Beyond Nuclear International

Lab should explore credible alternatives say Nuclear Watch New Mexico and Tewa Women United

The Los Alamos National Laboratory plans to begin large releases of radioactive tritium gas any time after June 2, 2025. The only roadblock to the Lab’s plans is that it needs a “Temporary Authorization” from the New Mexico Environment Department to do so.

Reasons why the New Mexico Environment Department should deny LANL’s request are:

1. The state Environment Department has a duty to protect the New Mexican public. As it states, “Our mission is to protect and restore the environment and to foster a healthy and prosperous New Mexico for present and future generations.” 

2. Why the rush? LANL explicitly admits there is no urgency. According to the Lab’s publicly-released “Questions and Answers” in response to “What is the urgency for this project?” “There is no urgency for this project beyond the broader mission goals to reduce onsite waste liabilities.” 

3. In addition, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) admits that the end time frame for action is 2028, not 2025. Therefore, there is time for deliberate consideration.

4. Contrary to NMED’s Resource Conservation and Recovery Act permit for LANL, the Lab has not fulfilled its duty to inform the public via NMED of possible alternatives to its planned tritium releases. According to Tewa Women United, “LANL has told EPA there are 53 alternatives; that list of alternatives, initially requested in 2022, has not yet been disclosed. Tewa Women United has repeatedly asked LANL to provide the public with that list.” 

Why would the US, Ukraine and Russia contemplate this when renewables could answer energy needs faster and more safely, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

The Trump administration has been dangling all sorts of offers before the embattled (literally) Ukrainian government lately. These include a US grab for Ukraine’s minerals in exchange for continued support of its war with Russia, and asking Ukraine to serve as an overseas prison for those residents of the US deemed “illegals” and “criminals” by Trump’s (in)justice department. 

Now, the White House is apparently suggesting that the US should first rebuild and then operate the damaged six-reactor Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant in the southeast of Ukraine, the area of some of the most intense fighting between Ukrainian and Russian forces.

This bizarre proposal is detailed in a new column by the director of the Nonproliferation Policy Education Center, Henry Sokolski, in the May 6, 2025 edition of The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. Along with the question of whose nuclear plant Zaporizhzhia actually is, or who damaged it, Sokolski also asks just how complex and expensive restoring the plant would be and whether it is even needed?

In reading through the list of challenges to a restart that Sokolski outlines, the answer to that last question becomes increasingly more obvious: No. It is glaringly evident that nuclear power is the wrong choice for Ukraine at this point (and, we would argue, always has been).

Renewable energy can take a couple of years — and in some cases just a few months — to build and bring into operation. Given Ukraine’s previous reliance on nuclear energy for around 55% of the country’s electricity (before the war interrupted the flow), developing an energy supplier that can come on fast and doesn’t present a safety risk (under war conditions or at any other time) is, as they say here, a “no brainer”.

Like the ghost of Armageddon Future, former Senator Jon Kyl keeps reappearing in nuclear debates, writes William Hartung

A primary responsibility of the government is, of course, to keep us safe. Given that obligation, you might think that the Washington establishment would be hard at work trying to prevent the ultimate catastrophe—a nuclear war. But you would be wrong.

A small, hardworking contingent of elected officials is indeed trying to roll back the nuclear arms race and make it harder for such world-ending weaponry ever to be used again, including stalwarts like Sen. Ed Markey (D-Mass.), Rep. John Garamendi (D-Calif.), and other members of the Congressional Nuclear Weapons and Arms Control Working Group. But they face ever stiffer headwinds from a resurgent network of nuclear hawks who want to build more kinds of nuclear weapons and ever more of them. And mind you, that would all be in addition to the Pentagon’s current plans for spending up to $2 trillion over the next three decades to create a whole new generation of nuclear weapons, stoking a dangerous new nuclear arms race.

There are many drivers of this push for a larger, more dangerous arsenal—from the misguided notion that more nuclear weapons will make us safer to an entrenched network of companies, governmental institutions, members of Congress, and policy pundits who will profit (directly or indirectly) from an accelerated nuclear arms race. One indicator of the current state of affairs is the resurgence of former Arizona Sen. Jon Kyl, who spent 18 years in Congress opposing even the most modest efforts to control nuclear weapons before he went on to work as a lobbyist and policy advocate for the nuclear weapons complex.

Trump is trying to rebuild the Iran nuclear deal he destroyed, then declare personal triumph, writes Linda Pentz Gunter

There is deep irony in the current efforts by the Trump administration to secure a nuclear deal with Iran, given it was the previous Trump administration that broke a fully functioning agreement already in place to ensure Iran did not develop nuclear weapons. 

The JCPOA — or Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action — also known colloquially as the Iran nuclear deal — was agreed in Vienna in June 2015 between Iran and China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. It involved significant monitoring and verification of Iran’s nuclear enrichment activities to ensure it remained within the confines of commercial grade. It also lifted UN Security Council sanctions on Iran as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to its nuclear program.

But under the first Donald Trump presidency, the White House effectively tore up the agreement, rendering it worthless when the US withdrew in May 2018. In his classically hyperbolic style, Trump labeled the JCPOA “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

The JCPOA was agreed in Vienna in June 2015 between Iran and China, France, Germany, the Russian Federation, the United Kingdom and the United States. It involved significant monitoring and verification of Iran’s uranium enrichment activities to ensure it remained within the confines of commercial grade. It also lifted UN Security Council sanctions on Iran as well as multilateral and national sanctions related to its nuclear program.

But Trump withdrew the US from the agreement in 2018, effectively ending it, and calling it at the time “one of the worst and most one-sided transactions the United States has ever entered into.”

The hype about massive data centers delivered by nuclear companies eager to power them, is probably just that, writes M.V. Ramana

One bright spot amidst all the terrible news the last couple of months was the market’s reaction to DeepSeek, with BigTech firms like Nvidia and Microsoft and Google taking major hits in their capitalizations. Billionaires Nvidia’s Jensen Huang and Oracle’s Larry Ellison—who had, just a few days back, been part of Donald Trump’s first news conference—lost a combined 48 billion dollars in paper money. As a good friend of mine, who shall go unnamed because of their use of an expletive, said “I hate all AI, but it’s hard to not feel joy that these asshats are losing a lot of money.”

Another set of companies lost large fractions of their stock valuations: U.S. power, utility and natural gas companies. Electric utilities like Constellation, Vistra and Talen had gained stock value on the basis of the argument that there would be a major increase in demand for energy due to data centers and AI, allowing them to invest in new power plants and expensive nuclear projects (such as small modular reactors), and profit from this process. [The other source of revenue, at least in the case of Constellation, was government largesse.] The much lower energy demand from DeepSeek, at least as reported, renders these plans questionable at best.

Remembering Past Fanfare

But we have been here before. Consider, for example, the arguments made for building the V. C. Summer nuclear project in South Carolina. That project came out of the hype cycle during the first decade of this century, during one of the many so-called nuclear renaissances that have been regularly announced since the 1980s. [In 1985, for example, Oak Ridge National Laboratory Director Alvin Weinberg predicted such a renaissance and a second nuclear era—that is yet to materialize.] During the hype cycle in the first decade of this century, utility companies proposed constructing more than 30 reactors, of which only four proceeded to construction. Two of these reactors were in South Carolina.

As with most nuclear projects, public funding was critical. The funding came through the 2005 Energy Policy Act, the main legislative outcome from President George W. Bush’s push for nuclear power, which offered several incentives, including production tax credits that were valued at approximately $2.2 billion for the South Carolina nuclear plant project at V. C. Summer.

The justification offered by the CEO of the South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to the state’s Public Service Commission was the expectation that the company’s energy sales would increase by 22 percent between 2006 and 2016, and by nearly 30 percent by 2019.