Note: Continuation with Chapter 5 of my in progress novel “El Nuclear Diablo” has been postponed to next Sunday.)
Thanks for reading All Things Nuclear! Subscribe for free to receive new posts and support my work.
Our shallow and virtually useless dependence on human law and how easily cast-off treaties and agreements mean nothing between or among rival Nations, and how we depend on something called ‘deterrence’, which is little more than a mutually applicable governmental political and military money sink paid for by each country’s working taxpayers while we build more nuclear weapons for the sake of ‘deterrence’, constantly followed by more costly and more powerful nuclear weapons. Such inanity cannot last forever, of course.
The Gibran free verse presented below about truths and lies is an excellent existential truth about untruths! Gibran, no doubt unintentionally, clearly demonstrates how our human world functions these days, and his verse is incidentally an axiom of the threats of nuclear war. Our world leaders of nuclear armed Nations, use lies as threats to other leaders of nuclear armed Nations in order to avoid nuclear war out of imposing fear, which the governmental, military, and political worlds of today call “deterrence”. So it is that bald-faced lies rather than honest common sense apparently protect us (at least for now) from Armageddon! ~llaw
(Thank you Deborah Hart Yemm for your brilliant post at a time when the world needs it most!)
“The Lie said to the Truth-
Let’s take a bath together,
the well water is very nice.
The Truth, still suspicious,
tested the water and found out
it really was nice.
So they got naked and bathed.
But suddenly, the Lie leapt out of the water
and fled, wearing the clothes of the Truth.
The Truth, furious, climbed out of the well
to get her clothes back.
But the World, upon seeing the naked Truth,
looked away, with anger and contempt.
Poor Truth returned to the well and disappeared
forever, hiding her shame.
Since then, the Lie runs around the world,
dressed as the Truth, and society is very happy.
Because the world has no desire to know
the naked Truth.”
~ Gibran Khalil Gibran
Truth Coming Out Of The Well Painting by Jean-Léon Gérome, 1896
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in this evening’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
Which is all well and good, except for when these things … We also knew a thing or two about low level flying in SAC. … payload (nuclear), 1 free-fall …
This is another recent update on the extremely tense issue in Ukraine centered around the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), already located in an ongoing war zone, with the possibility of turning even more consequential as a war weapon of mass destruction, which could spread into European countries and around the globe creating serious aggravating already frazzled tensions relative to global war, or, quite logically, World War III. Therefore, and also because the IAEA has overseers onsite at the ZNPP itself, I will frequently be posting the IAEA’s updates concerning this frightening situation without any personal comment, except reminders that the situation is grave . . . ~llaw
Update 231 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
Update 231 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
06 Jun 2024
53/2024
Vienna, Austria
The challenging nuclear safety and security situation in Ukraine was in the spotlight again this week at the International Atomic Energy Agency, with its Board of Governors discussing recent developments detailed in a new IAEA report and Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi meeting the country’s energy minister.
Director General Grossi and Energy Minister German Galushchenko discussed the IAEA’s ongoing efforts to support nuclear safety and security in Ukraine in their meeting today on the sidelines of the regularly scheduled June Board session at IAEA headquarters, where the Director General earlier in the week made clear his continued deep concerns about the situation.
Nuclear safety and security remains especially precarious at the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), and is potentially also fragile elsewhere in Ukraine following attacks on its energy infrastructure in recent months, including on electricity sub-stations which are vital in providing off-site power to the operating nuclear power stations, as well as to the ZNPP, Director General Grossi said after his talks with Minister Galushchenko.
Nuclear power plants (NPPs) need reliable access to off-site power in order to cool their reactors and for other essential nuclear safety and security functions, as underlined in the Seven Pillars of Nuclear Safety and Security. However, Ukraine’s electricity grid has been severely impacted by the conflict, with the ZNPP repeatedly losing connections to all its power lines.
“For the Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant in particular, the external power situation remains extremely vulnerable, prone to frequent outages. But it is also a wider concern in the current circumstances, where a loss of off-site power event has the potential to be even more serious given the higher nuclear fuel temperatures for reactors in operation in Ukraine. We are continuing to follow the situation very closely in this regard, as I also informed Minister Galushchenko in today’s meeting,” Director General Grossi said.
Director General Grossi, who had met with Rosatom head Alexey Likhachev in the Russian city of Kaliningrad last week, reiterated to Ukraine’s energy minister that there was an understanding that the ZNPP would not be re-started as long as nuclear safety and security remained in jeopardy due to the conflict.
“In these circumstances, operating this major nuclear plant would not be advisable,” he said.
Ahead of this week’s Board meeting, the Director General issued the 11th report on nuclear safety, security and safeguards in Ukraine since the conflict began in February 2022, covering developments in the three months to 24 May this year.
At the ZNPP this week, the IAEA team of experts stationed at the site has continued to conduct regular walkdowns to monitor nuclear safety and security at the plant.
At the same time, the team has continued to hear explosions some distance away from the site, a regular reminder of the ZNPP’s frontline location.
A year after the destruction of the downstream Kakhovka dam disrupted the ZNPP’s supplies of cooling water, the team visited the site’s cooling pond and observed that its height was almost 1.5 metres below the level before the dam was destroyed.
The plant, whose six reactors are all in cold shutdown, receives the cooling water it needs, for the reactors in the current shutdown state, from 11 groundwater wells that were built to supply about 250 m3 of water per hour to the site’s sprinkler ponds.
The IAEA team continues to closely monitor the maintenance activities at the plant, another area highlighted by the Director General as posing a potential risk to nuclear safety and security in his Board statement on Monday.
As part of these activities, the IAEA experts visited the 750 kilovolt (kV) open switchyard and discussed ongoing maintenance on the relay protections for the transformer of reactor unit 2, among other activities.
They saw that some of the switchyard components, for one of the 750 kV lines, that were damaged in 2022 had been dismantled. However, the ZNPP is not currently planning to complete repairs, at this time, as the line itself remains unavailable due to damage sustained earlier in the conflict, away from the site. The ZNPP had four 750 kV lines available before the conflict, but only one is remaining.
The IAEA experts were informed that western-supplied switchyard equipment, installed before the conflict, remained in good condition. The ZNPP also stated that some spare parts remain available on site from western supplies and, if required, it can order similar equipment through suppliers from the Russian Federation.
The IAEA team of experts also visited the two fresh fuel storage facilities and the turbine building of unit 6, once again without being granted access to the western side of the building.
In addition, the ZNPP informed the IAEA experts on the status of its on- and off-site radiation monitoring stations. The team was informed that all four on-site radiation monitoring stations are operational, but that three of the 14 off-site stations remain damaged as a result of military activities in 2022.
The ZNPP said that manual radiation monitoring measurements are also carried out, and that there are plans to purchase new radiation monitoring stations consistent with the regulations of the Russian Federation, and a mobile radiation measurement laboratory for use in case of a nuclear or radiological emergency.
The IAEA experts present at Ukraine’s other NPPs – Khelmnytskyy, Rivne and South Ukraine – and the Chornobyl site continue to perform routine walkdowns and assess nuclear safety and security. The teams reported that nuclear safety and security is being maintained despite the effects of the ongoing conflict, including air raid alarms on several days over the past week.
One reactor unit at each of the Rivne and the South Ukraine NPPs were in shutdown over the last week for planned maintenance and refuelling, while one other unit at the South Ukraine NPP is in planned outage.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in this evening’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
MARTÍNEZ: All right. So what does advertising for HealthCare.gov tell us about the two presidential candidates? SIMMONS-DUFFIN: Well, a lot. So we can …
The Russian official said that as long as Russia’s existence is not threatened, Moscow “will never use nuclear weapons.” “If there is a real threat to …
This absurd cartoon, as well as the critical article, misses the more direct point of Annie Jacobsen’s new novel “Nuclear War: A Scenario” mistakenly believing that mankind is invincible because we seem to think that nuclear war is based only on the logic(?) of what “human beings plan to do to each other for human reasons”.
Of course the “problem is us”, and Amy Jacobsen, the author who is being criticized in the posted article below, obviously and clearly recognizes that. So do I get it, and there is no reason to dwell on it by turning a 400 page book up to 800 to explain the well known intellectual ‘frailty’ of misguided human beings who believe we are far more intelligent than we are. The author, Matthew Petti, has a very good head on his own shoulders, and he knows, like Ms. Jacobsen knows, that the we ‘humans’ foolishly built and build these atomic/nuclear bombs and also build nuclear power plants, which is just as arrogantly stupid. And we believe we are in control of it all when we have no clue.
Is Matthew Petti being overly critical and tough on Ms. Jacobsen for writing such a powerful book that more than gets its point across? Or is it just typical male ego making chest-beating noise. He uses the word ‘fails’ in a few places about how Jacobsen’s book, which is not science fiction by the way, and which helps to explain why she doesn’t concentrate on the misled villains and their actions as much as Petti would like her to. I can say I already was well-aware of the misguided ‘villains’ and who the instigators were and are, and I have no doubt that Ms. Jacobsen does, too.
In support of what Mr. Petti has to say, he clearly draws the same conclusion as Ms. Jacobsen, who says it in a more direct and matter-of-fact way, only implying that we are egotistically playing a game of chess that has never been played before, pretending we know how.
And, as for the turtle cartoon, there is no way to “find shelter”, as Annie Jacobsen so clearly points out, in a nuclear war — nor a seriously “damaged” nuclear power plant. ~llaw
The most unsettling book I have ever read is “The 2020 Commission Report on the North Korean Attacks Against the United States,” by Jeffrey Lewis.
As the title suggests, it’s an alternative history in which the diplomacy between Donald Trump and Kim Jong Un goes terribly wrong. While Lewis criticizes Trump and Kim’s style of governing, the story is not about a mad king destroying the world. Instead, it demonstrates how governments concerned with their own interests and survival can misread each other’s signals and accidentally escalate beyond the point of no return.
A new book, “Nuclear War: A Scenario” by Annie Jacobsen, promises to provide the same kind of realistic, unsettling scenario. Based on dozens of interviews with former officials, Jacobsen plots out minute by minute and second by second how a nuclear exchange would happen.
She illuminates — at least as far as her sources are legally allowed to — the processes that govern American and Russian nuclear command and control. The reader learns what alarms would go off in which control rooms, what orders would have to be spoken to which officials, and which keys would have to be turned in which silos during an apocalypse. It is supposed to worry the readers.
The book falls short of that goal. It treats nuclear war as an incomprehensible horror, rather than something human beings plan to do to each other for human reasons, and focuses on the most unlikely scenarios. For all the action-movie details about nuclear weapons being deployed, Jacobsen fails to explain how or why a nuclear war might start. In other words, she treats nuclear annihilation like an asteroid strike or a bear attack, something that is scary to picture but fundamentally impossible to predict or stop. So why should the reader worry about it in day-to-day life?
“With time, after a nuclear war, all present-day knowledge will be gone. Including the knowledge that the enemy was not North Korea, Russia, America, China, Iran, or anyone else vilified as a nation or a group,” Jacobsen concludes. “It was the nuclear weapons that were the enemy of us all. All along.” Perhaps that’s a call to abolish nuclear weapons. If so, Jacobsen doesn’t provide any reason to believe that might happen.
And by juxtaposing the murderous insanity of nuclear war with the sleek efficiency of the institutions designed to fight one, Jacobsen might have hoped to jar her readers. Instead, the book comes off as a demented combination of anti-war pamphlet and U.S. military recruitment ad. (“The function of NATO is to further democratic values and peacefully resolve disputes,” comes right after a graphic description of everyone in Washington burning to death.) The only real coherent point it makes is how little time world leaders have to deliberate and react to a nuclear launch—which is certainly an important problem.
But again, Jacobsen does not explain why they might be faced with such a problem. “Nuclear War” focuses on a “Bolt out of the Blue” scenario, the U.S. military’s term for a complete surprise attack. Although that kind of attack might be “what everyone in DC fears the most,” according to a former assistant secretary of defense who speaks to Jacobsen, it is the least likely fear to come true. As Jacobsen herself admits, an unprovoked nuclear first strike would be “national suicide” for any country that launches it. What kind of a madman would do that?
Her answer is Kim, the North Korean ruler. “In this scenario, we don’t know why the North Korean leader chose to launch a Bolt out of the Blue attack against America, but paranoia almost most certainly played a role,” Jacobsen asserts. She throws out a theory about Kim feeling slighted by satellite photos of North Korea at night. To show how Kim fits the bill of a “nihilistic madman,” the book cites examples of how oppressive the North Korean system is. Oppressive, however, doesn’t mean suicidal. If Kim lives lavishly while his citizens starve, shouldn’t he want to keep that arrangement going?
Jacobsen misrepresents the purpose of the North Korean nuclear program by glossing over its history. The Clinton administration, she writes, tried to convince North Korea “to abandon the [nuclear] program in exchange for economic benefits. The result was nil.” In reality, North Korea did agree to the deal, which broke down a decade later. Believing that North Korea was about to collapse, the Clinton administration implemented it only halfheartedly. North Korea, of course, shirked its own obligations in return, provoking the Bush administration to tear up the deal completely.
The supervillain theory of geopolitics, in which America’s enemies are plotting to destroy the world for fun, doesn’t make sense. China, Russia, and North Korea all oppose the U.S.-led world order due to their specific national interests. For all of those countries, nuclear weapons are the ultimate life insurance policy. The real danger posed by North Korea lies in the Kim dynasty’s rational fears; they know that they are quite vulnerable to both internal and external enemies, so their threat calculus likely leaves little room for error.
The “2020 Commission Report,” on the other hand, lays out the kind of crisis that might push things over the edge. After a North Korean radar crew mistakes a malfunctioning South Korean airliner for a hostile bomber, fighting breaks out on the peninsula. The Trump administration believes that, through threatening bluster, it can force North Korea to stand down and restore calm. Instead, the threats convince Kim that a regime change war has already begun, and that he must show strength to force the United States to back off. That scenario — a series of “normal” mistakes adding up to an extreme outcome — makes more sense to worry about than an unlikely bolt out of the blue.
Strangely enough, Jacobsen also describes American policy as irrationally genocidal. She quotes John Rubel, a former U.S. defense official who sat through the secret unveiling of the Single Integrated Operational Plan, the 1960 plan for a “general nuclear war.” Years later, a guilt-stricken Rubel compared himself and the generals in the planning room to the Nazis who plotted the Holocaust, according to Jacobsen. After all, the Single Integrated Operational Plan called for the murder of hundreds of millions of civilians, many of them random bystanders in third countries, not counting the Americans who would be obliterated in retaliation.
Daniel Ellsberg, another defense planner from the 1960s, had a similar reaction when he read the death estimates. “This piece of paper should not exist,” he remembered thinking in “The Doomsday Machine,” his 2017 memoir. “It should never have existed. Not in America. Not anywhere, ever. It depicted evil beyond any human project ever. There should be nothing on earth, nothing real, that it referred to.” Ellsberg, who died in 2023 and whose parents were Jewish, called it a scheme for “a hundred Holocausts.”
“The Doomsday Machine,” however, goes beyond his immediate reaction to explain why such evil does exist in the world. In the 1930s and 1940s, military planners around the world had come to accept that “strategic bombing,” the destruction of enemy cities from a distance, would be the best way to end wars quickly. When the atomic bomb was created, the U.S. military simply thought of it as a more efficient version of the firebombs it was already dropping on German and Japanese cities. For a couple decades after World War II, planners continued to believe in the possibility of a “damage-limiting” nuclear strike, of wiping out the enemy’s weapons in order to save cities at home.
After many close brushes with nuclear war, world leaders slowly developed the understanding that nuclear weapons were a completely different kind of weapon. And these close brushes, for the most part, were not random or irrational events. Incidents like the 1962 Cuban missile crisis were the result of politics, when one superpower pressed its advantage too hard and set off its rival’s survival instinct. Even a 1983 false alarm in Moscow that Jacobsen mentions, the closest thing to a real-life bolt out of the blue scenario, came amid rising U.S.-Soviet military tensions in Europe.
The knowledge that mass murder can be a product of normal human motivations is depressing. Yet it’s also a relief. Nuclear war is not an inhuman force like an asteroid or a bear. It is a political problem with political solutions. There are many steps that world powers can take — even short of abolishing nuclear weapons — to reduce the risks, by communicating and respecting each other’s existential fears. Ellsberg, for example, called on the United States and Russia to at least deactivate the weapons designed for a first strike and take forces off of hair-trigger alert.
The enemy is not, as Jacobsen writes, any specific vilified nation. But it is not the nuclear weapons, inanimate objects sitting in silos, either. The problem is us. Nuclear weapons, like every other nasty implement of war, are a means to a human end.
Matthew Petti is an assistant editor at Reason Magazine. He worked for various Jordanian news outlets as a 2022-2023 Fulbright fellow. Previously, he worked as a reporter at Responsible Statecraft and a national security reporter at The National Interest. His work has appeared in the BBC, The Intercept, The Daily Beast, and New Lines magazine.
The views expressed by authors on Responsible Statecraft do not necessarily reflect those of the Quincy Institute or its associates.
Subscribed
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in this evening’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
The service is heavily dependent on off-site electricity providers to obtain energy and conduct its missions. If successful, these micro-reactor power …
Russia-Ukraine conflict: Putin sends nuclear … Russia-Ukraine conflict: Putin sends nuclear warning to the West | World DNA Live … Russia-Ukraine war: …
Mr Macron did not specify how many single-engine jet fighters would be provided, by when or under what financial terms. He said France had proposed to …
… nuclear war is not imminent, it is a possibility. … The Russian official said that as long as Russia’s existence is not threatened, Moscow “will never …
The remains of the Chernobyl nuclear power plant still in the process of being cleaned up since the deathly meltdown in Norther Ukraine in the spring of 1986.
I’m wondering if Russia hasn’t been subtly using the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant (ZNPP) as an ominous potential nuclear weapon all along. I have mentioned as much many times in these “All Things Nuclear” Posts, and if Russia continues on with this ‘threat’ (that’s what it is) they will ‘accidentally’, but intentionally, create a meltdown that will be multiple times worse than the last one they had (Chernobyl in April of 1986), and that one was more than bad enough. One could say no one lives there anymore.
This one, in a war zone, could be a serious threat to a significant part of Ukraine and Europe. From my views of following the long story for well over a year now, it appears to me that Russia (who operates the plant) is gradually working toward the day when they can blame Ukraine for causing the travesty that could kill thousands if not millions of people depending on the wind currents. Both nations have accused each other of repeatedly firing conventional weapons in attempts to substantially damage the plant, and the same thing applies to recent sabotage to the incoming electricity power grid and lines that allows the 6 reactors to function without failing, thereby creating a meltdown. Transmission lines repairs and use of diesel power generators have so far kept the plant (when operating) from melting down, creating hell on earth for that part of the world. ~llaw
Despite the risks, Russia continues to use Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant as a source of leverage
To minimize Russia’s leverage from holding the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power plant at risk, Ukraine’s partners must press Moscow to keep all reactors shut down and help Kyiv to prepare for a possible nuclear safety incident at the plant. (Credit: Image by Florent via Adobe Stock)
In April, The Wall Street Journalreported that Russia may be planning to restart at least one of the six reactors at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP), which Russia has occupied since March 2022. The reporting raised concerns about the safety of the plant, were such a decision to be taken. Then on May 28, Aleksey Likhachev, the head of Russia’s state-owned nuclear enterprise, Rosatom, stated that the restarting of the ZNPP would be conditional on guarantees of the facility’s safety, adding that “time will tell” how the requisite safety conditions will be met and that they could be achieved through the retreat of the front line “as far as possible” from the ZNPP.
The International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has since confirmed that an understanding has been reached that the ZNPP’s six reactors “should remain in cold shutdown for the time being.”
But as long as the ZNPP remains under Russian occupation, Moscow will be able to continue using the plant as a source of blackmail to pre-empt any future Ukrainian effort to regain control. To counter Russia’s nuclear blackmailing, Western countries must intensify their military, nuclear safety, and emergency response support to Ukraine, as well as counter Russian disinformation in relation to the state of ZNPP operations and attacks on the facility. Such measures can help minimize the coercive value Moscow may believe it can draw from further threatening the plant’s safety.
Safety risks. Russia has demonstrated a clear disregard for nuclear safety since the start of its full-scale invasion of Ukraine. Therefore, Likhachev’s comments about the need to guarantee ZNPP safety before restarting the plant must be taken with a grain of salt, and certainly not as any kind of assurance that reactors will not be restarted while the plant remains in a war zone. Moreover, so long as Russia maintains control over the ZNPP, Russian operators and regulators will want to dictate when they deem the facility safe for operation, even though the plant’s safety remains in a highly precarious state.
While the ZNPP is not currently in the vicinity of the heaviest fighting, it is still near the front line, with IAEA staff posted at the facility regularly reporting sounds of explosions. Recent drone attacks on the facility do not appear to have caused significant damage but they serve as a reminder of the persistent risk that a military strike—intentional or not—could trigger a safety emergency.
With the destruction of the Nova Kakhovka dam in June 2023 and subsequent draining of the Kakhovka reservoir, the plant lost its main water supply for removing radioactive decay heat from the reactors and spent fuel storage pools and for cooling the emergency diesel generators that kick in when the plant loses external power. The plant regularly loses connection to external power because of attacks on Ukraine’s electric grid and damage to the power lines connecting the plant to the grid. In addition, the IAEA has reported on the presence of anti-personnel mines both around the perimeter of the plant and on the grounds of the facility. There is also a shortage of qualified staff operating at the facility, as many Ukrainian staff have departed due to the conflict or were forced to leave if they refused to take Russian citizenship and sign contracts with Rosatom.
Since September 2022, all six of the plant’s 950-megawatt-electric reactors have been in a shutdown state—alternating between cold and hot shutdown—which has been a key factor in reducing the likelihood of a major radiological disaster at the ZNPP. A unit in a shutdown state is subcritical, meaning that the nuclear fission in the reactor is not self-sustaining and therefore the reactor doesn’t produce power. The core of a reactor in shutdown is at a lower temperature, and the unit requires less cooling water and external power than a fully operating unit. In the case of cold shutdown, the core is at a lower temperature than in hot shutdown and the containment vessel is kept at atmospheric pressure. This allows for more time and options to deal with possible power and coolant loss. Should water or power supply to shutdown reactors be cut off or damaged, experienced operators would likely have several days to prevent escalation to a serious nuclear safety incident (depending on the nature of the damage). This safety margin could shrink to mere hours for an operating reactor.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear power to generate electricity, alongside other sources of energy? … nuclear power plants as part of its plans to cut greenhouse gas emissions.
… nuke power plant … How would officials in Pennsylvania and West Virginia responde in the event of an emergency at the facility? … nuclear power plant …
To counter Russia’s nuclear blackmailing, Western countries must intensify their military, nuclear safety, and emergency response support to Ukraine, …
I’ve posted today’s You Tube video about the trouble with the entire nuclear industry (a good part of it clearly told in 12-1/2 minutes) that speaks beyond the ridiculous idea of building new nuclear power plants of all shapes, sizes, and power, including SMRs, and why the entire concept of nuclear power is absurd as I’ve been preaching to the choir every evening for 652 consecutive days in, of course, far more detail.
But this video summarizes it all perfectly well in a style that everyone can understand and the interview confirms many of my constant complaints for most all the reasons I’m trying to tell the human race that, hey, “World, we have a problem.”
The only difference of opinion I have with the interview is that the guest believes it’s okay to allow some well-managed currently operational nuclear power plants to continue to operate, which is extremely dangerous to humanity and other life. Everything else Mr. Schlissel says duplicates my own concerns, including recognizing that if current nuclear power plants continue to operate, there is the growing issue of continuing uncontrolled amounts of dangerous nuclear waste. Of course I have many other issues that are not dealt with in the interview.
This is what Mr. Schlissel says about existing nuclear power plants continuing to operate: “I think that where existing plants are managed well, that they can continue operating and provide a minor role in the transition,” Schlissel, director of resource planning analysis at the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis and co-author of a paper on the problems with SMRs told us in this interview with The Register’s Brandon Vigliarolo
The projected SMR plant (Natrium) they refer to near the end of the video will not be in Idaho, but rather in Wyoming, owned by startup company TerraPower. The major shareholder is Microsoft’s originator, Bill Gates. The story, told near the end of the interview, about TerraPower’s two year delay in bringing the plant online because Russian fuel is not available to them is true, and I have mentioned that issue several times over the year-and-a-half-plus that I have been providing these nightly posts. We will forever, if we continue down this path, be blaming our lack of uranium nuclear fuel on Russia when all nuclear power plants sit aimlessly idle because there is no fuel for our reactors, which could start a nuclear war all by itself. ~llaw
Click on the link just below to listen to this short but meaningful YouTube video:
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
This absolutely frightening article dovetails off of my “All Things Nuclear” Post from yesterday where I asked you, the reader, two simple questions concerning the possibility of another Trump presidency: . . . “who on planet Earth would want to allow this man access to the nuclear button?” and “who on Earth would want to go through Trump’s never-ending obsessive pathological lying again?”
Here is the ‘ultimate’ reason explained by “The Nation” writer William D. Hartung: If this well-documented article from “The Nation” concerning the right wing Republicans, who should not be referred to as Conservatives ever again, radical “Project 25” doesn’t provide you with an instant answer to my yesterday’s questions, while at the same time scaring the hell out of you, nothing will. ~llaw
Conservatives Are Gearing Up for a Major Military Expansion Under Trump 2.0
If Project 2025 gets its way, a second Trump term will funnel more money to the Pentagon, dwarfing even the Biden administration’s spending.
This article is part of “Project 2025: The Plot Against America,” a Nation special issue devoted to unpacking the right’s vast and chilling program for a second Trump term.
This article appears in the June 2024 issue, with the headline “Masters of War.”
When I dipped into the 195-page section on “The Common Defense” in Project 2025’s Mandate for Leadership, my first question was how even the most hawkish of hawks could be disappointed with a Pentagon budget that is now soaring toward $1 trillion a year—hundreds of billions of dollars more than at the height of the Vietnam War or the peak year of the Cold War. I was particularly intrigued because the author of its chapter on the Pentagon is Christopher Miller, who, after a brief stint as acting secretary of defense under Donald Trump, wrote a memoir in which he asserted that our military is “bloated and wasteful” and argued that we could “cut our defense budget in half and it would still be nearly twice as big as China’s.”
Unfortunately, Miller the budget cutter is nowhere to be found here. Instead, Miller calls for expanding the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Space Force and increasing the funding for nuclear weapons, missile defense, and offensive weapons in space. Perhaps that’s because, according to a number of veteran Pentagon watchers, he is the current favorite to serve as secretary of defense in the unfortunate event of a second Trump administration.
Miller conveniently fails to mention how much all of his proposals will cost. At a minimum, they would add hundreds of billions of dollars to the Pentagon’s spending plan for the next five years—and they would do so at the expense of everything else we need to protect the lives and livelihoods of the people of America and the world, from promoting public health to addressing climate change to rebuilding basic infrastructure to reducing poverty and hunger.
The central component of Miller’s ultra-muscular approach to “defense” is to double down on efforts to create a military that can beat China in a potential conflict. “By far the most significant danger to Americans’ security, freedoms, and prosperity is China,” he warns, adding, with some redundancy, that “U.S. defense strategy must identify China unequivocally as the top priority for U.S. defense planning.” Far from ensuring this country’s safety, however, a military-first approach to China increases the prospects for a war between nuclear-armed powers that we should be doing everything in our power to prevent. (For more on Project 2025’s plans for the US-China relationship, see Jake Werner’s “A New Exclusion Act” in this issue.)
To its credit, Mandate for Leadership makes a frank admission of the severe split within the Republican Party over the conflict in Ukraine. It notes that one conservative faction argues for “continued U.S. involvement including military aid, economic aid, and the presence of NATO and U.S. troops if necessary” (emphasis added), while the other side wants a negotiated end to the conflict and “denies that U.S. Ukrainian support is in the national security interest of America at all.”
Meanwhile, Miller’s proposals for changes in nuclear policy, missile defense, and the militarization of space are both straightforward and extremely aggressive: building more nuclear-armed bombers and intercontinental ballistic missiles than are currently planned, ensuring the viability of warheads on existing missiles, and developing new types of nuclear weapons. Keep in mind that these increases would come on top of the Pentagon’s current $2 trillion plan to build a new generation of nuclear weapons. It’s a recipe for an accelerated three-way arms race with Russia and China that will make a nuclear confrontation more likely.
Given Miller’s unalloyed militarism here, it’s not surprising that he calls for sharp increases in spending on missile defense and space war—items that have been near-sacred commitments of the Republican national security elite ever since Ronald Reagan’s 1983 “Star Wars” speech. The Project 2025 Mandate proposes the closest thing to a comprehensive missile defense program since that failed effort of the 1980s. Perhaps most important, Miller denies the very real likelihood that building up “defensive” systems will only provoke rival nuclear powers to increase their deployments of offensive weapons in return.
The flip side of such wholesale militarism is Miller’s call to jettison diplomacy. Among the chapter’s major proposals are plans to “streamline” the State Department by means of a deep restructuring; to issue a freeze on international agreements that are not enshrined in formal treaties; and to withdraw from international organizations like the United Nations Relief and Works Agency for Palestine Refugees and the World Health Organization.
While much of Miller’s chapter is a familiar right-wing wish list for US military dominance—albeit a Trumped-up version—there is one element that is decidedly new: the obsession with rooting out “Left” ideas like diversity, equity, and “gender radicalism.” Miller takes aim at these on the very first page, claiming that “the Biden Administration’s profoundly unserious equity agenda and vaccine mandates have taken a serious toll” on the military—and he goes on to blame the current low recruitment numbers on Biden-era interventions. Never mind that potential recruits may be having second thoughts after looking at the disastrous wars of this century—wars that have resulted in the deaths or severe physical and psychological wounding of hundreds of thousands of US troops, to say nothing of the massive death toll, devastation, and destabilization of the targeted countries. For Miller, the blame lies with DEI and public health.
The degree of focus on these issues is so far over the top that it’s hard to know whether it’s cynical, delusional—or both. For example, one of Miller’s major recommendations is to “eliminate Marxist indoctrination and divisive critical race theory programs and abolish newly established diversity, equity, and inclusion offices and staff.”
Elsewhere, Project 2025 proposes a litmus test for military leaders: The National Security Council “should rigorously review all general and flag officer promotions to prioritize the core roles and responsibilities of the military over social engineering and non-defense related matters, including climate change, critical race theory, manufactured extremism, and other polarizing policies that weaken our armed forces and discourage our nation’s finest men and women from enlisting.”
Or, put another way, even modest efforts to root out racism, sexism, and anti-government extremism in the ranks of the US military are too much for the Project 2025 crowd to bear.
Along with its hyper-militarism, this call for a neo-McCarthyite cleansing of the military and the diplomatic corps is different in kind from what has come before. Advocates of a more peaceful world must vigorously oppose this approach to “the common defense.” But blocking these proposals is not enough. We also need to press for an alternative to current US policies, which prioritize force and the threat of force over nonmilitary tools of interaction like diplomacy, dialogue, economic cooperation, and cultural exchange.
Existing US strategy is premised on maintaining a posture of global military dominance, despite the overwhelming evidence that this approach has done far more harm than good in Iraq, Afghanistan, and beyond. This is painfully evident in the Biden administration’s shameful policy of enabling Israel’s criminal attacks on Gaza.
We need to articulate a new vision for US foreign policy that not only refutes the validity of the hawkish policies proposed by Project 2025 but also advocates for a sharp departure from our current force-based approach to solving global problems. A short-term agenda should include pushing for a cease-fire in Gaza, pulling back from the brink of a potential war with Iran, halting the new nuclear arms race, reducing Pentagon spending, and taking a more constructive approach to relations with China. The fact that Project 2025’s recommendations would make things even worse than our current course is no reason to accept the status quo. It’s just another indication of how desperately we need to reverse course.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are two Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
All Things Considered. Next Up: 5:00 PM On the … nuclear facilities sent a sharp warning to … Professor Daniel Byman, senior fellow at the Center for …
These include “signing on to last year’s multi-country declaration at COP28 to triple nuclear energy capacity globally by 2050; developing new reactor …
Former U.S. President Donald Trump holds a press conference following the verdict in his hush-money trial at Trump Tower on May 31, 2024 in New York City. /Getty Images
Tonight I must digress from my usual direct voice and others’ voices relative to “All Things Nuclear” except to say that this man must never, ever, set foot in the Whitehouse again, elected or not. I have to wonder who on planet Earth would want to allow this man access to the nuclear button?
The article below by Ron Elving of NPR reporting on this man’s “News Conference” after being pronounced guilty in his infamous trial the day before, tells us in no uncertain terms (his own words) that this man is criminally insane, believing everyone on Earth who crosses his ego by speaking out against him is plainly seen by what he calls the presiding Judge in his trial: “He looks like an angel but he’s really a devil,” this man said of Judge Merchan. “He looks so nice and soft.” after, insanely, literally lying about what he and his legal defense were not allowed to do, as well as his verbal denigration and obvious hatred of Judge Merchan. Nearly every sentence (or phrase) that he spat out was, as his statements have always been, even long before he was President 45, were untrue. This man told over 30 thousand provable lies during the four years of his presidency, and that doesn’t count the ones when the media is out of hearing distance. Who on Earth would want to go through that again?
Given the world-wide anger and disparity among nations and an environment of potential nuclear war that we live with today, this man is in every possible way mentally unfit to be trusted or associated with any part of America’s future. ~llaw
Vintage Trump remarks after convictions renew dilemma for news media and voters alike
By Ron Elving
Published June 2, 2024 at 4:00 AM MDT
Former President Donald Trump stood in the lobby of Trump Tower in Midtown Manhattan Friday morning looking somehow ill at ease in his own building.
He wore his signature suit, shirt and tie and stood alone at a lectern with five American flags and a cold stone wall behind him. Gone was the usual human backdrop of flag-waving supporters seen at MAGA rallies. He stood alone, without script or teleprompter, armed only with two sheets of paper and a look of barely controlled rage.
It was billed as a press conference to respond to the jury verdict that had convicted him on 34 charges the day before. But it was more a speech than a press conference. A contingent of reporters with cameras stood a few yards away, but Trump spoke without interruption and took no questions.
Not far off, a small crowd of supporters including some family members applauded and cheered at intervals. Trump never quite settled on which group he was addressing, connecting only sporadically with the live TV broadcast camera. Some of the TV news channels eventually cut away while he rambled on for a total of 33 minutes.
It was the same location Trump spoke from nine years ago this month when he descended “the golden escalator” to the same lobby and announced his first campaign for the Republican nomination for president. The scene that day featured Melania and Ivanka Trump, both all in white, and a forest of cameras held aloft beneath Trump’s elevated stage. Everything about those theatrics described a different time in a different world.
Trump would recall that occasion on Friday when he almost immediately started attacking immigrants, as he had in 2015.
But first, he had to deal with the moment — and the reason he was here.
“This is a case where if they can do this to me, they can do this to anyone,” Trump said, referring to the prosecutors and Manhattan district attorney, Alvin Bragg. “These are bad people. These are in many cases, I believe, sick people.”
It was an echo of Trump’s frequent claim to his rally crowds that they and not him are the targets of all his legal woes and political adversaries.
But Trump reserved most of his vitriol for Judge Juan Merchan, who would not move the trial out of New York and denied most of the motions filed by Trump’s attorneys.
“We just went through one of many experiences where we had a conflicted judge, highly conflicted. There’s never been a more conflicted judge,” Trump said.
Trump has long tried to make an issue of Merchan’s total of $35 in contributions to Democrats in 2020 and the Democratic ties of the judge’s daughter. At Merchan’s request, both issues had been reviewed by the New York Advisory Committee on Judicial Ethics and his refusal to recuse was upheld on appeal.
But Trump was back at it on Friday, and the accusations of bias were just getting started.
“As far as the trial itself, it was very unfair,” said Trump. “We weren’t allowed to use our election expert under any circumstances.”
Merchan actually did allow that expert to testify with the stipulation that the prosecution could also bring in its own expert. At that point, Trump’s team decided not to call the witness.
“You saw what happened to some of the witnesses that were on our side, they were literally crucified by this man,” Trump said, again referring to the judge.
“He looks like an angel but he’s really a devil,” Trump said of Merchan. “He looks so nice and soft.”
Hearing Roy Cohn in Trump’s words
Trump’s weeks of vituperating Merchan recall the maxim he had received half a century ago from a lawyer named Roy Cohn, who was known for saying: “Don’t tell me what the law says, tell me who the judge is.”
Cohn had a career matched by few in the legal profession. The son of a judge, he graduated from both Columbia and Columbia Law School at the age of 20 and went to work for the Justice Department. He helped to convict Julius and Ethel Rosenberg of helping the Soviets steal nuclear secrets. FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover then recommended Cohn to Sen. Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin, who hired him to help with his hunt for communists in the government.
Cohn went on to spend 30 years representing many of the biggest names in New York, including athletes, entertainers, a cardinal and organized crime bosses. In the 1970s he represented Trump’s family real estate business when it faced federal charges for racial discrimination.
Trump himself continued to rely on Cohn for years thereafter. Even after reaching the White House in 2017, he complained that none of his many lawyers fought for him like “my Roy Cohn.”
Trump’s well-worn playbook of false statements
Trump did not let his most recent court reversal take up all his on-camera time on Friday. With live TV coverage rolling, at least for a while, he veered off his latest court reversal to attack the man he wants to replace in the White House in November.
Calling Election Day Nov. 5 “the most important day in American history,” Trump blamed Biden for all his legal travails. He said the trial in New York had been orchestrated “in Washington” to protect the incumbent administration, which he called “a fascist state.”
Trump has made these accusations before, offering no form of evidence, as he again did not on Friday. But he used the allegation of Biden involvement to pivot to attacking Biden on immigration.
It was a kind of reprise of what might be called Trump’s greatest hit. In his speech in this same venue in 2015, he had stunned the political world with his language about immigrants at the U.S. border with Mexico: “They’re not sending their best … they’re bringing drugs, they’re rapists.”
Trump on Friday broadened his assault to include a number of other specific countries and nationalities sending “millions” who were “pouring in” unchallenged across “open borders.” He mentioned Congo in Africa and China in particular.
He said the prisons of Venezuela had been “emptied out” and that countries were sending people from their mental institutions.
He offered no evidence or sources for any of these statements.
And while some of his assertions took the form of casual, unproven superlatives such as “record numbers of terrorists” entering the country, some were downright false statements starkly at odds with the facts.
Early in his Friday remarks, when he criticized the Manhattan district attorney, he had said crime was “rampant” in the city and painted it in apocalyptic terms. Crime statistics in New York City are actually much lower today than in the 1990s, a decade in which Trump ally Rudy Giuliani was elected to his two terms as mayor. Shootings and homicides are down in particular in the past two years.
But this species of misstatement or disinformation has been part of the Trump arsenal for some time. He often raises rhetorical questions and makes sweeping statements that seem to have sprung from an alternative reality.
His talent for selling his own version of reality posed a challenge to the news media as far back as his years as the star of a TV “reality show” called The Apprentice. Trump was in the middle of his 14 seasons with the show when he began publicly questioning whether President Barack Obama had been born in the U.S.
It was just this kind of falsehood — picked up and promoted by countless commenters on cable TV, websites and social media — that made Trump a political force before he was an actual candidate. And when, in the fall campaign of 2016, he informed the world that he had himself laid to rest the “birther” issue (which he blamed on Hillary Clinton’s 2008 campaign), it forced many in the mainstream media to reexamine their longstanding aversion to the word “lie.”
By the end of Trump’s term in office, the news media had come to routinely label many of his claims as false — especially his denial of his defeat in the 2020 election. Some had also taken to labeling as lies the Trump statements they believed he had to know were false.
But Friday at Trump Tower was another reminder that as the November election gets closer and the political season comes to predominate, Trump can be expected to test and exceed the boundaries of fact and fiction one again.
Are we better prepared to deal with it this time?
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
But Moscow has also taken actions recently to underline its threats, with Russian troops conducting nuclear drills near the border with Ukraine. These …
There’s not much to comment negatively about in this excellent report that comes with a link to a PDF (at the end of the article) of the justifiable findings from the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA) But this short article captures the problems with the entire concept of Small Nuclear Reactors (SMRs): They are too expensive, too slow, and too risky. ~llaw
A new report has assessed the feasibility of deploying small modular nuclear reactors to meet increasing energy demands around the world. The findings don’t look so good for this particular form of energy production.
Small modular nuclear reactors (SMR) are generally defined as nuclear plants that have capacity that tops out at about 300 megawatts, enough to run about 30,000 US homes. According to the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis (IEEFA), which prepared the report, there are about 80 SMR concepts currently in various stages of development around the world.
While such reactors were once thought to be a solution to the complexity, security risks, and costs of large-scale reactors, the report asks if continuing to pursue these smaller nuclear power plants is a worthwhile endeavor in terms of meeting the demand for more and more energy around the globe.
The answer to this question is pretty much found in the report’s title: “Small Modular Reactors: Still Too Expensive, Too Slow, and Too Risky.”
If that’s not clear enough though, the report’s executive summary certainly gets to the heart of their findings.
“The rhetoric from small modular reactor (SMR) advocates is loud and persistent: This time will be different because the cost overruns and schedule delays that have plagued large reactor construction projects will not be repeated with the new designs,” says the report. “But the few SMRs that have been built (or have been started) paint a different picture – one that looks startlingly similar to the past. Significant construction delays are still the norm and costs have continued to climb.”
Too Expensive
The cost of SMRs is at the forefront of the report’s argument against the deployment of the reactors. According to some of the data it provides, all three SMRs currently operating (plus one now being completed in Argentina) went way over budget, as this graph shows.
The report authors also point out that a project in Idaho called NuScale had to be scrapped because during its development between 2015 and 2023, costs soared from $9,964 per kilowatt to $21,561 per kilowatt. Additionally, the costs for three other small plants in the US have all skyrocketed dramatically from their initial cost assessments.
Not only are the excessive costs of building SMRs problematic in and of themselves, says the IEEFA, but the money being poured into the projects is money that is not being spent on developing other sources of energy that are cleaner, quicker to deploy, and safer.
“It is vital that this debate consider the opportunity costs associated with the SMR push,” write the authors. “The dollars invested in SMRs will not be available for use in building out a wind, solar and battery storage resource base. These carbon-free and lower-cost technologies are available today and can push the transition from fossil fuels forward significantly in the coming 10 years – years when SMRs will still be looking for licensing approval and construction funding.”
Too Slow
That last bit gets to another of the report’s findings: that building SMRs simply takes too much time. The Shidao Bay project in China, for example, was supposed to take four years to build, but actually took 12; the Russian Ship Borne project had an estimated completion time of three years, but took 13; and the ongoing CAREM project in Argentina was supposed to be done in four years, but it’s now in its 13th year of development.
The report also points out that the MPower PWR project, which was one of the first planned SMRs in the US, had its plug pulled in 2017 after it was clear it wouldn’t meet its 2022 deployment date – a decision that effectively wasted the $500 million that had already been spent on the effort.
“Despite this real-world experience, Westinghouse, X-Energy and NuScale, among others, continue to claim they will be able to construct their SMRs in 36 to 48 months, perhaps quickly enough to have them online by 2030,” write the authors. “GE-Hitachi even claims it ultimately will be able to construct its 300MW facility in as little as 24 months.
“Admittedly, there is a not-zero chance this is possible, but it flies in the face of nuclear industry experience, both in terms of past SMR development and construction efforts and the larger universe of full-size reactors, all of which have taken significantly longer than projected to begin commercial operation.”
Despite breakthroughs in SMR manufacturing, such as the welding advance that allows workers to put together an SMR reactor vessel in 24 hours instead of 12 months, the time it takes to get these facilities into the field will likely continue to be a major barrier to their adoption.
Too Risky
Both the unpredictable costs and the extraordinary building delays makes SMR development just too big of a risk, says the IEEFA. But that’s not the only potential peril. Because the technology for this small-scale nuclear facility is fairly new and untested, risks could exist in terms of functionality and safety as well. For example, the authors question if the new SMRs will actually be able to output the kind of power they claim. Based on cost and development estimates going so widely afield, the sense in the report is that power output claims could also be off.
In terms of safety, the report quotes a 2023 study for the US Air Force that said: “Since SMR technology is still developing and is not deployed in the US, information is scarce concerning the various costs for [operations & maintenance], decommissioning and end-of-life dissolution, property restoration and site clean-up and waste management.”
The authors also point out that because many SMRs are being built using identical technologies, if a component of that tech fails, it could easily affect reactors around the world.
For example, they bring up the fact that steam generators have needed to be replaced at more than 110 pressurized water reactors (PWRs), with half of those operating in the US, because of the denting and wall thinning of tubes made from a material called “heat-treated Alloy 600.”
“We’re not arguing that new SMRs will have these same issues,” they write. “We expect that the design and material decisions made for SMRs will reflect remedial measures taken at existing reactors. Our concern is broader in that a problem at one SMR might have serious repercussions at many other SMRs with the same standardized design.”
Conclusion
So: too expensive, too slow, and too risky. And not at all where we should be focussing our, um – energy – these days, as the study authors make clear in their conclusion.
“At least 375,000 MW of new renewable energy generating capacity is likely to be added to the US grid in the next seven years,” they say. “By contrast, IEEFA believes it is highly unlikely any SMRs will be brought online in that same time frame. The comparison couldn’t be clearer. Regulators, utilities, investors and government officials should acknowledge this and embrace the available reality: Renewables are the near-term solution.”
You can read the full report in PDF format online.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are no Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
North Korean defectors living in South Korea release balloons carrying propaganda leaflets denouncing North Korea’s nuclear test at Imjingak, near the …
Chris Womack is the CEO of Southern Co., the Atlanta-based parent company of Georgia Power. He said he supports Granholm’s call for more nuclear power …
… threats? Yes,” he said. “This is a threat to the whole world. I would want China to be present, and we know their presence … There should be nuclear …
This story from the Associated Press is the reporting of just another really, really, bad idea! What is wrong with our world leaders, including those of our own here in the United States of America? Instead of more nuclear nuclear power plants, we should be decommissioning all of the existing ones, and investing in renewable energy power plants instead, including considering presently wasted steam from the world’s volcanic calderas such as the Yellowstone caldera in the USA that is capable producing power for the entire North American continent with plenty left over. We have known this for more than a decade, but have done nothing but talk about it.
Some scientists say Yellowstone creates enough steam to power the world and even now geothermal energy is successfully produced to some moderate extent here in the USA and around the world from other geothermal resources. But instead we want to build nuclear energy monoliths or monuments to eventually suffer the consequences of worthless nuclear power plants because there is not enough uranium in the ground (Yes uranium is technically a fossil fuel and is NOT a renewable fuel.) and producing it after mining it is a very complicated and expensive several-step refining process including preliminary milling at or near the minesite to create a refined product called Yellowcake (U308), then shipping that product to additional refineries, all of which makes nuclear power a very expensive and an environmentally dirty process even without its ability to destroy all life around the entire globe, even without a nuclear war. And yet the nuclear industry, governments, and ignorant others call it clean, safe, and cheap. llolloll! Nothing could be further from the truth.
New nuclear power plants, including the two new ones in Georgia discussed in this article, cost more, including cost overruns, to build than anyone with an understanding of finance and who pays the future bills and taxes for these terrific costs and never-ending overruns would automatically realize that more nuclear power plants will further enslave the American workers and bankrupt America if they don’t kill us all first . . . ~llaw
US Energy Secretary calls for more nuclear power while celebrating $35 billion Georgia reactors
JEFF AMY
Fri, May 31, 2024, 11:39 AM PDT5 min read
WAYNESBORO, Ga. (AP) — U.S. Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm on Friday called for more nuclear reactors to be built in the United States and worldwide. But the CEO of the Georgia utility that just finished the first two scratch-built American reactors in a generation at a cost of nearly $35 billion says his company isn’t ready to pick up that baton.
Speaking in Waynesboro, Georgia, where Georgia Power Co. and three other utilities last month put a second new nuclear reactor into commercial operation, Granholm said the United States needs 98 more reactors with the capacity of units 3 and 4 at Plant Vogtle to produce electricity while reducing climate-changing carbon emissions. Each of the two new reactors can power 500,000 homes and businesses without releasing any carbon.
“It is now time for others to follow their lead to reach our goal of getting to net zero by 2050,” Granholm said. “We have to at least triple our current nuclear capacity in this country.”
The federal government says it is easing the risks of nuclear construction, but the $11 billion in cost overruns at Plant Vogtle near Augusta remain sobering for other utilities. Chris Womack is the CEO of Southern Co., the Atlanta-based parent company of Georgia Power. He said he supports Granholm’s call for more nuclear-power generation, but he added that his company won’t build more soon.
“I think the federal government should provide a leadership role in facilitating and making that become a reality,” Womack said. “We’ve had a long experience, and we’re going to celebrate what we’ve gotten done here for a good little while.”
Friday’s event capped a week of celebrations, where leaders proclaimed the reactors a success, even though they finished seven years late.
On Wednesday, Georgia Gov. Brian Kemp floated the idea of a fifth Vogtle reactor. Although the Republican Kemp rarely discusses climate change, he has made electric vehicles a priority and has said new industries demand carbon-free electricity.
“One of the first questions on their minds is: Can we provide them with what they need?” Kemp said. “We can confidently answer ‘Yes!’ because of days like today.”
The new Vogtle reactors are currently projected to cost Georgia Power and three other owners $31 billion, according to calculations by The Associated Press. Add in $3.7 billion that original contractor Westinghouse paid Vogtle owners to walk away from construction, and the total nears $35 billion.
Electric customers in Georgia already have paid billions for what may be the most expensive power plant ever. The federal government aided Vogtle by guaranteeing the repayment of $12 billion in loans, reducing borrowing costs.
On Wednesday, President Joe Biden’s administration held a meeting to promote nuclear power, saying it would create a working group to ease the challenges that dogged Vogtle.
The Biden administration promised that the military would commission reactors, which could help drive down costs for others. It also noted support for smaller reactors, suggesting small reactors could replace coal-fueled electric generating plants that are closing. The administration also pledged to further streamline licensing.
Granholm said that she believed others could learn from Vogtle’s mistakes, like starting construction before plans were completed. She also predicted additional models of the Vogtle reactors, which were the first of their kind built in the United States, could be built at lower cost.
Cooling tower three is seen at the nuclear reactor facility at the Alvin W. Vogtle Electric Generating Plant, Friday, May 31, 2024, in Waynesboro, Ga. (AP Photo/Mike Stewart) (ASSOCIATED PRESS)
“So the question is, how do you learn from the new design in the second and the third and the fourth and the fifth plant? If you don’t vary the design, it gets 30% less expensive every time you build it,” Granholm said.
In Michigan, where Granholm was a Democratic governor, she announced in March up to $1.5 billion in loans to restart the Palisades nuclear power plant, which was shut down in 2022 after a previous owner had trouble producing electricity that was price-competitive.
But with much of the domestic effort focused on building a series of smaller nuclear reactors using mass-produced components, critics question whether they can actually be built more cheaply. Others note that the United States still hasn’t created a permanent repository for nuclear waste, which lasts for thousands of years. Other forms of electrical generation, including solar backed up with battery storage, are much cheaper to build initially.
In Georgia, almost every electric customer will pay for Vogtle. Georgia Power owns 45.7% of the reactors. Smaller shares are owned by Oglethorpe Power Corp., which provides electricity to member-owned cooperatives, the Municipal Electric Authority of Georgia and the city of Dalton. Utilities in Jacksonville, Florida, as well as in the Florida Panhandle and parts of Alabama also have contracted to buy Vogtle’s power.
Regulators in December approved an additional 6% rate increase on Georgia Power’s 2.7 million customers to pay for $7.56 billion in remaining costs at Vogtle, with the company absorbing $2.6 billion in costs. That is expected to cost the typical residential customer an additional $8.97 a month in May, on top of the $5.42 increase that took effect when Unit 3 began operating.
Subscribed
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are two Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear security in the sustainable expansion of nuclear power. “ICONS … nuclear facilities requires new approaches to nuclear security and emergency …
Russia’s Medvedev Threatens West With Nuclear War … Former Russian President Dmitry Medvedev warned on May 31 that Moscow is not bluffing when it says …
Putin Aide Lashes Out At West, Issues Fresh Nuclear War Threat; ‘Not Mere Intimidation… … Nuclear Threats By Russia. Oneindia News New 2.5K views · 47 …
2. Yellowstone Caldera, USA. Yellowstone National Park, situated atop a massive supervolcano, is a hotbed of geothermal activity and biodiversity. The …
I must say that the following concern of the IAEA regarding the scary situation in Ukraine and considering both nuclear situations — nuclear power and nuclear war — which could instantly spark the beginning of World War III, especially considering NATO’s aggressive threats alongside Russia’s never-ending threats.
But contrary to the IAEA’s view, I consider Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP) to already be an important part of the ongoing Russia/Ukraine war rather than two separate states of affairs, although, either way, this dangerously volatile situation is the same.
I am profoundly beginning to doubt that there will ever be a peaceful solution to this war and that it is the culprit most likely to erupt into the final devastation courtesy of ‘all things nuclear’. ~llaw
Update 230 – IAEA Director General Statement on Situation in Ukraine
30 May 2024
51/2024
Vienna, Austria
Director General Rafael Mariano Grossi met with senior Russian officials this week as part of the continuing efforts of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to help prevent a nuclear accident at Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant (ZNPP).
During Tuesday’s meeting in Kaliningrad with Alexey Likhachev, head of Russian state nuclear company Rosatom, Director General Grossi again raised those factors that the IAEA believes remain a real challenge for nuclear safety. Specifically, these include the vulnerability of the ZNPP’s off-site power lines, its need for reliable water supplies to ensure reactor cooling and other essential functions, and the situation related to staffing and equipment maintenance.
As Director General Grossi has repeatedly stressed, the IAEA must engage with both Ukraine and the Russian Federation on matters related to nuclear safety and security, which remains precarious, especially at the ZNPP.
“The Zaporizhzhya Nuclear Power Plant is continuing to face serious nuclear safety and security risks. We can’t afford to let our guard down for a single minute,” Director General Grossi said after the meeting in the Russian city. “In view of these challenging and unprecedented circumstances – with Europe’s largest nuclear power plant located in a war zone – there is an understanding that its six reactors should remain in cold shutdown for the time being.”
“Even with all six reactors in cold shutdown, plant safety and security remain extremely fragile. Any decision to re-start the ZNPP’s reactors in the future – when it is safe to do so – must be preceded by a very careful and detailed examination of all operational and regulatory aspects relevant for nuclear safety and security to ensure that the plant is not further put in jeopardy,” he said.
On the ground at the ZNPP, the IAEA experts stationed at the site have continued to hear explosions on most days over the past week, normally at distances away from the plant. However, on Sunday, the team was awakened by four explosions near the site. The ZNPP informed the team that there was no damage to the plant.
Also this week, the IAEA experts have conducted regular walkdowns to monitor nuclear safety and security, including ongoing and planned maintenance activities on parts of the safety systems, such as the emergency core cooling system of the unit 1 reactor, and on the main electrical transformer of unit 2.
The IAEA team visited the ZNPP’s maintenance workshop, where they were told that all machines are in operational condition and able to perform necessary maintenance tasks.
During a visit to the reactor building and safety systems rooms of unit 4, the IAEA experts observed equipment including steam generators and the main cooling pumps. They noted that generally the housekeeping was good, but they did observe some oil on the floor of the reactor hall coming from the overhead cranes, as well as boron deposits on the floors of some of the safety systems rooms, which are not uncommon for such facilities. The ZNPP confirmed these would be addressed through cleaning and maintenance.
Over the past week, the IAEA team also observed the successful performance of routine testing of emergency diesel generators of units 4 and 6.
The experts visited four levels of the turbine building of unit 5 where they observed the status of different types of equipment, including the main feedwater pumps, main steam valves and the main condenser, but once again were denied access to the western side of the building.
The IAEA experts also met with the site’s Chemistry Control Division, where they were informed of the technological process used for water treatment and were also told that all necessary consumables and chemical reagents have been supplied from the Russian Federation. The team was further informed that the division has sufficient staff, including personnel that have come from Russian nuclear power plants (NPPs).
While visiting the ZNPP’s thermal mechanical warehouse, the IAEA team saw its diesel generator spare parts and electrical equipment. The team observed spare parts from various manufacturers, including from Western suppliers before the conflict, as well as some from the Russian Federation. The ZNPP informed the team that it had completed its transition to a Russian-based spare parts and equipment database.
The IAEA experts also went to the temporary shelters located inside each reactor building, which were established by the ZNPP in 2022 due to the unavailability of the original shelters. The team was informed that up to 1000 people can be sheltered on site in these temporary shelters.
As the summer approaches, the warmer temperatures and drier climate have contributed to wildfires in the areas around the ZNPP. Late last week, the IAEA experts could both see and smell smoke from what the ZNPP said was a forest fire on the other side of the Dnipro river. On Tuesday, the IAEA team saw a wildfire south of the 750 kilovolt (kV) open switchyard, but it appeared to have been extinguished later in the week and did not cause any damage to electrical systems.
Elsewhere in Ukraine, the IAEA experts present at the Khelmnytskyy, Rivne and South Ukraine NPPs and the Chornobyl site reported that nuclear safety and security is being maintained despite the effects of the ongoing conflict, including air raid alarms on several days over the past week.
Over the past week, two reactor units at the Rivne NPP successfully re-started after the planned outages for refuelling and maintenance were safely completed ahead of schedule. The Rivne NPP now has three units in full power operation, while the fourth reactor is being prepared for shutdown for planned refuelling and maintenance. Meanwhile, the planned maintenance activities at one of the reactor units at the South Ukraine NPP are continuing according to schedule.
The IAEA continues with the delivery of much-needed equipment and supplies for maintaining nuclear safety and security in Ukraine. This week, the Agency organized two deliveries of nuclear safety and security equipment to Ukraine, bringing the total number of deliveries to 49 since the start of the armed conflict. The KhNPP, SUNPP and USIE Izotop – a Ukrainian state enterprise involved in the management of radioactive material intended for medical, industrial and other purposes – received physical protection equipment and atmospheric probing systems. The equipment was procured using extrabudgetary contributions from the European Union and the United Kingdom.
ABOUT THE FOLLOWING ACCESS TO “LLAW’S ALL THINGS NUCLEAR” RELATED MEDIA:
There are 6 categories, including a bonus non-nuclear category for news about the Yellowstone caldera and other volcanic and caldera activity around the world that play an important role in humanity’s lives, as do ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links in each category about the most important media stories in each category, but sometimes fewer and occasionally even none (especially so with the Yellowstone Caldera). The Categories are listed below in their usual order:
All Things Nuclear
Nuclear Power
Nuclear Power Emergencies
Nuclear War
Nuclear War Threats
Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There is one Yellowstone Caldera bonus story available in tonight’s Post.)
Whenever there is an underlined link to a Category media news story, if you press or click on the link provided, you no longer have to cut and paste to your web browser, since this Post’s link will take you directly to the article in your browser.
A current Digest of major nuclear media headlines with automated links is listed below by nuclear Category (in the above listed order). If a Category heading does not appear in the daily news Digest, it means there was no news reported from this Category today. Generally, the three best articles in each Category from around the nuclear world(s) are Posted. Occasionally, if a Post is important enough, it may be listed in multiple Categories.
… nuclear bomb was accidentally dropped into the ocean decades ago … Peter Biello. Heard on. All Things Considered … Stephen Hundley: One thing I like …
All Things Considered. Next Up: 7:00 PM The … about their own careers than about our country! … If we can decrease the cost of nuclear — why shouldn’t …
Since Russian President Vladimir Putin launched his full-scale, illegal, and brutal assault on Ukraine in early 2022, he has issued occasional threats …
The Group of 20 nations also underscored the dangers in joint statements in 2022 and 2023, saying the use of nuclear weapons and threats of use are “ …
