Beyond Nuclear International
Remembering Chornobyl
40 years on we are still asking the wrong questions and getting a lot of wrong answers, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Probably the most heinous crime, other than the avoidable accident itself and its immediate coverup, is the way that the Chornobyl (Ukrainian equivalent spelling) nuclear power disaster in Ukraine, 40 years old this week, has been used to downplay and normalize the long-lasting health impacts caused by that April 26, 1986 explosion.
Still today, the myth is repeated that “no one died” — meaning no one in the public. Instead, we are told over and over that it was only a handful of liquidators, sent in to deal with the immediate crisis, who were killed by the massive release of radiation resulting from the reactor explosion.
And still today, in part because of that myth, now so firmly cemented in the public and media narratives around the Chornobyl disaster, the true health effects of even just routine reactor operation, or the exposures suffered by communities living around active or abandoned uranium mines, or by those working in uranium enrichment or fuel fabrication facilities, are discounted and dismissed.
Worse still, we are now facing a concerted effort by the Trump administration to emasculate already weak radiation protection standards, once again ignoring females who are most vulnerable to harm, and especially pregnant women, babies and children.
Read MoreBombing Bushehr could be another Chornobyl
Iran’s civil nuclear program provided a smokescreen for the real US/Israeli agenda for war, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
Watching Iran’s civilian infrastructure and countless of its civilians being mercilessly attacked by the US and Israel, followed by US President Donald Trump’s chilling threat that “a whole civilization will die tonight”, left no doubt that the motives behind this needless war had nothing whatever to do with Iran’s nuclear program.
Iran’s capacity to develop nuclear weapons from its civil program, which Trump had already bragged was “obliterated” by the US/Israel bombing raids on all of Iran’s key nuclear facilities last June , was provided as justification for the current war by the White House.
But it’s a patently false premise, as was most unequivocally confirmed by Jeffrey Sterling, a former CIA officer on the Iran desk. At a riveting legal symposium last week, organized by Ralph Nader and his team and looking at all the ways President Trump could, should and indeed must be impeached, Sterling vowed that “it’s been decades of the US interfering with Iran” and that the Iran task force at the CIA was set up “as an ongoing operation not for peace in Iran but regime change in Iran.”
The search for a justification for war has been ongoing, according to Sterling, “for 47 years since the 1979, the Iran revolution,” and, above all, it has been a “drive for revenge,” Sterling said, after the US was kicked out of Iran and its puppet, the Shah, deposed.
Sterling was the CIA case officer on Operation Merlin during the Clinton Administration, a plot designed to frame Iran by providing it with a false nuclear weapon component. Sterling found himself quickly wondering “is this actually something designed to stop Iran from gaining nuclear weapons or is it something designed to continue the rhetoric, to justify the rhetoric, to essentially plant evidence?”(Sterling is now well known as the CIA whistleblower who revealed the scheme to the New York Times.)
There was consensus throughout last week’s symposium that Iran’s nuclear ambitions did not constitute the real reason for the current war. If not regime change, which seems likely, it was certainly a grab for control of resources, as is so often the case. But, even if the June bombing raids on Iran’s nuclear facilities did indeed do lasting damage, another nuclear threat remains in the form of Iran’s civil nuclear power plant at Bushehr.
There is a ceasefire in place — tenuous at best and almost certainly designed to squeeze concessions from Iran — that has at least for now spared any harm from befalling Bushehr. However, missiles have already landed perilously close to the plant four times, according to Iranian authorities, and the danger is by no means over. If destroyed in an attack — or even should the war cause an extended loss of external power — Bushehr could become the next Chornobyl, the source of a region-wide radiological catastrophe of monumental proportions.
The 1,000 megawatt Russian built VVER reactor at Bushehr sits on the Iranian coast. It is the same design as the reactors in Ukraine where alarm has already been raised by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) and other international authorities, should any of those reactors be struck or seriously damaged by Russian missiles as the war in Ukraine continues to drag on.
But there has been significantly less international alarm about the similar risks at Bushehr, a disturbing trend as the US president dispenses with all the norms and protocols of war. One can only conclude that this media silence, at least in the western English language press, is based on who is doing the attacking.
Hitting the Bushehr civil nuclear power plant would constitute a war crime — in keeping with the murder of Iranian schoolgirls and all other attacks on civilian targets — because the Geneva Convention specifically defines a war crime to include hitting facilities that, if damaged or destroyed, would result in extensive loss of civilian life. A commercial nuclear power plant certainly falls into this category. Indeed, Russia has already started evacuating some of its personnel from the facility.
The particular dangers at Bushehr stem from the highly radioactive uranium fuel inside the reactor and stored in cooling pools and on-site casks. Any extended loss of power caused by an attack or a direct hit could see the fuel overheat and ignite, potentially leading to explosions. The resulting radiological releases would result in long-lasting radioactive fallout affecting vast areas in Iran, neighboring countries and beyond, contaminating agricultural land as well as sea water, an essential drinking water source for a region that relies on desalination.
Nuclear meltdowns deposit radioactive contamination where the wind blows, coming down during rainfall as fallout. The 1986 Chernobyl nuclear power disaster resulted in a 1,000 square mile exclusion zone, still too radiologically contaminated for human habitation even today.
Japan experienced a triple meltdown in March 2011, when three of the four Fuskushima Daiichi reactors exploded. The long gestation period for some diseases caused by persistent exposure to radiation, means that the true health outcomes from that disaster, whether fatalities or debilitating diseases, will not be known for many years.
Meanwhile, the IAEA’s director general, Rafael Grossi, has called for restraint in Iran, citing the “Seven Indispensable Pillars” he created to try to discourage attacks on nuclear power plants. But the IAEA’s alarm is disingenuous at best. In addition to being a UN nuclear watchdog, the IAEA promotes the use and expansion of nuclear power around the world. This means the agency must shoulder at least some of the responsibility for the extreme danger presented by a potential attack on Bushehr.
Similarly, Grossi’s cries of alarm about the dangers faced by Ukraine’s nuclear power plants embroiled in a war, ring hollow when you consider the IAEA’s happy endorsement of new reactors planned for that country.
Further, Grossi’s “seven pillars” make an assumption we can now recognize as entirely unreliable — that the world leaders expected to abide by these protocols are consistently sane and rational. This is clearly undermined by the genocidal calls made by Trump and Israeli leader Benjamin Netanyahu’s clear imperialist and expansionist agenda in the region (and existing genocidal actions in Gaza and the West Bank). This leaves Grossi clinging to his pillars like a barrelman aloft the mast of a storm-tossed ship about to hit the rocks, his cries of alarm drowned out by the mayhem around him.
Finally, what exposes the lie about an imminent Iranian bomb most definitively is that there was a perfectly good protocol in place to avoid such an outcome in the first place. This was the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action that ensured Iran stayed within the boundaries of a civil nuclear program by undergoing highly stringent inspection and verification programs to ensure it did. Even at the time of the June 2025 bombings of Iran’s nuclear sites, US intelligence and the IAEA were both insisting that Iran was not on the path to a nuclear weapon.
But all of this evidence can never silence a compulsive liar. “Do not be surprised if he comes back to trying to find justification or presenting justification that Iran was imminently developing nuclear weapons,” Sterling said of Trump during the Nader symposium. “Don’t trust any of it. Do not trust any of it.”
Linda Pentz Gunter is the Executive Director of Beyond Nuclear and writes for and edits Beyond Nuclear International. She is the author of the book, No To Nuclear. Why Nuclear Power Destroys Lives, Derails Climate Progress And Provokes War, published by Pluto Press. Any opinions are her own.
Headline photo: Secretary of War Pete Hegseth and Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff Gen. Dan Caine hold a press conference at the Pentagon about Epic Fury, March 19, 2026. (Photo: D. Applebaum/Wikimedia Commons.)
Nuclear costs of the Iran War
Trump’s recent threats to end civilization in Iran gave many a nuclear weapons expert the jitters, writes Sharon Squassoni
President Donald J. Trump’s recent threats to end civilization in Iran gave many a nuclear weapons expert the jitters. For them, existential threats mean only one thing: use of nuclear weapons. Thankfully, Trump’s April 7, 2026 threats were empty and possibly just a ruse to create a dramatic background for the temporary ceasefire in Iran.
To be clear, the use of nuclear weapons in combat would serve no earthly strategic or tactical purpose, but threats to use them can be potent: even a latent capability in the hands of Iran was regarded as too threatening for the United States to tolerate any longer, which reportedly drove the U.S. and Israeli military actions.
It’s hard to tell who’s winning or losing in this conflict, but already it’s clear that disruption of energy sources (Iran’s blocking the Straits of Hormuz and the U.S. and Israel striking Iran’s oil infrastructure) focuses attention like no other infrastructure attack. A sudden cutoff that shrinks supplies and distorts prices echoes in economies across the globe.
This is one reason the world was hesitant to impose sanctions on Iran’s oil some twenty years ago when Iran’s clandestine nuclear program was first unveiled. Today, the Iran war has underscored just how dependent the world continues to be on foreign sources of oil.
Would nuclear energy be any different?
Read MorePalomares remembered
Reflections of an American, sixty years later
Michael Ketterer
Before dawn on January 17, 1966, the six-year-old author was asleep in the Buffalo, New York suburb of North Tonawanda. Simultaneously, two US planes collided over the Iberian Peninsula during a mid-air refueling operation between a B-52 bomber and a KC-135 tanker. The B-52 was completing one of the US Air Force’s Strategic Air Command’s daily armed surveillance routes. In a matter of seconds, three thermonuclear bombs fell to the land, and a fourth fell into water, near Palomares, a village located about two kilometers west of the Mediterranean, in Almeria, Andalucía, Spain.
All of that happened, before I got vertical that day.
Two bombs were destroyed upon impact, although neither produced a nuclear explosion. Instead, several kg of plutonium (Pu) dusted the tomato fields and residences of Palomares on a windy day. A local resident found another bomb, largely intact with its opened parachute. However, the last bomb was somewhere deep in the Mediterranean, instantly redirecting the Air Force’s top priority into using all resources available on the critical mission: find the lost bomb before the Soviets can do so. The successful recovery became the narrative of Palomares, amplified by the two nations and in the world press. Today, photos of the recovered bomb onboard the USS Petrel are some of the most common internet images of Palomares.
I was just a boy, innocent and ignorant of these stunning events, lying horizontal. Mom got me up; later, I went to kindergarten like every Monday. Perhaps my parents soon heard something on the black and white TV or read something in the Buffalo Evening News. I don’t recall, though I could read in 1966, and definitely I watched enough TV. The ships containing a minor fraction of the Pu left Spain, along with any press attention, before I finished kindergarten. During 1975-1976, I was a neighborhood newspaper carrier for the Buffalo Evening News; reading nearly every edition, I’m pretty certain I never saw mention of Palomares. Buffalo’s weather records show I delivered the tenth anniversary 1976 edition in single-digit Fahrenheit temperatures, but I truly have no recollection of any Palomares stories in that, or any day’s Buffalo-area papers.
The years passed; the Pu stayed, and I didn’t learn anything about Palomares. I completed kindergarten; I finished primary school where I learned Spanish; in high school I focused on chemistry as a future vocation. I passed through my bachelor’s, grad school, and 15 work years as a chemist in industry, US EPA, and at three different universities. I wasn’t any different – I was ignorant and uninformed in those first four decades of my life.
Read MoreNo Three Mile Island in Suffolk!
A new nuclear review will ignore the obvious perils of new reactors on a UK beach, warns Together Against Sizewell C
The following is a statement from Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) in response to the “Fingleton Nuclear Review” adopted by the UK government, entirely influenced by the nuclear power industry and its lobbyists in a frantic effort to copycat the US model of accelerating approval of dangerous, expensive and entirely unnecessary nuclear power projects.
Together Against Sizewell C (TASC) is appalled that the UK government plans to adopt all 47 recommendations of the ‘Fingleton Nuclear Review’. This review is based on a false premise that nuclear is ‘clean energy’ [see Note 1] and ‘needed to power Britain’s future’[see Note 2]. Neither of these assertions stand up to public scrutiny, the review being driven by the nuclear industry, big business and lobbyists for commercial and ideological reasons. Claims that nuclear is ‘homegrown power’ conveniently overlook the fact that the UK do not have any indigenous supplies of uranium needed to fuel the reactors, that market currently being dominated by Russia.
Those trying to convey a false impression of nuclear as clean are merely gaslighting the British public. While nuclear may be able to claim relatively low carbon production during the operational period, the long deployment times for new gigawatt nuclear reactors such as Hinkley and Sizewell C means a lot of additional carbon is produced from burning more fossil fuels while we must wait for new nuclear to become operational when compared with far cheaper, quicker to deploy renewables and energy storage.
The review makes unsubstantiated claims that nature will benefit from adopting these recommendations but in TASC’s view this is an irresponsible assumption for this government to accept, especially as environmental experts were excluded from the review team. The UK is already one of the most nature depleted nations on the planet – we cannot afford to degrade our environmental protections any further.
In TASC’s opinion, Sizewell C demonstrates that regulations need to be strengthened, not weakened – Sizewell C is sited in a National Landscape, surrounded by designated wildlife sites, in the UK’s most drought-prone region and on one of Europe’s fastest eroding coastlines. Despite this, it received DCO approval from the Secretary of State against the recommendation of the 5 independent planning experts.
£40 billion Sizewell C is proceeding at pace, even though the project has still not secured a guaranteed sustainable supply of potable water essential for its 60 years of operation. Nor has it demonstrated that the site can be kept safe for its full lifetime in a credible maximum sea level rise scenario – after DCO approval TASC discovered that Sizewell C have committed to install two huge additional sea defences in an extreme climate change scenario, the need for which EDF knew about since 2015 yet chose not to include them in their DCO application, meaning the additional sea defences have had no public scrutiny or impact assessment on the receiving environment.
TASC fear for the safety of our descendants and the precious, rapidly eroding Suffolk coastline because future generations have been left to rely on the developer’s unassessed sea defences to protect Sizewell C and its 3,900 tonnes of spent nuclear fuel from flooding in an extreme sea level rise scenario over the next 150 years or longer if a geological disposal facility is not available [see Note 3]. Hardly responsible ancestry from this government.
Notes:-
1. The myth that nuclear is ‘clean energy’ In TASC’s view, the reasons why nuclear power can’t be legitimately labelled as ‘clean’ include:-
a) The pollution generated from the mining, milling, fabrication and enrichment to produce the nuclear fuel which mainly affects indigenous peoples in producer countries,
b) The pollutants discharged to air and water from an operational nuclear power station, including the thousands of tonnes of dead fish, heavy metals, chlorine and the cocktail of other pollutants that will be discharged to the sea annually from the plant’s cooling water system, and
c) The legacy of highly radioactive spent fuel and other radioactive waste from nuclear power plants currently has no universally agreed management programme, nor any waste repository and which will be an environmental, as well as financial, burden for future generations for thousands of years – see N Scarr Report, ‘Plutonium—the complex and ‘forever’ radiotoxic element of nuclear waste. How exactly should we manage its containment?’
2. Various reports have demonstrated that the UK can fulfil its low carbon energy requirements without new nuclear, and at lower cost than new nuclear e.g. the January 2023 report by LUT University, Finland, ‘100% Renewable Energy for the United Kingdom’ and the 2022 UCL report ‘The role of new nuclear power in the UK’s net-zero emissions energy system’. Regarding national security, events in Ukraine have demonstrated that nuclear plants and their associated infrastructure are both a target and a weapon (see iNews article, ‘Attacks on nuclear plants are being normalised – and the consequences could be disastrous’ and the recent direct drone attacks on Zaporizhzhya NPP which have led to fires at the plant) so are a threat to national scrutiny. Scattering SMRs throughout the country will only increase the risk of a malicious attack (or accident).
3. TASC press release 12.01.26, ‘Escalating Erosion on East Suffolk Coast should be a huge worry for Sizewell C’
Headline photo by Neil Chadwick/Geograph Britain and Ireland/Wikimedia Commons.
The opinions expressed in articles by outside contributors and published on the Beyond Nuclear International website, are their own, and do not necessarily reflect the views or positions of Beyond Nuclear. However, we try to offer a broad variety of viewpoints and perspectives as part of our mission “to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future”.
A ‘Great British Nuke-off’ in Wales?
Quintessentially British Rolls-Royce wants to put its new small reactors on Anglesey, but it turns out they’re not small or even particularly British, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
There is something about Rolls-Royce that is quintessentially British. Not necessarily in a good way. The name tends to bring to mind tweedy toffs or rock stars with more money than sense, driving shiny and extravagantly baubled motor cars.
It’s the cars that made the Rolls-Royce name synonymous with luxury and class, specifically upper-class. It’s even entered the lexicon. Something can be called “the Rolls-Royce of….”; fill in the blank.
Of course, Rolls-Royce is now much bigger than just a car manufacturer. Frequent fliers will have spotted the company logo on many a jet engine.
Less well known is that Rolls-Royce makes the reactors for nuclear submarines, specifically the British Trident nuclear fleet. The company is set to produce a new propulsion reactor, PWR3, for the Dreadnought-class ballistic deterrent submarine, expected to be operational in the early 2030s, and whose missiles are capable of destroying all life on Earth multiple times over.
More recently, Rolls-Royce has entered the commercial nuclear reactor market, proposing its own small modular reactor (SMR) design — which, at 470 megawatts, isn’t actually very small at all. Many of Britain’s old Magnox reactors, now all permanently closed, were smaller than that. Two of the largest, at Wylfa in Anglesey, were each 490 megawatts.
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