Beyond Nuclear International
‘Time is running out’
Navajo Nation urges Congress to act on RECA expansion bill
By Shondiin Silversmith, Arizona Mirror
Kathleen Tsosie remembers seeing her dad come home every evening with his clothes covered in dirt. As a little girl, she never questioned why, and she was often more excited to see if he had any leftover food in his lunchbox.
“We used to go through his lunch and eat whatever he didn’t eat,” Tsosie said, recalling when she was around 4 years old. “And he always had cold water that came back from the mountain.”
Tsosie’s father, grandfather, and uncles all worked as uranium miners on the Navajo Nation near Cove, Arizona, from the 1940s to the 1960s. The dirt Tsosie’s father was caked in when he arrived home came from the mines, and the cold water he brought back was from the nearby springs.
Tsosie grew up in Cove, a remote community located at the foothills of the Chuska mountain range in northeastern Arizona. There are 56 abandoned mines located in the Cove area, according to the Environmental Protection Agency.
In the late 1960s, Tsosie said her grandfather started getting sick. She remembers herding sheep with him and how he would often rest under a tree, asking her to push on his chest because it hurt.
Tsosie said she was about 7 years old when her uncles took her grandfather to the hospital. At the time, she didn’t know why he was sick, but later on, she learned he had cancer. Her grandfather died in October 1967.
Over a decade later, Tsosie’s father also started getting sick. She remembers when he came to visit her in Wyoming; she was rubbing his shoulders when she felt a lump. She told him to get it checked out because he complained about how painful it was.
Her father was diagnosed with cancer in 1984 and went through treatments, but died in April 1985.
“When my dad passed away, everybody knew it was from the mine,” Tsosie said. He was just the latest on a long list of Navajo men from her community who worked in the uranium mines and ended up getting sick and passing away.
She recalls how her father used to tell her that, one day, it may happen to him, but she did not want to believe him. Her dad worked in the uranium mines for over 20 years.
Read More“Terrible news”
Russian uranium ban reopens threat of uranium mining escalation in US
By Linda Pentz Gunter
When Russia first invaded Ukraine on February 24, 2022, no one knew how long the fighting would continue and what the outcome might be. Kyiv was expected to fall immediately. It didn’t. More than two years on, the war continues and the rumblings from Russia about nuclear weapons use grow frighteningly louder.
The rush by the United States and its NATO allies at the time of the invasion to help defend — and to some extent arm — Ukraine included a quick decision to sanction Russian fossil fuel imports. On March 8, 2022, just 12 days after the invasion, US president, Joe Biden, signed an Executive Order banning the import of Russian oil, liquefied natural gas, and coal to the United States. Russian uranium was not included.
At the time of the 2022 ban on Russian fossil fuels, many of us in the anti-nuclear movement were agitating for a Russian uranium ban as well. At least 12% of US uranium imports comes from Russia to fuel domestic US reactors. That number rises to close to 50% if you also factor in uranium sourced from Russian satellites Kazakhstan (25%) and Uzbekistan (11%). (Canada is the other major single-source supplier of uranium to the US at 27%.)
On May 13, 2024, President Biden finally signed into law a bipartisan bill — the Prohibiting Russian Uranium Imports Act — banning imports of Russian low-enriched uranium. According to the bill, the ban affects: “Unirradiated low-enriched uranium that is produced in the Russian Federation or by a Russian entity” (read Rosatom operating outside Russia).
When we were pushing for a Russian uranium boycott at the start of the war, it was in the context of highlighting the detriment of nuclear power and fed into our agenda to permanently end the use of this dangerous and discriminatory technology. We asked then why the nuclear sector was getting a pass. Now we have the answer. The bill is a poisoned pill, almost literally.
The bill’s enactment “releases $2.72 billion in appropriated funds to the Department of Energy to invest in domestic uranium enrichment further advancing a secure and resilient global nuclear energy fuel supply consistent with our international obligations,” said the US State Department.
Read MoreRhetoric of resilience
Recovery of the state or recovery of the people?
By Mia Winther-Tamaki
The Japanese people and landscapes still feel the unending impacts of a nuclear catastrophe that occurred a dozen years ago. Thousands of black bags litter the Fukushima exclusion zone enclosing radioactive earth and rubbish with nowhere to go. Japan has begun releasing millions of tons of radioactive wastewater into the sea. The death and destruction of the earthquake and tsunami — a tragedy in itself — was compounded by nuclear calamity.
On March 11, 2011, a powerful undersea earthquake unleashed the deluge that flooded the Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant run by Tokyo Electric Power Company (TEPCO), causing the release of deadly nuclear radiation. Invisible and moving uncontrollably, radiation continues to contaminate soil, air, water and lives it has touched. The Japanese government was responsible for not only creating the circumstance of neglect that caused the nuclear meltdown, but also for exacerbating the impacts of nuclear fallout through a delayed and opaque response that downplayed the severity of the catastrophe.
Though the crisis was triggered by natural disasters, the nuclear catastrophe that followed was profoundly man-made. The late geographer Neil Smith describes the “unnaturalness” of disasters like Fukushima’s: “The contours of disaster and the difference between who lives and who dies is to a greater or lesser extent a social calculus.”
Following the nuclear disaster, Japan shifted to a necessary post-disaster survival and recovery strategy that can be characterized by the term “resilience,” defined by the United Nations Office for Disaster Risk Reduction as the ability to “resist, absorb, accommodate to and recover from the effects of a hazard in a timely and efficient manner, including through…preservation and restoration…” However, resilience was invoked and experienced in two distinct forms in the aftermath of Fukushima: recovery of the state and recovery of the people.
Resilience, a term originating from ecology to describe species returning to “equilibrium” after an environmental shock, has become a frequently used buzzword across many disciplines. Urban geographer Tom Slater discusses the way resilience discourse is neatly folded into neoliberal nostrums by evoking the evolutionary “naturalness” of biological processes, framing market-driven agendas as inevitably interlinked with ongoing cycles of adaptive growth.
Read MoreMilitary interests are pushing new nuclear power
The UK government has finally admitted it
By Andy Stirling and Philip Johnstone
The UK government has announced the “biggest expansion of the [nuclear] sector in 70 years.” This follows years of extraordinarily expensive support.
Why is this? Official assessments acknowledge nuclear performs poorly compared to alternatives. With renewables and storage significantly cheaper, climate goals are achieved faster, more affordably and reliably by diverse other means. The only new power station under construction is still not finished, running ten years late and many times over budget.
So again: why does this ailing technology enjoy such intense and persistent generosity?
The UK government has for a long time failed even to try to justify support for nuclear power in the kinds of detailed substantive energy terms that were once routine. The last properly rigorous energy white paper was in 2003.
Even before wind and solar costs plummeted, this recognized nuclear as “unattractive.” The delayed 2020 white paper didn’t detail any comparative nuclear and renewable costs, let alone justify why this more expensive option receives such disproportionate funding.
A document published with the latest announcement, Civil Nuclear: Roadmap to 2050, is also more about affirming official support than substantively justifying it. More significant—in this supposedly “civil” strategy—are multiple statements about addressing “civil and military nuclear ambitions” together to “identify opportunities to align the two across government.”
These pressures are acknowledged by other states with nuclear weapons, but were until now treated like a secret in the UK: civil nuclear energy maintains the skills and supply chains needed for military nuclear programs.
Read MoreNuclear roadmap is massive detour
UK plan reveals true ‘energy’ agenda is pathway to nuclear weapons sector
By Jonathon Porritt
After 14 years of Tory mismanagement, the UK finds itself bereft of an energy strategy.
This was finally confirmed in the release of the Government’s new Nuclear Roadmap. At one level, it’s just the same old, same old, the latest in a very long line of PR-driven, more or less fantastical wishlists for new nuclear in the UK. But at another, it’s a total revelation.
For years, a small group of dedicated academics and campaigners have suggested that the UK Government’s Nuclear Energy Strategy is being driven more by the UK’s continuing commitment to an “independent” nuclear weapons capability than by any authoritative energy analysis. For an equal number of years, this was aggressively rebutted by one Energy Minister after another, both Tory and Labour.
The new Nuclear Roadmap dramatically changes all that. It sets to one side any pretence that the links between our civil nuclear programme and our military defence needs were anything other than small-scale – and of no material strategic significance. With quite startling transparency and clarity, the Roadmap not only reveals the full extent of those links, but positively celebrates that co-dependency as a massive plus in our ambition to achieve a Net Zero economy by 2050.
“Startling” is actually an understatement. Such a comprehensive volte-face is rare in policy-making circles. Every effort is usually made by Ministers to obscure the scale (let along the significance) of any such screeching handbrake turns. That is so not the case with the new Roadmap.
Nobody does this work alone
The Nuclear-Free Future Awards endeavor to ensure no-one has to
By Linda Pentz Gunter
If you are an activist in pretty much any area, you are rarely alone. The cliche, “it takes a village” applies. But it’s still possible to feel isolated and unheard, even by others in your own movement.
This is especially true for minorities and Indigenous activists, even those not necessarily working in remote areas or in countries most Westerners can’t point to on a map.
That’s why, to Claus Biegert, a founder of the Nuclear-Free Future Awards (and now a Beyond Nuclear board member), the World Uranium Hearing held in 1992 in Salzburg, Austria, was so important. Indigenous people from around the world were invited to testify about their daily experiences living with nuclear technology including uranium mining, nuclear weapons testing and radioactive waste storage.
As the people arrived, Biegert recalled, “you could see on all their faces they came from an isolated area and they felt alone and ignored.”
But at the end of the one-week conference, Biegert said, the participants left with “different faces because we helped them create a community.”
That moment gave birth in 1998 to the Nuclear-Free Future Awards, to keep that community together and to recognize the many who feel isolated and ignored, even as they do essential and often unpaid work to rid the world of nuclear dangers.
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