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World Nuclear Industry Status Report Summary

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

The conclusion of the 2021 World Nuclear Industry Status Report is that nuclear power is in decline. The 409-page report reveals that nuclear’s share of global electricity production is falling, having generated 3.9 percent less electricity in 2020 than the previous year. “Nuclear energy’s share of global gross electricity generation continues its slow but steady decline from a peak of 17.5% in 1996 [to] a share of 10.1% in 2020,” the report found. The report also reminds readers that “small modular reactors,” under development in the US, Canada and elsewhere, may never be commercially viable. The data indicate that renewable energy sources are fast becoming more available and increasingly cheaper than nuclear. Even China has slowed its reactor expansion and only increased its nuclear electricity capacity by 2 gigawatts (GW) in 2020, compared to a total of 133 GW from renewables. The world nuclear report also highlights the increasing levels of reported corruption in the nuclear industry, with an entire chapter devoted to the topic.

—Deutsche Welle, Sep. 28, 2021; The World Nuclear Industry Status Report 2021

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Ex Reactor Builder Sentenced for Fraud

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
By Adrian Monty

A former Chairman and CEO of SCANA Corp. in South Carolina, Kevin Marsh, was sentenced to two years in prison for fraud in the construction of two nuclear reactors that never produced a single watt of electricity. Marsh and other officials knowingly covered up various failings during construction of the “Westinghouse AP1000” reactors at the VC Summer site, in order to win rate increases and to $2.2 billion in tax credits. “Due to this fraud,” said acting US attorney M. Rhett DeHart, “an $11 billion nuclear ghost town, paid for by SCANA investors and customers, now sits vacant in Jenkinsville, South Carolina.” Both SCANA and Westinghouse were forced into bankruptcy in 2017, and construction at VC Summer was halted, leaving 5,000 workers unemployed. Marsh has paid $5 million in fines in a plea agreement. This case follows a July 2017 Westinghouse fraud scandal in which Senior VP Jeffrey Benjamin was charged with 16 felonies and could face up to 20 years in prison and a $5 million fine. Three other Westinghouse officials pleaded guilty to charges. In 2020, federal prosecutors accused Ohio’s Republican House Speaker Larry Householder and four associates of funneling $60 million in bribes to themselves in exchange for passing a financial bailout of the state’s decrepet old reactors. Power corrupts of course, but nuclear power means corruption on steroids.

— US Attorney’s Office, District of South Carolina, Press Release, Oct. 7, 2021; Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, Aug. 31, 2021; AP, Aug. 2, 2020

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Mass Destruction for the Whole Family

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

Congressman Jeff Fortenberry, R-Nebr., introduced a bill October 7 to designate the Strategic Air Command & Aerospace Museum outside Omaha “America’s National Museum of the Cold War.” Two weeks later a federal grand jury indicted Rep. Fortenberry on charges of lying and hiding evidence of illegal campaign contributions. Fortenberry’s bill would add to an extensive national effort to make believe nuclear weapons are quaint and a thing of the past. Fortenberry even said in a statement: “The Strategic Air Command in Bellevue, Nebraska was the literal and figurative ‘ground zero’ for thermonuclear exchange during the Cold War.” [emphasis added]. StratCom is more ground zero now than during the cold war, when it controlled Air Force weapons, as it now controls the entire US nuclear arsenal including submarine-launched missiles. Nuclear war wildlife or theme parks already operate at the “B Reactor” at Hanford in Washington State; the plutonium machining site in Rocky Flats, Colorado; a closed missile silo near Fargo, North Dakota; a retired ICBM launch control center and missile silo in South Dakota; a Titan Missile site by Tucson, Arizona; a 1,000-person fallout shelter in White Sulphur Springs, West Virginia; and a planned “Manhattan Project National Historic Park” inside the Oak Ridge National Lab in Tennessee.

— KETV 7, Omaha, Oct. 7, 2021; Politico, Oct. 19, 2021; “Nuclear War Theme Parks,” Counterpunch, Sep. 5, 2015

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Germany’s High-Level Waste Dump Plan Scrapped

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022
By Christine Manwiller

On September 17, 2021 Gorleben, the highly controversial nuclear waste dump site in Lower Saxony will close. The former salt mine was chosen by government officials in 1977 to be the final repository for high-level waste. This proposal was permanently discarded by the waste management organization Bundesgesellschaft für Endlagerung (BGE) with their 2021 report. In it, a total of 90 sites were identified as being geologically acceptable. The Gorleben salt dome was not included in this list.

Geological issues have always caused criticism of the proposed facility. Critics called the site unsuitable, according to Deutsch Welle, “arguing that the salt in the ground could weaken containment structures and cause radioactive leaks.” In addition, a lack of consultation with local residents or municipalities, and the steamroller approach taken by the government inflamed the controversy. Gorle

Police officers blocked anti-nuclear activists from interfering with a shipment of high-level radioactive waste Nov. 11, 2001, as it approached Gorleben, Germany, which was until now the proposed site for deep underground abandonment of the waste. This photo by John LaForge, taken with standard 35-milimeter film, was fogged by exposure to gamma radiation emitted by the passing “Castor” casks. Decades of broad-based opposition ended in September when Germany announced the proposal’s cancellation.

ben became the battleground for tens of thousands of farmers, anti-nuclear activists, scientists, medical workers, and students who organized dozens of protests. In 1979, over 100,000 attended a Berlin protest, making it one of the largest in the history of West Germany. The idea of building a waste reactor fuel reprocessing plant at the Gorleben site was abandoned in 1979 largely because of the intense public outcry. However, plans for the permanent waste repository continued, and shipments of “Castor” waste casks continued to arrive and to be stored above-ground awaiting placement underground.

On May 3, 1980 some 5,000 protesters converged on a test drilling site and built a large resistance camp they named the Free Republic of Wendland. After a month, police moved in and destroyed the encampment, but the movement was energized, and shipments of waste from 1995-2011 were regularly interrupted by demonstrations involving thousands of protesters. The site received a total of 13 shipments. According to one report, the first transport held five Castor casks of “reprocessing” waste fuel elements, and the remaining 12 shipments totaled 108 Castor casks, each holding 28 canisters. The
“vitrified” or glassified waste was shipped back to Gorleben after first being transferred to France for reprocessing. The last shipment of waste in 2011 incited strong public outrage, with protestors again physically blocking vehicles. Twenty-thousand police were required to hold back the protestors.

Cancellation of the Gorleben dump is a significant win for the local community and for organized anti-nuclear activism. Germany’s state secretary for the environment, Jochen Flasbarth said in September 2021, “I hope that the wounds in [the region of] Wendland can heal now that the decades-long dispute over Gorleben is over…. Gorleben stood [as] a major social conflict in Germany for over three decades.”

However, the fight is far from over as the search continues for a permanent reactor waste abandonment facility. Germany is faced with 1,900 Castor casks of the 1-million-year radioactive hazard, which hold about 27,000 cubic meters of waste. According to BGE chairman Stefan Studt, this inventory accounts for “only five percent of Germany’s radioactive waste

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Federal Prosecutor Calls Illegality of US Nuclear Bombs in Germany an “Insignificant fact”

Nukewatch Quarterly Winter 2021-2022

On Oct. 12, 2021 Sigrid Eckert-Hoßbach, Jürgen “Hops” Hoßbach, Frits ter Kuile, and Johanna Adickes were on trial in Koblenz, Germany charged with trespassing and damage to a fence during an 18-person go-in protest at the Büchel air base in July 2018. The base is the staging ground for 20 US hydrogen bombs, called B61s, kept ready for German Tornado fighter jets to use in attacks against Russia.

The four nuclear weapons resisters had asked the regional court judge to allow expert witnesses to testify about the status of the nuclear weapons under international treaties, and about the risk of accidental nuclear attacks. The senior public prosecutor in the case objected in writing, claiming that even if the “policy” of stationing US H-bombs in Germany was a violation of international law, the request for experts should be rejected “due to the insignificance of the evidentiary fact.”

In a September 21 filing, the prosecutor wrote, “The fact that … the nuclear weapons policy of the German government is contrary to international law can be assumed to be true.”

This written acknowledgement by a federal prosecutor of the validity of the resisters’ foremost complaint about Germany’s “nuclear sharing” came as a shocking surprise. But the letter went on to claim, without legal analysis, that a justification defense based on international law “cannot be derived from this.”

Expert testimony was excluded from the trial and the four defendants were found guilty.

This Dec. 9, Nukewatch staffer John LaForge will be in the same courtroom on similar charges and has also asked the court to hear expert testimony. Although unlikely to be allowed, Dr. Francis Boyle of the University of Illinois Law School has agreed to testify. He wrote to Nukewatch October 28 that, nuclear weapons resisters have no “criminal intent” — an element the government has to prove. “My testimony will show that planning and preparation of nuclear attacks is ongoing criminal activity under international law. You have no culpability here because you were acting to prevent the ongoing commission of international crimes,” Prof. Boyle wrote.

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