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July 14, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Who Has Time to Think About Nuclear Weapons?

Nukewatch’s Kelly Lundeen was arrested with 16 other abolitionists including Frida Berrigan whose article follows at the U.S. Mission to the United Nations in New York, demanding that the U.S. join the nuclear weapons ban treaty. See report, p. 3. Photo: Ellen Grady.

By Frida Berrigan

Nuclear weapons might be low on the list of most people’s concerns right now, but resisting them has never been more important.

“Pretty far from the pulse.” That was the comment someone on social media wrote below a photo of me getting arrested at an anti-nuclear protest near the United Nations in early March. Despite being strangely immune to my winning smile and pooh-poohing someone else’s work and passion to perhaps feel a bit superior, that person wasn’t wrong. After all, who has time to think about nuclear weapons when there’s so much else to worry about: Trump-Musk’s kleptocracy and government-busting, the daily fresh hell of Trump-Vance’s war on woke or the rise of white nationalists. Nuclear weapons — the most powerful and destructive weapon in the world — are not even on most people’s list of top 10 fears or top 10 causes they care about.

Unfortunately, this lack of interest doesn’t mean that nuclear weapons have somehow auto-disarmed. Thankfully, there is a serious, militant, and ever burgeoning international movement — mostly from the Global South — that is working toward nuclear abolition and that has led to the creation of the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons. The treaty came out of grassroots organizing initiated by the nations most affected by nuclear weapons every day. It is no small feat that the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons has now been signed and ratified by half the world’s governments. Sadly (but not surprisingly), the United States — the world’s largest nuclear power and only country to use nuclear weapons in war — has yet to sign on.

And that’s the reason I was in New York City on March 5, standing on First Avenue and 45th Street, with my hands behind my back in metal handcuffs. While parties to the TPNW were meeting inside the United Nations, protesters convened by the Atlantic Life Community, Nukewatch, and War Resisters League were standing outside, calling on a recalcitrant United States to send someone from the U.S. Mission to attend.

The goal was to block traffic in front of the United Nations, ostensibly making it easier for the U.S. delegation to get to the meeting. As we prepared to block traffic, I grabbed onto the banner imploring the U.S. to join the treaty. It was 40 feet long, made of taped strips of paper, and extremely fragile and slippery. Holding onto it in the late winter wind took so much concentration that I forgot to be fearful as I stepped into traffic. A block away, another team carried a banner saying “Ban nuclear weapons which are illegal and immoral.”

It was a moment of genuine happiness. In the end, 17 of us were arrested. Although we didn’t convince the U.S. to send anyone to the treaty meeting, we did make a pretty big stink — and a team from our group wheatpasted the text of the related Nuclear Non-proliferation Treaty onto the ground in front of the U.S. Mission.

So, going back to that person who commented “pretty far from the pulse” on the photo of my arrest, I’ll say this: The pulse is the resistance — and it is inside the resister. It gets bigger when we resist together, it helps us overcome fear and stay connected. In actions large or small, individual acts or mass movements, photographed or unnoticed, the pulse is there in the resistance. We couldn’t be closer to the pulse, because it is inside of us!

— Frida Berrigan is an author and columnist with Waging Nonviolence. This article, originally published at wagingnonviolence.org, was shortened for space.

May 29, 2025 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Who’s on the List of Radical Left Thugs that Live Like Vermin?

By John LaForge

**A stark monument in Hamburg’s courthouse square, near the infamous Dammtor prison. Photo by the author.**

I’m married to a German citizen who’s a life-long resident here in Hamburg, and I spent most of the winter and spring in this city of two-million — a far cry from my rural Wisconsin homestead outside a town of 2,000. Not far from our flat is Hamburg’s federal, state and municipal courthouse square, which has a billboard-sized concrete cuboid monument with a blunt, stark, and grim reminder. It reads simply: 1933. The monument is also the site of Dammtor prison where during the terror the Nazi regime conducted 468 executions using the guillotine.

It’s frightening to follow news of repression in the United States, and people here ask why I intend to fly back this month. The short answer is my connection to the rest of my family and friends, my work colleagues, personal identity, the national park system, and the intentional community farmstead that a group of us built with our own hands over the last 36 years.

The prevalence and unpredictable expansion of political persecution is what my friends here and at home are afraid of. They know even high-ranking Republican Party stalwarts like Alaska’s U.S. Senator Lisa Murkowski have said publicly, “We are all afraid. I’m oftentimes very anxious about using my voice because retaliation is real.”

This trepidation in high places prompted Sally Quinn to write in the New York Times May 10, “Washington is physically, emotionally, psychologically and spirituality permeated with an invisible poison. The emotion all around … is fear. Nobody feels safe.” Perhaps nobody should. Trump said Nov. 17, 2023 in New Hampshire, “We will root out the communists, Marxists, fascists, and the radical left thugs that live like vermin within the confines of our country.” I wonder if Sally Quinn and I qualify for the “vermin thug” list.

It’s hard to say, since Trump himself could hardly be more thuggish. On his first day in office he demonstrated that his magical thinking can’t find thugs among his radical right storm troopers. He released from prison 1,500 January 6 rioters led by far-right militias, many of whom had been convicted of violently assaulting police officers, injuring 140.

Speaking of thugs with the rightwing website National Pulse, Trump said that immigration was “poisoning the blood of our country” — his Hitlerian dog whistle heard around the world which he would repeat. At an Ohio rally March 16, 2024, he said about immigrants, “I don’t know if you call them people. In some cases, they’re not people, in my opinion.” Using his best words, Trump added, “I’ve seen the humanity, and these humanity, these are bad, these are animals, okay?”

Dehumanization and vengeful cruelty

Robert Jones, of the Public Religion Research Institute, told National Public Radio in 2023 that “dehumanization of political opponents are the bricks that pave the road to political violence.” In view of Charlottesville, January 6, and the pardons of unrepentant paramilitary rioters, that road’s been paved, resurfaced, and upgraded to a speedway.

Rümeysa Öztürk, a Tufts Univ. graduate student from Turkey was grabbed March 25 in Somerville, Mass. by masked secret agents, shipped off to a Louisiana jail, and held there 7 weeks for signing an opinion piece in the college paper. Mahmoud Khalil, a green card holder married to a U.S. citizen, was abducted without a warrant from his Columbia University housing in New York City by ICE agents March 8 and shipped to jail in Louisiana, although he’s not charged with a crime. Kilmar Armando Abrego Garcia, a Maryland sheet metal worker with no criminal record, was mistakenly shipped to El Salvador’s notorious “Center for Terrorism Confinement” or Cecot maximum security mega-prison, in violation of a federal immigration judge’s 2019 order prohibiting the U.S. from returning him to El Salvador, where gangs could “pose a threat to his life.” Garcia is still there.

The Kafkaesque nightmare nature of Trump’s martial law dreams is that neither the U.S. State Department nor the government of El Salvador have even identified the 260 prisoners sent to the giant maximum-security prison, and neither state has provided evidence of the men’s alleged crimes or gang membership. A federal judge’s order forbade the White House from invoking an antique wartime law to justify the deportations, but the flights had already left. The imprisoned men have effectively vanished indefinitely inside a Salvadoran dictator’s police state nihilism, without recourse. Is that federal district judge on the list?

And immigrants aren’t Trump’s only targets. Lydia Polgreen reported May 8 in the New York Times that the president “muses about ejecting U.S. citizens too,” and enacting “the fantasy of expelling every person he deems undesirable.” In January, Trump talked about sending U.S. citizens who are “repeat offenders” to El Salvador’s gulag-for-hire. Repeatedly belaboring his repetitive repetition again and again, Trump said January 27 in Miami, “If they’ve been arrested many, many times, they’re repeat offenders by many numbers.”

He added, “We’re going to get approval, hopefully, to get them the hell out of our country, along with others,” NBC News reported. The next day Trump said in the Oval Office he wanted U.S. citizens convicted of crimes sent to foreign prisons “to get these animals out” of the United States. “If we could get them out of our country, we have other countries that would take them.” In February, El Salvador offered to jail violent U.S. citizen convicts in the “most severe cases,” in addition to the 260 men flown there earlier from the U.S. without due process.

On May 9, White House adviser Stephen Miller said for the cameras, “The Constitution is clear — and that, of course, is the supreme law of the land — that the privilege of the writ of habeas corpus can be suspended in a time of invasion. So, it’s an option we’re actively looking at.” Miller misquotes the U.S. Constitution to suit his Apartheid agenda. Article VI says, “This Constitution, and the laws of the United States which shall be made in pursuance thereof; and all treaties made, or which shall be made, under the authority of the United States, shall be the supreme law of the land; and the judges in every state shall be bound thereby.”

Habeas corpus is the right to challenge your detention in court and threats of its suspension moved Sen. Chris Murphy of Connecticut to warn, “The slope to despotism can be slippery and quick.” Maybe the senator is on the vermin list. And this is where Trump’s deliberately irrational, secret and rogue police actions, designed to keep opponents off balance, can look and feel like terror. In my work against nuclear weapons and the war system over 4 decades, I’ve been convicted of dozens of nonviolent misdemeanor charges for sit-ins, blockades, and non-payment of fines, and have been sent to 20 county jails and four federal prison camps — including one here in Germany. Within our bands of “repeat offenders,” we call ourselves “nuclear resisters,” but the peace movement’s resistance has never garnered much more than a “pffff” from the police, the masters of war, or the courts that protect them. That’s why I’ll likely be left alone at passport control when I return.

But in view of warrantless, secret police snatching and detention of nonviolent immigrants and students, without due process and even in violation of court orders, Sally Quinn’s withering warning gives pause. “The hallmark of this administration is cruelty and sadism, vengefulness carried out with glee.” As if to prove the point, Trump’s richest friend, the Afrikaner Elon Musk, has declared: “The fundamental weakness of Western civilization is empathy.” Jawohl, Herr Musk! Cue the stiff-arm salute. ###

January 18, 2024 by Nukewatch Leave a Comment

Nuclear Power’s Magical Thinking Debunked

By John LaForge, Source article by Amory Lovins

Stewart Brand, the writer best known as the co-founder and editor of Whole Earth Catalog, and the writer and physicist Amory Lovins, a former chair of the Rocky Mountain Institute who’s been awarded 12 honorary doctorates, have been friends for years. When Brand came out in support of nuclear power (Whole Earth Discipline, Viking 2009), Lovins demolished his arguments in a carefully reasoned article rebutting four main claims that nuclear advocates continue to use. The nuclear industry’s case is still pushed by Brand, Jim Hansen, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the International Atomic Energy Agency, and others, in spite of the fact that they have been thoroughly refuted.

Four claims reactor construction advocates continue to use include:

● Baseload: Wind and photovoltaics can’t keep the lights on because they can’t run 24/7.
● Footprint: Photovoltaics need about 150-175 times, and wind farms from 600 to nearly 900 times more acreage than nuclear reactors to produce the same amount of electricity.
● Portfolio: We need every tool for combating climate change, including nuclear power.
● Government role: The climate imperative trumps economics, so governments everywhere must and will do what France did — ensure that nuclear power gets built, regardless of economics or dissent.

These claims are unsupportable, Lovins explains, but are worth reviewing because the same lies continue to be touted by young climate activists, industry greenwash groups like Generation Atomic, and others.

Artwork from Hoodwinked in the Hothouse and nativemovement.org.

Lovins explains:

Baseload: The electricity system doesn’t rely on any plant’s ability to run continuously; rather, all plants together supply the grid, and the grid serves all loads. That’s necessary because no kind of power plant can run all the time, as Stewart says they must do to meet steady loads. I repeat: there is not and has never been a need for any particular plant or kind of plant to run all the time, and none can do so. All power plants fail, varying only in their failures’ size, duration, frequency, predictability, and cause. Solar cells’ and wind power’s variation with night and weather is no different from the intermittence of coal and nuclear, except that they affect less capacity at once, and more briefly, far more predictably, and are no harder and probably easier and cheaper to manage. In short, the ability to serve steady loads is a statistical attribute of all plants on the grid, not an operational requirement for one plant. Variability (predictable failure) and intermittence (unpredictable failure) must be managed by diversifying type and location, forecasting, and integrating with other resources. Utilities do this every day, balancing diverse resources to meet fluctuating demand and to offset outages. Even with a largely (or probably a wholly) renewable grid, this is not a significant problem or cost, either in theory or in practice — as illustrated by areas that are already 30-40% wind-powered.

Footprint: Brand understates nuclear power’s land-use by about 43-fold by omitting all land used by exclusion zones and the nuclear fuel chain. Conversely, he includes the space between wind and solar equipment — unused land commonly used for farming, grazing, wildlife, and recreation. That’s like claiming that two lampposts require a parking lot’s worth of space, even though 99% of the lot is used for parking, driving, and walking. Properly measured, per-kilowatt-hour produced, the land made unavailable for other uses is about the same for ground-mounted photovoltaics as for nuclear power, sometimes less — or zero, for building-mounted PVs sufficient to power the world many times over. Land actually used-per-kWh is up to thousands of times smaller for wind power than for nuclear power. If land-use were an important criterion for picking energy systems, which it’s generally not, it would thus reverse Stewart’s footprint conclusion.

Portfolio: The one paper he cites as proof that we need all energy options (Pacala & Socolow’s “Stabilization Wedges”) actually says the opposite. There is no analytic basis for his conclusion, and there’s strong science to the contrary. We can’t afford to stuff our energy portfolio indiscriminately with some of everything, and we shouldn’t: some options are less worthy and effective than others. The more you fear climate change, the more judiciously you should invest to get the most solution per-dollar and per-year. Nuclear flunks both these tests.

Government’s role: If nuclear power isn’t needed, worsens climate change (vs. more effective solutions) and energy security, and can’t compete in the marketplace despite uniquely big subsidies — all evidence-based findings unexamined in Stewart Brand’s chapter — then his nuclear imperative evaporates. Of course, a few countries with centrally planned energy systems, mostly with socialized costs, are building reactors: over two-thirds of all nuclear plants under construction are in China, Russia, India, or South Korea. But that’s more because their nuclear bureaucracies dominate national energy policy and face little or no competition in technologies, business models, and ideas. Nuclear power requires such a system. The competitors beating nuclear power thrive in democracies and free markets.

— This article first appeared in Grist.

July 31, 2023 by Nukewatch 1 Comment

Leaks at Minnesota Reactor

By North American Water Office

Photo Credit: Mar 17, 2023 Valley News KVLY

Events having the potential to affect public health and safety are occurring at Xcel Energy’s Monticello single nuclear power reactor, about 35 miles up the Mississippi River from Minneapolis. Primary cooling water containing tritium (radioactive hydrogen) has been leaking into the ground at least since last November.

Xcel Energy and the Minnesota Department of Health didn’t bother to report the Monticello leak of about 400,000 gallons until mid-March, and then announced, with much fanfare, that there is no risk to public health and safety and that the leak had not reached the Mississippi River. Then, a few days later Xcel Energy announced a second leak of several hundred gallons because the tank into which contaminated water had been collected overflowed. Not bad, for a clown show.

While state and corporate officials say not to worry, the problem is that these same people fail to consider the authority of the National Academy of Sciences in its 2006 report BEIR VII — the Biological Effects of Ionizing Radiation. The book-length BEIR VII conclusively reported that there is no safe dose of ionizing radiation, no level of exposure that can be declared harmless. Every exposure, no matter how small, carries a potential for causing cancers and other mutations.

Considering that the radioactive half-life of tritium is just over 12 years, and that it takes about 10 half-lives before a radioactive substance becomes relatively benign biologically, it is probably premature to speculate about public health and safety impacts. In fact, there are three pathways for leaked radiation to affect the public: it can migrate to the river, which supplies most of the drinking water for Minneapolis; it can migrate into groundwater off-site, where it becomes available for private and municipal water pumps; and it can evaporate. There is no doubt that during the next 120 years, some fraction of the leakage will follow each of these pathways and then affect biological activity. Of course, nobody will ever know how much contamination went where, or know what it did when it got there, because radiation monitoring at Monticello, as well as at the rest of the global commercial nuclear fleet, is mostly incapable of detecting radiation in any of these pathways. It makes better PR to just say there is no threat to public health and safety.

This Monticello pipe leak could be an omen of things to come. The leak occurred because a pipe carrying primary cooling water broke. Primary cooling water circulates through the reactor and thereby becomes radioactive. This radioactivity bombards the pipe through which it flowed with neutrons, and over time, this neutron bombardment causes metals to get brittle. Arguably, the pipe broke because it had become embrittled and something jarred it. The problem here – as with all nuclear reactors — is that every bit of metal at Monticello that is part of the primary system, which contains and controls the nuclear reaction, has also been subjected to this same neutron bombardment. All these metals are at some elevated state of embrittlement, now that the reactor is over 50 years old. As a result, we all now get to sit around and wait to see which components will be next in line to brake, and what the consequences of that breakage will be. That could get real exciting very quickly.

— Additional news on Minnesota reactor troubles can be found at Water for Life, the newsletter of the North American Water Office (nawo.org)

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By John LaForge, Source article by Amory Lovins

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