Beyond Nuclear International
Awash in AI propaganda
The hype about massive data centers delivered by nuclear companies eager to power them, is probably just that, writes M.V. Ramana
One bright spot amidst all the terrible news the last couple of months was the market’s reaction to DeepSeek, with BigTech firms like Nvidia and Microsoft and Google taking major hits in their capitalizations. Billionaires Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who had, just a few days back, been part of Donald Trump’s first news conference—lost a combined 48 billion dollars in paper money. As a good friend of mine, who shall go unnamed because of their use of an expletive, said “I hate all AI, but it’s hard to not feel joy that these asshats are losing a lot of money.”
Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactors), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.
Remembering Past Fanfare
But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.
As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for the South Carolina nuclear plant project at V. C. Summer.
The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.
Read MoreAttacked, demonized and forced into hiding
S.P. Udayakumar and thousands of other Indian activists challenged a Russian nuclear plant
S.P. Udayakumar was awarded the 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Award for resistance. Owing to visa constraints he was not able to be present in New York City, where the Awards ceremony was held, to accept his prize in person. He delivered these remarks via a video recording, which was met with prolonged applause. We reproduce his speech here. (A report and photos of the 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards ceremony, was published last week.)
I am extremely happy and immensely grateful that the Nuclear-Free Future Awards family that includes Beyond Nuclear, IPPNW and the international jury have chosen me and our struggle for the 2025 “Nuclear-Free Future” Award in the resistance category.
Tens of thousands of people including children, youth, women and men are struggling against the Russian-supplied Koodankulam Nuclear Power Project near the southernmost tip of India. Several people have sacrificed their lives, scores of people have gone to prison, so many of us have braved police harassment, State surveillance, court cases, property losses, income deprivation, and umpteen number of various difficulties.
Lots and lots of religious leaders, community leaders, political leaders, lawyers, film personalities, intellectuals, writers, publishers, poets, artists, media persons, international human rights activists, even some conscientious government officials, police officers and the general public from all over Tamil Nadu and the larger India have contributed significantly to this 2011-2014 phase of a much longer struggle.
I know that you cannot honor all the people who have taken part in our struggle and that I have been chosen as a representative of all of them. On behalf of all those thousands and thousands of fellow protesters, I humbly accept this great award. Thank you!
Read MoreThe 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards
Rainbow serpent magic filled the air at the Great Hall at Cooper Union, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
The Rainbow Serpent has been the symbol of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards (NFFA) since the event first began in 1998. In Indigenous cultures, the serpent offers an ominous warning to be left undisturbed in the ground rather than unleash its vengeful powers. This has been taken to mean, in particular, uranium. But the NFFA’s friendlier serpent also seems to release a certain magic into the air, enveloping those who breathe it in joy and optimism when they attend an NFFA ceremony as it travels to different cities around the world.
In 2025, the Awards were held in the Great Hall at Cooper Union, in New York City, a historic and atmospheric venue where a certain candidate for US president, Abraham Lincoln, made what would remain not only his longest speech but arguably his most important and one that would send him on his way to winning the White House.
Lincoln’s lectern still stands on the Cooper Union stage and at the 2025 Nuclear-Free Future Awards it was graced by a series of remarkable activists. Some were there to receive the Awards, others to present it or honor recipients who could not be with us. Many in the audience had come to participate also in the Third Meeting of States Parties to the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons at the United Nations.
The Awards were founded by Claus Biegert, a Munich-based journalist who serves both as the event’s visionary and its emcee. And the event is now supported by my organization, Beyond Nuclear, and by International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War, Germany, as effectively “co-owners”, although the hard work on the IPPNW end comes from Chuck Johnson and Jenny Cole at the Geneva Liaison Office.
Courage is the first word that comes to mind when describing the 2025 recipient in the category of Resistance. For standing up to the Indian authorities in opposition to the construction of the massive Russian nuclear power plant at Kudankulam in Tamil Nadu, S.P. Udayakumar and thousands of other villagers, farmers and fisherfolk, the majority of them women, have been hounded, persecuted, arrested and prosecuted.
Udayakumar could not travel to the US to receive his award, but his sons Surya and Satya, both of whom live in Maryland, were able to come to New York to honor their father. The video recorded by Uday, as everyone knows him, moved the audience to prolonged applause and even tears, given all he and his family have endured, including two years in hiding when he could not see his sons at all.
Read MoreA long walk for justice
Won-Young Lee has walked from his homeland in South Korea to Tokyo. Now he’s on the march in the US, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
How far would you walk for a cause? In the case of South Korean anti-nuclear activist, Won-Young Lee, that distance has no limit.
Lee, 67, and the director of the Korea Land Future Research Institute and the Public Reporting Center for the Dangers of Nuclear Power Plants (PRCDN), will arrive in Washington, DC on April 8, having walked there from the United Nations in New York City, a journey he began on March 19. The distance is about 260 miles.
His cause this time is to draw attention to the continued dumping of highly radioactive waste water from the stricken Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant in Japan into the Pacific Ocean. This is not Mr. Lee’s first walk, but he chose the dates deliberately to span the time between the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster that began on March 11 and the April 26, 1986 Chornobyl reactor explosion in Ukraine.
This latest walk falls under the umbrella of what Lee has titled the “New Silk Road for Life and No-Nukes. Walking Planet Earth With Joy.” Together, the walks constitute a marathon that have taken Lee and other walkers through vast areas of the Asian continent, including Vietnam, Laos, Thailand, Malaysia, India and Nepal and on through Uzbekistan, Azerbaijan, and Georgia and through numerous countries in Europe. Lee himself has traversed 6,125 miles on foot.
He has been inspired, he says, by Gandhi’s ‘Salt March’ “that led to India’s independence,” and was also started, Lee says, “by a small number of people,” that grew into ever greater numbers.
Read MoreA nuclear Svengali on Capitol Hill?
Attempts by the Breakthrough Institute’s Ted Nordaus to derail NRC commissioner candidacies have met with mixed success, writes Linda Pentz Gunter
We’re getting used to the swagger of entitlement and the complacency of corporate nuclear lobbyists on Capitol Hill. They, in turn, have become accustomed to getting their way — usually through the powerful persuasion of big money or saturation propaganda campaigns financed with those large stashes of handy corporate cash.
But when that isn’t enough, then a nice smear campaign should do. One who appears to enjoy such an endeavor is the Breakthrough Institute’s founder, Ted Nordhaus, who has made it his business of late to decide who does and does not get a commissioner seat at the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Those who should not, in Nordhaus’s views, are the Democratic candidates or incumbents who have too much of a regard for nuclear safety as a priority.
Safety is a big ticket item for the nuclear power industry. Literally. Maintaining, upgrading and replacing aging parts in these decades-old dinosaurs of the 20th century, many of them running well past their sell-by date, is an expensive undertaking. But a relaxation of — or looking the other way on — some of those pesky safety regulations would be made easier by more compliant NRC commissioners.
Cue Nordhaus, Capitol Hill’s nuclear Svengali.
His most recent target was Matthew Marzano, the candidate for the long vacant fifth seat on the NRC commission. Nordhaus pulled out all the stops to derail Marzano, beginning last September prior to Marzano’s hearing before the Senate Committee on Environment and Public Works.
Nordhaus prepared a veritable death warrant in which he claimed, among other things, that Marzano would, if approved, be “the least qualified commissioner ever seated on the Nuclear Regulatory Commission”. Nordhaus also wrote that Marzano, if chosen, “will not be a voice for reform and modernization on the commission.”
Never mind that Marzano, who was then an official at the Idaho National Laboratory, has a pretty solid nuclear background, having worked both on commercial reactors and as an instructor for the Naval Nuclear Propulsion Program at the US Department of Energy. (As a side note, this exemplifies once again the two-way street and inexorable link between the civil and military nuclear sectors.)
Read MoreDelusional, ruinous and obsolete
The ITER fusion project is 18 years behind schedule and can do nothing for climate change, writes Antoine Calandra
ITER (International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor) is an international tokamak nuclear fusion research and engineering project, massively over budget and behind schedule, currently under construction next to the Cadarache nuclear facility in southern France.
India is one of 7 partner countries in the ITER project, along with the European Union, Russia, Japan, the United States, China and South Korea. No matter how much Macron boasts about it, ITER is a total fiasco, a delusional, ruinous and obsolete project.
On November 14, 2024, the annual public meeting was held in Peyrolles, entitled: ITER, 15 years on: what has been achieved?
I was expecting the event to be a great success, and to be able to pick up some recent information on the ITER project… But surprise, nothing of the sort!
An ordinary multi-purpose room, no decor, no documents available, an unpleasant white light, around forty people present, all interns (CEA ITER* employees, CLI members, local elected representatives, a few union members).
For the event, tables and chairs were arranged differently “for a more convivial, cabaret-like atmosphere”, did I hear them say? Aha!?
Pietro Barabaschi, ITER General Manager, wasn’t there.
As on previous occasions, there was no agenda with the names of the speakers to let us know how the evening would unfold. A meagre presentation of the ITER project (5 or 6 images) and that was it. And “time for questions from the floor”. Aha!
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