( Tomdispatch.com ) – One, erratic and often unhinged, blew up the U.S.-Iran accord that was the landmark foreign policy achievement of President Obama’s second term. He then ordered the assassination of a top Iranian general visiting Iraq, dramatically raising tensions in the region. The other is a traditional advocate of American exceptionalism, a supporter of the U.S.-Iran agreement who promised to restore it upon taking office, only to ham-handedly bungle the job, while placating Israel.

In November, of course, American voters get to choose which of the two they’d trust with handling ongoing explosive tensions with Tehran across a Middle East now in crisis. The war in Gaza has already intensified the danger of an Iran-Israel conflict — with the recent devastating Israeli strike on an Iranian consulate in Syria and the Iranian response of drones and missiles dispatched against Israel only upping the odds. In addition, Iran’s “axis of resistance” — including Hamas, Lebanon’s Hezbollah, the Houthis in Yemen, and militias in Iraq and Syria — has been challenging American hegemony throughout the Middle East, while drawing lethal U.S. counterstrikes in Iraq, Syria, and Yemen.

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It was President Donald Trump, of course, who condemned the U.S.-Iran agreement, known as the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) while running in 2016. With his team of fervent anti-Iran hawks, including Secretary of State Mike Pompeo and National Security Advisor John Bolton, he took a wrecking ball to relations with Iran. Six years ago, Trump withdrew the United States from the JCPOA and, in what he called a campaign of “maximum pressure,” reinstituted, then redoubled political and economic sanctions against Tehran. Characteristically, he maintained a consistently belligerent policy toward the Islamic Republic, threatening its very existence and warning that he could “obliterate” Iran.

Joe Biden had been a supporter of the accord, negotiated while he was Obama’s vice president. During his 2020 presidential campaign, he promised to rejoin it. In the end, though, he kept Trump’s onerous sanctions in place and months of negotiations went nowhere. While he put out feelers to Tehran, crises erupting in 2022 and 2023, including the invasion of Israel by Hamas, placed huge obstacles in the way of tangible progress toward rebooting the JCPOA.

Worse yet, still reeling from the collapse of the 2015 agreement and ruled by a hardline government deeply suspicious of Washington, Iran is in no mood to trust another American diplomatic venture. In fact, during the earlier talks, it distinctly overplayed its hand, demanding far more than Biden could conceivably offer.

“Natanz,” Digital Imagining, Dream, Realistic v. 2, 2024.

Meanwhile, Iran has accelerated its nuclear research and its potential production facilities, amassing large stockpiles of uranium that, as the Washington Post reports, “could be converted to weapons-grade fuel for at least three bombs in a time frame ranging from a few days to a few weeks.”

Trump’s Anti-Iran Jihad

While the U.S. and Iran weren’t exactly at peace when Trump took office in January 2017, the JCPOA had at least created the foundation for what many hoped would be a new era in their relations.

Iran had agreed to drastically limit the scale and scope of its uranium enrichment program, reduce the number of centrifuges it could operate, curtail its production of low-enriched uranium suitable for fueling a power plant, and ship nearly all of its enriched uranium stockpile out of the country. It closed and disabled its Arak plutonium reactor, while agreeing to a stringent regime in which the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) would monitor every aspect of its nuclear program.

In exchange, the United States, the European Union (EU), and the United Nations agreed to remove an array of economic sanctions, which, until then, had arguably made Iran the most sanctioned country in the world.

Free of some of them, its economy began to recover, while its oil exports, its economic lifeblood, nearly doubled. According to How Sanctions Work, a new book from Stanford University Press, Iran absorbed a windfall of $11 billion in foreign investment, gained access to $55 billion in assets frozen in Western banks, and saw its inflation rate fall from 45% to 8%.

But Trump acted forcefully to undermine it all. In October 2017, he “decertified” Iran’s compliance with the accord, amid false charges that it had violated the agreement. (Both the EU and the IAEA agreed that it had not.)

Many observers feared that Trump was creating an environment in which Washington could launch an Iraq-style war of aggression. In a New York Times op-ed, Larry Wilkerson, chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell at the time of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, suggested that Trump was repeating the pattern of unproven allegations President George W. Bush had relied on: “The Trump administration is using much the same playbook to create a false impression that war is the only way to address the threats posed by Iran.”

Finally, on May 8, 2018, Trump blew up the JCPOA and sanctions on Iran were back in place. Relentlessly, he and Secretary of the Treasury Steve Mnuchin piled on ever more of them in what they called a campaign of “maximum pressure.” Old sanctions were reactivated and hundreds of new ones added, targeting Iran’s banking and oil industries, its shipping industry, its metal and petrochemical firms, and finally, its construction, mining, manufacturing, and textile sectors. Countless individual officials and businessmen were also targeted, along with dozens of companies worldwide that dealt, however tangentially, with Iran’s sanctioned firms. It was, Mnuchin told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, “a maximum pressure campaign for sanctions…. We will continue to ramp up, more, more, more.” At one point, in a gesture both meaningless and insulting, the Trump administration even sanctioned Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, Iran’s supreme leader, a move moderate President Hassan Rouhani called “outrageous and idiotic,” adding that Trump was “afflicted by mental retardation.”

Then, in 2019, Trump took the unprecedented step of labeling the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps (IRGC), Iran’s chief military arm, a “foreign terrorist organization.” He put a violent exclamation point on that when he ordered the assassination of Iran’s premier military leader, General Qassem Soleimani, during his visit to Baghdad.

Administration officials made it clear that the goal was toppling the regime and that they hoped the sanctions would provoke an uprising to overthrow the government. Iranians did, in fact, rise up in strikes and demonstrations, including most recently 2023’s “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement, partly thanks to tougher economic times due to the sanctions. The government’s response, however, was a brutal crackdown. Meanwhile, on the nuclear front, having painstakingly complied with the JCPOA until 2018, instead of being even more conciliatory Iran ramped up its program, enriching far more uranium than was necessary to fuel a power plant. And militarily, it initiated a series of clashes with U.S. naval forces in the Persian Gulf, attacked or seized foreign-operated oil tankers, shot down a U.S. drone in the Straits of Hormuz, and launched drones meant to cripple Saudi Arabia’s huge oil industry.

“The American withdrawal from the JCPOA and the severity of the sanctions that followed were seen by Iran as an attempt to break the back of the Islamic Republic or, worse, to completely destroy it,” Vali Nasr, a veteran analyst at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and one of the authors of How Sanctions Work, told me. “So, they circled the wagons. Iran became far more securitized, and it handed more and more power to the IRGC and the security forces.”

Biden’s Reign of (Unforced) Error

Having long supported a deal with Iran —  in 2008, as chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee and, in 2015, in a speech to Jewish leaders — Joe Biden called Trump’s decision to quit the JCPOA a “self-inflicted disaster.” But on entering the Oval Office, Biden failed to simply rejoin it.

Instead, he let months go by, while waxing rhetorical in a quest to somehow improve it. Even though the JCPOA had been working quite well, the Biden team insisted it wanted a “longer and stronger agreement” and that Iran first had to return to compliance with the agreement, even though it was the United States that had pulled out of the deal.

Consider that an unforced error. “Early in 2021 there was one last chance to restore the agreement,” Trita Parsi, an expert on Iran and executive vice president of the Quincy Institute for Responsible Statecraft, told me. “He could have just come back to the JCPOA by issuing an executive order, but he didn’t do anything for what turned out to be the ten most critical weeks.”

It was critical because the Iranian administration of President Rouhani and Foreign Minister Javad Zarif, responsible for negotiating the original accord, was expiring and new elections were scheduled for June 2021. “One of the major mistakes Biden made is that he delayed the nuclear talks into April,” comments Seyed Hossein Mousavian, Princeton University scholar and a former top Iranian official who was part of its nuclear negotiating team in 2005-2007. “This was a golden opportunity to negotiate with the Rouhani team, but he delayed until a month before the Iranian elections. He could have finished the deal by May.”

When the talks finally did resume in April — “gingerly,” according to the New York Times — they were further complicated because, just days earlier, a covert Israeli operation had devastated one of Iran’s top nuclear research facilities with an enormous explosion. Iran responded by pledging to take the purity of its enriched uranium from 20% to 60%, which didn’t exactly help the talks, nor did Biden’s unwillingness to condemn Israel for a provocation clearly designed to wreck them.

That June, Iranians voted in a new president, Ebrahim Raisi, a hardline cleric and militant supporter of the “axis of resistance.” He took office in August, spent months assembling his administration, and appointed a new team to lead the nuclear talks. By July, according to American officials, those talks on a new version of the JCPOA had reached “near complete agreement,” only to fall apart when the Iranian side backed out.

It was also clear that the Biden administration didn’t prioritize the Iran talks, being less than eager to deal with bitter opposition from Israel and its allies on Capitol Hill. “Biden’s view was that he’d go along with reviving the JCPOA only if he felt it was absolutely necessary and to do it at the least political cost,” Parsi points out. “And it looked like he’d only do it if it were acceptable to Israel.”

Over the next two years, the United States and Iran engaged in an unproductive series of negotiations that seemed to come tantalizingly close to an agreement only to stop short. By the summer of 2022, the nuclear talks once again appeared to be making progress, only to fail yet again.  “After 15 months of intense, constructive negotiations in Vienna and countless interactions with the JCPOA participants and the U.S., I have concluded that the space for additional significant compromises has been exhausted,” wrote Josep Borrell Fontelles, the foreign policy chief for the European Union.

By the end of 2022, Biden reportedly declared the Iran deal “dead” and his chief negotiator insisted he wouldn’t “waste time” trying to revive it. As Mousavian told me, Iran’s crackdown on the Woman, Life, Freedom revolt in the wake of its “morality police” torturing and killing a young woman, Mahsa Amini, arrested on the streets of Tehran without a veil, and increased concern about Iranian drones being delivered to Russia for its war in Ukraine soured Biden on even talking to Iran.

Nonetheless, in 2023, yet another round of talks — helped, perhaps, by a prisoner exchange between the United States and Iran, including an agreement to unfreeze $6 billion in Iranian oil revenues – resulted in a tentative, informal accord that Iranian officials described as a “political ceasefire.” According to the Times of Israel, “the understandings would see Tehran pledge not to enrich uranium beyond its current level of 60 percent purity, to better cooperate with U.N. nuclear inspectors, to stop its proxy terror groups from attacking U.S. contractors in Iraq and Syria, to avoid providing Russia with ballistic missiles, and to release three American-Iranians held in the Islamic Republic.”

But even that informal agreement was consigned to the dustbin of history after Hamas’s October 7th attack doomed any rapprochement between the United States and Iran.

The question remains: Could some version of the JCPOA be salvaged in 2025?

Certainly not if, as now seems increasingly possible, a shooting war breaks out involving the United States, Iran, and Israel, a catastrophic crisis with unforeseeable consequences. And certainly not if Trump is reelected, which would plunge the United States and Iran deeper into their cold (if not a devastatingly hot) war.

What do the experts say? Against the possibility of a revived accord, according to Vali Nasr, Iran has concluded that Washington is an utterly untrustworthy negotiating partner whose word is worthless. “Iran has decided that there is no difference between Democrats and Republicans and they decided to escalate tensions further in order to gain what they hope is additional leverage vis-à-vis Washington.”

“Biden’s intention was to revive the deal,” says Hossein Mousavian. “He did take some practical steps to do so and at least he tried to deescalate the situation.” Iran was, however, less willing to move forward because Biden insisted on maintaining the sanctions Trump had imposed.

The Quincy Institute’s Trita Parsi, however, catches the full pessimism of a moment in which Iran and Israel (backed remarkably fully by Washington) are at the edge of actual war. Given the rising tensions in the region, not to speak of actual clashes, he says gloomily, “The best that we can hope for is that nothing happens. There is no hope for anything more.”

And that’s where hope is today in a Middle East that seems to be heading for hell in a handbasket. 

Copyright 2024 Bob Dreyfuss

Via Tomdispatch.com

1. The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air reports that the European Union’s carbon dioxide emissions fell 8% in 2023, to a level not seen since John F. Kennedy told people that he was a Berliner in 1963.

The bulk of the decline — 56% — was driven by wind, water, solar and nuclear, all low-carbon sources of energy. It also helped that use of the dirtiest fossil fuel, coal, declined by 25% in just one year, and is down by half since 2016. So the emissions fell in part because there are far more renewables in the European mix now, and in part because there is much less coal. Good weather also contributed to a decrease in electricity usage.

This finding is great good news because if we take the whole world into account and not just the EU, NOAA is predicting that we’ll have put out 36.8 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide last year, a 1.1% increase over 2022. Instead, the world needs to cut CO2 emissions by 1.8 billion metric tons every single year from here on out.

What the EU is showing is that with deliberate climate policy you can actually start significantly reducing emissions of carbon dioxide– a dangerous greenhouse gas that helped cause 28 disasters in the US last year that did $1 billion in damages each. That is, unfortunately, only the beginning.

Only if Europe ups its game further and only if the US, China and India follow Europe’s lead can we avoid tipping the planet into a chaotic, violent climate that threatens orderly human civilization.

The New Futurists Video: “Germany’s Green Revolution – A Hopeful Climate Change Story ”

2. Another piece of good news is that the International Energy Agency is saying that all the new demand for energy generated throughout the world for the next three years — through the end of 2026 — will be met by wind, water, solar and nuclear.

By 2025, a third of global power will be produced by renewables, which will outstrip coal for the first time.

3. Clean energy has gone from being something exotic to actually making a difference in a country’s gross domestic product. According to The Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air, China wanted 5% growth in 2023, but would only have achieved about 3% growth without wind and solar. With them, the economy grew 5.2%.

That is, some 42% of China’s GDP growth was generated by renewables. That is an astonishing statistic.

Moreover, virtually all of the country’s investment growth was in the renewables sector, as real estate and heavy industry turned soft.

This $890 billion investment in green energy matched the investments of the entire world in fossil fuels last year, and equaled the annual GDP of a G-20 member such as Turkey.

The clean energy sector generated $1.6 trillion for the Chinese economy, an increase of nearly a third over the previous year.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment;  Feature) – The book starts with a heist that represented “an astonishing covert achievement that decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy.”[1] At least, this is what Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, both journalists at The Jerusalem Post, claim in “Target Tehran”, their recently published book on Israel’s shadow war with Iran. As in so many other passages of “Target Tehran”, the authors show here a weakness for hyperbolic statements.

The “astonishing covert achievement” they refer to is Mossad’s operation to steal documents related to Iran’s nuclear program from a warehouse in Tehran in January 2018. It was certainly astonishing that Israel managed to access some of Iran’s most sensitive information. However, there was nothing truly surprising in the documents obtained during the heist. And yet, they were presented as such by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu in his well-rehearsed (fifteen times, according to the authors) televised speech in April 2018.

Netanyahu accused Iran of having lied and continuing to lie about its nuclear program after the conclusion in July 2015 of the Iran nuclear deal, formally known as the JCPOA. On the first point, everyone involved in the negotiation of the JCPOA knew perfectly well that Iran had been carrying out a covert nuclear program. This is why a nuclear agreement was needed in the first place. On the second point, Netanyahu did not present any convincing argument to contradict the IAEA’s assessments that Iran was complying with the JCPOA at that time.

As for the fact that the document heist “decisively altered both the balance of forces in the Middle East and U.S. policy,” this is even more of an over-statement. The normalization process between Israel and the UAE and Bahrain, which culminated in the Abraham Accords in September 2020 and had the external support of Saudi Arabia, had been in the making for years, as the authors themselves explain. And yes, Netanyahu’s speech might have affected U.S. President Donald Trump’s decision to abandon the JCPOA in May 2018, but the Israeli prime minister was pushing at an open door as Trump had been referring to the JCPOA already on the campaign trail as “the worst deal ever.”

Target Tehran: By Ilan Evyatar, Yonah Jeremy Bob and Jonathan Davis

Far more interesting than the details of how Israel convinced a U.S. President that needed little convincing to abandon the JCPOA are Israeli long-running efforts to first prevent the nuclear agreement and second, to complicate a return to it after Joseph Biden succeeded Trump. The main narrative thread in “Target Tehran” is Israel’s ingenuity in countering Iran through targeted assassinations, cyberwarfare, and diplomacy with the Arab world. But a more critical approach to the book allows us to read it as the story of how Israel consistently undermined U.S. diplomatic efforts to reduce tensions with Iran.

While negotiations on the nuclear file were ongoing between 2013 and 2015, Israel continued to carry out sabotage efforts against the Iranian nuclear program, former Mossad director Tamir Pardo told the authors. This covert action was simply the secret side of Netanyahu’s very open campaign against the JCPOA, which brought him to criticize Obama’s Iran policy in an address to a Republican-dominated Congress in March 2015.

There are more recent examples of similar dynamics. In May 2022, The Wall Street Journal reported that Iran had accessed internal IAEA documents and used them to thwart the international agency’s fact-finding efforts. Again, the documents were from the period prior to the signing of the JCPOA, but Israel’s intentions were clear. The Israeli government leaked this information to the WSJ, first obtained in the 2018 heist, during an intense phase of diplomatic efforts to revive the JCPOA.

In “Target Tehran”, we get to know the backstory of this leak. Naftali Bennett, who was Israel’s prime minister at the time, told the authors that “he picked that particular moment to release the intelligence about Iran’s hack of the IAEA because he thought it could push the U.S. away from the nuclear negotiations.”[2] With friends like these, who needs enemies?

One of the biggest weaknesses of “Target Tehran” is that, while it extensively describes how Iran has been fighting back against Israel in the context of the shadow war between both countries, it never really seeks to understand Iranian behavior. For instance, if we are puzzled by Iranian Supreme Leader Ali Khamenei’s fatwa against the production of nuclear weapons, we only need to read the explanation that Harold Rhode, a former American intelligence analyst, gave to the authors in an interview.

Rhode, most probably without an ounce of self-reflection on how he essentializes a whole culture, told the authors that the Persian culture has “perfected the art of deception” and that the Iranians “attach little meaning to words.” The targeted assassination in May 2022 of Hassan Sayyad Khodaei, a colonel in the Revolutionary Guard who had reportedly planned attacks against Israeli targets, is impersonally described by the authors as “a strike at the head of the octopus.”

Compare this with the bizarre description of former Mossad director Meir Dagan, who was “a prickly pear, tough on the outside like the thorny shell of the fruit and soft on the inside like its sweet flesh.”[3] Any claim to a minimum of objectivity is left behind when Saudi Crown Prince Mohammad bin Salman and Egyptian President Abdel Fattah Al-Sisi are introduced to us as “socially liberal autocrats,”[4] a concept you will not find in any political science textbook for good reason. More accurate is the description of John Bolton as an “ultra-hard-liner” and the former national security adviser seems to be content with it if we are to judge from his positive review of “Target Tehran” for the WSJ.

Bolton is just one of the key figures Bob and Evyatar had the opportunity to interview in the course of their journalistic careers and research for the book, alongside many others such as former prime minister Ehud Olmert and a succession of former Mossad directors. The authors’ access to these high-profile figures, however, seems to have come at the cost of avoiding uncomfortable but imperative questions. For example, how is it possible that, despite Israel’s undeniable success in killing key Iranian nuclear scientists and disrupting Iran’s nuclear program through cyber weapons and sabotage, Tehran is currently further than ever in its uranium enrichment path?

Under Netanyahu, but also during his brief period out of power, Iran has been the focus of Israel’s covert action. In April 2023, Netanyahu said Iran was “responsible for 95% of the security threats” against Israel. It is true that Tehran supports Hamas both rhetorically and materially. Nevertheless, to present Hamas as an Iranian puppet, as a WSJ report tried to do in the aftermath of Hamas terrorist attack against Israel on October 7, which killed 1,200 people, can only be the result of willful ignorance. Although one cannot flatly deny that Iran had some knowledge of Hamas’ plans, both Israeli and U.S. officials have expressed they have no proof that Iran was directly involved in the terrorist attack.

Palestinian armed groups have long had their own agendas, which are mainly the product of the specific situation in Israel/Palestine, and the PLO was fighting Israel long before Khomeini took power in Tehran. The main challenges to Israel’s security have long derived from its occupation of the West Bank and enforced isolation of the Gaza Strip after Hamas militarily took over the territory in 2007. The more than 15,000 Gazans that have been killed in the course of Israel’s offensive against the Gaza Strip after October 7 will not bring Israel any closer to safety and, considering the risk of regional escalation, the opposite appears more likely. For all its military superiority over the Palestinians and Washington’s support for the country, it is difficult to see how Israel can enjoy real peace as long as it remains an occupying power.

[1] Yonah Jeremy Bob and Ilan Evyatar, Target Tehran: How Israel Is Using Sabotage, Cyberwarfare, Assassination – and Secret Diplomacy – to Stop a Nuclear Iran and Create a New Middle East (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2023), p. 14.

[2] Ibid., p. 230.

[3] Ibid., p. 35.

[4] Ibid., p. 112.

( Tomdispatch.com) – If you didn’t know better, you’d think Lloyd Marbet was a dairy farmer or maybe a retired shop teacher. His beard is thick, soft, and gray, his hair pulled back in a small ponytail. In his mid-seventies, he still towers over nearly everyone. His handshake is firm, but there’s nothing menacing about him. He lumbers around like a wise, old hobbling tortoise.

We’re standing in the deco lobby of the historic Kiggins Theater in downtown Vancouver, Washington, about to view a screening of Atomic Bamboozle, a remarkable new documentary by filmmaker Jan Haaken that examines the latest push for atomic power and a nuclear “renaissance” in the Pacific Northwest. Lloyd, a Vietnam veteran, is something of an environmental folk hero in these parts, having led the early 1990s effort to shut down Oregon’s infamous Trojan Nuclear Plant. He’s also one of the unassuming stars of a film that highlights his critical role in that successful Trojan takedown and his continued opposition to nuclear technology.

I’ve always considered Lloyd an optimist, but this evening I sense a bit of trepidation.

“It concerns me greatly that this fight isn’t over yet,” he tells me in his deep baritone. He’s been at this for years and now helps direct the Oregon Conservancy Foundation, which promotes renewable energy, even as he continues to oppose nuclear power. “We learned a lot from Trojan, but that was a long time ago and this is a new era, and many people aren’t aware of the history of nuclear power and the anti-nuclear movement.”

The new push for atomic energy in the Pacific Northwest isn’t just coming from the well-funded nuclear industry, their boosters at the Department of Energy, or billionaires like Bill Gates. It’s also echoing in the mainstream environmental movement among those who increasingly view the technology as a potential climate savior.

In a recent interview with ABC News, Bill Gates couldn’t have been more candid about why he’s embraced the technology of so-called small modular nuclear reactors, or SMRs. “Nuclear energy, if we do it right, will help us solve our climate goals,” he claimed. As it happens, he’s also invested heavily in an “advanced” nuclear power start-up company, TerraPower, based up in Bellevue, Washington, which is hoping to build a small 345-megawatt atomic power reactor in rural Kemmerer, Wyoming.

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The nuclear industry is banking on a revival and placing its bets on SMRs like those proposed by the Portland, Oregon-based NuScale Power Corporation, whose novel 60-megawatt SMR design was approved by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) in 2022. While the underlying physics is the same as all nuclear power plants, SMRs are easier to build and safer to run than the previous generation of nuclear facilities — or so go the claims of those looking to profit from them.

NuScale’s design acceptance was a first in this country where 21 SMRs are now in the development stage. Such facilities are being billed as innovative alternatives to the hulking commercial reactors that average one gigawatt of power output per year and take decades and billions of dollars to construct. If SMRs can be brought online quickly, their sponsors claim, they will help mitigate carbon emissions because nuclear power is a zero-emissions energy source.

Never mind that it’s not, since nuclear power plants produce significant greenhouse gas emissions from uranium mining to plant construction to waste disposal. Life cycle analyses of carbon emissions from different energy sources find that, when every stage is taken into account, nuclear energy actually has a carbon footprint similar to, if not larger than, natural gas plants, almost double that of wind energy, and significantly more than solar power.

“SMRs are no longer an abstract concept,” Assistant Secretary for Nuclear Energy Kathryn Huff, a leading nuclear advocate who has the ear of the Biden administration, insisted. “They are real and they are ready for deployment thanks to the hard work of NuScale, the university community, our national labs, industry partners, and the NRC. This is innovation at its finest and we are just getting started here in the U.S.!”

A Risky (and Expensive) Business

Even though Huff claims that SMRs are “ready for deployment,” that’s hardly the case. NuScale’s initial SMR design, under development in Idaho, won’t actually be operable until at least 2029 after clearing more NRC regulatory hurdles. The scientists of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change are already calling for fossil-fuel use to be cut by two-thirds over the next 10 years to transition away from carbon-intensive energy, a schedule that, if kept, such small reactors won’t be able to speed up.

And keep in mind that the seemingly prohibitive costs of the SMRs are a distinct problem. NuScale’s original estimate of $55-$58 per megawatt-hour for a proposed project in Utah — already higher than wind and solar which come in at around $50 per megawatt-hour — has recently skyrocketed to $89 per megawatt-hour. And that’s after a $4 billion investment in such energy by U.S. taxpayers, which will cover 43% of the cost of the construction of such plants. This is based on strikingly rosy, if not unrealistic, projections. After all, nuclear power in the U.S. currently averages around $373 per megawatt-hour.

And as the Institute for Energy Economics and Financial Analysis put it:

“[N]o one should fool themselves into believing this will be the last cost increase for the NuScale/UAMPS SMR. The project still needs to go through additional design, licensing by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, construction, and pre-operational testing. The experience of other reactors has repeatedly shown that further significant cost increases and substantial schedule delays should be anticipated at any stages of project development.”

Here in the Pacific Northwest, NuScale faces an additional obstacle that couldn’t be more important: What will it do with all the noxious waste such SMRs are certain to produce? In 1980, Oregon voters overwhelmingly passed Measure 7, a landmark ballot initiative that halted the construction of new nuclear power plants until the federal government established a permanent site to store spent nuclear fuel and other high-level radioactive waste. Also included in Measure 7 was a provision that made all new Oregon nuclear plants subject to voter approval. Forty-three years later, no such repository for nuclear waste exists anywhere in the United States, which has prompted corporate lobbyists for the nuclear industry to push several bills that would essentially repeal that Oregon law.

NuScale, no fan of Measure 7, has decided to circumvent it by building its SMRs across the Columbia River in Washington, a state with fewer restrictions. There, Clark County is, in its own fashion, beckoning the industry by putting $200,000 into a feasibility study to see if SMRs could “benefit the region.” There’s another reason NuScale is eyeing the Columbia River corridor: its plants will need water. Like all commercial nuclear facilities, SMRs must be kept cool so they don’t overheat and melt down, creating little Chernobyls. In fact, being “light-water” reactors, the company’s SMRs will require a continuous water supply to operate correctly.

Like other nuclear reactors, SMRs will utilize fission to make heat, which in turn will be used to generate electricity. In the process, they will also produce a striking amount of waste, which may be even more challenging to deal with than the waste from traditional reactors. At the moment, NuScale hopes to store the nasty stuff alongside the gunk that the Trojan Nuclear Plant produces in big dry casks by the Columbia River in Oregon, near the Pacific Ocean.

As with all the waste housed at various nuclear sites nationwide, Trojan’s casks are anything but a permanent solution to the problem of such waste. After all, plutonium garbage will be radioactive for hundreds of thousands of years. Typically enough, even though it’s no longer operating, Trojan still remains a significant risk as it sits near the Cascadia Subduction Zone, where a “megathrust” earthquake is expected someday to violently shake the region and drown it in a gigantic flood of seawater. If that were to happen, much of Oregon’s coastline would be devastated, including the casks holding Trojan’s deadly rubbish. The last big quake of this sort hit the area more than 300 years ago, but it’s just a matter of time before another Big One strikes — undoubtedly, while the radioactive waste in those dry casks is still life-threatening.

Nuclear expert M. V. Ramana, a soft-spoken but authoritative voice in Jan Haaken’s Atomic Bamboozle documentary, put it this way to me:

“The industry’s plans for SMR waste are no different from their plans for radioactive waste from older reactors, which is to say that they want to find some suitable location and a community that is willing to accept the risk of future contamination and bury the waste underground.

“But there is a catch [with SMR’s waste]. Some of these proposed SMR designs use fuel with materials that are chemically difficult to deal with. The sodium-cooled reactor design proposed by Bill Gates would have to figure out how to manage the sodium. Because sodium does not behave well in the presence of water and all repositories face the possibility of water seeping into them, the radioactive waste generated by such designs would have to be processed to remove the sodium. This is unlike the fleet of reactors [currently in operation].”

Other troubles exist, too, explains Ramana. One, in particular, is deeply concerning: the waste from SMRs, like the waste produced in all nuclear plants, could lead to the proliferation of yet more atomic weaponry.

Nuclear Hot Links

As the pro-military Atlantic Council explained in a 2019 report on the deep ties between nuclear power and nuclear weapons in this country:

“The civilian nuclear power sector plays a crucial role in supporting U.S. national security goals. The connectivity of the civilian and military nuclear value chain — including shared equipment, services, and human capital — has created a mutually reinforcing feedback loop, wherein a robust civilian nuclear industry supports the nuclear elements of the national security establishment.”

In fact, governments globally, from France to Pakistan, the United States to China, have a strategic incentive to keep tabs on their nuclear energy sectors, not just for potential accidents but because nuclear waste can be utilized in making nuclear weapons.

Spent fuel, or the waste that’s left over from the fission process, comes out scalding hot and highly radioactive. It must be quickly cooled in pools of water to avoid the possibility of a radioactive meltdown. Since the U.S. has no repository for spent fuel, all this waste has to stay put — first in pools for at least a year or more and then in dry casks where air must be constantly circulated to keep the spent fuel from causing mayhem.

The United States already has a troubling and complicated nuclear-waste problem, which worsens by the day. Annually, the U.S. produces 88,000 metric tons of spent fuel from its commercial nuclear reactors. With the present push to build more plants, including SMRs, spent fuel will only be on the rise. Worse yet, as Ramana points out, SMRs are going to produce more of this incendiary waste per unit of electricity because they will prove less efficient than larger reactors. And therein lies the problem, not just because the amount of radioactive waste the country doesn’t truly know how to deal with will increase, but because more waste means more fuel for nukes.

As Ramana explains:

“When uranium fuel is irradiated in a reactor, the uranium-238 isotope absorbs neutrons and [transmutes] into plutonium-239. This plutonium is in the spent fuel that is discharged by the reactor but can be separated from the rest of the uranium and other chemicals in the irradiated fuel through a chemical process called reprocessing. Once it is separated, plutonium can be used in nuclear weapons. Even though there are technical differences between different kinds of nuclear reactors, all reactors, including SMRs, can be used to make nuclear weapons materials… Any country that acquires a nuclear reactor automatically enhances its ability to make nuclear weapons. Whether it does so or not is a matter of choice.”

Ramana is concerned for good reason. France, as he points out, has Europe’s largest arsenal of nuclear warheads, and its atomic weapons industry is deeply tied to its “peaceful” nuclear energy production. “Without civilian nuclear energy there is no military use of this technology — and without military use there is no civilian nuclear energy,” admitted French President Emmanuel Macron in 2019. No surprise then, that France is investing billions in SMR technology. After all, many SMR designs require enriched uranium and plutonium to operate, and the facilities that produce materials for SMRs can also be reconfigured to produce fuel for nuclear weapons. Put another way, the more countries that possess this technology, the more that will have the ability to manufacture atomic bombs.

As the credits rolled on Atomic Bamboozle, I glanced around the packed theater. I instantly sensed the shock felt by movie-goers who had no idea nuclear power was priming for a comeback in the Northwest. Lloyd Marbet, arms crossed, was seated at the back of the theater, looking calmer than most. Still, I knew he was eager to lead the fight to stop SMRs from reaching the shores of the nearby Columbia River and would infuse a younger generation with a passion to resist the nuclear-industrial complex he’s been challenging for decades.

“Can you believe we’re fighting this shit all over again?” he asked me later with his usual sense of urgency and outrage. “We’ve beat them before and you can damn well bet we’ll do it again.”

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com

The UN Security Council successfully negotiated the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Actions (JCPOA) in 2015 with Iran, which closed off all the plausible pathways by which Iran could turn its civilian uranium enrichment program into a military program aimed at making a bomb.

The odious Trump pulled out of the JCPOA in May 2018 and subjected Iran to the most severe financial and trade blockade ever imposed by one country on another in peacetime. This, despite Iran’s faithful adherence to the terms of the treaty according to the International Atomic Energy Agency. Iran went on observing the treaty for another year after Trump trashed it, but eventually started violating its provisions. Iran had signed the treaty in order to get sanctions relief, which it never did because the Republicans in Congress wouldn’t lift the sanctions. US sanctions scared Europe from investing in or trading much with Iran. So Iran had mothballed 80% of its civilian nuclear program and ended up with much more severe sanctions than ever before. Boy was Tehran peeved.

The Biden administration had the opportunity to restore the JCPOA early in 2021, but neglected to move forward with any speed, and then a new hard line government came into power in Iran, which set the negotiations back further. As an outside observer I would say that it seemed to me that the Biden administration just didn’t prioritize the Iran issue, and was content to let the Trump sanctions continue– even though this American virtual blockade put the two nations on a war footing.

Now at last there seems to be some movement from the American side. Perhaps the Iranian role in the Ukraine War has reminded the Biden team that Iran is a valuable player on the world stage, with a population the size of Germany’s and a GDP the size of Poland’s, and maybe it isn’t a good idea to just drive it into the arms of Russia and China.

So there were quiet meetings in Oman this spring.

The Iranian news agency Tasnim reports that this news is correct. The spokesman for the Iranian foreign ministry, Naser Kanani, said, “We have clear and principled views on the issue of the JCPOA. As has been announced, while Iran has made the policy of neutralizing sanctions — relying on its internal capacities and relations with its neighbors — its top priority, it has never halted diplomatic processes and exchanging messages at different levels through intermediary parties and friendly countries with the opposite side.

In order to secure the interests of the Iranian nation, the Iranian side never left the negotiating table and always showed its readiness to conduct serious negotiations to reach a satisfactory conclusion; and our criterion has been the performance of the other side, not what is said in the media.”

What Kanani says is true. Iran was ready to negotiate for genuine sanctions relief, not the sleight of hand pulled by Washington in 2015-2016. They also wanted to know that any deal they made with Biden wouldn’t just be summarily canceled by the next administration. Of course, these are things that no American administration can promise.

Kanani pointed out, “Regarding the JCPOA, the 13th government has announced a clear policy from the beginning that the JCPOA is not the whole issue of our foreign policy, but only one of the issues.”

He means that matters like prisoner exchanges have continued to be important for the government, as well as normalization of relations with countries such as Saudi Arabia and Egypt and the stabilization of post-war Syria.

The US hasn’t been a central figure in Iran’s relations with other Middle Eastern states, which are rapidly improving with the help of China and Saudi Arabia.

Kanani seems to be saying that yes, the government of President Ibrahim Raisi is talking to Biden through intermediaries, and no, that isn’t any surprise.

If Iran and the US could dial down the level of tensions between the two, the world would be much better off. The two have come close to being in a shooting war in recent years, especially after Trump murdered Iranian General Qasem Soleimani in 2020. Henry Kissinger, who just had his 100th birthday, used to say that ‘Diplomacy is a game that is played with the pieces on the board.” Iran is a big important piece on the board. Will the Biden administration prove able to play this piece? A lot hangs on the answer.

Munich (Special to Informed Comment; Feature) – “Words have consequences,” writes Jonathan G. Leslie on the last page of his book “Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative.” He argues that the predominant Israeli narrative on Iran, which originates in official statements and media reports, creates an outsized image of Iran’s threat to Israel.[1] Leslie is an adjunct professor and consultant at the Center for Security Studies at Georgetown University, Washington.

There is no denying that Iranian leaders often espouse anti-Semitic tropes. In one of the most disgraceful examples, then Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad’s said in 2009 that the Holocaust was a myth. Moreover, Tehran supports groups such as Hezbollah and Hamas that regularly target Israel. Direct rhetorical threats against Israel are also common in the speeches of Iranian officials. Last month, Iran’s President Ebrahim Raisi pronounced a speech stating that the slightest Israeli move against Iran would “bring about the destruction of Haifa and Tel Aviv.”

Jonathan G. Leslie, Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative (London: Hurst, 2022). Click Here

Still, the behavior of Iranian leaders does not validate what Leslie calls the “Iran Threat Narrative.” This is a vision that paints Israel as being perpetually on the brink of falling victim to the fanatical Iranian regime. The narrative is largely at odds with the fact that Israel is a richer and militarily stronger state than Iran. Israel does not only possess nuclear weapons but has also long been a close ally of the world’s biggest military power, the United States. Iran has progressively accumulated weapons-grade nuclear material after the Trump administration withdrew in May 2018 from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action (JCPOA) that constrained Iran’s nuclear program. However, Iran remains a non-nuclear state. And, for all of Raisi’s efforts to establish partnerships away from the West, neither Russia nor China will offer Iran the level of support Israel receives from Washington.

Leslie convincingly argues that Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu is the key personality to understand the emergence and strength of the Iran Threat Narrative. There were prior indicators of what was to come. The author explains that in 1996 Shimon Peres became the first Israeli prime minister to publicly compare Iran to Nazi Germany. But it was Netanyahu, especially after his return to power in 2009 – he had previously been prime minister from 1996 to 1999 – who “transformed the Iran threat from a technical security challenge into a moral crusade, his tropes echoing the titanic and multigenerational struggle between good and evil,” notes Leslie.[2]

In an academic article on Netanyahu’s populist foreign policy, Leslie referred to an illustrative speech given by the Israeli prime minister at the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC) Policy Conference in 2014. In his address to the US pro-Israel lobby, Netanyahu contrasted the “humane” and “compassionate” State of Israel, which represents a “force for good” in the world, with the “forces of terror” embodied by Iran and its proxies, who are “steeped in blood.”[3]

There are several reasons that explain why Netanyahu has been so successful in pushing forward his Iran Threat Narrative. Firstly, it “is far easier to sustain a mobilized constituency against a problem or enemy than it is to implement a policy solution.”[4] Secondly, a nuclear threat is an intangible one – different from rockets fired from the Gaza Strip, for instance – making its veracity more difficult to contest by the broader public, which normally has a scant understanding of the topic. And thirdly, and equally importantly, Netanyahu has always had a cavalier attitude toward truth. This could be seen in 2012, when the Israeli prime minister declared Iran was one year away from producing a nuclear bomb. Not only has this warning failed to materialize more than a decade afterwards, but leaked documents later showed that Israel’s secret service, the Mossad, was fully aware back in 2012 that the evidence did not support Netanyahu’s claims.

It is uncertain to which extent Netanyahu actually believes in the Iran threat. What is clearer, explains Leslie, is that the narrative he has built around an ever-threatening Iran has proven useful. On the international front, although only to a certain extent, it has diverted attention from Israel’s occupation of Palestine. Internally, it has provided Netanyahu with a platform “for positioning himself as a strong leader who merited voter support.”[5]

The Iran Threat Narrative is built around the idea that Iran is close to having a nuclear bomb and, even more significantly, that the power holders in Tehran are so fanatical that they would use nuclear weapons if they had access to them regardless of the consequences. After all, there are already nine nuclear states in the world. The point, or so the Iran Threat Narrative goes, is that Iran is different. Israeli media reports have long portrayed Iranian leaders as “irrational and lacking in self-restraint.”[6] To Netanyahu, it seems obvious that the Islamic Republic will “always be led by a ‘madman’ or ‘villain’,” writes Leslie.[7]

Netanyahu’s actions have, paradoxically enough, made the Iran threat more real. The conservative leader put considerable effort into lobbying Trump against the JCPOA. As Leslie details, Netanyahu soon recognized that “the best strategy for moving Trump to action would be an appeal to his ego.”[8] The JCPOA was Obama’s signature international agreement, and the Israeli prime minister fed Trump’s conviction that he could either negotiate a better deal or lead the United States in a confrontation with Iran. Netanyahu’s tailored approach to Trump included a visit to the TV show Fox & Friends, the former president’s favorite TV program, and a Twitter offensive against the deal, knowing perfectly well that Trump was an avid user of the social platform.

In May 2019, exactly one year after Trump abandoned the JCPOA, Tehran re-started some of the nuclear activities that had been put on hold to comply with the deal. The Iranian leaders had grown tired of waiting for a renegotiation of the agreement or a workable European Union mechanism that would guarantee the economic benefits of the deal even without the participation of the United States. During the last few years, the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has seen its access to Iranian nuclear facilities progressively reduced, in parallel to Iran’s growing uranium enrichment. The election of a conservative parliament in 2020 and the hardliner Raisi as president in 2021 further complicated the situation.

One of the most original aspects of Leslie’s research is his study of the frequency of mentions to Iran in the speeches of the main Israeli politicians. In 2010, Netanyahu’s first full year as prime minister after a decade out of power, the Likud leader mentioned Iran twice as often as his predecessor Ehud Olmert in 2008, his last full year as prime minister. This supports Leslie’s thesis that Netanyahu changed the rules of the game regarding the perception of Iran as a threat within Israel.

But more relevant than this is perhaps the fact that Netanyahu doubled the frequency of his mentions to Iran in the 2013-2015 period as compared to the 2010-2012 period. Leslie remarks that “Netanyahu averaged more attacks on Iran in his speeches and public statements during the Rouhani administration than during the Ahmadinejad years.”[9] It might appear counter-intuitive that the moderate Iranian President Hassan Rouhani, who engaged the international community to regulate Iran’s nuclear program, was perceived as more threatening than his bellicose predecessor. But there are strong reasons to assume that what Netanyahu feared even more than a nuclear Iran was an Iran re-integrated into international society. His efforts to dynamite the JCPOA speak in favor of this thesis.

Leslie aptly identifies some of the recurring themes in Israel’s depiction of Iran. In this sense, his study of the increasingly frequent appearance in the Jerusalem Post of the terms “Ayatollahs” and “Mullahs”, both simplistic but widespread terms to refer to Iran’s ruling class, is particularly illuminating. This notwithstanding, it would have been interesting to find in the book an analysis of how vilifying attributes depicting Iran can be understood within broader Israeli and Western discourses rife with Orientalist beliefs. These discourses gained new strength with the beginning of the so-called “War on Terror” after the 9/11 terrorist attacks and President George W. Bush’s “Axis of Evil” speech in 2002, where he presented Iran alongside Iraq and North Korea. In his book “Covering Islam: How the Media and the Experts Determine How We See the Rest of the World,” published in 1981, Edward Said already analyzed how the US media resorted to Orientalist tropes in its coverage of the hostage crisis that followed the storming of the US embassy in Tehran by Khomeini followers in 1979.

In “Fear and Insecurity”, Leslie convincingly demonstrates that words have consequences and that these can be profound. Considering that most works on Iran-Israel tensions have focused on the material dimensions of the confrontation, the author’s focus on the power of discourse, which he skillfully dissects, is a most refreshing perspective. In the brief interregnum between Netanyahu’s fifth and sixth governments, from June 2021 to December 2022, prime ministers Naftali Bennet and Yair Lapid closely followed the Likud’s leader line when it came to Iran. Thus, everything seems to indicate that the Iran Threat Narrative has come to stay.

[1] Jonathan G. Leslie, Fear and Insecurity: Israel and the Iran Threat Narrative (London: Hurst and Co., 2022), p. 225.

[2] Ibid., p. 31.

[3] Jonathan G. Leslie, “Netanyahu’s Populism: An Overlooked Explanation for Israeli Foreign Policy,” The SAIS Review of International Affairs 37, no. 1 (2017): 77.

[4] Leslie, Fear and Insecurity, p. 18.

[5] Ibid., p. 152.

[6] Ibid., p. 118.

[7] Ibid., p. 157.

[8] Ibid., p. 187.

[9] Ibid., p. 169.

Bussewitz notes that the climate emergency itself is getting in the way of our attempts to fight the climate emergency. The heating of the earth has intensified drought conditions in some parts of the world, such as the American Southwest, which caused water levels to fall in hydroelectric dams and reduced the amount of electricity that could be produced in this low-carbon manner. People turned to fossil gas instead. Likewise, the heat waves that are made worse and longer by the greenhouse gases already in the atmosphere caused people to run their air conditioners more, which caused the production of more carbon dioxide, which causes it to get hotter. . . in a vicious circle.

This finding is bad news because we need to be going in the opposite direction, reducing how much CO2 we put into the atmosphere by burning gasoline, fossil gas and coal by 7% a year. That is the only way to avoid our climate system going chaotic, as it will if earth gets too hot. What happened last year is like a person in danger of dying from obesity vowing to take off 14 pounds in a year and instead putting on two pounds.

That’s the bad news. The good news is that emissions grew less than 1% last year, whereas in 2021 they had grown 6%. Moreover, 2022 challenged the energy industry as have few other years in recent memory, given the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the boycott of and sanctions against Russian oil and gas. Some analysts had predicted a big return to coal in Europe to deal with this crisis. On the whole, with a few exceptions, that did not happen. Coal use did tick up slightly in Asia, with a 1.6% increase, but that after all is not very much.

So in a way it is good news, given the high prices for fossil gas caused by the war and the boycotts, and given the further post-COVID opening of major economies, that Europe and the U.S. avoided any significant revival of coal and that emissions were only up 0.9% globally for the year.

There is more good news buried in the bad. Fathi Birol at the International Energy Agency argues that the reason for which the rate of emissions increase was so small in 2022 was because a huge amount of green energy came online.

At some point in the near future, enough green energy will have been installed to achieve that so far elusive goal of a 7% a year reduction in CO2 emissions instead of an increase, however modest.

In fact, even last year, if some nuclear plants had not closed and if some Asian countries had not turned to coal, CO2 emissions would have fallen. Since coal puts out twice as much CO2 as fossil gas, for countries to dump the latter (made expensive by the Russian war on Ukraine) and pick up the former guaranteed an increase in emissions.

Again, however, there was good news in there. Emissions from fossil gas plummeted a stunning 13% in Europe.

Petroleum use was also up, but about half of the increase was in the aviation sector, as travel continued to rebound. Some 10 million electric vehicles were sold, making up 14% of the world’s car purchases. Since 28% of CO2 is emitted by the transportation sector, the rapid ramp-up in EV sales promises to make a significant dent in petroleum use in coming years.

One reason for which coal’s rebound was so puny was the rapid increase in wind and solar electricity generation. The IEA report says, “Renewables met 90% of last year’s global growth in electricity generation. Solar PV and wind generation each increased by around 275 TWh [terrawatt hours], a new annual record.”

That is, more new electricity was produced by wind and solar in 2022 than ever before, and almost all new demand was met by those sources.

More good news. If Europe were the whole world, we really would have seen a decline in carbon emissions. Europe’s were down for the year by 2.5%!

Wind and solar power generation in Europe grew by a gargantuan 15% in 2022, which forestalled a big move to coal. For the first time, wind and solar together produced more electricity for Europe last year than did either fossil gas or nuclear energy.

In the end, we have to think about the dog that didn’t bark, and the shoe that didn’t drop. Wind and solar grew so fast around the world that they avoided what otherwise would have been 465 Mt CO2 in power sector emissions. EVs and heat pumps also reduced potential emissions, by 85 megatons. If it hadn’t been for green energy, the world’s increase in emissions last year would have been closer to 3%, three times as much.

In the end the good news is good indeed. Despite the likelihood that China will be a big emitter again this year as President Xi Jinping lifts the “zero COVID” policy and the Chinese economy picks up considerably, the IAE notes that government investments in green energy, including the $367 billion in the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act, are becoming so large that they are producing a rapid greening of the electricity sector. These fixed investments will have a bigger and bigger impact in coming years.

( Tomdispatch.com) – In 1946, Albert Einstein shot off a telegram to several hundred American leaders and politicians warning that the “unleashed power of the atom has changed everything save our modes of thinking and we thus drift toward unparalleled catastrophe.” Einstein’s forecast remains prescient. Nuclear calamity still knocks.

Even prior to Vladimir Putin’s bloody invasion of Ukraine, the threat of a nuclear confrontation between NATO and Russia was intensifying. After all, in August 2019, President Donald Trump formally withdrew the U.S. from the Intermediate-Range Nuclear Forces Treaty, long heralded as a pillar of arms control between the two superpowers.

“Russia is solely responsible for the treaty’s demise,” declared Secretary of State Mike Pompeo following the announcement. “With the full support of our NATO allies, the United States has determined Russia to be in material breach of the treaty and has subsequently suspended our obligations under the treaty.” No evidence of that breach was offered, but in Trump World, no evidence was needed.

Then, on February 21st of this year, following the Biden administration’s claims that Russia was no longer abiding by its obligations under the New START treaty, the last remaining nuclear arms accord between the two nations, Putin announced that he would end his country’s participation.

In the year since Russia’s initial assault on Ukraine, the danger of nuclear war has only inched ever closer. While President Biden’s White House raised doubts that Putin would indeed use any of Russia’s tactical nuclear weapons in Ukraine, the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists ominously reset its Doomsday Clock at 90 seconds to midnight, the closest since its creation in 1947. Those scientific experts weren’t buying what the Biden administration was selling.

“As Russia’s war on Ukraine continues, the last remaining nuclear weapons treaty between Russia and the United States… stands in jeopardy,” read a January 2023 press release from the Bulletin before Putin backed out of the agreement. “Unless the two parties resume negotiations and find a basis for further reductions, the treaty will expire in February 2026. This would eliminate mutual inspections, deepen mistrust, spur a nuclear arms race, and heighten the possibility of a nuclear exchange.”

Of course, they were correct and, in mid-February, the Norwegian government claimed Russia had already deployed ships armed with tactical nukes in the Baltic Sea for the first time in more than 30 years. “Tactical nuclear weapons are a particularly serious threat in several operational scenarios in which NATO countries may be involved,” claimed the report. “The ongoing tensions between Russia and the West mean that Russia will continue to pose the greatest nuclear threat to NATO, and therefore to Norway.”

For its part, in October 2022, NATO ran its own nuclear bombing drills, designated “Steadfast Noon,” with fighter jets in Europe’s skies involved in “war games” (minus live weaponry). “It’s an exercise to ensure that our nuclear deterrent remains safe, secure, and effective,” claimed NATO chief Jens Stoltenberg, but it almost seemed as if NATO was taunting Putin to cross the line.

And yet, here’s the true horror story lurking behind the war in Ukraine. While a nuclear tit-for-tat between Russia and NATO — an exchange that could easily destroy much of Eastern Europe in no time at all — is a genuine, if frightening, prospect, it isn’t the most imminent radioactive peril facing the region.

Averting a Meltdown

By now, we all ought to be familiar with the worrisome Zaporizhzhia nuclear complex (ZNPP), which sits right in the middle of the Russian incursion into Ukraine. Assembled between 1980 and 1986, Zaporizhzhia is Europe’s largest nuclear-power complex, with six 950-megawatt reactors. In February and March of last year, after a series of fierce battles, which caused a fire to break out at a nearby training facility, the Russians hijacked the embattled plant. Representatives of the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) were later sent in to ensure that the reactors weren’t at immediate risk of meltdown and issued a report stating, in part, that:

“…further escalation affecting the six-reactor plant could lead to a severe nuclear accident with potentially grave radiological consequences for human health and the environment in Ukraine and elsewhere and that renewed shelling at or near the ZNPP was deeply troubling for nuclear safety and security at the facility.”

Since then, the fighting has only intensified. Russia kidnapped some of the plant’s Ukrainian employees, including its deputy director Valery Martynyuk. In September 2022, due to ongoing shelling in the area, Zaporizhzhia was taken offline and, after losing external power on several occasions, has since been sporadically relying on old diesel backup generators. (Once disconnected from the electrical grid, backup power is crucial to ensure the plant’s reactors don’t overheat, which could lead to a full-blown radioactive meltdown.)

However, relying on risk-prone backup power is a fool’s game, according to electrical engineer Josh Karpoff. A member of Science for the People who previously worked for the New York State Office of General Services where he designed electrical systems for buildings, including large standby generators, Karpoff knows how these things work in a real-world setting. He assures me that, although Zaporizhzhia is no longer getting much attention in the general rush of Ukraine news, the possibility of a major disaster there is ever more real. A backup generator, he explains, is about as reliable as a ’75 Winnebago.

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“It’s really not that hard to knock out these kinds of diesel generators,” Karpoff adds. “If your standby generator starts up but says there’s a leak in a high-pressure oil line fitting, it sprays heated, aerosolized oil all over the hot motor, starting a fire. This happens to diesel motors all the time. A similar diesel engine fire in a locomotive was partly responsible for causing the Lac Megantic Rail Disaster in Quebec back in 2013.”

Sadly enough, Karpoff is on target. Just remember how the backup generators failed at the three nuclear reactors in Fukushima, Japan, in 2011. Many people believe that the 9.0 magnitude underwater earthquake caused them to melt down, but that’s not exactly the case.

It was, in fact, a horrific chain of worsening events. While the earthquake itself didn’t damage Fukushima’s reactors, it cut the facility off from the power grid, automatically switching the plant to backup generators. So even though the fission reaction had stopped, heat was still being produced by the radioactive material inside the reactor cores. A continual water supply, relying on backup power, was needed to keep those cores from melting down. Then, 30 minutes after that huge quake, a tsunami struck, knocking out the plant’s seawater pumps, which subsequently caused the generators to go down.

“The myth of the tsunami is that the tsunami destroyed the [generators] and had that not happened, everything would have been fine,” former nuclear engineer Arnie Gunderson told Amy Goodman on Democracy Now! “What really happened is that the tsunami destroyed the [sea] pumps right along the ocean… Without that water, the [diesel generators] will overheat, and without that water, it’s impossible to cool a nuclear core.”

With the sea pumps out of commission, 12 of the plant’s 13 generators ended up failing. Unable to cool, the reactors began to melt, leading to three hydrogen explosions that released radioactive material, carried disastrously across the region and out to sea by prevailing winds, where much of it will continue to float around and accumulate for decades.

At Zaporizhzhia, there are several scenarios that could lead to a similar failure of the standby generators. They could be directly shelled and catch fire or clog up or just run out of fuel. It’s a dicey situation, as the ongoing war edges Ukraine and the surrounding countries toward the brink of a catastrophic nuclear crisis.

“I don’t know for how long we are going to be lucky in avoiding a nuclear accident,” said Rafael Grossi, director general of the IAEA in late January, calling it a “bizarre situation: a Ukrainian facility in Russian-controlled territory, managed by Russians, but operated by Ukrainians.”

Bad Things Will Follow

Unfortunately, it’s not just Zaporizhzhia we have to worry about. Though not much attention has been given to them, there are, in fact, 14 other nuclear power plants in the war zone and Russia has also seized the ruined Chernobyl plant, where there is still significant hot radioactive waste that must be kept cool.

Kate Brown, author of Plutopia, told Science for the People last April:

“Russians are apparently using these two captured nuclear installations like kings on a chessboard. They hold Chernobyl and the Zaporizhzhia nuclear power reactor plants, and they are stockpiling weapons and soldiers there as safe havens. This is a new military tactic we haven’t seen before, where you use the vulnerability of these installations, as a defensive tactic. The Russians apparently figured that the Ukrainians wouldn’t shoot. The Russians noticed that when they came to the Chernobyl zone, the Ukrainian guard of the Chernobyl plant stood down because they didn’t want missiles fired at these vulnerable installations. There are twenty thousand spent nuclear fuel rods, more than half of them in basins at that plant. It’s a precarious situation. This is a new scenario for us.”

Of course, the hazards facing Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl would be mitigated if Putin removed his forces tomorrow, but there’s little possibility of that happening. It’s worth noting as well that Ukraine is not the only place where, in the future, such a scenario could play out. Taiwan, at the center of a potential military conflict between the U.S. and China, has several nuclear power plants. Iran operates a nuclear facility. Pakistan has six reactors at two different sites. Saudi Arabia is building a new facility. The list only goes on and on.

Even more regrettably, Russia has raised the nuclear stakes in a new way, setting a distressing precedent with its illegal occupation of Zaporizhzhia and Chernobyl, turning them into tools of war. No other power-generating source operating in a war zone, even the worst of the fossil-fuel users, poses such a potentially serious and immediate threat to life as we know it on this planet.

And while hitting those Ukrainian reactors themselves is one recipe for utter disaster, there are other potentially horrific “peaceful” nuclear possibilities as well. What about a deliberate attack on nuclear-waste facilities or those unstable backup generators? You wouldn’t even have to strike the reactors directly to cause a disaster. Simply take out the power-grid supply lines, hit the generators, and terrible things will follow. With nuclear power, even the purportedly “peaceful” type, the potential for catastrophe is obvious.

The Greatest of Evils

In my new book Atomic Days: The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America, I probe the horrors of the Hanford site in Washington state, one of the locations chosen to develop the first nuclear weapons for the covert Manhattan Project during World War II. For more than 40 years, that facility churned out most of the plutonium used in the vast American arsenal of atomic weapons.

Now, however, Hanford is a radioactive wasteland, as well as the largest and most expensive environmental clean-up project in history. To say that it’s a boondoggle would be an understatement. Hanford has 177 underground tanks loaded with 56 million gallons of steaming radioactive gunk. Two of those tanks are currently leaking, their waste making its way toward groundwater supplies that could eventually reach the Columbia River. High-level whistleblowers I interviewed who worked at Hanford told me they feared that a hydrogen build-up in one of those tanks, if ignited, could lead to a Chernobyl-like event here in the United States, resulting in a tragedy unlike anything this country has ever experienced.

All of this makes me fear that those old Hanford tanks could someday be possible targets for an attack. Sabotage or a missile strike on them could cause a major release of radioactive material from coast to coast. The economy would crash. Major cities would become unlivable. And there’s precedent for this: in 1957, a massive explosion occurred at Mayak, Hanford’s Cold War sister facility in the then-Soviet Union that manufactured plutonium for nukes. Largely unknown, it was the second biggest peacetime radioactive disaster ever, only “bested” by the Chernobyl accident. In Mayak’s case, a faulty cooling system gave out and the waste in one of the facility’s tanks overheated, causing a radioactive blast equivalent to the force of 70 tons of TNT, contaminating 20,000 square miles. Countless people died and whole villages were forever vacated.

All of this is to say that nuclear waste, whether on a battlefield or not, is an inherently nasty business. Nuclear facilities around the world, containing less waste than the underground silos at Hanford, have already shown us their vulnerabilities. Last August, in fact, the Russians reported that containers housing spent fuel waste at Zaporizhzhia were shelled by Ukrainian forces. “One of the guided shells hit the ground ten meters from them (containers with nuclear waste…). Others fell down slightly further — 50 and 200 meters,” alleged Vladimir Rogov, a Russian-appointed official there. “As the storage area is open, a shell or a rocket may unseal containers and kilograms, or even hundreds of kilograms of nuclear waste will be emitted into the environment and contaminate it. To put it simply, it will be a ‘dirty bomb.’”

Ukraine, in turn, blamed Russia for the strike, but regardless of which side was at fault, after Chernobyl (which some researchers believe affected upwards of 1.8 million people) both the Ukrainians and the Russians understand the grave risks of atomically-charged explosions. This is undoubtedly why the Russians are apparently constructing protective coverings over Zaporizhzhia’s waste storage tanks. An incident at the plant releasing radioactive particles would damage not just Ukraine but Russia, too.

As former New York Times correspondent Chris Hedges so aptly put it, war is the greatest of evils and such evils rise exponentially with the prospect of a nuclear apocalypse. Worse yet, a radioactive Armageddon doesn’t have to come from the actual detonation of nuclear bombs. It can take many forms. The atom, as Einstein warned us, has certainly changed everything.

Copyright 2023 Joshua Frank

Via Tomdispatch.com