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November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Long-Term Operation of South Africa’s Koeberg Reactors: A Costly Gamble Enters Phase Two

By Lydia Petersen

CAPE TOWN, South Africa ⸺ In July 2024, Eskom Corp. brought Unit 2 of the Koeberg nuclear reactor station ⸺ a cornerstone of South Africa’s nuclear so-called Long-Term Operation (LTO) strategy ⸺ back online after significant delays. Framed as a “fix for energy insecurity and climate change,” the project is mired in cost overruns, missed deadlines, and legal wrangling. In July 2025, Eskom, owner and operator of the Koeberg reactors, was court-ordered to pay 1-billion South African rands (approximately $56.4 million) over disputes tied to a delayed steam generator replacement. The court’s decision exposes the risks and contradictions of extending aging nuclear infrastructure, not only for South Africa, but for the world, and is a global caution against nuclear “solutions” to the climate crisis.

A crumbling timeline

The repeated delays in the restart of Unit 2 disrupted Eskom’s energy planning and deepened the country’s electricity crisis during which South Africa has been experiencing rolling black-outs. While Koeberg Unit 1 received a 20-year operating license extension, the decision on Unit 2’s extension was deferred. The National Nuclear Regulator (NNR) has since opened a public comment period on the proposed extension, even as the unit resumes operations. With Unit 1 now offline for a planned outage, Koeberg will not run at full capacity again until late 2025. This fragmented process raises serious questions about how nuclear LTOs are being justified in the context of South Africa’s ongoing energy instability.

The $56-million fallout

Recently, the Western Cape High Court ordered Eskom to pay $56 million to France’s nuclear giant Framatome, which oversaw Koeberg’s steam generator replacement. Eskom had resisted resolving the matter through adjudication, opting instead for litigation, and insisted the payment was a “contractual obligation” rather than a penalty. Regardless of semantics, public funds are once again being used to resolve disputes tied to questionable project governance. The full financial cost of Koeberg’s LTO remains secretive, a recurring theme in nuclear contracting worldwide.

Unfinished safety business

Despite Unit 1’s license extension, critical safety concerns remain unresolved. The NNR imposed 29 safety conditions for continued operation, including issues related to containment integrity, corrosion, and seismic preparedness. Eskom claims it is addressing these, but civil society groups have flagged inconsistencies and a lack of transparency in compliance reporting. Adding to the concern is a broader governance issue: the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) has warned that South Africa’s Department of Mineral Resources and Energy, an active promoter of nuclear power, should not serve as the oversight body for the NNR. This conflict of interest undermines regulatory independence and erodes public trust.

**An unlined trench at South Africa’s Vaalputs National Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility. Photo credit: National Radioactive Waste**
**Disposal Institute**

Waste transport ⸺ a hidden risk

One of the least discussed but most consequential aspects of Koeberg’s LTO is the increase in radioactive waste shipments to the Vaalputs National Radioactive Waste Disposal Facility in the Northern Cape. Waste is transported 375 miles by road inmetal or concrete containers, following IAEA transport regulations. However, the reality on the ground tells a different story.

The primary route to Vaalputs is the R355, a remote, poorly maintained road that has long been flagged by community members and civil society as a safety hazard. Years of appeals to government departments and portfolio committees have yielded no meaningful upgrades. With Koeberg’s LTO expected to generate waste for another two decades, and a proposed Centralized Interim Storage Facility (CISF) at Vaalputs, the volume and frequency of waste transports will increase significantly.

This raises serious questions about South Africa’s ability to meet international benchmarks, not just in packaging and radiation shielding, but in infrastructure resilience, emergency preparedness, and community protection. The IAEA’s standards emphasize not only container integrity but also route safety, public consultation, and risk mitigation. South Africa’s current transport framework falls short on all three.

A global cautionary tale

Koeberg’s LTO is not an isolated case. Across the U.S., Europe, and Asia, utilities are attempting to extend the lives of aging reactors under similar conditions: deferred maintenance, ballooning costs, and weakened oversight. These efforts are often framed as climate solutions, yet the lived realities — from legal disputes to unresolved safety risks — tell a different story. South Africa’s experience with Koeberg adds to mounting global evidence that nuclear power, particularly operating extensions for aging plants, cannot form the backbone of a just and democratic energy transition.

As South Africa pushes ahead with its nuclear agenda, civil society continues to demand transparency, accountability, and a genuine shift toward community-owned renewable energy, not false solutions cloaked in the language of climate urgency. The road to Vaalputs is more than a transport route; it’s a symbol of systemic neglect, regulatory failure, and the urgent need for a new energy paradigm.

— Lydia Petersen is an environmentalist and anti-nuclear activist from Capetown, South Africa. She is the spokesperson for Koeberg Alert Alliance.

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

U.S. Atomic Bombings Didn’t Save Lives or End the War

By John LaForge

August 6 and 9 were the 80th anniversaries of the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The killing of 140,000 civilians at Hiroshima was the effect of detonating a 60-million-degree Celsius explosion (ten thousand times hotter than the surface of the sun) over the city. Richard Rhodes’ The Making of the Atomic Bomb (1986) reported, “People exposed within half a mile of the … fireball were seared to bundles of smoking black char in a fraction of a second as their internal organs boiled away…”

The use of atomic bombs was rationalized after-the-fact using myths that transformed the burning of children into a positive good. President Truman and government propagandists justified the attacks claiming they “ended the war” and “saved lives” ⸺ stories still believed today ⸺ but, as historian Gar Alperovitz has demonstrated in The Decision to Use the Atomic Bomb and the Architecture of an American Myth (1995), the pretext of “saving lives” was fabricated.

General Dwight Eisenhower, who had been the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, notes in his book Mandate for Change (1963) that he told Secretary of War Henry Stimson at the July 1945 Potsdam Conference ⸺ just before the bombings ⸺ that he opposed using the bomb because it was “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives.” Ike told Sec. Stimson, “Japan was already defeated and that dropping the bomb was completely unnecessary.”

Broad declassification of wartime documents has made the facts accessible to everyone, leading the historian of the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission, J. Samuel Walker, to report in the winter 1990 edition of the journal Diplomatic History, “The consensus among scholars is that the bomb was not needed to avoid an invasion of Japan and to end the war within a relatively short time.”

Dozens of leaders who ran the war agree. Winston Churchill wrote in his six-volume history of WWII (1953), “It would be a mistake to suppose that the fate of Japan was settled by the atomic bomb. Her defeat was certain before the first bomb fell.”

Admiral William Leahy, the Chief of Staff to Presidents Roosevelt and Truman, declared in his memoir I Was There (1950), “The Japanese were already defeated and ready to surrender. The use of this barbarous weapon at Hiroshima and Nagasaki was of no material assistance in our war against Japan. I was not taught to make war in that fashion, and wars cannot be won by destroying women and children.”

Major General Curtis LeMay, who directed the devastating incendiary destruction of Japan’s 67 largest cities prior to August 1945, was more emphatic. Asked by a reporter at a Sept. 20, 1945 press conference, “Had they [Japan] not surrendered because of the atomic bomb?” Gen. LeMay declared, “The atomic bomb had nothing to do with the end of the war at all.”

Gen. “Hap” Arnold, commander of the Army Air Force, wrote in Global Mission (1949), “It always appeared to us that atomic bomb or no atomic bomb the Japanese were already on the verge of collapse.” Likewise, Brig. Gen. Bonner Fellers reported in the July 1947 Reader’s Digest, “Obviously … the atomic bomb neither induced the emperor’s decision to surrender nor had any effect on the ultimate outcome of the war.” And the renowned Gen. Douglas MacArthur, said “he saw no military justification for the dropping of the bomb.”

Religious and cultural leaders contemporaneously condemned the attacks, as on March 5, 1946, when the Federal Council of Churches issued a statement signed by 22 prominent Protestant religious leaders saying in part, “the surprise bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki are morally indefensible. … Both bombings, moreover, must be judged to have been unnecessary for winning the war.”

Nuclear weapons are still protected by lies like “limited nuclear war” and “flexible response.” So, August’s anniversaries remind us to rebel against such lies, to demand that the United States apologize to Japanese and Korean survivors and their descendants for the massacres; that the U.S. abandon its nuclear attack plans and preparations; and that it finally stand down and eliminate the crown jewels and poisoned foundation of all government waste, fraud, and abuse ⸺ nuclear weapons.

⸺A version of this commentary appeared at Z-Network August 5 and Counterpunch August 29, 2025

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Environmental Review Begins for Massive Project to Produce New Nuclear Weapon Cores

By John Burroughs

In 2021, this billboard was installed on Interstate 25, facing traffic traveling toward Albuquerque, New Mexico, and seen by 451,000 drivers per month. What do nuclear weapons cores or “pits” cost these days? At least $50 million each. Photo: Los Alamos Study Group, lasg.org

The United States is planning to establish an infrastructure capable of producing at least 80 plutonium pits for the W87-1 nuclear warhead per year. The project is well described and criticized in a comprehensive report released in May by the Union of Concerned Scientists. In the current approach, facilities would be located at Los Alamos National Laboratory, in New Mexico, and the Savannah River Site, in South Carolina. In a settlement of a lawsuit brought by activist groups, the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) agreed to conduct programmatic environmental review of this major project. This summer the NNSA accepted public comments on the scope of the review.

Many Non-Governmental Organizations submitted comments, including the groups that brought the lawsuit resulting in the review: Savannah River Site Watch of Columbia, South Carolina; Nuclear Watch New Mexico of Santa Fe, New Mexico; Tri-Valley Communities Against a Radioactive Environment, based in Livermore, Calif.; and the Gullah/Geechee Sea Island Coalition of coastal Georgia. Other submissions included one from Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy and Western States Legal Foundation. Their comment focused on the nuclear disarmament obligation under Article VI of the Nuclear Nonproliferation Treaty and argued that the NNSA must consider a true no-action alternative of no pit production.

According to the comment: “If the United States and other nuclear-armed states, in particular China and Russia, in accordance with Article VI, take a negotiated path to the global elimination of nuclear weapons in the foreseeable future, there will be no need, perceived or real, for plutonium pit production. While the current international landscape is not conducive to that enterprise, it should not be assumed that pit production will take place over the next several decades. The negotiation of the abolition of nuclear arms is a legal obligation of extraordinary practical and moral importance. The PEIS [Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement] should not assume non-compliance with the obligation.”

The comment also observed: “Additionally, a sometimes-overlooked element of Article VI is cessation of the nuclear arms race at an early date. Production of pits for new-design warheads on a new delivery system, the Sentinel ICBM, and on submarine-based ballistic missiles, has aspects of nuclear arms racing, both in reality and, importantly, as it is perceived by rival nuclear-armed states. If the W87-1 serves to enable the placement of multiple warheads [on] the Sentinel ICBM, it would contribute to quantitative arms racing; it also would be destabilizing. Moreover, according to the Department of Defense, the Sentinel ICBM will have enhanced capabilities and thus its development and deployment amounts to qualitative arms racing. It also appears that the W93 warhead for submarine-based missiles will add some military capability….”

It concluded: “The PEIS should not rule out the possibility that nuclear arms racing will cease and nuclear disarmament will be implemented in accordance with Nonproliferation Treaty Article VI….”

⸺ John Burroughs is the Senior Analyst of the Lawyers Committee on Nuclear Policy, and Board Member, Western States Legal Foundation. This article appeared in “Currents,” the newsletter of Abolishing Nuclear Weapons for Peace and Justice.

November 5, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Summer Heatwaves Force French and Swiss Nuclear Reactors to Shut Down ⸺ Again

Summer river water temperatures in France and Switzerland were nearing or exceeding 80 degrees Fahrenheit. Between the high heat and a marine jellyfish bloom, at least seven reactors were shut down and several others had to reduce output. Most nuclear reactors pump cooling water from nearby rivers or the sea, returning heated water to the environment. This can harm biodiversity as the hotter water has less oxygen, can be subject to algal blooms, and can cause large kills of fish and other organisms.

Extreme temperatures caused by global warming can mean that reactors are sometimes unable to be cooled as the water bodies become too hot, or that reactors must shut down in order to prevent raising the water temperature to unsafe levels.

Both France and Switzerland have safeguards intended to curtail reactor operations when river temperatures reach a certain level. However, during a major 2022 heatwave, both countries allowed reactors to continue operating with water hotter than the allowed maximum, in order to avoid electricity shortages.

Simultaneously, numerous swarms of jellyfish, expanding due to warmer waters, clogged water intake systems and caused four reactors in France to shut down in August.

Reactors have been forced to reduce output or shut down on several occasions in recent years. Switzerland, which produces about one third of its energy from four nuclear reactors, plans to phase them out by 2033. France’s 56 reactors account for about 65% of the country’s electricity.

A 2024 report by the Cour des Comptes, a French administrative court tasked with auditing government spending, projected the “country may see the amount of electricity lost because of climate-related shutdowns triple or quadruple by 2050.”
⸺ Euronews.com, July 2, 2025; New York Times July 3, 2025

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