years fighting a proposal to store high-level nuclear waste in southeastern New Mexico.
“I was born here in Eunice, New Mexico, and have lived through a lot of ups and downs, oil booms and busts,” Gardner told NM Political Report. “But never have I ever felt that we needed an industry as dangerous as storing high-level nuclear waste right here.”
Gardner, who co-founded the Alliance for Environmental Strategies, is part of a groundswell of opposition to a project currently under consideration by the federal Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that would see the world’s largest nuclear waste storage facility be built along the Lea-Eddy county line.
Holtec International, a private company specializing in spent nuclear fuel storage and management, applied for a license from the NRC in 2017 to construct and operate the facility in southeastern New Mexico that would hold waste generated at nuclear utilities around the country temporarily until a permanent, federally-managed repository is established. The license application is making steady progress in the NRC’s process, despite the pandemic.
According to a new report by the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, the U.S. spent $35.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2019. This figure includes $11.1 billion to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, and $24.3 billion to the Department of Defense. That amount equals spending $67,352 every minute of 2019 on nuclear weapons. In this time of the global COVID-19 pandemic, some question whether these taxpayers’ dollars could fund the needed masks, gloves, personal protective equipment and other equipment for medical professionals and patients, as well as for essential workers across the country. https://www.icanw.org/global_nuclear_weapons_spending_2020
As Alicia Sanders-Zakre, former Nuclear Watch New Mexico intern and current Policy and Research Coordinator for the International Campaign for the Abolition of Nuclear Weapons (ICAN), who is the primary author of the report, Enough is Enough: 2019 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending, said in this week’s Update:
“The billions spent on nuclear weapons in 2019 didn’t save lives – it was a waste of resources needed to address real security challenges, including pandemics and climate change.”
The report, entitled, “Enough is Enough: 2019 Global Nuclear Weapons Spending,” carefully reviewed the nuclear weapons budgets of nine nuclear-armed countries.
Creator: Wayne Clark | Credit: Secretary of the Air Force Public Affairs Copyright: Public Domain
Spending by the world’s nine nuclear nations climbed to nearly $73 billion in 2019, nearly half of it by the United States alone. At the same time, the Trump administration has prioritized nuclear weapons in its defense budget while abandoning nuclear treaties, fumbling negotiations and confounding allies.
The administration’s lack of coherent goals, strategies or polices have increased nuclear dangers, leaving the U.S. “blundering toward nuclear chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.” Those are the findings of two separate reports published in May that examine nuclear spending and strategy under Trump.
The findings of the reports lay bare the soaring costs and dangers of the Trump administration’s pursuit of more nuclear pits; the fast tracking of a new generation of intercontinental ballistic missiles; and the deployment of new, low-yield submarine-launched nuclear weapons. In May, The Washington Postreported that Trump officials are in ongoing discussions about resuming explosive nuclear weapons testing.
Three years after entering office, the Trump administration lacks a coherent set of goals, a strategy to achieve them, or the personnel or effective policy process to address the most complex set of nuclear risks in U.S. history. Put simply, the current U.S. administration is blundering toward nuclear chaos with potentially disastrous consequences.
In May 2020, the American Nuclear Policy Initiative (ANPI), a task force of former government and non-governmental experts, released an objective analysis of U.S. nuclear policy under Donald Trump. “Blundering Toward Nuclear Chaos: The Trump Administration after Three Years” finds that all of the nuclear challenges facing the United States – some inherited by the president and others of his own creation – have worsened over the last three years, putting national and global security at greater risk of nuclear use.
For 50 years, Frank von Hippel has been working as a citizen-scientist to reduce the grave dangers to humankind from nuclear-weapon and nuclear-energy programs around the world. In this special collection of edited, illustrated and footnoted interviews, von Hippel describes in vivid personal detail the many policy battles he has taken on, the state of nuclear dangers today, and his hopes for a path forward.
Born into an illustrious scientific family that included his grandfather, Nobel laureate James Franck, a leader of the opposition within the Manhattan Project to the use of nuclear weapons against Japan, von Hippel got his PhD in physics from Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar. He was inspired by student activists opposed to the Vietnam War to move from teaching physics at Stanford into a career of policy activism based in Princeton University, where he co-founded the Program on Science and Global Security a leading international center for nuclear arms control, nonproliferation and disarmament research. During the 1980s, von Hippel joined the US citizens’ uprising to “freeze” the nuclear arms race.
BEYOND NUCLEAR FILES FEDERAL LAWSUIT CHALLENGING HIGH-LEVEL RADIOACTIVE WASTE DUMP FOR ENTIRE INVENTORY OF U.S. “SPENT” REACTOR FUEL
Petitioner charges the Nuclear Regulatory Commission knowingly violated U.S. Nuclear Waste Policy Act and up-ended settled law prohibiting transfer of ownership of spent fuel to the federal government until a permanent underground repository is ready to receive it
[WASHINGTON, DC – June 4, 2020] Today the non-profit organization Beyond Nuclear filed an appeal with the U.S. Court of Appeals for the District of Columbia Circuit requesting review of an April 23, 2020 order and an October 29, 2018 order by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), rejecting challenges to Holtec International/Eddy-Lea Energy Alliance’s application to build a massive “consolidated interim storage facility” (CISF) for nuclear waste in southeastern New Mexico. Holtec proposes to store as much as 173,000 metric tons of highly radioactive irradiated or “spent” nuclear fuel – more than twice the amount of spent fuel currently stored at U.S. nuclear power reactors – in shallowly buried containers on the site.
DOE’s NNSA Quietly Plans for All-Out Nuclear War as Coronavirus Rages and Peace and Justice Demonstrations Grow; Plutonium Pit Production to Stimulate Arms Race
Abandoned plutonium fuel (MOX) buiding at Savannah River Site, coutersy High Flyer to SRS Watch – Proposed to be converted into SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP), not for any concept of “deterrence” but for 4000 nuclear weapons to be used in all-out nuclear war
COLUMBIA, SOUTH CAROLINA, US, June 3, 2020 — Numerous public interest groups and individuals have submitted comments critical of the U.S. Department of Energy’s unjustified proposal to expand production of plutonium “pits” – the core of nuclear weapons – to DOE’s Savannah River Site near Aiken, South Carolina. A flurry of comments were submitted on the proposed SRS Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP) as the comment period ended on June 2.
Comments were formally submitted on the National Nuclear Security Administration’s “Draft Environmental Impact Statement on Plutonium Pit Production at Savannah River Site; Aiken, South Carolina,” which was released on April 3. Various groups submitted their own hard-hitting comments and solicited comments to be submitted by their supporters.
Commenters uniformly opposed plans to expand plutonium pit production into the terminated plutonium fuel (MOX) building at SRS, to produce 50 or more pits by 2030, called for preparation of an overarching Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement (PEIS) to review the need for pit-production expansion and impacts at a host of DOE sites.
We respectfully submit these comments1 for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s (NNSA’s) DOE/EIS-0541 Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Plutonium Pit Production at the Savannah River Site in South Carolina2 (hereinafter “DEIS”). Through comprehensive research, public education, and effective citizen action, Nuclear Watch New Mexico seeks to promote safety and environmental protection at defense nuclear facilities; mission diversification away from nuclear weapons programs; greater accountability and cleanup in the nation-wide nuclear weapons complex; and consistent U.S. leadership toward a world free of nuclear weapons.
These comments incorporate by reference the comments submitted by Nuclear Watch and others regarding NNSA’s Supplement Analysis of its 2008 Complex Transformation Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement.3 We believe they are relevant to connected issues which the agency seeks to segment contrary to statutory requirements under the National Environmental Policy Act.
WHAT? Wednesday morning, March 5, the United States Supreme Court will hear oral arguments in Nuclear Regulatory Commission vs. Texas. At issue in the SCOTUS (Supreme Court of the U.S.) proceeding is whether the NRC exceeded its authority when it approved licenses for proposed “consolidated interim storage facilities” for high-level radioactive waste including highly irradiated “spent” fuel from nuclear power plants. Two CISFs are planned for western Texas and southeastern New Mexico. The Nuclear Waste Policy Act of 1982, as Amended specifically prohibits private “interim” storage of federal spent nuclear fuel, and disallows the Department of Energy from taking title to the waste (which would be necessary for DOE to transport it to CISFs), unless and until a permanent geologic repository is licensed, built and opened to receive the waste. The law intended to prevent private “interim” storage of federal radwaste, which is much less robust than permanent storage, and would double the risk of accident or attack during transport, since consolidated “interim” storage necessitates moving the waste twice, once to the CISF and again to a permanent repository. The NRC approved recent CISF license applications despite the law, saying it anticipated Congress would change it in the future. But the federal Fifth Circuit court ruled that the NRC didn’t have that authority. If the Supreme Court strikes that ruling down, it could open the floodgates for thousands of shipments of spent fuel from nuclear power plants across the US, through many states, to CISFs in Texas and New Mexico.
We here at NukeWatch will dearly miss Ken’s weekly presence at the corner vigil to protest Nuclear Weapons in Santa Fe.
Representative Barbara Lee. (photo: Jose Luis Magana/AP)
n response to the Covid-19 pandemic, Washington has initiated its largest spending binge in history. In the process, you might assume that the unparalleled spread of the disease would have led to a little rethinking when it came to all the trillions of dollars Congress has given the Pentagon in these years that have in no way made us safer from, or prepared us better to respond to, this predictable threat to American national security. As it happens, though, even if the rest of us remain in danger from the coronavirus, Congress has done a remarkably good job of vaccinating the Department of Defense and the weapons makers that rely on it financially.
Robert Richter’s IN OUR HANDS is about a magical day, June 12, 1982, when one million people took to the streets of New York to peacefully protest for an end to the nuclear arms race. It remains the largest single peace demonstration in US history.
According to a new report by the Nobel Prize-winning International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons, or ICAN, the U.S. spent $35.4 billion on nuclear weapons in 2019. This figure includes $11.1 billion to the National Nuclear Security Administration, a semi-autonomous agency within the Department of Energy, and $24.3 billion to the Department of Defense. That amount equals spending $67,352 every minute of 2019 on nuclear weapons. In this time of the global COVID-19 pandemic, some question whether these taxpayers’ dollars could fund the needed masks, gloves, personal protective equipment and other equipment for medical professionals and patients, as well as for essential workers across the country. https://www.icanw.org/global_nuclear_weapons_spending_2020 
