Beyond Nuclear International

Half the US population favors the nuclear abolition treaty

By Lawrence Wittner

Although today’s public protests against nuclear weapons can’t compare to the major antinuclear upheavals of past decades, there are clear indications that most Americans reject the Trump administration’s nuclear weapons policies.

Since entering office in 2017, the Trump administration has withdrawn the United States from the nuclear agreement with Iran, scrapped the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces (INF) Treaty with Russia, and apparently abandoned plans to renew the New START Treaty with Russia.

After an overwhelming majority of the world’s nations agreed on a landmark UN Treaty on the Prohibitions of Nuclear Weapons in July 2017, the Trump administration quickly announced that it would never sign the treaty.

Popular support for a nuclear ban is widespread. (Photo: “Nuclear Summit protest” by vpickering is licensed under CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The only nuclear arms control measure that the Trump administration has pursued―an agreement by North Korea to abandon its nuclear weapons program―appears to have collapsed, at least in part because the Trump administration badly mishandled the negotiations.

Moreover, the Trump administration has not only failed to follow the nuclear arms control and disarmament policies of its Democratic and Republican predecessors, but has plunged into a renewed nuclear arms race with other nations by championing a $1.7 trillion program to refurbish the entire U.S. nuclear weapons complex.  Perhaps most alarming, it has again and again publicly threatened to initiate a nuclear war.

These policies are quite out of line with U.S. public opinion.

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The climate crisis is job one and we all need to sign up

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Jay Inslee staked his whole presidential campaign on one issue: climate change. His campaign began on March 1, 2019. By August 21, 2019, it was over.

Whatever the merits or not of Inslee as a candidate, the Democratic governor of the State of Washington was right about one thing. Climate change — or, more accurately, the climate crisis — is the single most important issue of our time. (Alongside the potential for instant annihilation under nuclear war.)

The presidential debates tussle endlessly and repetitively over health care, racial equality and immigration. Of course these issues are not unimportant, or at least they weren’t under normal conditions.

Nevertheless, we can argue until the cows come home about Medicare-For-All and gun control, but if we don’t address our climate emergency right away, none of that will matter. We will be in chaos, damage control and survival mode.

Widespread gun ownership will make climate chaos more dangerous. Lack of access to affordable health care means that the poor — who are already disproportionately impacted by climate change — won’t have the same access to the ensuing care needed as the climate emergency spawns its own health crisis.

Jay Inslee staked his entire presidential campaign on climate change. It didn’t work. (Photo:Phil Roeder/Wikimedia Commons)

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Leaving out “nuclear” doesn’t minimize the danger, or the cost

By Gordon Edwards, Michel Duguay and Pierre Jasmin

On Friday the 13th, September 2019, the St John Telegraph-Journal’s front page was dominated by what many gullible readers hoped will be a good luck story for New Brunswick  – making the province a booming and prosperous Nuclear Energy powerhouse for the entire world.

After many months of behind-the-scenes meetings throughout New Brunswick with utility company executives, provincial politicians, federal government representatives, township mayors and First Nations, two nuclear entrepreneurial companies laid out a dazzling dream promising thousands of jobs – nay, tens of thousands! – in New Brunswick, achieved by mass-producing and selling components for hitherto untested nuclear reactors called SMNRs (Small Modular Nuclear Reactors) which, it is hoped, will be installed around the world by the hundreds or thousands!

On December 1, the Saskatchewan and Ontario premiers hitched their hopes to the same nuclear dream machine through a dramatic tripartite Sunday press conference in Ottawa featuring the premiers of the provinces. The three amigos announced their desire to promote and deploy some version of Small Modular Nuclear Reactors in their respective provinces. All three claimed it as a strategy to fight climate change, and they want the federal government to pledge federal tax money to pay for the R&D. Perhaps it is a way of paying lip service to the climate crisis without actually achieving anything substantial; prior to the recent election, all three men were opposed to even putting a price on carbon emissions.

Motives other than climate protection may apply. Saskatchewan’s uranium is in desperate need of new markets, as some of the province’s most productive mines have been mothballed and over a thousand uranium workers have been laid off, due to the global decline in nuclear power. Meanwhile, Ontario has cancelled all investments in over 800 renewable energy projects – at a financial penalty of over 200 million dollars – while investing tens of billions of dollars to rebuild many of its geriatric nuclear reactors. This, instead of purchasing surplus water-based hydropower from Quebec at less than half the cost.

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Storm surges could see nuclear plants swamped

By Paul Brown

With sea level rise accelerating faster than thought, the risk is growing for coastal cities − and for nuclear power stations.

The latest science shows how the pace of sea level rise is speeding up, fuelling fears that not only millions of homes will be under threat, but that vulnerable installations like docks and power plants will be overwhelmed by the waves.

New research using satellite data over a 30-year period shows that around the year 2000 sea level rise was 2mm a year, by 2010 it was 3mm and now it is at 4mm, with the pace of change still increasing.

The calculations were made by a research student, Tadea Veng, at the Technical University of Denmark, which has a special interest in Greenland, where the icecap is melting fast. That, combined with accelerating melting in Antarctica and further warming of the oceans, is raising sea levels across the globe.

Storm surge, Clydebank, UK, January 2014. (Photo: Mark Harkin/Creative Commons)

The report coincides with a European Environment Agency (EEA) study whose maps show large areas of the shorelines of countries with coastlines on the North Sea will go under water unless heavily defended against sea level rise.

Based on the maps, newspapers like The Guardian in London have predicted that more than half of one key UK east coast provincial port − Hull − will be swamped. Ironically, Hull is the base for making giant wind turbine blades for use in the North Sea.

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Battle against dumping of radioactive mud set to resume

In 2018, French nuclear company, Électricé de France (EDF), dredged up radioactive mud around its coastal Hinkley Point C two reactor construction site in England, and dumped it in Welsh waters just off the coast of Cardiff. The operation caused considerable opposition, and the scientific integrity of the testing used to analyze the mud was strongly contested as we showed in our 2018 story on the first round of mud dumping.

Now, EDF is set to apply for a new license from Natural Resources Wales (NRW) to dredge up an additional 780,000 tonnes of sediment to make way for the installation of the Hinkley Point C cooling water intake system. This mud would again be dumped in Cardiff Bay. NRW sanctioned the earlier dump, claiming the levels of radioactivity in the mud were “well within legal limits and therefore suitable for disposal at sea.”

However, as one of our authors here, marine biologist, Tim Deere-Jones, argued at the time, the methodology and extent of the testing was set up to deliver a “no harm” conclusion and did not, literally, dig deep enough to uncover the true extent of contamination.

As EDF prepares its case to resume dumping, Deere-Jones and CND Cymru’s Brian Jones, once again challenge an operation that has serious health implications for nearby populations and wildlife.

By Tim Deere-Jones and Brian Jones

Data from the government funded “Radioactivity in Food and the Environment” (RIFE) reports for 2016, 2017 and 2018 show that EDF’s dredging of underwater sediment and shoreline construction work at Hinkley Point have resulted in significantly increased radioactivity levels in the environment.

EDF’s operations have disturbed radioactive particles from the Hinkley Point A and B nuclear power stations, which had been relatively contained within the sediments, resulting in them now being detected at far higher levels than before the dredging began.

The dredge and dump ship in action by night in 2018.

RIFE measured radioactivity at seven locations along the Somerset coast. The results indicate a significant increase in the distribution of radioactive sediments from the Bridgwater Bay and River Parrett Estuary construction activity into the wider regional marine environment.

This environment includes:

• the entire tidal corridor of the River Parrett, reaching 21 km inland and passing through the centre of the region’s busiest town, Bridgwater (where concentrations of cobalt-60 increased by 98% and concentrations of highly radioactive americium-241 rose by 139%);
• the shoreline at Stolford, where concentrations of americium-241 increased by 158%, and cobalt-60 by 209%. (Note: this site is approximately the same distance (2 km) from the area dredged, as the Cardiff shoreline is from the Cardiff bay Dumpsite);
• the shoreline east of Hinkley Point, including Burnham (where concentrations of americium-241 increased by 46%) and Weston super-Mare, 12 miles from Hinkley Point (where concentrations of cobalt-60 increased by 17%).

Note: Weston is the most easterly site sampled, and so it is possible that increases in concentrations occurred further along the coast.

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But the harm it causes should stir emotions

By Linda Pentz Gunter

Time was, that a woman suffering from menopause, pre-menstrual syndrome, a heightened libido or lack thereof,  was labeled “hysterical.” Her very real medical or psychological troubles were put down to an “emotional reaction.” For a while these symptoms were even attributed to a “wandering womb.” What? Yes, really.

For years, if you were a woman who opposed nuclear power, you were likely subjected to exactly the same treatment (although luckily not the one for the “wandering womb,” which I won’t go into here). How many of us were told, usually by men, that we were simply far too “emotional”? (Implication? We just didn’t understand the actual “science”.)

But as the long-term survival of nuclear power became ever more unlikely, the pro-nuclear forces ramped up their rhetoric to sweep everyone into the “hysteria” basket. That’s where you belonged if you dared to claim that nuclear power is too dangerous a technology to continue. A hysteric. A fear-mongerer. And, these days, a purveyor of “fake news.” You’ll find it everywhere. 

“Let’s see if there are any countries out there that did not get entirely persuaded by the anti-nuclear hysteria, and how that affected their carbon emissions,” wrote somebody called Anthony Watts on his blog after the 2011 Fukushima disaster.

Under the headline “There’s No Good Reason For Anti-Nuclear Hysteria”, Veit Ringel wrote in the spooky sounding Executive Intelligence Review, “If we do not guard against ideologically driven hysteria against modern, advanced nuclear technology . . . we will see that one day our granddaughters will be sewing T-shirts for the Chinese market.”  That conclusion sounds pretty hysterical to me. 

“A partial meltdown at Japan’s Fukushima Dai-ichi plant as a result of the largest recorded earthquake to hit Japan has set off a renewed bout of nuclear hysteria,” wrote John Downs in Business Insider.

Those illustrious scientists Penn & Teller called their takedown show on Helen Caldicott — who has certainly borne the brunt of the “too emotional” slur in our movement — “Penn & Teller vs Dr. Helen Caldicott, Candles & Anti-Nuclear Fearmongering.”

And here’s what well known columnist, Fareed Zacharia, just wrote in a February 14 column in the Washington Post that appeared to have been cribbed from the cliff notes of any number of pro-nuclear front groups:

“Fears about nuclear power, which Sanders clearly shares, are largely based on emotional reactions to the few high-profile accidents that have taken place over the past few decades.”

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