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ARTICLE ARCHIVE

Nuclear Power

Nuclear power cannot address climate change effectively or in time. Reactors have long, unpredictable construction times are expensive - at least $12 billion or higher per reactor. Furthermore, reactors are sitting-duck targets vulnerable to attack and routinely release - as well as leak - radioactivity. There is so solution to the problem of radioactive waste.

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Entries by admin (883)

Wednesday
Oct092019

10/9/19: Beyond Nuclear on Sputnik International's "Loud & Clear"

Wednesday’s regular segment, Beyond Nuclear, is about nuclear issues, including weapons, energy, waste, and the future of nuclear technology in the United States. Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear, and Sputnik news analyst and producer Nicole Roussell, join the show.

Listen to the audio recording here:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/beyond-nuclear-with-kevin-kamps_71

Tuesday
Oct082019

Karl Grossman's "Crimes Against the Future" screening at New Earth International Film Festival

Karl Grossman is a professor of journalism at the State University of New York/College at Old Westbury who has specialized in investigative reporting for nearly 50 years. He is the host of the TV program “Enviro Close-Up,” the writer and presenter of numerous TV documentaries and the author of six books.The New Earth International Film Festival has selected “Crimes Against The Future” for screening. The documentary is hosted and was written by Karl Grossman (photo, left), a member of the board of Beyond Nuclear. Frank Melli is its executive producer and director.

“Crimes Against The Future” investigates environmental and human rights crimes currently being committed—from climate change to the dangers of nuclear power—and puts into perspective what they mean for future generations. The documentary was aired nationally in the United States last month on Free Speech TV.

The New Earth International Film Festival is based in Poland and will run between October 16 and 20. The documentary can be viewed on YouTube at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6sYrFEBBDnE

Featured in it are: Bianca Jagger of the Bianca Jagger Human Rights Foundation; science broadcaster Dr. David Suzuki; Dr. Helen Caldicott, a founder of Physicians for Social Responsibility, and Beyond Nuclear's Founding President; best-selling author Dr. Michio Kaku, professor of theoretical physics at the City University of New York; Derek Osborn, president of Stakeholders Forum; Randy Hayes of Foundation of Earth; Hunter Lovins of Natural Capital Solutions; Brice Lalonde, former environmental minister of France; and environmental journalist Barbara Y.E. Pyle.

Saturday
Oct052019

Vigilance needed against nuclear snake oil salesmen!

The nuclear power industry's PR machine has long tried to cynically hitch its wagon to the climate crisis. As but one recent example, WAMU (NPR's Washington, D.C. station) has been, yet again, running regular Nuclear Energy Institute, NuScale (a so-called Small Modular Reactor vendor), and other atomic sales pitches, during major climate protection events in the nation's capital. Unfortunately, those who should know better seem to be falling for it. The nuclear power lobby has long had its way with Congress, the White House, and federal agencies like NRC, DOE, EPA, etc. But the likes of climate scientist James Hansen, and even 350.org co-founder Bill McKibben, have not only fallen for it, they have joined the promotions. Even CNN host Van Jones, Obama's green jobs czar, recently praised U.S. Senator Cory Booker (D-NJ), a presidential candidate, for his "brave" stand in support of nuclear power. This, despite Booker's close association with Holtec International, whose CEO made racist statements against his own African American and Puerto Rican workforce in Camden, NJ, just a year ago, and whose consolidated interim storage facility for 173,600 metric tons of highly radioactive, irradiated nuclear fuel in southeastern New Mexico targets already heavily burdened Hispanic communities, not far from the Mescalero Apache Indian Reservation. As former EPA environmental justice head, Mustafa Ali, said on a Sept. 5, 2019 Democracy Now! interview, the high-level radioactive waste shipments to such targeted, environmentally unjust dump-sites out West, would themselves pass through countless low income, people of color communities en route, making this yet another environmental racism burden. As Beyond Nuclear founding president Helen Caldicott, to be given a PSR lifetime achievement award next month in D.C., put it 15 years ago, nuclear power is not the answer. As Dr. Brice Smith of IEER put it in 2006, nuclear power costs too much, and takes too long, to solve the climate crisis, and has a long list of insurmountable risks all its own, from nuclear weapons proliferation, to catastrophic releases of hazardous radioactivity, to the unsolved radioactive waste dilemma. And as Dr. Arjun Makhijani of IEER put it in 2007, carbon-free and nuclear-free is the roadmap for U.S., and even global, energy policy. Nuclear power cannot be allowed to hijack the Green New Deal! If it does, it would be an irreversible, fatal mistake. It will not solve the climate crisis. But it would waste the precious resources -- in time, and money -- needed to implement genuine clean energy solutions to the climate crisis, namely renewables like wind and solar, and energy efficiency, before it is too late.

Thursday
Oct032019

The madness of nuclear power in Saudi Arabia

U.S. Energy Secretary Rick Perry (with sword), alongside Saudi energy ministerOne year has passed since the brutal murder, and macabre dismemberment, of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi, at the Saudi Arabian consulate in Istanbal, Turkey, at the hands of a high-level Saudi regime death squad. Official U.S. and United Nations reports implicate Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman in having ordered the assassination. The genocidal Saudi-led war and siege of Yemen continues, with Houthi rebel attacks igniting Saudi oil fields deep within the country, and causing recent large-scale Saudi coalition casualties at the front lines on its border. Is this a place where nuclear power plants should be built? Bennett Ramberg warned in 1985 that nuclear power plants could serve as pre-deployed weapons for an enemy, if they chose to attack them, veritable dirty bombs of immense size. In fact, Houthi forces previously fired a warning shot across the bow at a pre-operational nuclear plant in United Arab Emirates; the atomic reactor has since fired up, unfortunately. Nobel Peace Prize winner Mohamed ElBaradei, while still serving as Director General of the International Atomic Energy Agency, warned that the reason Middle Eastern countries like Saudi Arabia were pursuing nuclear power, was in order to have a pathway to nuclear weapons, if they chose to use it that way. In fact, MBS has admitted as much on a CBS "60 Minutes" interview. Despite the inherent risk that uranium enrichment and/or plutonium reprocessing can be used for nuclear weapons production, the Trump administration has continuously tried to do end runs around congressional safeguards against nuclear weapons proliferation, in order to transfer U.S. nuclear technology and know how to Saudi Arabia. U.S. Rep. Elijah Cummings, chairman of the House Government Oversight Committee, has reported that corporate and personal greed are a prime motivation, despite the risks. Scandalously, the same Canadian firm that bailed out Jared Kushner's family from its billion dollar, bad real estate investment at 666 5th Avenue in Manhattan, also owns Westinghouse Nuclear, which is vying to sell atomic reactors to Saudi Arabia; Kushner has been Trump's point person in all things Saudi Arabian. But Trump's Energy Secretary, Rick Perry, has also met with his Saudi counterparts, regarding nuclear commerce, including recently (see photo, above left, of Perry in Saudi-style robe, holding a sword, shown with Saudi Minister of Energy, Khalid al-Falih; Perry is now implicated in the Trump impeachment inquiry as well, as reported by the Washington Post, having led the Trump administration delegation to Ukrainian President Zelensky's inauguration.) As decades-long, leading congressional nuclear watchdog, U.S. Senator Ed Markey (D-MA), pointed out a decade ago, "Saudi Arabia is the Saudi Arabia of solar power!" Nuclear power makes no sense there, from a safety, security, and non-proliferation perspective. Saudi nuclear power risks an arms race with Israel (which already has nuclear weapons), Iran (there are fears it could use its nuclear power industry to break out into nuclear weapons production), and perhaps other countries. As U.S. Representative Brad Sherman (D-CA) has put it, "A country that can't be trusted with a bone saw shouldn't be trusted with nuclear weapons."
Wednesday
Oct022019

10/2/19: Beyond Nuclear on Sputnik International's "Loud & Clear"

Wednesday’s regular segment, Beyond Nuclear, is about nuclear issues, including weapons, energy, waste, and the future of nuclear technology in the United States. Kevin Kamps, the Radioactive Waste Watchdog at the organization Beyond Nuclear, and Sputnik news analyst and producer Nicole Roussell, join the show.

Listen to the audio recording here:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/radiosputnik/beyond-nuclear-with-kevin-kamps_70