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Nuclear Reactors and Weapons Electrify a Warzone

Throwing gas on a burning roulette table

 

By John LaForge

Photo by ANDREY BORODULIN/AFP via Getty Images

The risk of catastrophic radiation releases is in the news again. Today it’s not because of the frequently recurring earthquakes jolting the site of three simultaneous reactor meltdowns at Fukushima-Daiichi, in northeast Japan. This year’s radiation risk focus is the shooting war in Ukraine, a country with 15 operational nuclear reactors, and in particular the Zaporizhzhia complex in the city of Enerhodar. The site has six large reactors lined up like dominoes, and hundreds of tons of thermally hot and ferociously radioactive waste that must be continuously cooled in huge, engineered pools on site. As of September 15, all six reactors have been put to cold shut down for a multitude of reasons, but their hot cores and hot waste systems all still require millions of gallons of cooling water every day.

Shrouding the risks of reactor meltdowns in a cloud of grim apprehension are thinly veiled threats of attacks using nuclear weapons by Russia and NATO. Major news services repeatedly showcase supposed nuclear weapons threats hinted at by Russian authorities, while NATO’s and the United States’ official and long-standing threat of nuclear first-use — and their stationing of US nuclear bombs in five European NATO states — doesn’t warrant a mention. The risk of nuclear weapons detonations is said to be as high as it was during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but this is due as much to NATO’s threatening “Strategic Concept” declaration of June 29 as to anything President Vladimir Putin of Russia has said.

News reports repeatedly claim that the Zaporizhzhia reactor complex—which is on the Dnieper River and close to the fighting in the south—is being shelled and rocketed by both Russian and Ukrainian forces. CNN reported August 18: “Kyiv has repeatedly accused Russian forces of storing heavy weaponry inside the complex and using it as cover to launch attacks, knowing that Ukraine can’t return fire without risking hitting one of the six reactors. Moscow, meanwhile, has claimed Ukrainian troops are targeting the site. Both sides have tried to point the finger at the other for threatening nuclear terrorism.”

However, this “both” sounds like an absurdity, since Russian troops surrounded the vast complex soon after invading, and seized it in March. These occupying Russian forces have kept the reactor site running using its Ukrainian engineers. For Russia to attack the site would be to fire on its own personnel, endanger the operating technicians, and risk catastrophe. As such, news reports that Russia is firing on the complex appear to be disinformation or propaganda.

The Mayor of Enerhodar on August 31 again accused Russia of doing the shelling, but the head of the International Atomic Energy Agency, Rafael Grossi, said during his visit there the next day, “We don’t have the elements to assess that.” What’s more likely is that the Russians are using the huge reactor site as a safe area, amassing equipment and munitions on the sprawling compound, as CNN noted.

“It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant”

Greg Mello, executive director of the Los Alamos Study Group in New Mexico, asserted August 14, “It is not difficult to figure out who is shooting at this power plant, and the dam, and hydroelectric facility on the Dnieper [River], which are necessary for its operation and safety even in a shutdown condition.” With Ukraine forces shelling the area on a regular basis, there is an ongoing chance that munitions aimed at Russian forces surrounding the site could strike one of the reactors, one of its high-level waste storage units, or power lines that supply the site with electricity to circulate cooling water.

Robert Mardini, the head of the International Committee of the Red Cross, told The Guardian, “The slightest miscalculation could trigger devastation we will regret for decades,” adding that the stakes were “immense … When hazardous sites become battlegrounds, the consequences for millions of people and the environment can be catastrophic and last many years.”

In this context, Reuters news agency reported Sept. 1, “Russia’s defense ministry said up to 60 Ukrainian troops had crossed the Dnieper in boats at 6:00 a.m. local time, in what it said was a ‘provocation’ aimed at disrupting the IAEA visit’ referring to an International Atomic Energy Agency delegation. It said ‘measures had been taken’ to destroy the opposing troops.” Reuters could not verify those reports.

Additional risks were highlighted the week of August 25, when wildfires knocked out electric power to the complex. Energoatom, Ukraine’s state nuclear reactor agency, said fires at a nearby thermal power plant caused the reactor complex’s last remaining electric power line to disconnect twice. The site’s three other lines were “lost earlier during the conflict,” the agency said, according to CNN, and the cut-off caused emergency diesel electric generators to start up in order to keep cooling water circulating, preventing potentially disastrous overheating and even reactor and/or fuel pool meltdown(s).

Electricity was restored to the site the next day, but the shutoff terrified observers who were reminded that massive radiation releases can be caused by a power outage — like the station blackout and destroyed backup generators that caused three meltdowns in Fukushima.

Russia’s invasion is doubtless an international crime under the UN Charter, and the Hague and Geneva Conventions. The world has justifiably condemned it, as it recalls the thundering denunciation of the International Military Tribunal at Nuremberg which declared: “To initiate a war of aggression … is not only an international crime; it is the supreme international crime, differing only from other war crimes in that it contains within itself the accumulated evil of the whole.” Of course this applies as well to NATO’s and the United States’ supremely criminal wars of aggression against Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, Somalia, Panama, Laos, Cambodia, and Vietnam.

Russia’s February 24 invasion of Ukraine is the first bombardment and invasion of a country with operational nuclear power reactors. For the global anti-nuclear movement — whose teachers, scientists, physicians, and parliamentarians have warned that reactors are sitting-duck dirty bombs, perpetually threatening major radiation releases — its worst-case scenario of deadly risks have been realized, foisted upon the world in an enormously dangerous powder keg we can call “nuclear Russian roulette.” The US role so far has been to play “weapons testing trade show host,” offering over $40 billion in weapons, artillery, ammunition, military training, logistics, and satellite-aided intelligence to enrich our arms merchants and throw gas on the burning roulette table.

The tragic irony of war zone nuclear targets in Ukraine is the country’s zealous embrace of nuclear power on one hand, and its horrifying, ongoing experience of Chernobyl on the other. Chernobyl’s 1986 unit 4 reactor explosions, 40-day graphite fire, and hemisphere-wide radioactive fallout have killed between half-a-million and 900,000 people. In a world not turned upside-down, Ukrainians would be the last people on Earth to risk damaging nuclear reactors.

– CNN, Aug. 18; Reuters, Sept. 1; Reuters, Sept. 1; The Guardian, Sept. 3

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Fr. Carl Kabat, 88, Rest in Peace

For a June 2006 plowshares action, Fr. Carl Kabat wore a clown costume into a nuclear missile site near Grand Forks, North Dakota. Kabat, along with Greg Boertje-Obed, and Michael Walli, hammered and poured blood on the heavy silo lid, and the three were later sent to federal prison for 15, 12, and 8 months respectively. All tolled, Carl spent 17 years in prison for resisting nuclear weapons. Photo by John LaForge.
By John LaForge

 

Carl Kabat, the jovial peace activist, teacher, translator, Catholic Priest, and relentless practitioner of radical nonviolent action against nuclear weapons, died August 4 in San Antonio at the age of 88.

A member of the order Missionary Oblates of Mary Immaculate, Fr. Carl was a long-time friend of our Nukewatch clan and of the greater nuclear abolition movement. Carl’s example of non-cooperation with wrongdoing, and his straightforward, no-frills denunciation of nuclear war planning, particularly the fiction that hydrogen bombs are lawful, has always been a stinging reminder of our focus and mission. “Everything Hitler did was legal,” Carl said to a college history class in 1978, reminding the students that slavery, Jim Crow, child labor, poison gas, torture, and firing squads were all legalized once, the way thermonuclear weapons are today.

I met Carl before he joined the monumental Plowshares Eight action of 1980, which clanged over the anti-nuclear movement like a bell. With crystalline symbolic use of hammers and blood against WMD — the former to “turn swords into plowshares,” and the latter to “name” the Bomb for killing even before war by stealing food from the hungry — the gob smacking protest has inspired over 100 similar actions, Carl acting in six more himself.

An inveterate smoker who liked corny, politically incorrect jokes, if warned about his smoking habit, he’d say, “These are my prayer sticks.” And Carl was pensive about his five years (1968-1973) as a missionary priest in Brazil and the Philippines. After the Oblates ordered him home out of concern for his safety, his haunting experience of poverty and hunger, juxtaposed to the US war in Vietnam and gargantuan military budgets, seared his consciousness. He once told me, “I saw people starve to death in my own parish.”

In a statement for the 1984 “Silo Pruning Hooks” action, Carl and his cohorts wrote: After the fact, we questioned why people of conscience allowed the slave ships and the auction blocks to remain in their midst. After the fact, we insisted that the German people should have cut the fences and torn down the gas chambers and crematoria. … but there will be no after when the missiles have done their demonic work.

Fr. Carl told St. Louis Magazine in 2010, “Justice is serious,” a fact he knew from experience, having endured over 17 years in jail and prison for nonviolent actions. (The New York Times, Washington Post, and National Catholic Reporter have detailed obituaries.)

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Point Beach Reactors Pose Needless Risks

By Al Gedicks*

On July 31, 2021 the operators of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant on the shore of Lake Michigan had to shut down the 52-year-old reactor after a cooling pump failed and waste heat was vented into the atmosphere.

According to Physicians for Social Responsibility and Nukewatch, two anti-nuclear groups, the shutdown “was caused by a failure to adequately monitor and maintain the aging and outmoded components in the Point Beach reactor” (“Questions about nuclear safety,” La Crosse Tribune, August 14, 2022).

ups have told the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) that the plant is operating beyond the 40- year lifespan of its 1960s design and questioned the agency’s oversight of the plant’s safety.

One of the most serious safety questions for aging nuclear reactors is the problem of neutron embrittlement of the nuclear reactor. Scientists have long been aware that neutron radiation from inside the nuclear core would gradually destroy the thick metal reactor that surrounds the core.

According to nuclear expert Arnold Gundersen: “If embrittlement becomes extensive, the dense metallic reactor can shatter like glass…creating what the NRC calls a Class 9 Accident, which is the worst nuclear catastrophe acknowledged by the NRC…The NRC has identified that NextEra’s Point Beach Reactors are the most embrittled operating reactors in the United States.” NextEra Energy is the owner of the Point Beach Nuclear Plant in Two Rivers.

Neutron embrittlement happens to all reactors, but the issue is especially crucial in reactors built before 1972, such as Point Beach. Those vessels were built using copper – which is no longer used in reactor construction because it is more prone to embrittlement – in the walls and welds.

The NRC estimated that both the Point Beach 2 reactor, located on Wisconsin’s Lake Michigan shoreline, and the Palisades nuclear power plant, also located on the Lake Michigan shoreline in Covert, Michigan, were expected to reach the traditional embrittlement screening limits in 2017. Some scientists have called embrittlement the single most important factor in determining the life span of a reactor.

Unlike the Palisades reactor that has announced permanent closure by May 31, 2022, Point Beach has sought permission to operate 20 more years, despite increasing age-related degradation risks. The current licenses for the two reactors are set to expire in 2030 and 2033.

With thermal shock from rapid cooling or from overheating, the steel vessel could crack, releasing coolant from around the fuel rods, leading to a core meltdown, as it did at the Fukushima Daiichi site in Japan on March 11, 2011. Pressurized thermal shock is a problem most severe in the older generation of reactors such as Point Beach.

In 1982, Demetrios Basdekas an NRC Reactor Safety Engineer, expressed his concern about the age-degradation risks of reactor embrittlement in a letter published in the New York Times: “There is a high, increasing likelihood that someday soon during a seemingly minor malfunction at any of a dozen or more nuclear plants around the United States, the steel vessel that houses the radioactive core is going to crack like a piece of glass. The result will be a core meltdown, the most serious kind of accident, which will injure many people, and probably destroy the nuclear industry with it.”

The casualty and property damage figures from the NRC’s “CRAC-2 Report on Accident Consequences for Point Beach, Units 1 & 2, Two Rivers, Wisconsin,” show that a reactor meltdown would have catastrophic negative impacts on health and the economy of nearby neighborhoods and the people who live and work in those communities.

This level of risk justifies serious consideration for shutting down the plant. Renewable energy sources would provide safer alternatives to this threat.

* Al Gedicks is executive secretary of the Wisconsin Resources Protection Council in La Crosse. This report was first published in La Crosse Tribune as ‘Nuclear Safety Must be Focus’, Aug. 31, 2022

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Deterrencelessness: Nuclear Threats Neither Credible Nor Viable

US plans to produce about 500 new tactical nuclear bombs - experts - ВПК.name

The United States intends to produce at least 500 of these new B61-12 thermonuclear gravity bombs, many of which are scheduled to be deploy at air bases in Belgium, Germany, Italy, The Netherlands, and Turkey.
by John LaForge
Nukewatch Quarterly Fall 2022
LA Progressive, July 26, 2020

Threatening to make attacks with nuclear weapons is known as “deterrence” when the United States does it, but it’s called madness, blackmail, or “terrorism” if Russia, China, or North Korea does.

U.S. Air Force thermonuclear weapons, about 100-to-150 of them known as B61s, are stationed at two NATO bases in Italy, and at one NATO base each in Belgium, The Netherlands, Germany, and Turkey. These 170-kiloton H-bombs — 11 times the force of the Hiroshima bomb — are always described euphemistically as “theater” nuclear weapons, defensive ones that are a “deterrent” to aggression.

Of course, Russian aggression in Ukraine has shown nuclear “deterrence” to be an expensive, destabilizing, terroristic fraud. That our high, holy, sacrosanct, and unquestionable arsenal of “deterrence” did not deter Russia on February 24, 2022 is dreadfully, painfully, catastrophically obvious. Yet the nakedness of the deterrent-less Emperor has hardly been acknowledged.

In the ghastly maw of ongoing war in Ukraine, the needless provocation of stationing U.S. thermonuclear B61 H-bombs at six NATO base’s facing Russia could hardly be more frightening. Then, as if to scream “fire” in the crowded auditorium, NATO’s ministers on June 30 issued their latest “Strategic Concept,” a public relations version of the alliance’s ongoing threat to wage indiscriminate, uncontrollable, and poisonous mass destruction using U.S., French and British nuclear warheads.

The Strategic Concept’s soothing, cotton candy version of NATO’s open embrace of nuclear terrorism is this: “NATO will take all necessary steps to ensure the credibility, effectiveness, safety and security of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

At the moment however, the B61 hydrogen bombs stationed at Germany’s Büchel air base cannot credibly be a part of the “mission” since they can’t be attached to Germany’s Tornado fighter jets. This is because the base’s runway is being rebuilt. Until 2026, Büchel’s 33rd Fighter-Bomber Wing of Tornado jets are based at the nearby Nörvenich air base.

For Kathrin Vogler, a Left Party member of the German Parliament in 2021, this is a chance to denuclearize Germany. The politician told the daily paper Rhein-Zeitung last year that “From June 2022 to February 2026, flight operations at Büchel Air Base will be largely discontinued and transferred to the Nörvenich military airfield…. This was confirmed to us by the German government in our minor inquiry. As far as we know, the 20 or so nuclear bombs stored at Büchel will remain there.”

“This means that German nuclear sharing will effectively not take place for four years from 2022,” Volger told the paper.

“This exposes the argumentation of the German government, which repeatedly claims that nuclear sharing is an important part of NATO’s deterrence strategy. In fact, maintaining it and thus also the Büchel nuclear weapons site is pure symbolic politics, albeit with high risks for the population. Therefore: The suspension of nuclear sharing must become a phase-out, [and] now would be a good opportunity to do so,” Volger said last year.

Proven useless, nuclear weapons can now be discarded

The June 30 NATO “concept” says, “The fundamental purpose of NATO’s nuclear capability is to preserve peace, prevent coercion and deter aggression.”

As of February 24, 2022, NATO’s nuclear weapons arsenal’s “fundamental purpose” has been utterly delegitimized, politically pulverized, and militarily reduced to ashes. The alliance’s nuclear arsenal can finally be removed without any loss of face, much less any loss of security.

NATO’s latest “concept” accidentally acknowledges the uselessness of retaining nuclear weapons in its recognition that, “The strategic nuclear forces of the Alliance, particularly those of the United States, are the supreme guarantee of the security of the Alliance.”

This is the terrible farce of nuclearism. If nuclear weapon threats guaranteed any security at all, none of the tens of billions of Euro-dollars’ worth of military training, weapons, mercenaries, cyber warfare, or intelligence assistance that NATO partners and Russia are now pouring into Ukraine would be necessary.

Nuclear-armed alliances are a thing of the past which must be and now can be abolished. Under the auspices of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, along with the Treaty on the Nonproliferation of Nuclear Weapons, international law provides a pathway, training wheels, guide rails and a motorcade — courtesy of the great majority of the world’s governments — to a world where conflict and even wars don’t endanger whole civilizations and the biological integrity of life on earth.

 

 

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“No One is Paying Attention to Your Protests”

On the 77th anniversary of the first atomic bomb test and the 43rd anniversary of the catastrophic Church Rock, New Mexico uranium mine waste spill, four US citizens  (Susan Crane, Dennis DuVall, John LaForge, Brian Terrell) attempted to blockade the main gate at nuclear weapons base Buchel in west-central Germany.

BÜCHEL, Germany

This pointed insult was shouted without a trace of irony through a chain-link fence toward a group of nuclear weapons opponents last Tuesday by a military guard equipped with binoculars and wearing a camera strapped around his neck.

The protest group was at the perimeter of Büchel Air Force Base in west-central Germany on July 12, the 205th anniversary of the birth of Henry David Thoreau — the naturalist and theorist of conscientious defiance of illegitimate authority.

It’s safe to say no one was paying much attention to Thoreau either when he went to jail in July 1846 rather than pay poll taxes that were going to support the expansion of slavery into the western United States and President James Polk’s war on Mexico. It was only later that attention was paid, as Thoreau’s essay “On Resistance to Civil Government” would become a world literary classic regarding principled individual refusal to obey orders in violation of one’s personal integrity. After the Concord, Mass. constable demanded he pay his back taxes, Thoreau explained, “I cannot for an instant recognize … as my government [that] which is the slave’s government also.”

None of the anti-war activists went to jail last Tuesday for picnicking near the Büchel NATO base, but a colleague, Frits ter Kuile, of the Amsterdam Catholic Worker, had just begun a 30-day sentence in Germany’s Wittlich prison, for refusing to pay fines imposed for protests at the same base. Frits is the first non-German citizen jailed in the 26-year-long campaign of civil resistance at the controversial site, where 15-to-20 U.S. hydrogen bombs, known as B61s, are stationed. The old-fashioned, 170-kiloton gravity bombs are called “theatre” nuclear weapons war planners although the terrorism and provocation they produce in Moscow, 1,500 miles east, are anything but theatrical. The Hiroshima bomb that turned 140,000 people to powder and ash was ten times smaller an explosive, 15 kilotons.

German Air Force Tornado fighter jets regularly rehearse nuclear weapons attacks on Russia using weighted replicas of these U.S. nuclear weapons. The exercises, 95 of them in 2021 alone, have names like Cold Response, Defender-Europe 21, Anaconda, Locked Shields, Dragon Ride, Atlantic Resolve, Steadfast Noon, and Iron Wolf. Many of the military practices take place in the former Soviet Bloc countries Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania and Poland. Why Russia, invaded from the West three times in the last century, would be alarmed at these overt demonstrations of aggressive hostility is never considered by our gung-ho commercial media.

Another nuclear weapons resister, Ria Makien, a Quaker from the state of North Rhine-Westphalia, recently finished a 30-day sentence in a women’s prison for a similar action at the base. Ria’s protest and jail-going has been noticed, as her example of radical nonviolence in opposition to suicidal weapons is recognized across Germany.

Objections to the stationing and threatening posture of U.S. nuclear weapons in Germany (and four other European partners) are based on legal principles and simple common sense which stands aghast at NATO’s eastern expansion and nuclear war games. The 1970 Nonproliferation Treaty prohibits the United States, Germany, and other states parties from transferring nuclear weapons to or receiving them from another NPT state. This makes NATO’s quaintly named “nuclear sharing” an ongoing criminal violation of binding international law. The destabilizing deployments, rehearsals, and threatened use of the U.S. B61s — rationalized in NATO’s newly issued “Strategic Concept” — cannot be distinguished from Russia’s recent nuclear threat-mongering, except in terms of nuance. “NATO’s … posture is based on an appropriate mix of nuclear … capabilities”, the Concept states.

“NATO’s nuclear deterrence posture relies on the United States’ nuclear weapons forward-deployed in Europe ….” And “NATO will … ensure the credibility … of the nuclear deterrent mission.”

NATO’s cold-blooded “strategic” preparation for meaningless, genocidal atomic violence is cosmetically presented in defensive, sanctimonious, antiseptic language depicting hydrogen bombs as reasonable, measured, protective security blankets. This is a childishly naïve mindset that the wargamers promote but do not share.

Realists like Vicki Elson of NuclearBan.US, who spoke June 21 at a Washington, DC press conference promoting their abolition, described them honestly: they are “climate wrecking, indiscriminate weapons of mass extinction that don’t keep us secure but exacerbate the plunge toward environmental collapse, even without war.” At least Elson is paying attention.

–This column  appeared at CounterPunch July 15, 16, 17, 2022

 

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