Michael Flynn’s role in Mideast nuclear project could compound legal issues

As reported by Michael Kranish, Tom Hamburger, and Carol D. Leonnig in the Washington Post.

As the article reports:

Flynn, who was fired by President Barack Obama from his post as director of the Defense Intelligence Agency in 2014, became involved in ACU’s project in 2015, as part of a group of former top military and diplomatic officials and nuclear experts the company assembled to help push its plan.

The idea: to build several dozen “proliferation-proof” nuclear power plants across Persian Gulf states. The plan relied heavily on Russian interests, which would help build the plants, as well as possibly take possession of spent fuel that could be used to build a nuclear weapon, according to people familiar with the project.

ACU’s managing director, Alex Copson, had been promoting variations of building nuclear facilities with Russian help for more than two decades, according to news reports. Copson did not respond to requests for comment, and ACU’s counsel, Don Gross, declined to comment.

But such a claim of nuclear weapons "proliferation-proof" atomic reators is a hollow, PR ploy. It flies in the face of basic physics.

As the prescient 2006 book, Insurmountable Risks: The Dangers of Using Nuclear Power to Combat Global Climate Change, by IEER's (Institute for Energy and Environmental Research) senior scientist, Dr. Brice Smith, made clear, nuclear weapons proliferation is an inevitable risk of nuclear power's expansion to regions like the Middle East (see Chapter 3, "Megawatts and Mushroom Clouds").