Plutonium Sampling at Los Alamos National Laboratory
Cost of RECA Chart
In 1985, US President Ronald Reagan and Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev declared that “a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”
High Detections of Plutonium in Los Alamos’ Acid Canyon
Full Video Recording: NukeWatch and Dr. Michael Ketterer Present Results from Recent Sampling for Plutonium Contamination Around the Los Alamos National Lab |
Dr. Michael Ketterer's Presentation of Results Showing High Detections of Plutonium in Los Alamos Neighborhood |
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If New START Dies, These Questions Will Need Answers
There’s little public indication that the Trump administration is thinking about several things that will happen if the last strategic arms agreement is allowed to expire.
BY VINCENT MANZO & MADISON ESTES | defenseone.com
A U.S. Air Force B-52H Stratofortress bomber takes off from Andersen Air Force Base, Guam, for a routine training mission in the vicinity of the South China Sea and Indian Ocean, Sept 23, 2018.
The Trump administration has articulated an ambitious new vision for nuclear arms control, one that includes China and seeks to limit more types of Russian systems. This vision appears to have little room for the New START agreement, which helped to cap U.S. and Russian nuclear arsenals and which is due to expire in 2021. And yet there is little in the public record to indicate how the administration would deal with various problems that would surface if New START is left to die.
As we mark the seventy-fourth anniversary of the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings in a handful of days, we will rightly remember the horrors of nuclear war.
BY ZACK BROWN & ALEX SPIRE
For a brief fraction of a second on an early March morning in 1954, the United States summoned a second sun into existence above Bikini Atoll.
As the four-mile wide fireball bathed the Pacific seascape in its angry, white-red light, onlookers recognized something nearly divine—and unquestionably ominous. “It was a religious experience, a personal view of the apocalypse or transfiguration,” said one observer. Another remembered feeling “like you stepped into a blast furnace,” even though he was over thirty miles away.
This was the Castle Bravo thermonuclear test, one of several dozen nuclear detonations the United States carried out in the Marshall Islands during the Cold War. At 15 million tons of TNT—one thousand times more powerful than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima—it was the largest explosion ever set off by Americans.
Inside the Secret Campaign to Export U.S. Nuclear Tech to Saudi Arabia
Industry coalition’s push to win over the Trump administration is concerning officials on Capitol Hill who are fearful that it could threaten U.S. national security.
ERIN BANCO | thedailybeast.com
When President Donald Trump took the stage in the East Room of the White House earlier this month to give his first speech on the environment, nuclear energy executives and industry leaders held their breath. They exchanged text messages with fellow colleagues during the speech’s broadcast, wondering aloud to one another if Trump had taken the bait.
Since the fall of 2016, the executives have built an underground coalition along with academics, technology experts and well-connected politicos, including some lobbyists, to get the president and his administration to support—even promote—an American nuclear energy comeback. The industry has declined in recent years due mostly to the closing of critical nuclear infrastructure and plants. Between 2010 and 2018, only one new nuclear power plant came online in the United States.
Thank you to those who submitted comments in the NNSA’s EIS “scoping” for the proposed Plutonium Bomb Plant (PBP) at the Savannah River Site. The PBP remains unauthorized and unfunded.
“Despite requests by many, NNSA denied extending the comment period. Though the comment period ended on July 25, there is still time to submit late comments. (See Federal Register notice of June 10.)
Special thanks are due to the experts at Nuclear Watch New Mexico, Tri-Valley CAREs and the Oak Ridge Environmental Peace Alliance (OREPA) for submitting extensive comments pertaining to the question of “need” for new pits for new nuclear weapons.
It is of note that we enlisted groups that don’t traditionally work on nuclear weapons or DOE issues to engage the scoping process, including the South Carolina Chapter of the Sierra Club, Conservation Voters of South Carolina and the League of Women Voters of South Carolina. Plus, there were a flurry of individual comments in the last few days.
Comments included the lack of need for new pits for the W87-1-style warhead, the issue of pit reuse and the need for a “nuclear non-proliferation risk assessment” on the production of new pits for new nuclear weapons.
Sheep Fire Burns on Idaho National Laboratory Land
