Beyond Nuclear International

Your country might not endorse the ban treaty, but your city can

From the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons (ICAN)

In the blink of an eye a nuclear detonation will wipe a metropolitan center off the map, laying waste to countless lives, destroying all infrastructure and poisoning the environment. This isn’t hypothetical: cities are the main targets of nuclear weapons.

Nuclear weapons are designed to inflict comprehensive damage upon their targets. It is the very nature of the nuclear threat to a rival country’s most important places that underpins the theory and practice of nuclear deterrence, which is promoted as a legitimate defense strategy by all nine nuclear-armed states, and the several dozen more that endorse the use of nuclear weapons.

These governments are putting their citizens’ lives at risk by subscribing to this strategy, which has been undermined time and again by near misses and miscalculations which very nearly unleashed nuclear war. Local governments bear a special responsibility for the safety of their residents. It is therefore incumbent upon cities to speak out against nuclear weapons.

Engaging the cities is an important way to pressure governments to be responsive to the will of their people. When cities call on their governments to join the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, it’s a tangible reminder that citizens are against these weapons of mass destruction and that governments are consistently ignoring this view. A new coalition of cities and towns around the world will amplify these voices and compel governments to ditch any involvement with nuclear weapons and encouraging their peers to follow suit.

Every dollar wasted on nuclear is a dollar not invested in renewables

By Tim Judson and Luis Hestres

We’ve known for a long time that nuclear energy is a false solution to climate change. Not only are the health and environmental impacts of nuclear power intolerable, but it also gobbles up investments we should be making in clean and safe renewable energy.

Now, a new study by researchers at the University of Sussex in the UK brings us the latest and most robust evidence of these facts.

The study, published last week in Nature Energy, considers three hypotheses: Firstly, that emissions decline the more a country adopts nuclear power; secondly, that emissions decline the more a country adopts renewables; and thirdly, that nuclear and renewables are ‘mutually exclusive’ options that tend to crowd each other out at an energy system level. The hypotheses were tested against 25 years’ worth of electricity-production and emissions data from 123 countries.

The result? Investment in nuclear is mostly negatively correlated with decreases in carbon emissions, while investment in renewables was positively correlated with such decreases across the board. In other words, countries that invested in nuclear didn’t see emission reductions but countries that invested in renewables did. 

The only exceptions were higher per-capita GDP countries, which saw some decreases in emissions while investing in nuclear—but countries with lower per-capita GDP didn’t. But this last finding didn’t take into account the costs associated with nuclear waste storage and cleanup, the dangers of nuclear accidents, or the fact that those reductions might have been deeper if renewables had been chosen.

Please start with the easiest problem to solve

Editor’s note: The author’s assumption that Joe Biden will be elected president is of course his own.

By Alan Robock

Here is a letter I intend to mail in November. But I want you to know about it now, to bring up an issue that is crucial to consider before you vote, and which has not received enough attention.

Dear President-Elect Biden,

I’m so happy that you were elected because in January you can start to address major problems in America. But before you deal with the COVID-19 pandemic, racism, immigration, gun violence, and climate change, all of which are very important, I recommend that first you take immediate steps to lower the danger of nuclear war. You will be Commander in Chief, and there are several first steps you can take immediately to make the world safer.

In the early 1980s, I was one of the American and Russian scientists who, working together, discovered that in a war between the U.S. and the Soviet Union smoke from fires ignited by nuclear explosions would block out the Sun, producing instant climate change, turning the Earth cold, dark and dry, killing plants and preventing agriculture for at least a year, producing global famine.

As I described in a New York Times op-ed on Feb. 11, 2016, this nuclear winter theory was accepted by presidents Ronald Reagan and Mikhail Gorbachev and was instrumental in ending the nuclear arms race. But although the Russian and American nuclear arsenals have decreased, our research shows they can still produce a nuclear winter.

Furthermore, there are seven other nuclear nations now: China, Britain, France, India, Pakistan, Israel and North Korea. Even a nuclear war between two with much smaller arsenals, such as India and Pakistan (one of the scariest scenarios, given continued conflict over Kashmir), could produce global climate change unprecedented in recorded human history and major impacts on the world food supply.

Fly me to the moon, but don’t put reactors there

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Not content to desecrate our terrestrial landscape with hundreds of thousands of tons of nuclear waste — much piled up with nowhere to go, the rest released to contaminate our air, water and soil — humankind, in all its folly, now plans to do the same to the Moon. And, eventually to Mars.

While our species’ insatiable scientific curiosity has undoubtedly led to some beneficial inventions, it has also drawn us inexorably towards our own downfall. Our zeal to create the atomic bomb ignored logic, ethics, consequences and the fundamentals of human rights. 

The bomb brought us so-called civil nuclear power reactors, the ugly and irresponsible spawn of a weapon that leaves us perched perpetually on the precipice of extinction. But there is nothing “civil” about nuclear power.

At the dawn of the nuclear energy age, not a thought was given to the legacy of deadly radioactive waste it would produce. That can was kicked summarily down the road. Now we are far down that road and no solution has been arrived at, while we ignore the one obvious one: stop making more of it!

So now comes the news that the US wants to put nuclear power reactors on the Moon. 

In the news stories that followed the announcement, replete with the usual excitement about space exploration (never mind the cost and bellicose implications) there was not one single mention of the radioactive waste these reactors would produce. 

The problem, like the waste itself, will simply be kicked into some invisible crater on the dark side of the Moon.