TODAY. Dominic Cummings the “evil gnome” who makes us think.

I am NOT a fan of Dominic Cummings, (described as the evil gnome on the shoulder of former British prime minister Boris Johnson)

He’s the one who scandalised Britain with bizarre ideas on Covid vaccination. He has harsh anti-immigration views, has promoted small nuclear reactors, and was largely responsible for Britain’s decision to leave the European Union.

And now, Dominic Cummings is starting a new political party – with a mixture of what seem to me to be some good ideas and some terrible ideas.

AND YET, AND YET ……. Cummings has something to give us.

He is an independent thinker. At a time when we desperately need independent thinking. We are stuck with world leaders rigidly sticking to their doctrines, no matter what. With political party leaders who have no aim except to fight the other side, no matter what. The media love this conflict-obsessed culture, the military-industrial-nuclear-complex is orgiastic about it.

Cummings has a great interest and knowledge of ancient and modern history, has lived in Russia, and speaks Russian, -he does bring to politics a different view from that of the usual business-oriented politicians . He certainly has had a chequered career, (to put it kindly!) in British politics, and has made lots of enemies on both the Right and the Left.

Who knows whether Dominic Cummings’ new “start-up” political party will become a reality?

I’m certainly not advocating for that party. But many of Cumming’s ideas and policies are developed from a deep understanding of European history. And that is refreshing. In the current Ukraine mess, very few leaders and journalists show any grasp of history.

Even if you hate Dominic Cummings, you would have to concede that he has brought a highly individual and independent view on politics and world affairs.

And that is a valuable gift and example for us – as against slavishly following political parties, and dogmas like the “rules based international order”.

Australia risks being ‘world’s nuclear waste dump’ unless Aukus laws changed, critics say

Labor-chaired inquiry calls for legislation to rule out accepting high-level nuclear waste from US and UK submarines among other recommendations

Daniel Hurst Foreign affairs and defence correspondent,  https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/13/australia-aukus-deal-submarines-critics-nuclear-waste

Australia risks becoming the “world’s nuclear waste dump” unless the Albanese government moves to rewrite its proposed Aukus laws, critics say.

A Labor-chaired inquiry has called for the legislative safeguard to specifically rule out accepting high-level nuclear waste from the US and the UK. One of the members of a Senate committee that reviewed the draft laws, independent senator Lidia Thorpe, said the legislation “should be setting off alarm bells” because “it could mean that Australia becomes the world’s nuclear waste dump”.

The government’s bill for regulating nuclear safety talks about “managing, storing or disposing of radioactive waste from an Aukus submarine”, which it defines broadly as Australia, UK or US submarines.

In a report published on Monday, the Senate’s foreign affairs, defence and trade legislation committee said this wording did not reflect the government’s promise not to accept high-level nuclear waste.

It recommended that the government consider “amending the bill so that a distinction is made between Australia’s acceptance of low-level nuclear waste from Aukus partners, but non-acceptance of high-level nuclear waste”.

The government has left the door open to accepting low-level waste from US and UK nuclear-powered submarines when they conduct rotational visits to Western Australia in the first phase of the Aukus plan. Low-level waste contains small amounts of radioactivity and include items such as personal protective equipment, gloves and wipes.

“According to the Australian Submarine Agency, nuclear-powered submarines only generate around a ‘small skip bin’ of low-level naval nuclear waste per submarine per year and that intermediate- and high-level waste will not become a concern until the first naval nuclear reactor requires disposal in the mid-2050s,” the Senate committee report said.

The government has yet to decide on the location for the disposal of radioactive waste from the submarines.

But infrastructure works proposed for HMAS Stirling – the naval base in Western Australia – to support the increased rotational visits are expected to include an operational waste storage facility for low-level radioactive waste.

The Department of Defence has argued any changes to the definitions should not prevent “regulatory control of the management of low-level radioactive waste from UK or US submarines” as part of those rotational visits.

Thorpe, an independent senator, said the call to prohibit high-level nuclear waste from being stored in Australia was “backed by experts in the field and was one of the major concerns raised during the inquiry into the bill”.

“The government claims it has no intention to take Aukus nuclear waste beyond that of Australian submarines, so they should have no reason not to close this loophole,” Thorpe said.

“They also need to stop future governments from deciding otherwise. We can’t risk our future generations with this.”

The government’s proposed legislation would set up an Australian naval nuclear power safety regulator to oversee the safety of the nuclear-powered submarines.

The committee made eight recommendations, including setting “a suitable minimum period of separation” to prevent a revolving door from the Australian Defence Force or Department of Defence to the new regulator.

The main committee report acknowledged concerns in the community that Australia might become a “dumping ground” for the Aukus countries, but it said the term was “not helpful in discussing the very serious question of national responsibility for nuclear waste”.

It also said the bill should be amended to ensure the regulator was transparent about “any accidents or incidents” with the soon-to-be-established parliamentary oversight committee on defence.

The Labor chair of the committee, Raff Ciccone, said the recommendations would “further strengthen the bill” and help “ensure Australia maintains the highest standards of nuclear safety”.

In a dissenting report, the Greens senator David Shoebridge said the legislation was “deeply flawed”, including because the regulator would report to the defence minister.

“The proposed regulator lacks genuine independence, the process for dealing with nuclear waste is recklessly indifferent to community or First Nations interests and the level of secrecy is a threat to both the environment and the public interest,” Shoebridge said.

The defence minister, Richard Marles, was contacted for comment.

Constellation Energy looks to small nuclear reactors for the gross, ever-increasing energy needs of great steel data containers.

Constellation Energy eyes new nuclear for unprecedented data center power
demand.

Constellation Energy (CEG.O), opens new tab is considering building
next-generation nuclear plants on its existing sites to meet soaring demand
from data centers, executives with the Baltimore-based power company said
on Thursday. The largest operator of U.S. nuclear energy said it is looking
at adding new small modular reactors and other energy technologies to
deliver electricity to large load customers like data centers.

 Reuters 9th May 2024

https://www.reuters.com/business/energy/constellation-energy-beats-q1-profit-estimates-higher-nuclear-power-generation-2024-05-09/

Sam Altman-backed nuclear start-up crashes after Wall Street debut

NEW YORK,  https://www.malaymail.com/news/money/2024/05/11/sam-altman-backed-nuclear-start-up-crashes-after-wall-street-debut/133694 ― The share price of nuclear energy start-up Oklo, chaired by OpenAI boss Sam Altman, fell sharply yesterday on its first day of trading on Wall Street.

At around 3.40pm (1940GMT), the stock was down 53.9 per cent to US$8.40 (RM39.80).

Founded in 2013 by graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), Oklo went public by merging with AltC Acquisition Corp, a listed company.

The latter is a SPAC (special purpose acquisition company), a company whose sole purpose is to enable another firm to enter Wall Street through a merger.

Since the deal with Oklo was announced in July last year, AltC’s share price has soared, gaining over 72 per cent.

But transactions involving a SPAC are often highly volatile, partly because they are more exposed to speculation than traditional IPOs.

Altman is involved in several cutting-edge sectors and invested in Oklo in 2015, also becoming its chairman.

According to company documents, Altman directly controls around three per cent of the capital.

Oklo plans to build small modular reactors (SMRs), which are theoretically quicker to build than conventional power plants and less complicated to construct in remote areas. Oklo also wants to offer nuclear fuel recycling.

Conventional nuclear reactors are hugely expensive and take a long time to construct, with major projects having become notorious for their budget and schedule overruns.

The startup does not yet have a site of its own, and in January 2022 was refused a licence to build an SMR in Idaho by the Nuclear Regulatory Agency (NRC).

The NRC rejected the application on the grounds that there was a lack of information on the risks of accidents and the responses planned in such cases.

With the merger with AltC, Oklo raised US$306 million, which will be used to build the company’s first fission reactor, Aurora, in Ohio. ― AFP

“Nuclear comes last”

the tail-between-legs exit of the Nuclear Summit conferees declared in a headline: “Taxpayers are needed to foot the bill to achieve 2050 targets.”

Banks reject nuclear funding, stocks nosedive and the industry says it should, believe it or not, slow down

 By Linda Pentz Gunter  March 31, 2024   https://beyondnuclearinternational.org/2024/03/31/nuclear-comes-last/

NuScale, the company whose small modular reactor project collapsed so spectacularly last November, is “burning cash at the rate of $185 million per year”. On March 22, the company’s CEO, John Hopkins, sold 59,768 of his shares in the company. This is the same CEO who declared NuScale’s SMR project, aptly named VOYGR, “a dead horse.” It’s clearly on a journey to nowhere.

Wells Fargo, with an eye on prudent investments, has declared, “We think investor enthusiasm for SMR is misguided”. As The Motley Fool reported, “NuScale’s VOYGR nuclear power product has ‘no secure customers’ and is ‘not cost competitive’ says the analyst.” 

The splashy cheerleading Nuclear Energy Summit organized by the International Atomic Energy Agency in Brussels on March 21 proved to be just that. The participants arrived floating on the hot air of their misplaced enthusiasm but “left humbled by the tepid reaction of bankers assessing the price tag of their ambitions”.

European Investment Bank Vice President Thomas Ostros, told Summit attendees to their face that “The project risks, as we have seen in reality, seem to be very high”. Representatives from the European and Latin American banking worlds said that “their lending priorities lean toward renewables and transmission grids” and that “nuclear comes last”.

Even the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission couldn’t quite bring itself to slam down its rubber stamp on Oklo’s chalet-in-the-woods micro reactor, the Aurora, which remains about as real as its namesake fairy tale princess. 

In January 2022, the NRC denied Oklo’s license application outright because it “continues to contain significant information gaps in its description of Aurora’s potential accidents as well as its classification of safety systems and components,” wrote the NRC. 

Oklo reapplied nine months later but according to the NRC docket there is “no further action”. 

Nevertheless, Oklo brags on its website that it “made history” simply by developing “the first advanced fission combined license application to the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission”, which sums up the second nuclear “renaissance” perfectly: Make a drawing. Hit ‘send’.

Meanwhile, the US military canceled its contract for an Aurora reactor originally intended for the Eielson Air Force Base near Fairbanks, Alaska.

And finally, an executive from the industry that has consistently delivered its latest new reactors decades late and billions over the original budget — in one case $20 billion over — suggested they should all just slow down. Said Ian Edwards, chief executive of Canadian reactor producer, Atkins Realis, “we all become too optimistic. We have this optimism bias towards being able to deliver faster. Really we should probably slow things down a little bit.”

But nuclear power is the answer to our current climate crisis! Ya think?

It’s tempting to ask whether things can get any worse for the nuclear power industry, but they almost certainly will. Unless we end up paying for it all. As the Bloomberg article that related the tail-between-legs exit of the Nuclear Summit conferees declared in a headline: “Taxpayers are needed to foot the bill to achieve 2050 targets.”

At the moment, a majority in the US Congress seem intent on making sure that is exactly what will happen. Because after all, why should multi-billionaire, Bill Gates, be forced to pay for his own nuclear toys when he can milk (read ‘bilk’) US taxpayers instead?

The US government has already pledged $2 billion of our money to Gates for his proliferation-friendly liquid sodium-cooled molten salt fast reactor produced by his company, TerraPower (more properly, TerrorPower). Gates can’t wait to export it the United Arab Emirates. Nuclear weapons anyone?

The strokey-white-beard-named ADVANCE Act, has been passed by the US House with 365 voting in favor and only 36 Democrats-with-a-conscience voting against it. By its own description, the ADVANCE ACT aims to “advance the benefits of nuclear energy by enabling efficient, timely, and predictable licensing, regulation, and deployment of nuclear energy technologies.” In other words, do away with burdensome — and expensive — safety regulations. 

Indeed, New Mexico Democrat, Senator Martin Heinrich, told E&E News in January that “These regulatory timelines do not lend themselves to fighting the climate crisis.” Oh those wascally wegulations!

Meanwhile, Democratic senator Joe Manchin of West Virginia doesn’t want to seat any new NRC commissioners who might be “too focused on safety.” 

The NRC’s motto is “protecting people and the environment,” a mandate it demonstrably endeavors to avoid already, but even some vestige of interest in safety is probably better than none. Not that safety oversight will be needed of course because, hey, SMRs are “walkaway safe” and “meltdown proof” and any new light water reactors are too “advanced” to be a safety risk.

This makes the insistence by SMR manufacturers that they must be covered by the Price-Anderson Act (PAA) all the more curious. Price-Anderson, due to expire in 2025, was culled out of the ADVANCE ACT, now moving out of Senate committee and working its way through the reconciliation process, and handled separately. The Senate adopted the House version of the PAA, giving it a 40-year extension to 2026, and expanded limited liability for a major accident to just over $16 billion per reactor.

President Biden duly signed it into law, marking another misstep on what is becoming an increasingly problematic presidency.

Ed Lyman, Nuclear Power Safety Director at the Union of Concerned Scientists, told Nuclear Intelligence Weekly that “The nuclear industry’s push for a 40-year Price-Anderson Act extension is a sure sign that it doesn’t believe its own messaging about how safe the next generation of nuclear reactors is going to be.”

But in a joint statement, Senator Shelley Moore Capito (R-W.Va.) and Senator Tom Carper (D-Del.) declared that “The extension of the Price-Anderson Act in the minibus sends a clear message that we are committed to the advancement of this safe and reliable power source.”

The “clear message” this actually sends is that, in the event of a major nuclear accident, US taxpayers will be thrown under that minibus. The $16 billion coverage will be chicken feed and we will all be stuck with the bill. Let’s remember that the Chornobyl and Fukushima nuclear disasters are each racking up costs in the hundreds of billions of dollars and counting. We have been warned.

But a bi-partisan group of Representatives and Senators think it’s perfectly fine for all of us to pay for such an eventuality. Meanwhile, if you own a home and are forced to abandon it in the path of a nuclear accident, you cannot claim a dime off your homeowner’s insurance. It will just be a total loss. Think about that for a moment.

Are we outraged yet?

Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear 

Indonesia civil society groups raise concerns over proposed Borneo nuclear reactor

by Irfan Maulana on 14 May 2024,  https://news.mongabay.com/2024/05/indonesia-civil-society-groups-raise-concerns-over-proposed-borneo-nuclear-reactor/

• Indonesia’s largest environmental advocacy group, Walhi, staged demonstrations in Jakarta and West Kalimantan province to raise awareness about a proposed nuclear power plant in West Kalimantan’s Bengkayang district.
• In 2021, a U.S. agency signed a partnership agreement with Indonesia’s state-owned power utility to explore possibilities for a reactor in the province. Survey work is currently being conducted to determine the project’s viability and safety.
• Some environmental groups have questioned the merit of the plan on safety grounds and the availability of alternative renewable sources.

JAKARTA — Civil society organizations in Indonesia staged protests in late April to raise awareness of a planned nuclear plant near Pontianak, capital of West Kalimantan province on the island of Borneo.

“We are advocating that West Kalimantan be kept away from the threat of a nuclear radiation disaster. Indonesia is not Chernobyl,” said Hendrikus Adam, executive director of the West Kalimantan chapter of the Indonesia Forum for the Environment, a national NGO known as Walhi, referring to the site of a notorious 1986 nuclear meltdown in the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist Republic.

Indonesia’s first experimental nuclear reactor, the TRIGA Mark II, opened in the city of Bandung in February 1965. Since then, however, the world’s fourth-largest country has yet to open a full-fledged nuclear power station.

In March 2023, Indonesia and the U.S. Trade and Development Agency (USTDA) signed a partnership agreement to develop small modular reactor technology for the archipelago’s power network. The agreement included a $1 million grant to PLN, the state-owned power utility, to carry out feasibility studies on a nuclear reactor.

PLN has proposed a 462-megawatt facility in West Kalimantan, which would use technology supplied by NuScale Power OVS, a publicly traded company based in Oregon in the U.S.

In capacity terms, that represents almost one-tenth of the giant Paiton coal-fired complex in East Java province, a mainstay of the Java-Bali power grid.

NuScale says the modular design of its technology has additional resilience to earthquakes — a significant consideration for civil engineering projects in Indonesia, one of the most seismically active countries in the world.

However, the technology encountered controversy after John Ma, a senior structural engineer with the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), questioned the commission’s approval of the design’s earthquake resistance. That “differing professional opinion” was subsequently dismissed on review.

In 2021, Indonesia’s national research agency, known as BRIN, carried out a seismic study on a prospective site in the West Kalimantan district of Bengkayang.

That early work is part of research under the internationally agreed Probabilistic Seismic Hazard Assessment, which is recommended by the International Atomic Energy Agency as part of its safety regimen.

Risk assessment

At Walhi’s demonstration on April 26 in Jakarta, volunteers with the environmental group unfurled banners stating “Indonesia is not Chernobyl.” Lessons from the Chernobyl incident, as well as the 2011 Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant meltdown in Japan — the latter triggered by an earthquake — inform much of the civil society campaign in Indonesia.

“The number of human and environmental tragedies shows that human-created technology such as nuclear power plants cannot be completely controlled,” Adam said.

He also questioned the government’s choice of Indonesian Borneo, known locally as Kalimantan, on the basis that it isn’t as seismically active as islands like Java, Sumatra and Sulawesi.

“The assumption that Kalimantan is safe from this disaster is of course not true,” Adam said. “Kalimantan has earthquake sources, such as the Meratus Fault, Mangkabayar Fault, Tarakan Fault, Sampurna Fault and Paternoster Fault.”

Walhi also pointed to slow uptake of solar and other renewable energy sources in Indonesia, which haven’t received the kinds of subsidies seen in other countries transitioning to clean energy.

“We have so many choices for energy transition, why do we have to choose technology that is actually dangerous?” said Fanny Tri Jamboree Christianto, Walhi’s energy campaign lead.

Dominic Cummings: Zelensky’s no Churchill and Ukraine’s corrupt

Former Brexit campaign chief says the West is ‘getting f**ked’ by supporting Ukraine.

BY NOAH KEATE, MAY 9, 2024  https://www.politico.eu/article/dominic-cummings-volodymyr-zelenskyy-ukraine-war-corruption/

LONDON — Boris Johnson’s former top adviser Dominic Cummings launched a sweary attack on Western support for Ukraine Thursday.

In an interview with the i newspaper, Cummings — who led Britain’s Vote Leave Brexit campaign and spectacularly fell out with Johnson in 2020 — declared that the West “should have never got into the whole stupid situation” and claimed sanctions against Russia have had a greater impact on European politics than in Moscow.

The former adviser was scathing of Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy and comparisons with World War II.

“This is not a replay of 1940 with Zelenskyy as the Churchillian underdog,” he said.

“This whole Ukrainian corrupt mafia state has basically conned us all and we’re all going to get f**ked as a consequence. We are getting f**ked now right?”

In a follow-up tweet, Cummings later branded Zelenskyy a “potemkin” leader — but denied he’d called him a “pumpkin” as originally quoted in the interview.

He argued that war would only strengthen the relationship between Russia and China, saying Western nations “pushed [Russia] into an alliance with the world’s biggest manufacturing power.”

Cummings has long been critical of support for Ukraine, a stance that puts him sharply at odds with his old boss Johnson, a vocal supporter of Zelenskyy and Ukraine’s war effort.

He told the paper the West had failed to send Russian President Vladimir Putin a worthwhile signal which would deter him from invading another country.

“What lesson have we taught him? The lesson we’ve taught Putin is that we’re a bunch of total f**king jokers,” Cummings asserted, saying the war had “broadcast it to the entire world what a bunch of clowns we are.”

It comes as the former Vote Leave Brexit campaign chief tests the water for a new political party to replace the Tories.

POLITICO reported on Thursday that Cummings has organized a series of focus groups to get the public’s views about a new anti-establishment outfit.

Cummings told the i his “Start Up Party” would be “ruthlessly focused on the voters not on Westminster and the old media.”

Amidst genocide and war, anti-Zionism protesters are demonised as ‘extremists’

Independent Australia, By Martin Hirst | 13 May 2024

As human rights experts warn of an ongoing genocide in Gaza, any opposition to Zionism is being egregiously labelled as extremism, Dr Martin Hirst writes.

STUDENT PROTESTERS around the world are being demonised by politicians, bureaucrats and the news media for taking a stand against genocide.

This is just an updated version of the moral panic playbook that conservatives use to demonise young people who don’t toe the establishment line.

In the last six weeks, student protests have exploded around the world on a scale not seen since the Vietnam Moratorium almost 60 years ago. These students are protesting against what human rights experts are not hesitating to call a genocide in Gaza.

This reporter knows some of the Australian leaders of these protests quite well, organising politically with them as a long-term member of Left-wing group Socialist Alternative and a writer for its newspaper, Red Flag.

We know that none of these outstanding young activists are antisemitic. We know they are better educated about Palestine from a contemporary and historical perspective than our Prime Minister and most politicians…………………………………………………

We know that these young people are on the right side of history.

We also know that attempts by political leaders, intelligence agencies, Zionist hacks, the police and some university administrators to brand these brave students as violent, dangerous and antisemitic is a bald lie.

It is the lie itself that is dangerous because it actually emboldens Zionist thugs to launch ever-more violent attacks on student encampments, causing injury and mayhem.

It is also dangerous because it is a serious attempt – carried out with planning and intent – to criminalise anti-genocide activists and to criminalise their right to political speech.

What is happening in Australia, across Europe and in the United States is the creation of a state of emergency based on these dangerous lies. Right in front of our eyes, pro-Israel elements of the ruling class are establishing the conditions for a new wave of moral panic.

Students are being demonised as the 21st-Century version of the “folk devil“. The protests are being compared to 1930s Germany – which most people who make this comparison know absolutely fuck-all about – and they are being used to launch a McCarthyite witch hunt against students and academics who stand up for Palestine.

There’s nothing new about moral panics — the phrase was coined by British sociologist Stanley Cohen in the 1970s to describe the clamour for the state to take action against “Mods” and “Rockers” — two rival youth subcultures that enjoyed different types of music.

Interestingly, the Pogroms against Jews that swept Europe in the 1920s were a form of moral panic…………………………………………………………………………………………………

A moral panic only works when those in power – who feel threatened by resistance from below – can enlist loyal handmaidens in the media to prosecute their case and amplify their fear-mongering. Now, these tactics of intimidation are aimed at silencing dissent and any vocal opposition to the Israeli slaughter in Gaza.

Make no mistake, it is happening. Take it seriously because the Zionists and the political establishment are taking it seriously……………………………………………………

Failed Liberal Minister Josh Frydenberg helped to produce a “documentary” helpfully explaining to Sky News audiences how Australia is sliding into Nazi-era pogroms because of the threat to civil order posed by the student encampments and the wider anti-genocide movement.

In the last week alone, there has been a slew of opinion columns and news pieces in The Australian slandering student encampments while ignoring the attacks mounted on them by Zionist thugs.

Andrew Bolt and the usual list of suspects are apoplectic with rage that university administrators haven’t (yet) moved to shut down the protests.

However, the universities are beginning to move. The administration at Monash University in Melbourne is demanding students remove ‘Zionists not welcome’ signs from around their encampment because of some spurious “legal advice” that it is vilification.

Police have been allowed to install surveillance cameras overlooking the Monash encampment. Vice Chancellors from the Group of Eight — Australia’s richest universities — have asked Attorney-General Mark Dreyfus to advise them if the slogans used in the encampments are “hate speech”.

This is particularly egregious because Dreyfus himself is a Zionist. Dreyfus declined to provide legal advice but urged people who feel offended to lodge complaints under Section 18a of the Racial Discrimination Act. …………………………………………………..

It is too early to tell where all of this will end, but we can confidently predict that the Labor Party will support Sarah Henderson’s call for a Senate inquiry.

Anthony Albanese is fuelling the moral panic with apparent joy. He is reported to have told a room full of senior Zionist elders and student leaders that he believes the campus protests are led by outside agitators.

Helpfully, he was able to name them too. It’s all “the Trots‘ fault”.

This is deeply ironic for two reasons:

Russian revolutionary leader Leon Trotsky was a Jew and when he fell foul of the Stalinist regime, his Jewish heritage was used against him to launch a moral panic that even spread to Australia and poisoned the minds of many good Communist Party members, including the artist Noel Counihan who famously called Trotsky a “fascist gangster”.

Albanese has also been demonised as a Trotskyist by Murdoch hacks and (former Liberal MP Bronwyn Bishop) “Kerosene Bronny“…………….. https://independentaustralia.net/politics/politics-display/amidst-genocide-and-war-anti-zionism-protesters-are-demonised-as-extremists,18594

US bans China crypto-miner from nuclear base area

Yahoo! News, João da Silva – Business reporter, Tue, 14 May 2024 

US President Joe Biden has ordered a Chinese-owned cryptocurrency miner and its partners to sell land they own near a US nuclear missile base, citing spying concerns.

MineOne Partners, which the White House says is majority-owned by Chinese citizens, has been given 120 days to sell the property, where it runs a crypto-mining operation.

The land is less than a mile (1.6km) away from an air force base in Wyoming, where intercontinental ballistic missiles are stored.

BBC News has contacted MineOne Partners and China’s embassy in the US for comment.

“The proximity of the foreign-owned Real Estate to a strategic missile base… and the presence of specialised and foreign-sourced equipment potentially capable of facilitating surveillance and espionage activities, presents a national security risk”, the White House said in a statement.

Francis E. Warren Air Force Base in Wyoming is home to Minuteman III nuclear intercontinental ballistic missiles.

MineOne bought the land close to the military base in 2022 and later installed cryptocurrency mining equipment.

The Committee on Foreign Investment in the US (CFIUS), a powerful body that scrutinises deals for national security security threats, was not notified about the purchase by the company, the White House said………………………………….. https://au.news.yahoo.com/us-bans-china-crypto-miner-011028473.html

Nuclear power and nuclear weapons – two sides of the same coin

In March 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak explicitly linked nuclear weapons production capability with civil nuclear power generation development. This is because nuclear reactors are used to create tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen – necessary for nuclear weapons.

The government has admitted its push for nuclear energy expansion is linked to its strategic military interests

by Peter Wilkinson,  12 May 2024, o https://eastangliabylines.co.uk/nuclear-power-and-nuclear-weapons-two-sides-of-the-same-coin/

The government’s apparent answer to climate change and Russia’s invasion of Ukraine is to triple the amount of nuclear generated electricity in the belief that it generates ‘low carbon’ electricity. But a recent admission by Prime Minister Rishi Sunak suggests there is a strong military component to what looks on the surface to be a civil matter.

The UK review of the energy sector, prompted by the invasion of Ukraine, offered a golden opportunity to address the need to drive down demand for electricity and energy more generally. This could be achieved by retrofitting insulation to the housing stock and buildings, mandating solar panel use for all new homes, investing heavily in renewables, in emerging battery technology and in decentralisation. Instead, the government has focused on a massive expansion of nuclear-generated electricity.

The dual nuclear agenda

Now the reason has finally been openly admitted. Maintaining and improving the supply chain and the knowledge and skills base in the workforce for the UK’s £100bn Trident nuclear weapons renewal programme relies on the civil nuclear sector.

While this claim has been regularly made by anti-nuclear campaigners – and just as regularly denied by minister after minister – it is now openly acknowledged. The Roadmap states quite clearly that it is important to align civil and military nuclear ambitions across government, to strengthen the interconnections between civil and military industries’ research and development, and thereby reduce costs for both the weapons and power sectors.

In March 2024, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak explicitly linked nuclear weapons production capability with civil nuclear power generation development. This is because nuclear reactors are used to create tritium – the radioactive isotope of hydrogen – necessary for nuclear weapons.

The cat which was so carefully and fraudulently hidden for decades is finally out of the bag: ministers now have to acknowledge that the civil nuclear programme owes more to maintaining weapons of mass destruction – weapons that were outlawed by the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons which entered into force in January 2021 – than it has to do with salvation from the existential crisis that is climate change.

Debunking myths: the truth behind nuclear ambitions

Its brave new world aims for a nuclear sector generating upto 24 Gigawatts of electricity by 2050. That’s comparable to seven new 3.2 Gw capacity Hinkley Point Cs or Sizewell Cs or forty-eight Sizewell A-size reactors at around half a Megawatt output.

The locations for a proposed ‘mix’ of ‘gigawatt-sized reactors’ such as the European Pressurised Reactor (EPR) planned for Sizewell C, and ‘small modular’ and ‘advanced modular’ reactors (SMRs and AMRs respectively) is the subject of the government’s ‘Nuclear Road Map’.

It is, necessarily, largely a work of fiction laced with eulogies to nuclear power and liberally interspersed with admissions of hope over expectations. The truth is that Hinkley Point C is now expected to cost an eye-watering £40+bn from its original £20bn, and Sizewell C has already cost the taxpayer £2.4bn in sweeteners to the private sector.

Commercial SMRs don’t yet exist, and they are not small, unless you consider that Sizewell A falls into that category. AMRs have remained a fantasy for decades and are likely to remain so. Mention them to a nuclear regulator, and you’ll probably get a raised eyebrow in response.

Nuclear revival: promises vs reality

The Sizewell project has yet to be granted multiple construction and operating permits and licences and no final investment decision has been made. Other issues which make Sizewell C a terrible idea include:

• A multi-billion hole existing in its finances
• There is no reliable and guaranteed supply of potable water – of which an average of 2.2 million litres a day are required in the country’s most water-scarce area
• It is situated in a flood zone
• It is in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty
• It sits on the fastest-eroding coastline in northern Europe
• An estimated 46 hectares of woodland have already been flattened
• The Environment Agency (EA) has authorised the dumping of 1,590 tonnes of dead and dying fish back into the North Sea each year as a consequence of the Sizewell C cooling water intake (not to mention the 100s of millions of fish, fish larvae and other marine biota)
• In addition, there will be an estimated 171 million sacrificial sand goby, none of which are acknowledged by the EA.
• Radiological discharges from Sizewell C to the sea and air have contested health impacts

EDF ploughs on

The Supreme Court is still considering the merits of a judicial review appeal against the original planning approval. None of these uncertainties and deficiencies have stopped EDF devastating the areas around the development with the sanction of the local planning authority.

The tragedy is that nuclear is now a redundant technology which takes too long to come to our climate-change rescue and is not fit to be in the front-line of defence against climate change. It does not represent a plan of great urgency to meet the accelerating existential threats of climate change.

It has a rapidly narrowing window in which to contribute its electricity to the job of reducing climate change risks. When compared to renewables and conservation measures, nuclear is slow, costly and unreliable in terms of the new technology embodied in the EPR design. The Flamanville project in France, using a Sizewell EPR-type reactor, is still offline, is twelve years late and will cost four times the original budget.

The government has been in thrall to nuclear power for a long time. Perhaps with the admission of its connection to its strategic miliary goals, we can now better understand why that is. But the knowledge only deepens and entrenches the divide between the hawks and the doves.

Ontario’s nuclear option is the wrong path to meet green energy targets

The province should focus on cost-efficient wind, solar and hydro expansion, as well as increased interprovincial transmission.

by Quinn Goranson May 13, 2024,  https://policyoptions.irpp.org/magazines/may-2024/ontario-nuclear-option/

Ontario is failing in its strategy to reduce emissions to meet the province’s climate commitment of reducing emissions by 2030 to 30 per cent below 2005 levels (which is already 10 to 15 per cent below the current federal target).

The province’s auditor general released a report in 2021 stating the Ford government’s policies for reducing greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions were already falling short by 14.2 megatons.

Fast-forward three years and the situation is likely to get worse.

Plans to meet the province’s possible 1.7-per-cent annual increase in electricity demand include the addition of natural gas-powered turbines, refurbishing old nuclear reactors and developing small modular reactors (SMRs).

This presents a dual problem. First, burning natural gas produces CO2, so expanding capacity using new gas turbines will increase emissions. Second, nuclear power generation cannot successfully help meet 2030 targets

Ontario’s nuclear hopes out of step with reality

SMRs are a class of nuclear reactor, built in a factory and shipped to a site, designed to generate up to 300 megawatts (MW) of electrical power per unit. By comparison, larger conventional reactors in Ontario have a capacity of roughly 900 MW.

Ontario Power Generation (OPG) states it is “leading the way in the advancement of SMR technology in Canada” and that SMRs are “the future of nuclear power generation.”

This position collides head-on with technological realities.

SMRs are a futuristic technology at best. The only operational SMRs anywhere in the world are in Northeast Russia and in Shidao Bay, China.

Both reactors faced construction delays, primarily due to cost overruns and poor economics., The Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission has yet to fully approve a single SMR licence.

SMRs cannot be built in time to help meet Ontario’s 2030 emission targets. Worse, by betting on them, OPG has committed to making Ontario’s electricity grid dirtier.

Nuclear power a costly option

In addition to being largely unproven, SMRs will not be cheap. While their absolute cost may be lower than conventional nuclear reactors, their lower electricity output means they become significantly more expensive per megawatt to operate.

Beyond the fact that every single new nuclear project in Ontario’s history has gone over budget, gas and nuclear energy now contribute the most to increasing energy bills for Ontario residents.

A 2018 report from the Canadian SMR roadmap steering committee, a group of provincial and territorial governments and power utilities, estimated the baseline cost of electricity from SMRs would be 16.3 cents per kilowatt hour (kWh). Comparatively, according to the International Renewable Energy Agency renewable alternatives are less expensive:

• Onshore wind electricity costs consumers an average of 4.5 cents per kWh;
• Offshore wind costs an average of 10 cents/kWh;
• Solar PV farms cost an average of 6.6 cents/kWh;
• Hydropower costs an average of 5 cents/kWh.

In North America, the only SMR design certified by the United States Nuclear Regulatory Commission was cancelled due to “lack of interest” once rising costs deterred potential customers. Originally announced in 2015 at the equivalent of $4.1 billion Cdn, estimates rose to $5.6 billion (2018), then $8.4 billion (2020) and finally $12.7 billion (2023).

Time keeps on ticking

New nuclear projects are taking on average of 10 to 15 years to become operational. Ontario’s first SMR designated for the Darlington Nuclear Generating Station is planned for 2028.

Meanwhile, the Ontario government says additional SMRs could come online between 2034 and 2036. In reality, nuclear projects typically exceed time estimates by 64 per cent and given a strong trend of delays for such projects globally, new SMRs are unlikely to come online before 2042, if ever.

So, in addition to the speculative viability of SMRs, likely delays even under the best of circumstances mean this technology is unable to help meet Ontario’s emissions reduction targets.

Radioactive waste another key factor

The “green” label often applied to nuclear energy should be viewed with scepticism. While no fossil fuel is burned to generate nuclear power, the industry produces radioactive waste and is not “renewable.”

In fact, there is evidence to suggest SMRs will produce a greater volume of radioactive waste per unit of electricity generated than existing large reactors.

Radioactive waste remains hazardous for tens of thousands of years and there are no demonstrated solutions to managing this risk. According to the Nuclear Waste Management Organization, which is owned by Canada’s nuclear power companies, radioactive nuclear waste must be fully isolated from people and the environment for one million years or more.

Committing to new nuclear projects in Ontario as a climate solution is essentially trading one intergenerational threat for another.

The green path toward Ontario’s emissions targets

A report from the David Suzuki Foundation in 2022 found that “reliable, affordable, 100 per cent emissions-free electricity in Canada by 2035 is entirely possible.”

In 2020, the International Energy Agency declared wind and solar the “cheapest sources of new electricity in history.”

In 2018, Ontario cancelled 758 signed contracts for smaller renewable energy projects, many of them in Indigenous communities Only recently, the province’s Independent Electricity System Operator (IESO) has announced it seeks to procure 5,000 MW of new non-emitting (wind, solar, hydropower or bioenergy) energy.

Utility-scale solar costs plummeted by 90 per cent between 2009-21. Wind energy costs declined 72 per cent. This presents an important opportunity given Ontario’s more than 1,500 kilometres of Great Lakes shoreline and abundant sunshine.

The already low cost of hydropower in Ontario through existing infrastructure, combined with the potential for integration with Hydro-Québec, can help Ontario convert its “intermittent wind and solar energy into a firm 24/7 source of baseload electricity,” according to the Ontario Clean Air Alliance.

Likewise, offshore wind-generating potential in Atlantic Canada far exceeds energy needs in the region and could be exported to Ontario via existing mainstream high-voltage direct-current transmission lines.

By cancelling SMR development and focusing on cost-efficient wind, solar and hydro expansion, as well as increased interprovincial transmission, Ontario can reclaim leadership when it comes to green energy development now and for future generations.

US Says It Won’t Let Iran Build Nuclear Bomb

Iran International Newsroom, 14 May 24  https://www.iranintl.com/en/202405131207

The US will not allow Iran to build a nuclear bomb, the State Department said on Monday, one day after a senior Iranian official said Tehran would have no option but to change its nuclear doctrine in the face of Israel’s threats.

“[President] Biden and [US Secretary of State Antony] Blinken will not allow Iran to have a nuclear weapon,” State Department deputy spokesperson Vedant Patel said in a press briefing.

He made the remarks in reaction to Sunday comments by Kamal Kharrazi, a senior advisor to Iran’s ruler Ali Khamenei, that the Islamic Republic would be left with no option but to alter its nuclear doctrine if Israel threatened its nuclear facilities or its existence.

“We continue to assess, though, that Iran is not taking any key activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” Patel told Iran International correspondent Samira Gharaei.

Kharazi said on Sunday that Iran does “not possess nuclear weapons, and there is a fatwa from the leader regarding this matter. But what should you do if the enemy threatens you? You will inevitably have to make changes to your doctrine.”

Asked if these comments were a concern for the United States, Patel said, “We don’t believe that the Supreme Leader has yet made a decision to resume the (nuclear) weaponization program that we judge Iran suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”

“We continue to assess, though, that Iran is not taking any key activities that would be necessary to produce a testable nuclear device,” Patel told Iran International correspondent Samira Gharaei.

Kharazi said on Sunday that Iran does “not possess nuclear weapons, and there is a fatwa from the leader regarding this matter. But what should you do if the enemy threatens you? You will inevitably have to make changes to your doctrine.”

Asked if these comments were a concern for the United States, Patel said, “We don’t believe that the Supreme Leader has yet made a decision to resume the (nuclear) weaponization program that we judge Iran suspended or stopped at the end of 2003.”

When asked about the Biden administration’s strategy toward a “nuclear threshold state” like Iran in the absence of ongoing negotiations, Patel told Iran International, “We have ways of communicating with Iran when it’s in our interest, I’m not going to comment on that.”

In a Monday press conference in Tehran, Iran’s foreign ministry spokesman suggested that Kharrazi’s remarks were not the official position of the Islamic Republic, and that Tehran’s nuclear doctrine has not changed.

“Iran’s official position on Weapons of Mass Destruction has been repeatedly declared by high-ranking Iranian officials, and there has been no change in Iran’s nuclear doctrine,” Nasser Kanaani told reporters in a briefing held on the sidelines of Tehran International Book Fair, citing a fatwa by Ali Khamenei on the prohibition of the production and use of nuclear weapons as the basis for Iran’s position.

However, the fatwa Iranian officials refer to is not an irrevocable principle. Islamic fatwas can change or be reversed at a moment’s notice, experts have pointed out. Also, the alleged Khamenei fatwa is not actually a religious order, it is part of a statement he submitted to an international conference more than a decade ago.

Khamenei may invoke the principle of expediency to overrule his “anti-Nuclear” fatwa. The principle of expediency, as decreed by the founder of the Islamic Republic Ayatollah Khomeini in January 1988, stipulates that the Supreme Leader may even violate the fundamental tenets of the Islamic faith in order to preserve “the Islamic Regime” as the preservation of the Islamic Regime supersedes all else.

Kharrazi on Sunday also raised the issue of Israel’s alleged nuclear arsenal and called for the Jewish state’s nuclear disarmament. “If Israel threatens other counties, they cannot remain silent,” he retorted.

Last week, Kharrazi had stated, “If they dare to strike Iran’s nuclear facilities, our level of deterrence will change. We have experienced deterrence at the conventional level so far. If they intend to strike Iran’s nuclear capabilities, naturally, it could lead to a change in Iran’s nuclear doctrine.”

In recent weeks, Iran has evoked the option of using the nuclear option as a deterrent against the possibility of an Israeli strike against its atomic facilities, amid a new reality in the Middle East after the October 7 Hamas attack.

On Friday, Iranian lawmaker Ahmad Bakhshayesh Ardestani claimed Iran might already possess a nuclear weapon.

He conveyed to the Rouydad 24 website his belief that Iran’s decision to risk attacking Israel in April stemmed from its possession of nuclear weapons.

Ali-Akbar Salehi, who was foreign minister more than a decade ago and is still a key foreign policy voice in the Iranian government, also said last month that Iran has everything it needed to build a nuclear bomb, as tensions rose with Israel amid the Gaza war.

In a televised interview in April, Salehi, was asked if Iran has achieved the capability of developing a nuclear bomb. Avoiding a direct answer he stated, “We have [crossed] all the thresholds of nuclear science and technology.”

Salehi’s statement was preceded by a declaration from a Revolutionary Guard general. In the midst of tensions between the Islamic Republic and Israel, Ahmad Haghtalab, the IRGC commander of the Guard for the Protection and Security of Nuclear Facilities, announced on April 19 that if Israel intends to “use the threat of attacking our nuclear facilities as a tool to pressure Iran, a revision of the nuclear doctrine and policies of the Islamic Republic of Iran and a shift from previously stated considerations is conceivable and likely.”

Since early 2021, when the Biden administration opted for negotiations to restore the Obama-era JCPOA agreement, Iran has vastly expanded its uranium enrichment efforts and is now believed to have amassed enough fissile material for 3-5 nuclear warheads.

Nuclear Weapons at Any Price? Congress Should Say No

Costs are skyrocketing to modernize the U.S. nuclear arsenal. Instead of turning a blind eye, Congress should demand fiscal oversight and make hard decisions balancing costs with deterrence

BY SHARON K. WEINER, 13 May 24,  https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/nuclear-weapons-at-any-price-congress-should-say-no/

Bipartisanship seems rare in Congress these days. But one place to consistently find agreement between Democrats and Republicans is support for modernizing the U.S. nuclear arsenal—currently numbering almost 5,000 nuclear warheads, plus the triad of missiles, submarines and bombers to deliver them. Unfortunately, that consensus also seems to extend to turning a blind eye to the exploding costs, which helps explain why the original $1 trillion modernization program proposed in 2010 today has a price tag approaching $2 trillion. That estimate is likely to escalate even further by 2050—the supposed end date for modernization.

Supporting nuclear modernization at any price is neither necessary nor affordable. Instead, Congress needs to improve, and be held accountable for, fiscal oversight of the nuclear arsenal.

Congress should first start by looking at the intercontinental ballistic missiles (ICBMs). In January of this year, the Air Force announced that the price tag for its new ICBM—the Sentinel—had increased by more than 37 percent. This triggered a review mandated by the Nunn-McCurdy Act—a 1982 law that sought to rein in the spiraling cost of military spending. Sentinel’s increased cost—from $96 billion to $130 billion over the next 10 years—is a “critical breach” of the act and should lead to termination of the program. To avoid this, the secretary of defense must explain the cause of the cost growth and restructure the program, which he is expected to do in coming months.

But the Sentinel “critical breach” underplays modernization’s inflation. In 2015 the U.S. Air Force put the price of a new ICBM program at $62 billion and argued that a new missile would be cheaper than maintaining the current Minuteman III ICBMs. A year later an independent Pentagon evaluation had argued that costs could go as high as $150 billion—yet the official estimate put the price at $85 billion. Congress failed to investigate why the budget request was based on the lower figure. So far, no hearings are planned to investigate the Sentinel cost overrun or to consider the options for restructuring or eliminating the program. For perspective, Congress has held two hearings on UFOs in the last two years.

Not to be outdone, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA)—the part of the Department of Energy in charge of making warheads for the nuclear arsenal—announced on April 18 that building the facilities to make plutonium pits for those warheads would cost $28 to $37 billion—a significant jump over the 2018 estimate of $8.6 to 14.8 billion. But that increase doesn’t capture the full picture of the cost inflation that has plagued pit production.

Until 1989, pits were made at Rocky Flats, a U.S. government facility operated by a contractor that was raided by the FBI and subsequently closed after numerous environmental and safety violations. Since that time, only a handful of pits have been made, all at Los Alamos National Laboratory, which itself has a history of safety problems.

In the late 1990s, NNSA began proposing expanded pit production at Los Alamos. In 2001 it proposed a facility to produce 80 pits per year at an estimated cost of $375 million. By 2011 the price tag for pit production had grown to between $3.7 and $5.8 billion—even at that time seen as unrealistically low because the facility’s design had yet to be completed and the estimate was for construction only, not operations and maintenance. By 2014, that plan was abandoned, and a new one was introduced with an estimated cost of $4.3 billion. Soon that too ran over budget and behind schedule. You might notice a pattern here.

At this point, Congress stepped in. But not to investigate the reasons for the cost overruns. Instead, in the 2015 National Defense Authorization Act, Congress simply ordered NNSA to succeed. It decreed that NNSA had to make 80 pits per year by 2027, later extended to 2030. Frustrated with the seeming inability of Los Alamos to make progress, in 2018 pit production was expanded to another NNSA facility: the Savannah River Site in South Carolina. The plan now is to repurpose for pit production a building originally intended to recycle plutonium from dismantled Cold War nuclear weapons to turn it into fuel for nuclear reactors. But that original disarmament project was terminated in 2018 after costs rose from a 2004 estimate of $1.8 billion to $17.2 billion. Congress never held hearings to assess the reasons for this cost escalation, lessons learned or how to prevent similar problems in the future.

If major projects at NASA, the Veterans Administration or almost any other government agency mimicked these problems, Congress would hold hearings and demand explanations. Nuclear modernization deserves the same hard scrutiny.

Congress should require independent cost estimates of the Sentinel program, pit production at both Los Alamos and Savannah River, and any other major nuclear modernization program where the estimated cost exceeds the original baseline by 50 percent or more—a threshold in the Nunn-McCurdy Act. These estimates should be undertaken by an entity that has no fiscal stake in the outcome, and is politically insulated from those who do.

Unlike the Defense Department’s Cost Assessment and Program Evaluation (CAPE) office, which has a track record of independent analysis, the NNSA has struggled to develop a similar oversight capability. The NNSA remains on GAO’s list of federal agencies that are “vulnerable to waste, fraud, abuse, and mismanagement,” or that need broad reform, since the list was first created in 1990. The NNSA has shown, repeatedly, that it cannot change itself.

It’s reasonable, of course, that cost estimates for projects involving uncertainties such as technologies still under development can result in a range of estimates. Routinely rubber-stamping endorsements of the lower figures, however, should stop. Instead the president’s budget submission should adopt the highest credible estimate, accompanied by an explanation of how the program will strive to come in under budget.

Independent cost estimates typically link budgets to services, such as plutonium processing, or material things such as facilities or weapons. In the case of nuclear modernization, though, that’s not sufficient; the link needs to extend to the impact on the strategy of deterrence. Nuclear weapons threaten the lives of billions of people. Does $14 billion worth of pit production provide better deterrence than $37 billion worth? Is a $118 million Sentinel missile more effective at preventing nuclear war than an existing ICBM that costs half as much? It’s only by linking dollars to deterrence that Congress can assess the tradeoffs and move beyond the notion that nuclear modernization is justified regardless of the final price tag.

MISTAKES THAT CAUSED THE CHERNOBYL DISASTER

BY S. FLANNAGAN/MAY 12, 2024  https://www.grunge.com/1562994/mistakes-that-caused-chernobyl-disaster/

The Chernobyl disaster remains one of the most chilling incidents of the nuclear age. The Chernobyl Power Complex was the name of a nuclear power plant in northern Ukraine just a few miles from the Belarus border near the city of Pripyat. At the time Ukraine was part of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), and Chernobyl was constructed between 1970 and 1977 as part of the USSR’s nuclear expansion program. It had four reactors, each capable of generating colossal amounts of energy to enrich the Soviet bloc. On April 26, 1986, a series of errors caused reactor 4 to experience an unexpected surge of power that started a huge fire, which led to several explosions and the biggest release of radioactive material into the atmosphere in history.

Local areas such as Pripyat were evacuated, but a delayed emergency response saw the area transformed into an uninhabitable no-go zone. It has been reported that 31 people lost their lives in the immediate aftermath of the meltdown, including six firefighters who received double the fatal amount of radiation as they attempted to extinguish the blaze. But a delayed response saw the amount of material released into the environment and spread across Ukraine, Belarus, Russia, and parts of Central Europe. Hundreds of thousands of people were involved in the clean-up, many of whom went on to develop health problems such as cancer as a consequence of the exposure. Here are some of the mistakes that led to the meltdown, and to the local area being largely uninhabited even today.

A FLAWED DESIGN

The World Nuclear Association notes that one of the key issues that led to the meltdown of Reactor 4 which resulted in the Chernobyl disaster of 1986 was the flawed design of the reactor itself. Each of Chernobyl’s four reactors was of a new Soviet design known as “reaktor bolshoy moshchnosty kanalny,” or RBMK. RBMK reactors were one of two reactor designs to emerge from the USSR in the 1970s. They employ a water-cooling system and graphite control rods that regulate fission, which creates nuclear energy.

On the night of the meltdown, operators were attempting to test whether residual steam pressure would be able to keep the reactor going in the event of a power cut long enough for the backup diesel generators to take over. However, in the course of the experiment, a huge and unexpected power surge hit the reactor, which was later found to have been caused by the RBMK’s enormous “void coefficient,” ultimately meaning that excess steam in the water cooling system would not be able to absorb neutrons in the system, resulting in the surge. After an investigation into these flaws, crews were tasked with upgrading other reactors in the Chernobyl Power Complex to make them safer, though over the years these other reactors have also eventually been decommissioned.

SAFETY ISSUES COVERED UP

But the flaws in the design of the RBMK-1000 reactor at Chernobyl that rendered it unsafe weren’t exactly a surprise to experts in the wake of the meltdown. In fact, the site had suffered several notable accidents and emergencies years before the shocking events of April 1986. But as we know now, those in charge of the Soviet nuclear program sought to cover up evidence that their reactors were unsafe, meaning that they continued to be operated despite such safety issues leading to the worst nuclear accident in history.

According to a 2021 report published by Reuters, it was revealed that the side had a radiation leak as early as 1982 and that numerous accidents occurred at the plant in 1984. The Soviet government was reportedly aware of the truth that Chernobyl was fundamentally unsafe as a power plant as early as 1983 but kept the matter a secret from the public.

The same instinct among the Soviet powers that be to cover their tracks led to their delayed order to evacuate the city of Pripyat until about Chernobyl 36 hours after the meltdown began, ultimately exposing thousands of locals to dangerous levels of radiation.

The nuclear operators on-site at the Chernobyl Power Complex were later identified as lacking in adequate training required to keep such a complicated and cutting-edge power station running effectively and safely. In the years following the devastating nuclear meltdown, the operators themselves were afforded a great deal of blame for the disaster in which many of them lost their lives.

Indeed, the experiment that the Chernobyl nuclear operators were performing on the night of the meltdown was flawed as a result of human error, which largely came down to the team’s lack of understanding of the reactor’s internal systems. None of them expected the surge of power that the experiment unleashed. The experiment itself was later reported to have been unauthorized, though plant director Viktor Bryukhanov, chief engineer Nikolai Fomin, and his deputy, Anatoly Dyatlov later received 10-year prison sentences for the disaster. Official Soviet government reports claimed that the operators, three more of whom were given prison sentences, had been negligent.

The lack of training that the operators were afforded resulted from what is now known to have been an almost complete lack of safety culture at the Chernobyl Power Complex, a characteristic of Soviet industry more generally at the time. No interest in maximum design accidents, hypothetical disasters that could then be mitigated against in design features, were of little interest to commissioners or designers of the RBMK-1000 reactor, who were also looking to reduce costs.

The safety of Chernobyl was further impacted by opacity within the Soviet hierarchy, which prevented subordinates from reporting issues and misgivings to their superiors, leading to a culture of silence in which errors were not course-corrected. Similarly, mistakes, including those around safety, were covered up, rather than treated as lessons to be learned from. “The attitude came from the race for the atomic bomb, “Chernobyl: History of a Tragedy writer Sehii Plokhy writer told The Guardian in 2018. “The sacrifice of health and life was almost expected. That culture was transferred to the nuclear power establishment.”

Further safety features were overlooked as director Viktor Bryukhanov, who was also in charge of the setting up of the reactors as well as providing accommodation for the operators, raced to keep the project on track. The science journal Nature reports that under his direction electric cables were installed without the required fire-resistant cladding, just one instance of the corners that were cut in the creation of the plant despite the potential calamity that might occur were something to go wrong with any of its reactors.

A lax attitude to safety continued even after the meltdown and the delayed evacuation of local people from the area around the site as it grew more and more radiated and became a danger to human life. In the aftermath, an international effort saw a concrete “sarcophagus” erected around the reactor intended to stop the spread of further radiation. However, the structure was only intended to be temporary and still requires a permanent solution to this day, with experts claiming that it and other stores of radioactive material from the world’s worst nuclear disaster constitute an ongoing risk to public safety if not adequately maintained.

Afghanistan flash floods kill more than 300 as torrents of water and mud crash through villages

More than 300 people were killed in flash floods that ripped through
multiple provinces in Afghanistan, the UN’s World Food Programme said, as
authorities declared a state of emergency and rushed to rescue the injured.
Many people remained missing after heavy rains on Friday sent roaring
rivers of water and mud crashing through villages and across agricultural
land in several provinces, causing what one aid group described as a
“major humanitarian emergency”.

 Guardian 12th May 2024

https://www.theguardian.com/world/article/2024/may/12/afghanistan-flash-floods-kill-more-than-300-as-torrents-of-water-and-mud-crash-through-villages