Beyond Nuclear International
Why divestment works
We can all refuse to do business with nuclear weapons companies
By Lydia Wood
One of the key strategies behind the campaign to get the US to sign on to the Nuclear Ban Treaty is divestment. Divestment, simply put, means the opposite of investment, and occurs when individuals, institutions, businesses, and governments get rid of all their financial ties to particular corporations, institutions, or entities that are involved in unethical or morally reprehensible activities.
Divestment has quickly become a key strategy for activists and social movements working to put pressure on powerful corporations and reluctant governments to address various social or environmental justice issues. As citizens living in a global capitalist system where money equates to power, determining with whom and how we spend money is an important tool for creating change.
In the 1980s, widespread divestment campaigns were credited with helping end apartheid in South Africa, by raising awareness and eventually pressuring the US and other states to impose sanctions on South Africa. Major cities, universities, and corporations like IBM and General Motors divested from South Africa – in the process educating people on the brutality of apartheid and highlighting the US’s relative apathy on the issue.
Students at Tufts University march for divestment from fossil fuels during actions organized by the Power Shift network. Photo: James Ennis
While the economic impacts of divestment campaigns are often minimal– for instance, in South Africa divestiture did not significantly impact the country’s economy – they are nonetheless important tools in the social movement arsenal that help educate and stigmatize particular activities of corporations, institutions, and governments that would otherwise go unnoticed.
Cutting Japan’s nuclear artery
It’s up to Wales. The rest of us can help
Breaking update, May 3, 2018. FoE Japan and PAWB today issued a FoEJapan-PAWB press release denouncing Hitachi’s Chairman, Hirokai Nakanishi’s visit today with British Prime Minister Theresa May. As we posited in the article below, it is probable that Hitachi will ask not only that the UK government take a direct stake in the Wylfa Newydd nuclear power project in Anglesey, Wales but that Hitachi will indeed seek assurance for a power purchase agreement similar to the ratepayer fleecing granted EdF for the Hinkley C nuclear project in Somerset.
By Linda Pentz Gunter
New nuclear build in the US is pretty much dead. If the two AP1000 reactors under construction by the bankrupt Westinghouse in Georgia are ever completed it will be a miracle — and not of the good kind.
Even in Japan, despite the nuclear promoting ardor of its misguided prime minister, Shinzo Abe, nuclear power is struggling to recover. Nuclear power plants will never be back in any kind of meaningful numbers in a post-Fukushima Japan. But of course one is too many.
Naoto Kan visited with a Welsh farming family who oppose Wylfa B. Kan spoke out against nuclear power during a 2015 visit. Photo: Julian Wynne
The myth of nuclear deterrence
Why the arguments that promote it just don’t work
By Linda Pentz Gunter
In trying to argue the myth of deterrence, it is easy to feel as if one has landed in the middle of this brilliantly inspired January 9, 1986 segment of the British television comedy, Yes, Prime Minister. In it, Sir Humphrey tries to persuade the British Prime Minister that purchasing Trident missiles will provide Britain with a nuclear deterrent. But the argument quickly unravels.
But many a truth spoken in jest, as they say. The uncertainty over what the enemy probably does or does not believe is at the very heart of why deterrence remains deeply flawed and arguably a myth.
Nevertheless, deterrence is the cornerstone of nuclear weapons policy, perpetuating their possession by nine nations. If we are serious about moving the nuclear ban agenda forward, we cannot shy away from the deterrence argument.
The little piggies that won’t go to market
Wild boars remain too radioactive to eat, 32 years after Chernobyl
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Wild board in Europe, parts of the former Soviet Union and Japan are too radioactive to be safe for human consumption. That sounds like good news for the boars. But only partly so.
The boars are radioactively contaminated due to fallout from the April 26, 1986 Chernobyl, Ukraine nuclear power plant explosion. They were vulnerable because they love mushrooms and truffles. These fungi absorbed the cesium-137 fallout released by the Chernobyl nuclear explosion.
Because they lack stems and roots, mushrooms and other fungi use absorption to obtain nutrition from the atmosphere through their surface cells. As a result, they are prone to absorbing radioactive substances such as cesium-137 and other radionuclides.
When the boars eat the mushrooms and truffles, that radioactive contamination moves up the food chain. The mushrooms are also too radioactive for human consumption.
Wild boar in Germany. Photo: Frank Vincentz
Between 2014 and 2016, nearly half of the 614 wild boar inspected in the Czech Republic were too radioactive to eat. In Germany, more than one in three boars killed by hunters were also radioactive.
The woman who paints insects
Swiss artist, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, finds and draws bugs deformed by Chernobyl and other nuclear accidents and exposures
By Claus-Peter Lieckfeld
We speak of “dumb creatures” because animal utterances are largely incomprehensible to the human ear. But animals can show us things. And if you know how to look, they might even give you warning signals. Bugs, for example, give warnings where human perception fails. But to understand those warnings, you have to learn how to read their signals.
You can find the insect drawings of the Swiss artist and scientific illustrator, Cornelia Hesse-Honegger, in museums and galleries all over the world. Most of them reflect (and praise) the breathtaking beauty of the insect realm. But their beauty can be deceptive.
In 1987, one year after the Chernobyl nuclear disaster, Hesse-Honegger came across deformed leaf bugs in areas of Sweden that had been hit hard by fallout from Ukraine. She sensed that something was seriously wrong, even though what she saw did not come as a total surprise. Hesse-Honegger had already been working for many years as a scientific illustrator for the Natural History Museum at the University of Zurich. As early as 1967 she had drawn mutations of drosophila fruit flies and houseflies that had been exposed to radiation in the lab.
In the June 19, 2014 video below by Michael Segal for Nautilus, Hesse-Honegger explains her background and work.
Mother Earth and the “too late” time
We are getting perilously close, warn First Nations
By Linda Pentz Gunter
“I’m choked up. My heart is pounding right now,” said Chief April Adams-Phillips of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne through tears. “We give back thanks to our Mother Earth every day,” she said. But because of our disrespect and our destructive ways, she warned, Mother Earth is “going to get rid of us soon. She’s going to shake us.”
We are heading deeper into the “too late time” when it comes to climate change. “And that too late time is not far away,” said Chief Clinton Phillips of the Mohawk Nation. “Science is saying that. Animals are saying that. Animals who are living where they should not be living are saying that.”
Chief April Adams-Phillips of the Mohawk Nation of Akwesasne
Are we listening yet? “People are not listening,” Chief Clinton Phillips says. Global warming is upon us and yet we persist with nuclear power whose wastes poison the water, air, land, people and animals. The original guardians of those precious elements of our existence — indigenous peoples — are trying once again to be heard.
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