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Who Deserves a Nobel Peace Prize in Ukraine?

By Medea Benjamin and Ariel Gold

 

In what was described as a harsh rebuke of Russia, the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize was awarded to the Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties, along with Belarusian human rights advocate Ales Bialiatski and the Russian human rights organization Memorial. While at first glance, the Ukrainian Center for Civil Liberties might sound like a group that is well-deserving of this honor, Ukrainian peace leader Yurii Sheliazhenko wrote a stinging critique.

Sheliazhenko, who heads up the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement and is a board member of the European Bureau for Conscientious Objection, accused the Center for Civil Liberties of embracing the agendas of such problematic international donors as the US Department of State and the National Endowment for Democracy. The National Endowment for Democracy supports NATO membership for Ukraine; insists that no negotiations with Russia are possible and shames those who seek compromise; wants the West to impose a dangerous no-fly zone; says that only Putin violates human rights in Ukraine; never criticizes the Ukrainian government for suppressing pro-Russian media, parties, and public figures; never criticizes the Ukrainian army for war crimes and human rights violations; and refuses to stand up for the human right, recognized under international law, to conscientious objection to military service.

Supporting conscientious objectors is the role of Sheliazhenko and his organization, the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement. While we hear a lot about Russian war resisters, as Sheliazhenko points out, even inside Ukraine, which is portrayed in Western media as a country entirely united in its war with Russia, there are men who don’t want to fight.

The Ukrainian Pacifist Movement was founded in 2019 when fighting in the separatist-ruled Donbas region was at a peak and Ukraine was forcing its citizens to participate in the civil war. According to Sheliazhenko, Ukrainian men were “being given military summonses off of the streets, out of night clubs and dormitories, or snatched for military service for minor infractions such as traffic violations, public drunkenness, or casual rudeness to police officers.”

To make matters worse, when Russia invaded in February 2022, Ukraine suspended its citizens’ right to conscientious objection and forbade men between the ages of 18 and 60 from leaving the country; nevertheless, since February, over 100,000 Ukrainian draft-eligible men managed to flee instead of fight. It’s estimated that several thousand more have been detained while trying to escape.

“The Knotted Gun,” by Carl Fredrik. Photo Credit: Reuters

International human rights law affirms people’s right, due to principled conviction, to refuse to participate in military conflict and conscientious objection has a long and rich history. In 1914 a group of Christians in Europe, hoping to avert the impending war, formed the International Fellowship of Reconciliation to support conscientious objectors. When the US joined WWI, social reformer and women’s rights activist Jane Addams protested. She was harshly criticized at the time but, in 1931, she became the first American woman to win the Nobel Peace Prize.

In Russia, hundreds of thousands of young men are refusing to fight. According to a source inside Russia’s Federal Security Service, within three days of Russia’s announcement that it was drafting 300,000 more recruits, 261,000 men fled the country. Those who could, booked flights; others drove, bicycled, or walked across the border.

Belarusians have also joined the exodus. According to estimates by Connection e.V., a European organization that supports conscientious objectors and deserters, an estimated 22,000 draft-eligible Belarusians have fled their country since the war began.

The Russian organization Kovcheg, or The Ark, helps Russians fleeing because of anti-war positions, condemnation of Russia’s military aggression against Ukraine, and/or persecution they are experiencing in Russia. In Belarus, the organization Nash Dom runs a “NO means NO” campaign to encourage draft-eligible Belarusians not to fight. Despite refusing to fight being a noble and courageous act for peace — the penalty in Russia for refusing the draft is up to ten years in prison and in Ukraine, it is at least up to three years, and likely much higher, with hearings and verdicts closed to the public — neither Kovcheg, Nash Dom nor the Ukrainian Pacifist Movement, were announced as Nobel Peace Prize winners yesterday.

The US government nominally supports Russia’s war resisters. On September 27, White House press secretary Karine Jean-Pierre declared that Russians fleeing Putin’s draft were “welcome” in the US and encouraged them to apply for asylum. But as far back as October 2021, before Russia invaded Ukraine, amid tit-for-tat US-Russia tensions, Washington announced it would henceforth only issue visas to Russians through the US Embassy in Warsaw, 750 miles away from Moscow.

To put a further damper on Russian hopes of refuge in the US, on the same day as the White House held its press conference where it encouraged draft-eligible Russians to seek US asylum, the Biden administration announced that it would be continuing into fiscal year 2023 its FY2022 global refugee cap of 125,000.

You would think that those resisting this war would be able to find refuge in European countries, as Americans fleeing the Vietnam war did in Canada. Indeed, when the Ukraine war was in its early stages, European Council President Charles Michel called on Russian soldiers to desert, promising them protection under EU refugee law. But in August, Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky asked his Western allies to reject all Russian emigres. Currently, all non-visa travel from Russia to EU countries is suspended.

As Russian men fled after Putin’s draft announcement, Latvia closed its border with Russia and Finland said it was likely going to be tightening its visa policy for Russians.

Had the Nobel Peace Prize awardees been the Russian, Ukrainian, and Belarusian organizations that are supporting war resisters and peacemakers, it would have drawn global attention to the courageous young men taking this stand and perhaps opened more avenues for them to get asylum abroad. It could have also initiated a much-needed conversation about how the US is supplying Ukraine with an endless flow of weapons but not pushing for negotiations to end a war so dangerous that President Biden is warning of “nuclear Armageddon.” It certainly would have been more in line with Alfred Nobel’s desire to bring global recognition to those who have “done the most or best to advance fellowship among nations and the abolition or reduction of standing armies.”

— Medea Benjamin is co-founder of CODEPINK, and author of several books including War In Ukraine (with Nicolas Davies). Ariel Gold is the national co-director of CODEPINK and manages the group’s Middle East Program.

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Nuclear Threats in Ukraine: Real and Hyped

Photograph by Nathaniel St. Clair
By John LaForge

Is it possible that all the press about the highly elevated the risk of nuclear weapons being detonated in Ukraine is a lot of smoke? US political and military leaders have downplayed the risk of nuclear attacks in Ukraine many times.

The United States, Russia, France, China, and the United Kingdom possess most of the world’s nuclear weapons. Last January 3rd, these five states jointly declared, “We affirm that a nuclear war cannot be won and must never be fought.”

Consequently the five governments should be racing to sign and ratify the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons and to redirect the hundreds of billions of dollars being spent on nuclearism after defunding their vast nuclear weapons infrastructures.

Instead, most are spending enormous sums on expanding their nuclear arsenals, and publicly announcing plans for the “first use” of the devices under certain conditions. The spending and strategies flatly contradict their public pledge that nuclear weapons can’t win anything and must never be used.

Yet it is possible that the military and political authorities in control of nuclear weapons know they must not explode them. It could be that nuclear attack planners understand that the effects of such detonations boomerang and bite back, poisoning and killing their own forces, contaminating the sought-after territories and that of neutral states.

The White House, the Pentagon and other experts have repeatedly assured the world they don’t think nuclear attacks are likely.

November 30:“Why Zelensky thinks Putin won’t use nukes on Ukraine” (Axios)

November 2: “US sees no indications Russia readying nuclear weapons, White House says.” (Reuters)

October 24: “No indication Russia has decided to use nuclear weapon in Ukraine, says senior US official.” (The Guardian & Financial Times)

October 9: “White House Sees No Indication Russia Is Preparing Nuclear Attack After Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ Warning.” (Forbes)
October 9: “…the White House emphasized on Friday that the United States has seen no signs that Russia is gearing up to use nuclear weapons.” (New York Times)

October 9: “Pentagon spokesperson tamps down concerns over nuclear ‘Armageddon.’” (The Guardian)

October 7: “Pentagon: No sign Putin is planning to use nukes after Biden’s ‘Armageddon’ comment.” (Politico)

Sept. 30: “US has not seen acts indicating Russia contemplating nuclear attack.” (Reuters)

Sept. 28:“US believes it’s unlikely Putin will use a nuclear weapon but threat has ‘elevated.’” (CNN)

Sept. 24: “The US says Russia isn’t preparing to use nuclear weapons, yet.” (New York Times)

Sept. 16: “I don’t see Putin using nuclear weapons” [says] British military strategist Sir Lawrence Freedman. (Euromaidan Press)

When asked about it on October 28, 2022 before the Valdai Discussion Club in Moscow, even Russian President Vladimir Putin himself made clear that it’s useless to detonate nuclear weapons in Ukraine. Putin answered, “There is no point in that, neither political, nor military.”

The truly terrifying threat from nuclear weapons in the Ukraine war is the risk of an accidental or unintentional detonation. Nearby nuclear weapons are in the hands of Russia, France, Britain, and the United States, which deploy them on submarines, bombers, fighter jets and in “nuclear sharing” with NATO members Germany, Holland, Belgium, Italy, and Turkey — which station US B61 H-bombs at six separate bases. Computer glitches, false alarms, mistakes identifying shooters (as happened November 15 when Ukraine blamed Russia in error for a blast caused by one its own air-defense missiles striking Poland), or panicked commanders misreading communications, could all lead to catastrophe; a good reason to demand universal denuclearization.

The other truly consequential nuclear threats in Ukraine stem from the country’s 15 operational nuclear power reactors, those sitting-duck time bombs in this first-ever reactors-in-a-war zone conflict. These radiation grenades with their pins ready to be pulled should spark global anti-nuclear militancy — as did the Chernobyl reactor catastrophe in the same place 36 years ago.

 

— A version of this opinion ran at Counterpunch.org on November 21, and at L.A. Progressive December 2, 2022

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Goldmine of International Nuclear Reactor News

World Nuclear Industry Status Report:
All the empirical data we need to know about nuclear power’s decline

By Linda Pentz Gunter

The annual goldmine of empirical data on nuclear power that is the World Nuclear Industry Status Report (WNISR) was unveiled on October 5 in Berlin. The 2022 edition is available for download and is an indispensable reference source.

Beyond its in-depth overview of the status of nuclear power worldwide, the report also provides sections focused on particular areas of the technology or on certain countries or regions of the world.

As its principal author Mycle Schneider pointed out during the rollout, the report’s co-authors are fans of empirical data. Many of the findings in the report are taken from the nuclear industry itself. Facts and physics are pretty much immutable when it comes to nuclear power, and neither favors the industry very well. No amount of industry aspirational rhetoric can hide the truth about a waning and outdated technology.

The over-riding finding of the WNISR is that nuclear power’s share of global commercial gross electricity generation in 2021 dropped to below 10 percent for the first time ever, sinking to its lowest in 40 years.

[Journalist Elisa Serret on Radio Canada noted that this is a 40 percent drop from 1996, when nuclear’s share of global electricity generation peaked at 17.5 percent.]

As in past years, if you take China out of the picture — a country with 21 new reactors under construction as of mid-2022 — the decline of nuclear power worldwide is even more dramatic.

At close to 400 pages, the WNISR is a tome, but it is packed full of essential detail on every important topic related to nuclear power and its decline.

Whether you are interested in new reactors or closures, decommissioning or small modular reactors, the world or a specific country, there is something in the report that will flesh out the details.
In addition, there is an important chapter — Nuclear Power and War — dealing with the fate of nuclear reactors caught up in the Russian invasion of Ukraine and the warfare that is exploding around them.

We have of course been talking, writing, and warning about the perils of reactors in a war zone since the time a Russian invasion was first intimated late in 2021. But the WNISR helpfully lays out all the possible causes and consequences of a nuclear disaster in Ukraine. It answers the many questions we have about the robustness, or not, of reactors, fuel pools, and radioactive waste casks to withstand and survive a bombardment or even a prolonged power outage.

As former IAEA director of nuclear safety, Aybars Gurpinar told Bloomberg when addressing the risks to reactors in Ukraine: “Even if structures are extremely well designed, you cannot expect them to withstand a military-style attack. They are not designed for this.”

The WNISR concludes:

“Nuclear power plants are immediately vulnerable in war situations. This is directly due to the constant and permanent need for cooling. Extensive failure of the necessary electrical power or destruction of the cooling systems would lead to overheating of the reactor core. It is relatively unimportant whether this damage is intentional, unintentional, or of indeterminate cause and motivation.

“On the other hand, with increasing duration, the specific stress on the personnel and poorer maintenance worsens the operating conditions which also increases the probability of triggering serious accidents.”

In addition to covering the most obviously disastrous impacts, such as loss of coolant leading to fires and meltdowns, the report also explores some of the other essentials that could be lost during war but that are less often discussed.
These include lack of access to the site due to the destruction of roadways; absence of diesel fuel supplies for backup generators; the continued presence of a fire department with necessary equipment and access; the availability of skilled operating personnel and the consequences of staff working under duress or takeover; and the necessity of continued maintenance, repairs, and inspections.

These add to the already long list of technical things that could go wrong at a reactor under war conditions. This makes it particularly important to focus on the prevention of such a disaster, rather than speculating about who is at fault.

Speculation is not to be found in the WNISR. Accordingly, the authors chose to point out in conclusion that the news reports, about who is firing on what and why, are not necessarily reliable. All they, and we, can assess, is what the damage might be and what the consequences of that damage could lead to.

“In a war situation, it is particularly difficult to verify whether certain reports cover indisputable facts, are exaggerated, or false,” the WNISR authors write. “The warring parties, as well as organizations and individuals interacting with them, have an interest in a representation that is not necessarily objective.”

Wars will happen, and the fog of war will mask and confuse what is actually going on. But the one abiding problem is the nuclear reactors being there in the first place. And that’s the one thing we do have the power to change.

— Linda Pentz Gunter is the international specialist at Beyond Nuclear and writes for and curates Beyond Nuclear International, where this report first appeared.

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Dangerous Nuclear Fantasies: Bill Gates and Techno-fix Delusions

Melted core of Experimental Breeder molten sodium reactor, Idaho, Nov. 29, 1955. In 2018, TerraPower reached a cooperation agreement with China’s National Nuclear Corporation to form a joint venture to co-develop the Traveling Wave Reactor, which is also a liquid sodium-cooled reactor like the failed one above. (Reddit)

Editor’s note: The excerpts below, edited for space, are reprinted from the article by M.V. Ramana and Cassandra Jeffery in the Sept/Oct 2022 issue of Against the Current. To read the full article with footnotes visit https://againstthecurrent.org/atc220/bill-gates-and-techno-fix-delusions/.

Bill Gates and TerraPower
[Bill Gates’ firm] TerraPower was founded in 2006, and Gates continues to serve as Chairman of the Board. The company has funded the development of three different nuclear reactor designs through a mix of venture capitalist investments from fellow billionaires, engineering and manufacturing corporations in the energy and military sector, and government grants. The company has research and development partnerships with the Los Alamos National Laboratory and Y-12 National Security Complex, both of which design and test nuclear weapons. In 2010, the company received $35 million from venture capital firms to develop the first of its “Traveling Wave” reactor[s] (TWR). In 2016, the firm received a $40 million grant from the Department of Energy (DOE), followed by another $80 million in 2020, and $8.5 million in 2022. In 2021, [DOE’s] Office of Clean Energy Demonstrations … set aside $2.5 billion for nuclear projects and some of this funding will subsidize the TerraPower nuclear project. [Though TerraPower’s financial records are not available], government support [seems to] add up to nearly as much as private investment and almost certainly more than Gates has personally invested.

Technical Problems

TerraPower has three different reactor designs: the Natrium reactor; the molten chloride fast reactor; and the TWR. All of them are based on old reactor designs vexed with major problems. As its name suggests, the [molten chloride fast] reactor uses nuclear materials dissolved in molten chemical salts … so the inside of the reactor will be a chemically corrosive and highly radioactive environment. The last one to be built [in Oakridge, Tennessee] … operated intermittently from 1965 to 1969, and [was] interrupted [by] 225 [shutdowns] in those four years, only 58 [of which] were planned. Both the TWR and the Natrium use molten sodium … to transport the intense heat produced by the nuclear fission … such reactors have had numerous accidents: on November 29, 1955, the Experimental Breeder Reactor in Idaho had a partial core meltdown; in October 1966, the Fermi-1 fast reactor in Michigan suffered a partial core meltdown; in Japan, the [abandoned] Monju reactor suffered a series of accidents, produced almost no electricity [and was abandoned] after an expenditure of at least $8.5 billion.

The use of molten sodium makes reactors susceptible to serious fires, because the material burns if exposed to air. Almost all sodium-cooled reactors constructed around the world have experienced sodium leaks, likely because of chemical interactions between sodium and the stainless steel used in various components. Having to deal with all these volatile properties and safety concerns naturally drives up the construction costs of fast reactors, rendering them substantially more expensive than common thermal reactors. Sodium-cooled reactors … operat[e] at dismally low rates compared to standard reactors, the [fuel] load factor … for the Prototype Fast Reactor in the United Kingdom was 27%; France’s Superphenix reactor managed a mere 7.9%. The typical US reactor operates with a load factor of more than 90%.

Systemic Problems and Corruption

The [industrial lobby group] Nuclear Energy Institute [pushed] the Nuclear Energy Innovation and Modernization Act [of 2019]. Publicly endorsed by Gates, the law makes it easier for “next-generation advanced reactors” of the sort that TerraPower promotes, to be licensed by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. In the case of TerraPower, tens of millions of federal tax dollars have been donated to TerraPower without taxpayers ever being given an opportunity to provide or deny their informed consent.
The public — especially near sites [of] new reactor[s], areas where uranium will be mined and processed, and wherever the radioactive waste will go — will be subject to environmental contamination, paying far more than just a financial cost. Further, this obsession with nuclear power … diverts attention from the larger systemic drivers of the climate crisis: unabated capitalism and its need for never-ending economic growth. Pushing the nuclear agenda furthers the falsehood that … climate change can be solved using one more technology from the same toolbox. “Those most responsible for creating the problem [of climate change] will see to it that they profit from the solution,” wrote Arundhati Roy. People like Gates exemplify that observation.

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Elementary School Contaminated by Nuclear Weapons Production

By Bob Mayberry

The US Army Corps of Engineers (Corps) returned yet again to a Missouri elementary school in November to test for radioactivity on the playgrounds and in the classrooms. In 2018 and 2019, the Corps “identified an area of low-level radioactive contamination” in a heavily wooded area on the edge of the Jane Elementary School property in northern St. Louis. The school serves mostly Black students and sits in the flood plain of Coldwater Creek, contaminated during the 1940s and 1950s when waste from uranium processing for nuclear weapons was dumped nearby. For twenty-plus years, the Corps has been cleaning up the creek and testing for radioactive contamination in the area, but never within 300 feet of the school.
The 2018 tests, revealing low-level contamination nearby, prompted parents to request tests inside school buildings. The Corps declined. Community pressure finally compelled school officials to order third-party testing. According to a report released in October, the Boston Chemical Data Corp. discovered 22 times the expected levels of radioactive isotopes on the playground and more than 12 times expected levels in the gymnasium, resulting in the school’s shutdown in late October. The company found radioactive lead-210, thorium-230, polonium-210, and radium-226 “far in excess” of what the analysts expected.

Jana Elementary School in Florissant, Missouri, sits by Coldwater Creek, a waterway contaminated by improperly stored radioactive waste. Photo Credit: CNN

Corps program manager Phil Moser disagreed with the Boston Chemical findings, claiming the report was not consistent with “accepted evaluation techniques,” but promised the agency would reevaluate Boston Chemical’s report and methods. At the urging of local lawmakers, the Corps has agreed to conduct new tests at Jane Elementary School.

—The Guardian, Nov. 2; Huffington Post, Smithsonian, and NBC News, Oct. 18; Associated Press, and St. Louis Post Dispatch, Oct. 17, 2022

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