“End Nuclear Insanity Before Nuclear Insanity Ends Humanity” ~llaw
Feb 04, 2025
(See the article below for image description and photo credits ~llaw)
LLAW’s NUCLEAR WORLD NEWS TODAY with the RISKS and CONSEQUENCES for TOMORROW
It is a crying shame that the nuclear industry hopes, once again, to sell itself on the idea that nuclear energy is clean, safe, and will end our world-wide problem with carbon dioxide (CO2) and other greenhouse gasses that are causing climate change and global warming.
The facts are that none of these claims are true — nor is their 4th claim that nuclear power will lower the cost of electricity — all promoted via the nuclear industry, the corporate financial world(s), governmental politics, and the media.
Unsavory nuclear energy products consist of weapons of mass destruction (bombs) and damaged nuclear power plants that create nuclear fallout, consisting of deadly radiation by-products and other harmful nuclear waste, consisting of poisonous radioactive remains such as plutonium — all together perhaps the most “dirty” products, and for sure the most wide-spread and dangerous threats to human and other life on the largest scale known to mankind.
We don’t know what to do with the nuclear waste we already have, yet we are willing to make more of it all the while facing the threat of nuclear war, nuclear power meltdowns, and lethal nuclear waste — not to mention that nuclear power plants have become a huge part of a new kind of war weapons, as proven by their use as weapons against humanity in the current Russia/Ukraine war. It is nuclear insanity. . . . ~llaw
The following article from “The Hill”, written by Cindy Folkers and Amanda M. Nichols explains how Scientists who know the facts about the dangers of radiation are being drowned out by the nuclear industry, politics, and the “gullible” media.
The views expressed by contributors are their own and not the view of The Hill
They won’t tell you these truths about nuclear energy
by Cindy Folkers and Amanda M. Nichols, opinion contributors – 02/02/25 7:00 AM ET
Scientists have been arguing about the health risks from radiation since the end of the 19th century, when radioactivity was first discovered. Today, with electricity demand soaring and AI companies clamoring for their own nuclear power plants, from small modular reactor projects to giant new nuclear builds, that century-old argument is ongoing.
But now it’s mostly a battle between scientists on the one hand and the nuclear industry, the politicians it lobbies and gullible media on the other.
Currently, scientists are being drowned out. The Biden administration proposed to triple U.S. nuclear capacity by 2050, and President Trump is perceived as favoring nuclear expansion as well. Despite reams of peer-reviewed studies and books showing radiation’s harmful effects, there is persistent denialism that seems impervious to fact-checking.
It took until this century for the U.S. government to finally admit that radiation had killed workers at nuclear weapons plants. For Congress, compensating them remains politically radioactive: lawmakers failed to reauthorize the Radiation Exposure Compensation Act that expired in 2024. Media coverage increasingly and uncritically repeats the talking points of nuclear industry spokespeople, who preposterously claim you would have to stand next to nuclear waste for a year to get as much radiation as having an X-ray, or that eating a banana gives you as much radiation exposure as living next to a nuclear plant.
This is dangerous disinformation in a long line of dangerous disinformation.
After the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Japan, the director of the Manhattan Project, Gen. Leslie R. Groves, debunked reports of radiation sickness as Japanese “propaganda.” Later, when he had to admit its existence, Groves misled Congress and the public by saying it was “a very pleasant way to die.”
Spreading such lies is bad enough. What is even worse is that the truth of the matter has been actively and deliberately suppressed.
Scientists who first dared to expose radiation’s harms — cancer, birth defects, disproportionate impacts on females — had their funding and data seized and suffered professional ostracism and vilification.
Yet their early scientific findings were largely vindicated. It’s now well established that exposure to ionizing radiation has adverse health impacts, affecting the heart, lungs, thyroid, brain and immune system, causing blood disorders, cataracts, malignant tumors, keloids and other chronic conditions. It wreaks genetic havoc that can result in cancer, organ dysfunction and immune and metabolic disorders. Children and pregnant women are particularly vulnerable.
It’s also proven that ionizing radiation disproportionately impacts women and girls, with the youngest worst affected. Ethnicity and other factors beyond biological sex and age may be contributing or compounding factors. There is also a growing body of evidence that radiation has transgenerational impacts.
Meanwhile, regulators set dose limits for radiation exposure that fly in the face of the evidence. These limits purport to set a “safe” level of radiation exposure, ignoring radiation researchers who have long stressed there is no such thing as a safe level, since any exposure can contribute to adverse health impacts.
In fact, nuclear technologies, including civilian power reactors, have poisoned large swaths of land — and not only the areas around Chernobyl and Fukushima, whose radioactive cesium contaminated Tokyo. The U.S. nuclear industry has left a lasting legacy of radiation in our environment, including in our water and food, which U.S. regulators are hardly able to effectively track, let alone remediate.
Uranium mining and nuclear weapons testing particularly and disproportionately affect Indigenous land and Native Americans, compounding the harms of colonization, exploitation and marginalization on already overburdened communities. Nuclear technologies have done and will continue to do long, slow violence, especially to the poor and marginalized, leaving long-lasting ecological, human-health and genetic impacts.
We seem unable to keep these inconvenient truths in our heads, the more so since well-financed nuclear lobbyists and their government targets have misdirected our attention by reframing nuclear power as key to fighting climate change.
This is a fallacy. There’s actually plenty of evidence showing the opposite — that relying on nuclear power actually makes climate change worse, and undercuts the true climate solution of renewables and efficiency. Even the Government Accountability Office called out the Nuclear Regulatory Commission for its nonsensical refusal to consider the growing dangers of operating nuclear plants amid climate change. But none of that has prevented countenancing the myth of nuclear as a climate strategy and other big lies about it.
Perhaps the biggest lies about nuclear stem from Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech, a carefully crafted bid to recast nuclear technology as peaceful after the atrocious 1945 Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings. Atoms for Peace promised to make electricity “too cheap to meter” and “make the deserts bloom,” while deliberately concealing the truth that nuclear was utterly uncompetitive and not remotely economically viable as a power source. Civilian nuclear power was misdirection away from the real agenda of building nuclear power plants, which was to help supply the nuclear weapons complex, producing enriched plutonium as feedstocks for nuclear bombs in the burgeoning arms race.
Today, nuclear weapons are still the hidden agenda and secret rationale behind the otherwise nonsensical nuclear power industry. The resurgent nuclear arms race is the real reason why many tens of billions in federal subsidies ($53.5 billion in the Inflation Reduction Act alone, plus billions more in state subsidies) are propping up the utterly uncompetitive nuclear power industry, and why many billions more of taxpayers’ money is now getting thrown at corporations pushing chimerical “advanced” nuclear and uneconomical, dirty, failing small modular reactors (SMRs).
But some are pushing back, like Indigenous nations and public interest advocates in southwest Washington, where Amazon is pushing to build SMRs to power its AI business, heedless of their negative impacts and prohibitive costs.
Of all the dangers of reckless nuclear boosterism, the most insidious is disinformation concealing and denying nuclear’s past, present and future harms while wildly exaggerating its benefits. These are the perennial tactics of the nuclear industry. They litter its history, and they’re again getting traction today.
But they can be countered with sunshine — both the kind that powers real renewables with which nuclear can’t compete, and the kind that exposes its prevarications and lies with scientific evidence and public scrutiny.
Cindy Folkers is the radiation and health hazard specialist at the NGO Beyond Nuclear, and co-author with Ian Fairlie of the new book “The Scientists who Alerted us to the Dangers of Radiation.” Amanda M. Nichols, Ph.D. is a postdoctoral research fellow at University of California Santa Barbara’s Environmental Studies Program, and managing editor of the peer-reviewed Journal of Religion, Nature and Culture.
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(Please note that the Sunday and Saturday NUCLEAR WORLD’S NEWS are also added below by category, following Monday’s news posts in order to maintain continuity of nuclear news as well as for research for the overall information provided in “LLAW;s All Things Nuclear”.)
There are 7 categories, with the latest addition, (#7) being a Friday weekly roundup of IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) global nuclear news stories. Also included is 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. The feature categories provide articles and information about ‘all things nuclear’ for you to pick from, usually with up to 3 links with headlines concerning 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
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- Yellowstone Caldera (Note: There are three Yellowstone Caldera bonus stories available in today’s Post.)
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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.
TODAY’s NUCLEAR WORLD’s NEWS, Tuesday, (02/04/2025)
All Things Nuclear
NEWS
Nuclear fusion hopeful nears £60m funding boost amid concern over China breakthrough
Yahoo
Nuclear fusion hopeful nears £60m funding boost amid concern over China breakthrough … “This look is all about American exceptionalism,” she said of …
How Trump’s ‘Iron Dome for America’ upends four decades of nuclear doctrine
Breaking Defense
Scientists then and now are at odds about not only the effects on nuclear … Doing All The Things: Is It Feasible? While there is an argument to be …
Palisades nuclear plant’s restart uncertain amid Trump’s mixed signals – Planet Detroit
Planet Detroit
… all federal loans and grants. Such an environment could complicate things for projects like Palisades that require stability to plan for, say …
Nuclear Power
NEWS
They won’t tell you these truths about nuclear energy
The Hill
In fact, nuclear technologies, including civilian power reactors, have poisoned large swaths of land — and not only the areas around Chernobyl and …
Palisades nuclear plant’s restart uncertain amid Trump’s mixed signals – Planet Detroit
Planet Detroit
The Palisades Nuclear Plant in Michigan is set for reopening amid mixed signals from President Trump, raising questions about its stability.
Vietnam to talk soon with foreign partners on nuclear power plants | Reuters
Reuters
State utility EVN and oil and gas firm PetroVietnam have been assigned as the investors for the first two plants, the government said in a statement.
Nuclear Power Emergencies
NEWS
Russian attacks near Ukrainian nuclear infrastructure heighten scrutiny of Kyiv’s preparedness
AP News
… nuclear agency has repeatedly warned since the Russian attacks began in August. And while Ukraine’s nuclear plants have backup emergency power …
24/7 duty, border controls: How UAE regulates nuclear materials, prepares for emergencies
Khaleej Times
The authority conducted three inspections at Barakah Nuclear Power Plant in 2024 to assess emergency preparedness and response arrants. “We ..
Tariffs Using Emergency Economic Powers Risk Undermining U.S. Economic Security
CSIS
… nuclear energy, heavy machinery, and defense industries. Various macroeconomic estimates suggest that U.S. tariffs on Canada will result in higher .
Nuclear War Threats
NEWS
A New Era in Nuclear Arms Reduction – New York State Bar Association
New York State Bar Association
… threats of using nuclear weapons. … “The rule of law and basic morality will reign in the threat of nuclear war – we need both to reign in this threat …
An Unreal Pain: Russia’s New Nuclear Doctrine Delivers Headlines, But Not Change
Stimson Center
Just as President Richard Nixon was unable to terminate the war in Vietnam on his terms through use of coercive nuclear threats, Putin must also fail …
Iran warns any attack on its nuclear facilities will lead to regional war – Peoples Dispatch
Peoples Dispatch
Araghchi was responding to repeated Israeli threats made over the last few months about targeting Iranian nuclear facilities. These threats may …
Nuclear War
NEWS
Trump Has a Rare and Short Window to Solve the Iran Problem — Here’s How
War on the Rocks
… nuclear program itself, extending sunset timelines and further restricting certain Iranian nuclear activities. … war against Hamas have also …
The national missile defense fantasy—again – Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists
If so, it would repeat the role strategic defenses have played in the Cold War’s nuclear arms race. Efforts to build national defenses always …
IAEA chief warns of nuclear risk from Russia attacks on Ukraine power grids – Al Jazeera
Al Jazeera
“A nuclear accident can result from a direct attack on a plant, but also from power supply disruption.” Moscow has constantly bombarded Ukraine’s …
Yellowstone Caldera
NEWS
Yellowstone’s Monument Geyser Basin might have formed under lake – Buckrail
Buckrail
YELLOWSTONE NATIONAL PARK — On Saturday, Feb. 1, Scientist-in-Charge of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory Mike Poland shared a video exploring …
Will the Yellowstone volcano erupt any time soon? Scientists say it’s not likely – KBZK.com
KBZK.com
The Chief Scientist of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory, Dr. Michael Poland, says he’s not worried about an imminent eruption of the volcano …
Yellowstone National Park: Where Geology Is On Display Nearly Everywhere
National Parks Traveler
Editor’s note:Yellowstone Caldera Chronicles is a weekly column written by scientists and collaborators of the Yellowstone Volcano Observatory.