Beyond Nuclear International
Palomares 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.
Read MoreDeader than a doornail
Electricity prices from new nuclear plants will be sky high with more delays to completion while jobs don’t materialize.
If you wanted to sum up the most compelling reasons not to build new nuclear power plants, Hinkley Point C, the two-reactor project under construction in Somerset in the UK, encapsulates almost all of them.
When the UK government, still miraculously led by the clinging-by-his-fingernails beleaguered Labour prime minister, Keir Starmer, announced its Golden Age of nuclear last September, obediently gliding in Trump’s gilded wake, it claimed that the new nuclear power plants planned for Britain “will drive down household bills in the long run.” Nothing could be further from the truth.
Far from driving down consumer costs, the Hinkley Point C project, consisting of two 1,630 MW French Evolutionary Power Reactors (EPR), could see the original agreed strike price of $123.50 per megawatt — already considerably higher than the price Britons were paying at the time it was set in 2012 — soar even higher by the time the plant is finished, since prices are designed to increase annually in line with the Consumer Price Index.
The original estimated cost of $24 billion for the two Hinkley C EPRs has now almost tripled, having sky-rocketed to almost $67 billion as announced last week, along with new delays.
In 2007, when EDF first proposed its Hinkley Point C scheme, an officer with the company predicted locals would be cooking their turkeys using electricity from Hinkley C by Christmas 2017. That’s the same year — in March — that construction eventually began.
Read MoreThe dragon is getting ready to roar
Citizens of Wales are gearing up for another assault on their right to a safe, clean and healthy environment
Anti-nuclear campaigners meeting in Wrexham last October issued a declaration calling on politicians representing Welsh constituencies in parliaments in Cardiff and Westminster to work for a nuclear-free, renewables-powered Wales.
Welsh campaigners are working with US, Canadian and other UK activists to establish a Transatlantic Nuclear-Free Alliance to campaign on issues of common concern. The new initiative came in conjunction with a screening of the award-winning film SOS: The San Onofre Syndrome, which highlights the impact of the decommissioning and the legacy of managing deadly radioactive waste faced by the neighbors of the San Onofre nuclear power plant in California.
The film’s messages resonate with international audiences faced with identical threats and challenges. At the screening, the audience heard from the filmmakers Marybeth Brangan and the now sadly late Jim Heddle as well as from Professor Stephen Thomas, Emeritus Professor in Energy Policy at Greenwich University and Richard Outram, Secretary of the Welsh Nuclear Free Local Authorities.
“The nuclear industry tries to assure us the radioactive waste disposal and reactor decommissioning are established processes with easily affordable costs,” Thomas said. “The truth is that we are three or more decades away from permanent disposal of waste and of carrying out the most challenging stages of decommissioning. The cost will be high, and the failure of previous funding schemes means the burden will fall on future taxpayers, generations ahead”.
Despite this, the UK Government will introduce developer-led siting plans, permitting nuclear operators to apply to locate new plants in sites throughout Wales, and intends to reduce regulation in the nuclear industry.
Read MoreSpace “superiority” should alarm us all
In a domain long guided by restraint, Trump’s space rhetoric is ominous, writes Dr. Ghassan Shahrour
On December 18, 2025, the White House issued an executive order titled “Ensuring American Space Superiority.” Framed as a strategy for exploration, innovation, and national security, it mandates a rapid expansion of U.S. military, commercial, and technological capabilities in outer space. But the very notion of “superiority” should alarm the international community. In a domain long guided by restraint and shared stewardship, this language signals a shift from cooperative security to strategic competition—with profound consequences for global human security.
Space is not an abstract arena for power projection. Satellites sustain modern life: communications, navigation, climate monitoring, disaster response, food security, humanitarian operations, and scientific research all depend on stable space systems. Once these systems are woven into military planning, they become entangled in rivalry. In any crisis, they risk becoming targets, collateral damage, or triggers for escalation. The fallout would not be limited to states in conflict; it would reach civilians everywhere.
International space law was built precisely to prevent such dangers. The 1967 Outer Space Treaty established space as a global commons, banned nuclear weapons in orbit, and rejected national appropriation of celestial bodies. Its logic is preventive: security in space is preserved through restraint, transparency, and collective responsibility before competition hardens into confrontation. While the new order may not violate the letter of existing treaties, it departs from their spirit by normalizing military preparedness and competitive dominance as the organizing principles of space governance. History is clear: when one state elevates superiority as a strategic goal, others follow—fueling arms racing, mistrust, and shrinking margins for error.
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