Beyond Nuclear International
Not so “super-duper”
Hypersonic nuclear-capable missiles would return us to the madness of the Cold War
By Karl Grossman
The United States is seeking to acquire “volumes of hundreds or even thousands” of nuclear-capable hypersonic missiles that are “stealthy” and can fly undetected at 3,600 miles per hour, five times faster than the speed of sound. In unveiling the plan, Trump called the new weapon a ‘super-duper’ missile. But with even less time to respond to a potential threat, will this lead to a deadly misjudgment?
Why so many? A Pentagon official is quoted in the current issue of Aviation Week & Space Technology as saying “we have to be careful we’re not building boutique weapons. If we build boutique weapons, we won’t—we’ll be very reluctant to—use them.”
The article in the aerospace industry trade journal is headlined: “Hypersonic Mass Production.” A subhead reads: “Pentagon Forms Hypersonic Industry ‘War Room.’”
On March 19, 2020, the U.S. conducted its first hypersonic missile test from its Pacific Missile Range Facility on Kauai, Hawaii.
“Fast and Furiously Accurate” is the title of an article about hypersonic missiles written by a U.S. Navy officer which appeared last year on a U.S. Naval Institute website.
The piece declares that by “specifically integrating hypersonic weapons with U.S. Navy submarines, the United States may gain an edge in developing the fastest, most precise weapons the world has ever seen.”
Read MoreBut not to the nuclear industry
“Black communities get more promises than jobs — and they get pollution and they get sick”
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Systemic racism in the nuclear industrial complex has endured for decades. Every community of color has been affected. As we confront the wider impact of centuries of racism in the US, we take a closer look specifically at discrimination against African Americans in the nuclear power sector.
The shackles of slavery may be gone, but there is now a knee on the neck of African American voices, whether literal or metaphorical, when it comes to challenging injustice. And it is there when confronting the bias of the nuclear power industry and other lethal polluters. It is quite deliberately there. It is there not only to oppress — and in the case of George Floyd to kill — but to silence and disenfranchise. To stunt movements for change.
Protest poster by Mateusz Sambor
That is perhaps how the NAACP’s A.C. Garner, felt after the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) dismissed black concerns over a proposed new nuclear power plant in Mississippi in 2005. It was, he said, like “posting a ‘WHITES ONLY’ sign on the hearing room door.”
Garner’s statement was a reaction to a January 19, 2005 decision by the NRC to grant permission for a second nuclear reactor to be built at the Grand Gulf site in Mississippi. It was to be built in the poorest county in the state, itself the poorest state in the union.
It would join Grand Gulf Unit 1, opened in 1985 in the Claiborne County city of Port Gibson, and would be known as Grand Gulf Unit 3, as all there is of Unit 2 is an empty concrete pad— the plant owners, Entergy, having asked the NRC to revoke that planned reactor’s license in 1991.
Grand Gulf 1, the largest single unit in the country, with an output of around 1,500 MW, is located in a community that is 87% African American, with a poverty rate of 46% according to census data. The median household income in Claiborne County is $24,601 per year. At least 35% of the population depends on Medicaid. The Covid-19 infection rate there is still headed on an upward trajectory.
Back in 2005, the county was already ill prepared for a health crisis of any sort. It had just one crumbling hospital, struggling to meet the needs of a deprived community and with zero capacity to handle a nuclear emergency. Evacuation routes were washed out and impassible. The police force was completely under-equipped.
“The county doesn’t even have a hospital that’s open 24 hours, and there’s only one fire station in the entire county,” Rose Johnson, chairwoman of the Mississippi Chapter of the Sierra Club, told the Jackson Free Press at the time. “The situation should send chills down the spines of anyone who lives within a 100-mile radius of Port Gibson.”
Why such deprivation? Why weren’t Port Gibson and Claiborne County flush with the tax revenues the plant should have brought in? Because in 1986, fearing price hikes for the “too cheap to meter” electricity generated by Grand Gulf nuclear Unit 1, Entergy succeeded in getting the predominantly white Mississippi legislature to pass a bill to redistribute more than 70% of those tax revenues to 47 other counties in the state. It is the only reactor community in the country that does not reap the lion’s share of its nuclear plant tax dollars.
The law left an already poor black community even more desperately deprived. But it pre-empted any complaints about increased electricity costs from whiter communities elsewhere in the state.
From uranium mining to Covid-19
Assaulted by massacres, smallpox, uranium mining, and pipelines Native Tribes are standing up for their rights on COVID-19 protection
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Native Americans have largely been left out of the conversation about COVID-19 even though they have some of the highest infection rates in the country. They’ve been here before; with massacres, smallpox, pipelines, and the ravages of uranium mining whose radioactive releases compromise immune systems.
“We have an 80% unemployment rate,” said Milo Yellow Hair, who lives on the Pine Ridge reservation in South Dakota, one of nine which make up the Lakota Nation.
I made him repeat it. That was eight zero. Not one eight. Eighty. In America. Today.
It’s a symbol, to put it mildly, of several centuries of neglect, discrimination and persecution.
The Lakota Nation today contends with a chronic and widespread lack, not only of employment, but of other fundamental rights like running water, electricity, and adequate health care. Its communities are beset with high rates of poverty, alcoholism, drug use and domestic violence. These constitute the legacy of occupations, displacements, massacres, smallpox, fights for freedom crushed, and the imposition of ecosystem-destroying oil and gas pipelines.
Most significantly, perhaps, it is an inevitable result of the harmful legacy of exposures from uranium mining, unique to Native American communities, and which have had a devastating effect on health.
And now there’s COVID-19.
And yet, while some media attention has focused on the disproportionate COVID-19 infection and death rates among African American and Latinx populations, there was almost no mention at the outset of its effect on Native American communities.
Stop EDF’s silent spring!
Birds and other wildlife would be eliminated by EDF two-reactor project on English coast
By Linda Pentz Gunter
Two new nuclear reactors are threatened for the English east coast. The EDF project would destroy precious ecosystems and drive away already rare wildlife. Activists there are now raising funds for scientific expertise to help block any further progress on the reactors, and also, in a separate appeal, to continue the legal fight.
Did you ever hear a bittern boom?
It sounds like a question Dr. Suess might have asked. But that sound, and the bird that makes it, is one of the critically important losses about to befall coastal Suffolk in the UK if French nuclear firm, EDF, continues to press forward with its plans for a new reactor there. The project is called Sizewell C.
Or more accurately, plows ahead. Because what EDF is proposing, and so far not nearly enough people are opposing, is to literally plow under some of the most precious, fragile and unique flora and fauna anywhere in the world. In exchange, it will plant the technically flawed and financially failing fiasco that is its European Pressurized Reactor, directly on the beach there. Two of them in fact. As it is already doing at the Somerset UK site — Hinkley C. To disastrous effects on the surrounding countryside.
We touched on this threat earlier this year in another article. As I wrote there: “The first thing that is likely to happen is that EDF will raze Coronation Wood. It will do this, not because it needs to now. It is not even certain that Sizewell C will go ahead. It will do this for show. The show in question is to prove to the world that the French nuclear industry is alive and well.”
Fortunately, on June 3, Suffolk activists won a crucial round in court that will allow a judicial review of the decision by East Suffolk Council in September 2019 to grant EDF planning permission to cut down the 100 year-old Coronation Wood. The judge granted permission for the challenge to proceed on the basis it is arguable that there were deficiencies within the Environmental Impact Assessment relied upon by the Council in making their planning decision. (Update: As the allowed challenge forced the exclusion of the argument that the proposed development did not satisfy the standard of need required by law to justify a major development in an Area of Outstanding Natural Beauty, TASC has now also launched an appeal on those grounds.)
The otter, a remarkable comeback success story, could be driven away by EDF’s Sizewell C project. (Photo courtesy of Suffolk Coastal Friends of the Earth)
This is a crucial development because, if EDF is not stopped, and Coronation Wood goes, the company will then proceed to desecrate and destroy a remarkable landscape that abuts and traverses the beautiful Minsmere Nature Reserve, managed by the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds.
Space Force is no laughing matter
What started as “a joke” his now deadly serious; and just plain deadly
Beyond Nuclear has been publishing a series of informational booklets that, taken together, comprise The Case Against Nuclear Power: Facts and Arguments from A-Z. To date, we have focused on nuclear power on Earth. But with Trump’s ominous creation of the U.S. Space Force, the possibility of nuclear-powered weapons — for the purposes of war — moved one, or possibly several, steps closer. Accordingly, we have shifted our horizons to include the heavens. Our newest handbook is about the Space Force.
Space Force has just launched. On Netflix. It’s a reboot of a chronically bad 1978 TV movie of the same name. The older version featured a crew of astronauts tasked with keeping “the galaxy from getting worse”. It was a comedy, or trying to be. So is the new series, starring Steve Carell, or at least it, too, is trying to be. (If only they had let Armando Iannucci write it).
(None of this is to be confused with the Saturday launch of SpaceX, another topic and possibly for another time).
The Carell series endeavors to poke fun at the real Space Force, an expensive and dangerous reality created by Trump last December. But even that Buffoon in Chief said the idea for an actual US. Space Force started out as a joke.
The Space Force will be wildly expensive and could lead to war — and the use of nuclear weapons — in space. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons)
Consequently, when space is viewed as “a warfighting domain” that could utilize nuclear-powered battle platforms and lasers, we have no choice but to extend our opposition to nuclear power beyond Earth’s boundaries.
The nuclear weaponizing of space has, to date, captured too little attention among politicians and the press. The new Beyond Nuclear booklet — The U.S. Space Force and the dangers of nuclear power and nuclear war in space— is intended, in some small way, to help redress that imbalance. You will find it on our Handbooks page.
Make Nuclear Great Again?
The claim that nuclear power is needed for national security is a masked money-grab
By Linda Pentz Gunter
The US Department of Energy’s assertions about Russian and Chinese supremacy in the nuclear sector is reminiscent of the “Commie plot” rhetoric of the 1950s. But it’s a thinly disguised ploy to feed at the federal subsidies trough and revive a moribund industry.
A few years ago I attended two days of the Nuclear Deterrence Summit, held just outside Washington, DC. In my defense, I’ll say it was a necessity. I really wanted to get inside how these people think. There was plenty of talk about the need for nuclear weapons, their range and potency, all done with a calm equilibrium devoid of conscience. It was chilling.
But it was also the theatre of the absurd. At one point there was actually talk about a “missile gap.” The Russians were getting ahead. This must be stopped. Was I on the set of a remake of Dr. Strangelove? Was this General ‘Buck’ Turgidson railing about “commie plots” and “mineshaft gaps”?
Life, as it turns out, is routinely stranger than any fiction. Turgidson is still with us, and he has extended his brief to include “civilian” nuclear power plants in the competition with the “Ruskies” and now, the Chinese.
U.S. Energy Secretary, Danny Ray Brouillette, whose parents, in christening him, must have intended a future for him at the Grand Ole Opry, recently bemoaned on air that “We’ve lost our leadership both on the technology side and on the market side… to the Russians and the Chinese”. That vanquished pre-eminence in both the development and export of nuclear technology, is “a national defense issue.”
So great is this national emergency, that I received an alert in my email inbox from the DOE trumpeting a new report that aims to set this foundering ship to rights.
The US Department of Energy announces its new plan to make nuclear great again.
Beyond Nuclear International 