Beyond Nuclear International
Where’s our “Dr. Strangelove?”
In the Trump era, America desperately needs a great movie about nuclear apocalypse
By Jon Schwarz, The Intercept, originally published July 1, 2018
Published by Beyond Nuclear International with permission from The Intercept
The most peculiar thing about America’s 2018 apocalyptic imagination is the dog that isn’t barking. We have “Westworld” and “Terminator” and “Ex Machina” and a dozen more movies about artificial intelligence that decides to kill us. We have “The Day After Tomorrow” and “An Inconvenient Truth” and “Mother!” and maybe “Interstellar” and “Game of Thrones” about global warming. But we are notably bereft of movies, television shows, and novels about nuclear war.
You might believe this is because the danger of a nuclear Armageddon vanished with the Cold War. Or that we aren’t given to imagining it because it’s unimaginable. But neither of those things is true. In fact, we’ve stopped imagining the most terrifying possible future for ourselves at exactly the moment we most urgently need to do so, if we’re going to have any chance of avoiding it.
The good news – or at least the not incredibly horrible news – is that Donald Trump may be doing us the unexpected favor of kickstarting our nuclear imagination and sending us down a path where we can save ourselves.
Daniel Ellsberg, author of The Doomsday Machine, has warned we are unlikely to survive another 100 years if we don’t completely eliminate nuclear weapons. (Photo: WikiCommons)
What are nuclear power plants doing to address climate threats?
As shorelines creep inland and storms worsen, nuclear reactors around the world face new challenges
By John Vidal for Ensia
The outer defensive wall of what is expected to be the world’s most expensive nuclear power station is taking shape on the shoreline of the choppy gray waters of the Bristol Channel in western England.
By the time the US$25 billion Hinkley Point C nuclear station is finished, possibly in 2028, the concrete seawall will be 12.5 meters (41 feet) high, 900 meters (3,000 feet) long and durable enough, the UK regulator and French engineers say, to withstand the strongest storm surge, the greatest tsunami and the highest sea-level rise.
But will it? Independent nuclear consultant Pete Roche, a former adviser to the UK government and Greenpeace, points out that the tidal range along this stretch of coast is one of the highest in the world, and that erosion is heavy. Indeed, observers reported serious flooding on the site in 1981 when an earlier nuclear power station had to be shut down for a week following a spring tide and a storm surge. However well built, says Roche, the new seawall does not adequately take into account sea-level rise due to climate change.
San Onofre nuclear generating station on the California coast. The plant is closed but the radioactive waste remains on site. (Photo: NRC)
Sticking with nuclear power will make climate change worse
New A-Z anti-nuclear handbook chapter lays out all the arguments against nuclear power as a climate change “solution”
Nuclear power as a climate change “solution” is probably the most frequently made pitch by the pro-nuclear lobby. And now we hear that the nuclear industry is about to make another major push on both sides of the Atlantic — on Capitol Hill and in the British Parliament at Westminster — to convince lawmakers not to abandon nuclear power and that it is essential to curb climate change.
Politicians listen to this facile rhetoric and believe it. And yet the nuclear-for-climate-change argument should never really get out of the starting gate for one simple reason: Time. We are out of it.
Climate change has arrived and it is an existential crisis. A nuclear power plant can take a decade (or more) from start to finish. We cannot wait a decade for nuclear power plants to arrive and we would need scores or more of them to come on line every year to make even a dent in global carbon emissions. Countries with new build such as the US, France, Finland, China, are struggling to complete even one, and when they do, they can years to arrive.
The time argument is such an obvious showstopper when it comes to arguing the case for nuclear power that proponents simply avoid it altogether. James Hansen, the “guru” of the pro-nuclear movement, uses his NASA credentials and unarguable knowledge about the perils of climate change, to push for nuclear while bridging quickly to phantoms like “new” reactor designs when confronted with the question of time. So on the one hand, Hansen sounds the alarm about the terrible and rapid countdown we are on to address climate change. On the other, he claims nuclear energy is the answer. Baffling.
Japan tries to dilute tritium danger
TEPCO still wants to dump radioactive water into the ocean. Help stop it!
From various correspondents
More than one million tonnes of radioactively contaminated water has already accumulated at the destroyed Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant site, stored in steel tanks and increasing in volume daily — by some accounts one new tank is added every four days. Space to store it is rapidly running out. So far, the only “plan” Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO) has come up with to deal with the problem is to dump the water into the Pacific Ocean.
The water is accumulating in part because about 150 tonnes of groundwater seeps daily through cracks in the stricken reactors’ foundations, thereby becoming contaminated with radioactive isotopes. In addition, water flows down the surrounding hillsides onto the site, picks up radiation, and must be captured and stored.
TEPCO has so far been pumping the contaminated water through a filtering system that can only remove cesium and strontium. But the process creates a highly toxic sludge as a byproduct, which also has to be stored in sealed canisters on site.
Tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen, cannot of course be removed from water. Hence the plan to dump the radioactive (tritiated) water into the ocean. This move has long been strongly opposed by people from many spectra in Japan. A “Resolution Against the Ocean Dumping of Radioactive Tritium-contaminated Waste Water From the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant,” has been initiated by physics Professor Emeritus at Kyoto University, Kosaku Yamada, under the auspices of the Association for Citizens and Scientists Concerned about Internal Radiation Exposures (ACSIR). It has already garnered signatures from 280 individuals and 35 organizations. The Resolution is reproduced further below.
The goal of the resolution is to raise public awareness about the prolonged serious health effects of the Fukushima nuclear disaster that the Japanese government is taking every step to conceal.
The resolution has already been submitted to the Japanese government, TEPCO, the Nuclear Regulatory Authority and the governor of Fukushima Prefecture. On August 30 and 31, the government held public hearings on this issue at three sites — Tomioka and Koriyama (both Fukushima Prefecture) and Tokyo.
There, several members of the ACSIR, including Professor Yamada, presented their views against the dumping of tritiated water. But, reports Professor Yamada, despite the fact that “only one speaker endorsed the government plan, and only on the condition of rigorous measurement of radioactivity, and all the 45 other speakers opposed the dumping plan, the Japanese government and mainstream mass-media continue to blatantly promote their PR campaign that radiological risks of tritium are ‘ignorable'”.
Iranians want peace. Trump isn’t helping
Tehran Peace Museum is a vibrant hub of peacemaking and education
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The fact that there is a Tehran Peace Museum seems like an important thing to know right now. Despite the bellicose, all capital letters Twitter rhetoric of the man inflicted on us to run the United States, there are many ordinary people in Iran who want peace.
That peace has been put in greater jeopardy, not only by a man who refuses to look in the mirror (or the history books) when accusing Iran of “DEMENTED WORDS OF VIOLENCE & DEATH.” It has been undermined by the White House decision to withdraw the US from the Iran nuclear deal — officially known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA). The JCPOA, forged under the Obama administration, created the greatest likelihood to date that Iran would not develop nuclear weapons.
On the face of it, given the Trump administration’s hostile stance toward Iran, you would think this White House would be all for the JCPOA. But for Trump’s friends in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates — for whom he does a devoted puppet dance second only to the one he performs for Russia — the JCPOA was not enough. Saudi Arabia and the UAE, and therefore the Trump regime, would like to see Iran collapse, even destroyed. We should probably mention Israel in the same breath here as well, although why Israel would want to see a nuclear armed Iran is as illogical as Trump’s decision to effectively encourage it.
The Tehran Peace Museum, whose slogan is “Peace is more than the absence of war”. (Photo: WikiCommons.)
CODEPINK’s Medea Benjamin takes a look inside Iran
Anti-war activist wants peace talks with Iran, not crushing sanctions
By Sophia Akram, The Iranian
Medea Benjamin’s entry into the public sphere came with disruptive vigor in May 2013, when she interrupted an address by former US President Barack Obama to object to his then policy on the use of armed drones.
Obama responded to Benjamin at the time saying, “The voice of that woman is worth paying attention to… these are tough issues, and the suggestion that we can gloss over them is wrong.”
The incident perhaps gave Benjamin a bigger audience for her activism via the organization CODEPINK, through which she had been involved for years. And through which she’s tackled a number of global issues across the world.
Having looked at the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia in a book published in 2016, she’s now taking on Iran.
CODEPINK co-founder, Medea Benjamin, has a new book out about Iran and is a dedicated campaigner for peace and justice.
Beyond Nuclear International 