Beyond Nuclear International
The annual goldmine
World Nuclear Industry Status Report delivers all the empirical data we need to know about nuclear power’s decline
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The annual goldmine of empirical data on nuclear power that is the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) was duly rolled out on October 5th, this year in Berlin. The 2022 edition is available for download here and is an indispensable reference source, updated each year.
While delivering an in-depth overview, as its title suggests, of the status of nuclear power worldwide, the report also provides sections focused on particular areas of the technology or on certain countries or regions of the world.
As its principal author, Mycle Schneider, pointed out during the rollout, the report’s authors are big fans of empirical data. Indeed, many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favor the industry very well. No amount of nuclear industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.
The over-riding finding of the 2022 edition of the report is that nuclear power’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation in 2021 dropped to below 10 percent for the first time ever, sinking to its lowest in four decades.
As in past years, if you take China out of the picture — a country with 21 new reactors under construction as of mid-2022 — the decline of nuclear power worldwide is even more dramatic.
At close to 400 pages, the WNISR is a tome, but it is packed full of essential detail on every important topic related to nuclear power and its declining place in the world. Whether you are interested in new builds or closure, decommissioning or small modular reactors, or a specific country, there is something in the report that will flesh out the details.
Read MoreA lesson from the TPNW
A Fossil-Fuel Non-ProliferationTreaty will save lives
By Ira Helfand and Marjaneh Moini
We can almost always tell how sick a patient may be before seeing them just by looking at their address. Every day we treat patients who are desperately ill with a number of medical conditions all with the same root cause: environmental racism. Historical discriminatory housing policies have trapped non-white and low income communities in overpolluted neighborhoods. Neighborhoods in previously redlined zones have nearly twice as many oil wells, breathe dirtier air and have much less green space.
Burning fossil fuels is the major driver of climate change, but also the leading source of air pollution. Worldwide, more than seven million people die prematurely every year from air pollution. Over 130 million people in the US, more than forty percent of our population, breathe unhealthy air. Fossil fuels put people’s health at risk at every stage of their operations from extraction to transport, to processing and finally to burning. Nearly 18 million U.S. residents live within a mile of an active oil or gas well putting them at risk of asthma and other breathing problems, cancer, poor brain development and function, dementia and much more. Living near an oil or gas well affects our children’s health even before they are born. Non-white and low income communities who already bear the burden of dirty fossil fuels are also most affected by the climate crisis.
The climate crisis is a public health crisis. It affects our food, our shelter and every organ in our body. It is much worse than the COVID-19 pandemic. We can’t hide in our homes. Our forests are burning now, our neighborhoods are next. And poor people, and in particular poor people of color, are getting hit the hardest.
That is why the World Health Organization, over 1,400 health professionals and over 200 health organizations are asking for a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty, inspired by the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons and the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. In fact, the climate crisis is an existential threat to our society similar to a nuclear war. (Editor’s note: On October 20, subsequent to the original publication of this article, the European Parliament passed a motion calling on EU nation states to begin developing a Fossil Fuel Non-Proliferation Treaty.)
Read MoreNoisy support for an obvious failure
Why do media and governments insist on nuclear for climate?
By Andrew Stirling and Phil Johnstone
At Edinburgh’s Haymarket station, on the route used by COP26 delegates hopping across to Glasgow last November, a large poster displayed a vista from the head of Loch Shiel. In the foreground, a monument to the Jacobite rebellion towers from the spot where Bonnie Prince Charlie raised his standard. From there, the water sweeps back to a rugged line of hills.
This is one of Scotland’s most iconic views, famous for both its history and its role in the Harry Potter films.
On the poster, written in the sky above the loch are the words: “Keep nature natural: more nuclear power means more wild spaces like these.” At the bottom is a hashtag – #NetZeroNeedsNuclear – with no further mention of who might be behind this advert.
But it’s not hard to find a website for this group, which claims to be run by “a team of young, international volunteers made up of engineers, scientists and communicators”, all with the engagingly smiley profile pictures to be expected from citizen activists.
Only when you scroll to the end do you see these activities are ‘sponsored’ by nuclear companies EDF and Urenco. At the bottom, it is explained that Nuclear Needs Net Zero is part of the Young Generation Network (YGN) – “young members of the Nuclear Institute (NI), which is the professional body and learned society for the UK nuclear sector”. The website asserts that the Nuclear4Climate campaign – described as “grassroots” both on the site and in a presentation to an International Atomic Agency conference in 2019 – is in fact “coordinated via regional and national nuclear associations and technical societies”.
During COP26, Nuclear Needs Net Zero laid on a pro-nuclear flash mob in central Glasgow, complete with young dancers wearing ‘we need to talk about nuclear’ T-shirts. Such is the ostensibly fresh, youthful face of today’s nuclear lobby.
Of course, all this is par for the course in the creative world of PR. But there are more substantive grounds why nuclear advocates might wish to avoid too much public scrutiny at the moment. One reality, which can be agreed on from all sides, is that this is by far the worst period in the 70-year history of this ageing industry. So how come it is benefitting from growing and noisy support in mainstream and social media? Why are easily refuted arguments still being deployed to justify new nuclear power alongside renewables in the energy supply mix? And why has the media seized so enthusiastically on a few prominent converts to the nuclear cause?
Read MoreEdging toward Armageddon?
Would the use of a tactical nuclear weapon in Ukraine lead to all-out nuclear war?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
As we mark 60 years since the Cuban Missile Crisis, it’s truly horrifying to realize that our present times are considered to be the closest to nuclear war we have been since those 13 terrifying days in 1962.
What saved us then was cooler heads prevailing, as our stories last week described. But can we be assured that those with the power to press the proverbial button — whether at the pinnacle of leadership or lower down the chain of command — will act with similar sense and restraint?
With Kennedy and Khrushchev in command, there was a willingness on both sides to pull back from the brink, not only rhetorically, but through meaningful actions. Khrushchev removed his nuclear missiles from Cuba while the US publicly declared it would not invade the island. Privately, the US also agreed to dismantle its ballistic missiles stationed in Turkey.
And, as we have seen over the years — and in last week’s article by Angelo Baracca — sometimes it takes a person of more humble position to restore rationality and act with restraint. These near-misses ought to have put the halt on nuclear weapons development many decades ago.
Instead, that most obvious of lessons was never learned: that nuclear weapons serve only one purpose; the mutual destruction of all of us. Instead, the nuclear arms race escalated to obscene heights and there are still at least 13,000 nuclear weapons in the world, leaving us perpetually on the edge of Armageddon.
And it was that word, “Armageddon,” that current US President Joe Biden used recently when he said at a Democratic gathering, “We have not faced the prospect of Armageddon since Kennedy and the Cuban Missile Crisis.”
Kennedy had met Khrushchev prior to the 1962 standoff and Biden described Russian president, Vladimir Putin, as “a guy I know fairly well”. But so far, that familiarity hasn’t relieved the current atomic tensions around Russia’s ongoing invasion of Ukraine. Instead, the news is full of alarm bells, warning that yes, Putin might just be mad enough to push the nuclear button and take us all down with him.
Pundits have cautioned that we are “not there yet,” which should not be taken as comfort. It should be taken as an opportunity to ensure that we never, ever get there. And it’s certainly not encouraging that Russia’s new top commander of the war in Ukraine. General Sergei Surovikin, is nicknamed “General Armageddon” for his command of Russia’s Syria bombardments. But, in the meantime, when we talk about Russia “using” nuclear weapons, what could happen?
Read MoreVasily Arkhipov saved the world
Sixty years ago the Cuban Missile Crisis erupted and nuclear war came close
On October 14, 1962, a U.S. U-2 spy plane flying over Cuba revealed that the Soviet Union was building ramps for the installation of missiles with nuclear warheads. President Kennedy immediately ordered a naval blockade of Cuba. The most serious crisis since the beginning of the Cold War began: for thirteen, endless, days the Soviet Union and the United States faced off against one another, coming close to war. The whole world waited with bated breath. And indeed, not only did we get close to World War III, but also to nuclear Armageddon! The reason that none of this came to pass was the cool-headedness of a Soviet captain, Vasily Arkhipov (and “perhaps” also, quite independently, of his American counterpart, William Bassett, although we have only a posthumous testimony).
Since the outbreak of the war in Ukraine, comparisons have been made from many quarters with that crisis 60 years ago: indeed there are not only a few commonalities, but also many points of difference. History is a great teacher, in fact it is the only guide we have for the present, but it is necessary to put it in context.
At that time, 15 years after the end of World War II (and the bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki), there was no international agreement on arms control, much less on the nuclear arsenals that were becoming the focus of military confrontation between the two blocs. By about 1960, the U.S. had about 30,000 nuclear warheads, the USSR about 5,000, enough for total devastation: intercontinental missiles were in their infancy, and the USSR had only about 20 capable of reaching U.S. territory. Britain built their bomb in 1952; France in 1960 (in collaboration with Israel); China did not reach that point until 1964.
Incidentally, the Doomsday Clock established in 1947, had touched 2 minutes to Midnight (the metaphor for the end of the world) in 1953 with the Korean War (when indeed McArthur wanted to drop nuclear bombs on the North), but by 1960 it had been reset to 7 minutes, and in 1963 to 12 minutes, so it does not record the threat in 1962, which in fact was only known many years later; here is the first difference to the current situation.
Also at that time, in 1959 the United States had deployed missiles with nuclear warheads capable of striking the Soviet Union in Italy, at Gioia del Colle (Apulia, South Italy), and in Turkey in great secrecy. Of course Moscow suspected and it could be argued that it knew, but as there were no spy satellites at the time, and only the U.S. had U-2 spy planes capable of flying high over other countries, it can therefore be argued (certainly not justified) that Khrushchev’s decision in 1962 to secretly deploy nuclear missiles to Cuba was an act of defence, albeit an extremely risky one; and this is where there is, in my view, an analogy to the present, the expansion of NATO (a nuclear alliance) eastward to Russia’s borders, which Moscow perceived as a threat.
However, one might ask how the Cold War situation would have developed if the existence of Soviet missiles in Cuba had only been discovered when it was a done deal, and the nuclear threat had been balanced, between US missiles in Italy and Turkey, and Soviet missiles in Cuba? Even though this is a rhetorical question, history is not made with “ifs”. “Perhaps” the necessary push for nuclear disarmament agreements would have happened much sooner.
Read More60 years of luck
The Cuban Missile Crisis was a warning. So why did the nuclear arms race escalate?
By Linda Pentz Gunter
When you are a medical professional, relying on luck is not the preferred option. But for 87-year old retired radiologist, Dr. Murray Watnick, there are some circumstances when, if luck comes your way, you readily embrace it.
One such moment was the Cuban Missile Crisis, 13 tense days in October 1962, now being remembered 60 years on. Watnick was serving as a medical officer at the time, assigned to the US Strategic Air Command base at High Wycombe in the UK, headquarters base for the 7th Air Division and also home to a “nuclear bunker”.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is still believed, today, to be the closest the world ever came to nuclear war between two superpowers. It lasted from October 16-28, 1962, although officially it was finally resolved on November 20. The phrase, ‘thirteen days in October’, remains synonymous with our narrowest of escapes from a nuclear apocalypse.
“We were on edge for 13 days,” recounted Watnick in a conversation last month as he recalled the rising tension among troops when the base was placed on DEFCON 2, the highest alert level before all-out war.
“Fortunately cooler heads prevailed and war was averted,” he said. “We were very lucky to have Nikita Khrushchev and John Kennedy in charge. Theirs were measured responses and a careful analysis of the situation.”
That measured response included a letter written by Khrushchev to President Kennedy on October 26, 1962 that is hard to imagine being replicated today. In part, it said:
“Mr. President, we and you ought not now to pull on the ends of the rope in which you have tied the knot of war, because the more the two of us pull, the tighter that knot will be tied. And a moment may come when that knot will be tied so tight that even he who tied it will not have the strength to untie it, and then it will be necessary to cut that knot, and what that would mean is not for me to explain to you, because you yourself understand perfectly of what terrible forces our countries dispose.
“Consequently, if there is no intention to tighten that knot and thereby to doom the world to the catastrophe of thermonuclear war, then let us not only relax the forces pulling on the ends of the rope, let us take measures to untie that knot. We are ready for this.”
And yet, despite that realization as the bullet of Armageddon was dodged, the Cold War continued and the nuclear arms race between the two super powers escalated to obscene heights. There was a failure to recognize then, and still now, that nuclear weapons are a madness and we need to get rid of them completely. Instead, the world’s collective atomic arsenal ballooned to a high of more than 64,000 by the late 1980s.
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