A PLAGUE UPON BOTH YOUR HOUSES

Don’t let US-Chinese rivalry haunt tracing of Covid-19 origin

The search for the truth has become a blame game driven not by science but by superpower rivalry

By SUN XI

APRIL 14, 2023

An aerial view shows a laboratory at the Wuhan Institute of Virology in central China's Hubei province. Photo: AFP

Although the global Covid-19 pandemic has not completely ended, the post-Covid era is coming. Life in Singapore where I reside has long gone back to normal, and I have traveled back to China twice this year for business trips. There is hardly any trace of the pandemic, and people are just working and living as usual to enjoy their lives without talking about Covid-19 any more.

However, some people seem still to be obsessed with Covid-19. Most notably, the US Congress passed and President Joe Biden signed the “Covid-19 Origin Act of 2023” last month to “get to the bottom of Covid-19’s origins to help ensure we can better prevent future pandemics.”

But why did the United States not pass an “HIV/AIDS Origin Act” or “Swine Flu/H1N1 Origin Act” in the past? Obviously, because the human immunodeficiency virus did not originate in China, and H1N1 virus was first detected in the US.

President Biden stated that under the Act, his administration will review all classified information relating to Covid-19’s origins, including potential links to the Wuhan Institute of Virology.

The main advocate of the Act, US Senator Josh Hawley, put it more bluntly: “The American [people] deserve to know the truth behind the origins of the pandemic and we must begin the process of holding China accountable.”

So the real goal of the Act is very clear: to prove the SARS-CoV-2 virus was leaked from the Wuhan lab and to blame China. Isn’t that against the “presumption of innocence,” a principle long held by the US itself?

Previously, former US secretary of state Mike Pompeo firmly claimed that he had “a large amount of evidence” of the leak but eventually was unable to show anything concrete. Even today, US intelligence agencies are still divided over whether virus came from a lab leak or an animal.

If the US government really wants to know the origin of Covid-19, it should not ignore the appeal that its Fort Detrick lab in Frederick, Maryland, and 336 biological laboratories overseas should also be investigated by an independent third party led by the World Health Organization. Doing otherwise shows double standards applied on China and the US itself.

In his recent article “Navigating the new age of great-power competition,” veteran former Singaporean diplomat Bilahari Kausikan sharply pointed out that “the US-Chinese rivalry seems set to become the defining feature of international relations in the 21st century.”

He is right. Tracing the origin of Covid-19 should be a matter of science, but unfortunately it has become a blame game haunted by superpower rivalry. It seems that the US does not really care whether the SARS-CoV-2 virus was from China, but it just wants to use the issue to attack China further.

If so, the world may never be able to know the truth about the virus’ origin. If we still want to know the facts, we need to put geopolitics aside and leave the matter to scientists.

Sun Xi, a China-born alumnus of the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy at the National University of Singapore, is an independent commentary writer based in Singapore. He is also founder and CEO of ESGuru, a Singapore-based consultancy firm specializing in environmental, social and governance issues.

The Cobalt Gold Rush and the East Palestine Disaster

BY ELLEN BROWN

 APRIL 14, 2023
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Holidays in my childhood were spent at my grandparents’ farm in Plain Grove, Pennsylvania, 35 miles from East Palestine, Ohio. My grandfather’s grandfather fought at Gettysburg and homesteaded the 160-acre farm after the Civil War. My grandmother sold it in the 1960s for $13,000, lacking a male heir to do the work; but my relatives still live in the area.

I have therefore taken a keen interest in the toxic chemical disaster that resulted when a Norfolk Southern freight train derailed  in East Palestine on Feb. 3, although it is not my usual line of research. The official narrative doesn’t seem to add up. Something else must have been going on, but what?

A Litany of Anomalies

The 150-car train was 1.76 miles long, and 10 of the 38 derailed cars contained hazardous materials, including vinyl chloride. The decision was made to create a hole in each of the suspect cars and allow the contents to flow into a pit, which was then lit on fire. As reported in Newsweek:

The toxic mixture of chemicals and carcinogens released … could spread many miles out from the crash site, experts say.

The chemicals—including vinyl chloride, butyl acrylate, ethylhexyl acrylate and ethylene glycol monobutyl, according to the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)— were being carried aboard the train when it derailed. …

The fire sent up a large plume of black smoke.  When burned, vinyl chloride reacts to form phosgene gas, which was used as a chemical weapon in World War I.

How far could the phosgene cloud spread? According to a researcher cited in the Newsweek article, “It depends very much on the weather conditions … but potentially well over 100 miles radius.” Vinyl chloride becomes phosgene gas, a chemical weapon, only when burned. Why was the decision made to dump and burn the chemicals? Independent journalist Eric Coppolino writes that the “decision to breach, dump and burn was totally irrational and nobody understands it. The more experience people have, the less they understand it. EPA was involved; it cannot merely be a bystander.” Observing that there are gaping holes in the official narrative, he writes [brackets mine]:

There has never been a dump and burn in railroad history, even in the decade prior to its being banned by 1980 regulations. There is always dump and remove, or decant (into tankers) and remove. Spills happen every two weeks — the burn part is unprecedented and there is rarely a need to dump. The typical approach is to take the contaminated dirt to a hazardous waste landfill.

A 2022 EPA guidance, which says how to interpret laws and regs, repeats the ban on dump and burn except only after careful consideration when there is absolutely no other alternative (which has never happened in civilian society; it happens in the military). [For more on the EPA guidance, see here.]

Fully enclosed hazmat tanker truck driver recovery operation (entirely routine procedure when there are damaged tanker cars) was initiated the night of Friday Feb. 3 — and then called off within 24 hours (on Friday night or Saturday). Who called it off and why?

Fire lines pulled from keeping tankers cool.

No samples of soot or wipe samples from inside the tanker cars — missing crucial data that would reveal the true nature of the incident.

Point source soot samples are also missing. These would also be tell-all. …

No state or federal emergencies were declared, depriving governments of emergency powers and agencies of certain kinds of authority …

Analysis of samples from PTRMS lab (a high-end mobile chemistry analysis lab) are bogged [logged? bogged down?] at Carnegie Mellon, in custody of [research professor] Albert Presto, who is not releasing them.

Pressure release valves (PRVs) were working fine, per NTSB [National Transportation Safety Board] report; the tanker cars were not in jeopardy. Other reports say the VCM [vinyl chloride monomer] was not in jeopardy of exploding and besides, they can easily decanter it into tanker trucks as is done regularly.

Five dead CTEH guys [environmental scientists] in airplane crash (eyewitnesses to point source sampling), who were at the East Palestine scene taking samples on behalf of the railroad and took samples … they died en route to the next mission. [CTEH was the company hired by Norfolk Southern to test the air in East Palestine, though the plane crash was en route to a later Ohio mission.]

People are still sick in Palestine in a way they should not be based on every other incident my source has worked on for 30 years. …

Chemicals that are currently banned from production by federal law are DDT, PCBs, PBDEs, some CFCs, all chemical warfare agents and chemicals banned from production by voluntary agreement with chemical industry are PFOS and PFOA.

OK, what really happened? —Eric Coppolino, reposted on The Truth Barrier.

Cobalt, Lithium and Appalachian Coal Mines

Another astute researcher, who has a podcast at SquirrelTribe.com, has been asking similar questions. She traces possible links to the cobalt gold rush, having found a research paper from Pennsylvania State University targeting western Pennsylvania and the adjacent Ohio border area for cobalt extraction. It seems that old abandoned coal mines are potential sources of cobalt and lithium. (My uncle was a coal miner in western Pennsylvania.)

As observed in the New York Times, “The quest for cobalt, which is essential for electric-car batteries, has fueled a cycle of exploitation, greed and gamesmanship.” And as noted on Energy.gov in April 2021, “Cobalt is considered the highest material supply chain risk for electric vehicles (EVs) in the short and medium-term.”

According to Energy.gov on April 4, 2023, “Across the country, there are billions of tons of coal waste and ash, mine tailings, acid mine drainage, and discharged water. These waste streams from mining, energy production, and related activities contain a wide variety of valuable rare earth elements and other critical minerals that can be produced and used to build clean energy technologies ….”

The SquirrelTribe podcaster points to an April 4, 2023, Associated Press article which states:

President Joe Biden’s administration is making $450 million available for solar farms and other clean energy projects at the site of current or former coal mines, part of his efforts to combat climate change.

As many as five projects nationwide will be funded through the 2021 infrastructure law …

The White House also said it will allow developers of clean energy projects to take advantage of billions of dollars in new bonuses being offered in addition to investment and production tax credits available through the 2022 Inflation Reduction Act. …

Mining areas in Appalachia and other parts of the country have long had the infrastructure, workforce, expertise and “can-​do attitude” to produce energy, [Energy Secretary Jennifer Granholm] told reporters on Monday. …Rare earth elements and other minerals are key parts of batteries for electric vehicles, cellphones and other technology. Biden has made boosting domestic mining a priority as the U.S. seeks to decrease its reliance on China, which has long dominated the battery supply chain.

In November 2021, Scientific American published an article titled “Chip Shortage Threatens Biden’s Electric Vehicle Plans,” quoting Commerce Secretary Gina Raimondo, who said, “The average electric vehicle has about 2000 chips, roughly double the average number of chips in a non-electric car.” She told reporters that Biden’s plans for half of new vehicles to be electric by 2030 depends on the U.S. investing in semiconductor production – the “Creating Helpful Incentives to Produce Semiconductors (CHIPS) for America Act.”

On Jan. 21, 2022, a White House Fact Sheet said that computer chips were critical to a range of products from cars to smart phones; that the Administration had been working around the clock to expand U.S. chip manufacturing capacity; and that “Today, Intel will announce a new $20 billion factory outside Columbus, Ohio.”

The Intel chip factory has been called the largest private sector investment in Ohio history, expected to become the “largest silicon manufacturing location on the planet.” But finding the needed minerals could be a problem. As detailed by Andrew Hawkins in an August 2022 article on The Verge:

EVs need batteries, and batteries need minerals like nickel, cobalt, and lithium. The US has some of these minerals underground, and it wants to dig them up, expeditiously, so that it doesn’t have to rely as much on other countries, including China.

But this is where it gets tricky. Mining operators say they can speed up the digging process, but a bunch of regulatory roadblocks stand in their way. And environmentalists and tribal groups remain extremely skeptical that all this mining can be done in a way that doesn’t ruin the land and spoil the water. …

The Inflation Reduction Act, the Democrats’ new tax and climate bill, devotes nearly $400 billion to clean energy initiatives over the next decade, including EV tax credits and financing for companies that manufacture clean cars in the U.S. And California said it would ban the sale of new gas-​powered vehicles starting in 2035, a move that over a dozen other states are expected to follow.

But the only EVs that will be eligible for the $7,500 credit are ones that are made in North America using batteries with minerals dug out of the ground in the U.S. or from its trading partners….

It may just not be possible. A US Geological Survey estimated that to fully electrify its vehicle fleet, the U.S. will need 1.27 million and 160,000 metric tons of battery-​grade nickel and cobalt per year, respectively — both of which exceed total global production in 2021.

Sitting on a Rare Earth Goldmine – Blessing or Curse?

As observed on NPR.org, “Smartphones, computers and electric vehicles may be emblems of the modern world, but … their rechargeable batteries are frequently powered by cobalt mined by workers laboring in slave-like conditions in the Democratic Republic of Congo.”

Those are not conditions under which American miners would want to work, and the Congolese shouldn’t  have to either. But it could be good news for the people of the East Palestine region: They may be sitting on something that is more valuable to the electric vehicle industry even than gold — cobalt and lithium.

However, suspicions also run the other way: that their lands have been rendered uninhabitable in order to devalue the property, allowing it to be acquired cheaply for cobalt recovery, either in voluntary sale or by eminent domain.

Eminent domain is an extraordinary power by which the government can take property without the owner’s consent. Generally, the only prerequisites are that the property be put to a public use and that fair compensation be paid. But the power is controversial and subject to abuse. In Iowa, it is being used over landowners’ objections to force access for carbon capture pipelines, intended to lower ethanol’s carbon emissions by transporting liquefied carbon dioxide from ethanol plants to be stored underground. Summit Carbon Solutions plans a $4.5 billion 2000-mile pipeline transporting carbon dioxide through five states.

Intentionally rendering properties uninhabitable sounds pretty far-fetched, but it is not without precedent. In a podcast titled “Blackstone STEALING Homes From Working Class Americans,” Krystal Ball states:

Danish lawmakers passed a law that would prevent landlords from jacking up prices until five years after the completion of any new renovations. This was in response to allegations from residents that Blackstone would intentionally embark upon loud and intrusive renovations with the direct goal of trying to force longtime residents out so that they could then dramatically up their rents. In Copenhagen this approach came to be known as “shake the building.” As one journalist wrote, “Imagine an apple tree shaking at the trunk to get the apples loose from the branches. In the real estate world the occupants are the apples, the apartments are the branches, and when a landlord ‘shakes the building,’ it is to get the tenants out.”

Two of the three largest institutional investors in Blackstone are Vanguard and BlackRock, which largely own each other. Vanguard and BlackRock are also the two largest shareholders of Intel Corp. And the SquirrelTribe podcaster notes that they are two of the three largest investors not only in Southern Norfork but in Netflix, which released a movie called “White Noise” in November 2022. The movie tracks the incidents in East Palestine so closely that some bloggers suggest it was “predictive programming” for that disaster. The plot includes a tanker truck carrying toxic materials that crashes into a train in a small Ohio town, creating an airborne toxic event. The film was shot almost entirely in Northeast Ohio, where several East Palestine residents worked as extras in it. One of them told CNN that the film “hits too close to home.” He said, “The first half of the movie is all almost exactly what’s going on here. Everybody’s been talking about that.”

Another suspicious development is an East Palestine ordinance passed in January that requires the owners of vacant buildings to pay a substantial fee, file a vacant building plan, and obtain an inspection for vacant buildings. Exemptions apply if they plan to sell the property.

Abandon the Ban?

Whether or not the push for U.S. cobalt and lithium mining had anything to do with the East Palestine disaster, maybe it is time to rethink the drive to force 100% of new car sales to be electric vehicles. Europe is now “all but abandoning” its engine ban. According to the Wall Street Journal on March 27:

The implausibility of a net-​zero carbon energy future is becoming so obvious that even Europeans are starting to notice. Witness the weekend decision to step back from the ban on internal-​combustion automobile engines that the European Union had intended to implement by 2035.

… Battery technologies don’t exist to replace fossil fuels in driving distance or ease of refueling, and no one can say if or when such batteries will materialize. …

Electric vehicles also require rare-​earth minerals often sourced from dirty mines in China. They’re only as green and affordable as the electricity used to charge them. In Europe that means coal-​fired power for which consumers pay a huge price owing to the costs of forcing intermittent renewables such as wind and solar into the grid.

For these reasons plus a strong dose of old-​fashioned commercial self-​interest, Germany’s auto industry objected to the ban on internal-​combustion engines, and it’s good someone did. Resistance from Berlin and several other European governments has forced Brussels into all but abandoning its engine ban.

As the chairman of one Indigenous tribe wrote in a comment to the U.S. Department of the Interior, “The green energy revolution cannot be built on a dirty mining industry, outdated regulations, and environmental injustice.”

This article was first posted on ScheerPost.

Ellen Brown is an attorney, founder of the Public Banking Institute, and author of twelve books including the best-selling Web of Debt. Her latest book, The Public Bank Solution, explores successful public banking models historically and globally. Her 300+ blog articles are at EllenBrown.com.

Annals of the Covert World: the Secret Life of

Shampoo

Jeffrey St. Clair 

APRIL 14, 2023

Lobby of CIA HQ. Photo: CIA.

It’s been 30 years now since I wrote my first story about the CIA. In the decades that followed, the Agency has been a featured player in at least four books (Whiteout, Imperial Crusades, Grand Theft Pentagon and End Times) and hundreds of articles. My office has nearly been overtaken by the inexorable accretion of boxes filled with heavily redacted files extracted from the Agency’s vaults via FOIA. The files for our book Whiteout totaled more than 150,000 pages alone. The papers from the George W. Bush and Obama forever wars, mass surveillance, renditions and torture schemes amassed another 100,000 pages, at least. At a certain point you just stop counting. This week I was rearranging the Teton-like piles of boxes to reduce the risk of being crushed at my desk when the Big One hits the Willamette Valley and a file spilled open, scattering my notes on the following story, which I was working on the week before the planes took down the Twin Towers and immolated the Pentagon. It seems an epoch ago now and I’d nearly forgotten it. But I chuckled as I read the pages about how a veteran of the Agency’s infamous Phoenix Program had landed a job doing dirty tricks in a shampoo caper. The surveillance state is both more sinister and much sillier than most of us imagine. There are many such stories in these files, some of them outtakes from Whiteout, which deserve to be resurrected from the crypt to remind us of the kinds of obscenities and absurdities the CIA has been up to all these years. The running title for this occasional series, Annals of the Covert World, is a tribute to John McPhee’s books on geology, Annals of the Former World. We’ve both done years of excavating through deep strata of information about how the past continues to shape and often warp the present. –JSC

Veterans of the CIA’s Phoenix Program always seem to make soft landings with a golden parachute: a lifetime guarantee of gainful employment. CounterPunch reported on the ascent into the Congress of Robert Simmons, a Phoenix veteran and adept at torture. Then there’s the case of former senator Bob Kerrey, who commanded a Phoenix operation in the Mekong delta that featured throat-slitting and the assassination of elderly men and women and children. Now comes word that Phoenix veterans are also highly sought after by the upper echelons of the corporate world.

In early September, Procter and Gamble, the Cincinnati-based conglomerate, fessed up to hiring Phoenix operatives to infiltrate its chief rival Unilever, the Anglo-Dutch cosmetics giants. It was all about the secrets of shampoo, specifically the top-selling Salon Selectives and Finesse. It seems both of those Unilever brands had taken a big bite out of the market share once dominated by a shelf of P&G products, including Wash & Go, Head & Shoulders, Pantene and Vidal Sassoon. Also at stake was the planned sale of Clairol, which was on the auction block with both companies in an intense bidding struggle. One former P&G executive said that the companies were engaged in a decades-long dirty war, which had become “a death struggle to incrementally gain share”.

The operation was launched in June of 2000, when P&G contracted with the Phoenix Consulting Group of Huntsville, Alabama, a corporate espionage firm set up by Phoenix veteran John Nolan and fellow CIA officers. P&G also set up a secret wing inside its own security department. The operations were run out of a secret office known as The Ranch, and featured safe houses, off-shore bank accounts, dumpster diving and informants.

Nolan and his operatives were apparently able to secure more than 80 internal Unilever documents that detailed the company’s shampoo marketing strategy for the next two years. The documents were returned to the company after word of the operation leaked out to a reporter at Fortune magazine. P&G apologized for the operation, saying it had “violated our strict business guidelines regarding our business policies.” The company also fired two executives in the firm’s security sector.

But few take these actions as anything more than the defensive maneuvers of a company caught doing something shady and in full damage control mode. Indeed, P&G is well-known for its paranoia and obsessive concerns about corporate secrecy. Its security officers are known inside the company as “Proctoids”. In the past, P&G has shadowed employees on their business trips to see if they chatted to fellow travelers (and Unilever agents?) about company business, snooped in on company phone lines and tracked computer traffic. A few years ago P&G executives became enraged by a series of critical articles about the company by Wall Street Journal reporter Alecia Swasy and retaliated by hitting her with grand jury subpoenas and putting her under 24-hour surveillance.

P&G CEO, John Pepper, can hardly claim ignorance of the operation. Over the past year, Pepper has been bragging publicly about the success of his company’s ventures into “competitive intelligence,” most recently in a June speech in Montreal. The speech was given two months after Pepper sent his apologies to Unilever for filching the company’s marketing plans.

The leading guru of competitive intelligence is none other than Pepper’s pal John Nolan, the Phoenix vet who credits himself with perfecting, if not inventing the field. Indeed, there’s even a school for corporate snoops set up by Nolan and other CIA/Phoenix retirees called the Centre for Operational Business Intelligence, a kind of School of the Americas for corporate snooping and assorted dirty tricks.

Douglas Valentine, author of The Phoenix Program, describes Nolan as “disarmingly forthright”. There’s no question that Nolan doesn’t shy away from his bloody resumé. In fact, it’s his calling card. CounterPunch has acquired a briefing paper Nolan prepared for prospective clients, in which the former spook details his methods for “competitive intelligence gathering”, “elicitation techniques”, and “countermeasures”.

“As business turns” Nolan writes, “we’ve been asked to conduct intelligence collection assignments against an even dozen of those companies where the security managers had previously asked us about steps to defeat our efforts,” Nolan writes. “In every one of those cases, we’ve accepted the assignment, because that is what we do, but with the caveat to the client that we are uncertain about our level of success because we know that the company under consideration has a security leader who is apparently involved in information protection. But now we don’t bother with that caveat anymore. Why? Because when we try to penetrate the designated target company, we don’t find it any more difficult to conduct collection operations there than in any other companies…perhaps we’re just a heckuva lot better than we think we are.” It would take an analyst versed in the work of Lacan to decode the depth of schizophrenia involved in this spy-vs-spy scenario.

In his pitch to corporate executives Nolan delicately avoids mentioning the most important factor in corporate snitching: the fact that so many employees are mistreated at their jobs that they can’t wait to sabotage their bosses.

Jeffrey St. Clair is editor of CounterPunch. His most recent book is An Orgy of Thieves: Neoliberalism and Its Discontents (with Alexander Cockburn). He can be reached at: sitka@comcast.net or on Twitter @JeffreyStClair3. 

Highest U.S. Marginal Tax Rate is Too Damn Low

BY SYLVIA ALLEGRETTO

 APRIL 14, 2023
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With Tax Day just around the corner, it is a good time to put post-WWII top marginal tax rate into context. Many find it hard to believe that the top rate was 91% during the Eisenhower years. No, that didn’t mean that high earners paid a 91% tax on all of their income.

Take the 2022 tax brackets for single filers. The lowest rate is 10% and applies to taxable income (after deductions) up to $10,275. The first $10,275 is taxed at the same rate for everyone regardless of whether total taxable income is $10,000 or $750,000. The same logic applies to each successive tax bracket.

The highest marginal rate this year is 37%, which only applies to each dollar above $539,900 for single filers. So, for taxable income of $539,901, the top tax rate would be assessed on $1.00 for a tax of 37 cents. Income that is millions above the $539,900 threshold is all taxed at the same 37%. Given rate increases for much lower levels of income, this seems unfair.

For the last three decades, the mainstream policy debate around the top rates has centered around the difference of, at most, a few percentage points. As the figure shows, the Bush tax cuts (2001-03) lowered the highest rate from 39.6% to 35%. Obama set them back to 39.6% (2013) before Trump moved them to 37% (2018).^[1] President Biden’s income tax plan continues the trend over the last three decades, as it would return the top rate to the Obama-era 39.6% for single filers earning over $450,000. The best research from Saez and Zucman pegs the optimal federal marginal income tax rate around 60% – though this depends on enforcement and avoidance factors, this optimal rate is leaps and bounds away from the modern-day seesaw of a couple percentage points.

While no single tax change can solve the issue of fairness and revenue for things both needed and nice, progressive tax changes across corporate, capital gains (20% top tax rate!), personal income (federal and state^[2]), estates, and wealth together can change the landscape of the country. Current tax structures starve investments in our aging infrastructureand other public goods like healthcare, education, childcare, and veteran care. Inequality continues to soar and the richest Americans and corporations are not paying their fair share. Bold progressive policies across all taxes are necessary to invest in people, their communities, and to reflect our values at a level commensurate with our vast national resources and wealth.

Notes.

^[1] Clinton did not change the top rate but removed the cap on Medicare taxes. Obama also added a 0.9% surcharge to high income earners. Together, they add 3.8 percentage-points to the top marginal rate.

^[2] State taxes vary widely with many implementing cuts, nine states have no personal income tax. Other states have more progressive policies. For instance, California has a top state rate of 13.3% with an additional 1% on income above a million dollars

Resilience Development and Decision Making in Nuclear and Wider Power Generation
Part 2

FEBRUARY 1, 2023
MARIO PIEROBON

Factors such as war, climate change, technology, and public opinion are causing significant disruption and change in power generation. In this second of a two-part story, SCT’s Mario Pierobon identifies solutions for resilience development and possible operational drawbacks.
Solutions

Stout et al. [i] identify that power sector resilience solutions often include a combination of resource or technological diversity, redundancy, decentralization, transparency, collaboration, flexibility, and foresight considerations. “A mix of solutions should be considered because no single intervention will address all potential vulnerabilities,” they state.

According to Gilbert & Bazilian [ii], recent innovations in advanced nuclear designs could make nuclear power a distributed energy solution for the first time. “As a dispatchable and resilient energy source, distributed nuclear could complement and accelerate the ongoing distributed energy revolution,” they say. “Although decarbonization imperatives are recognized, the role of distributed energy in addressing energy poverty and energy resilience is worth considering.”

In a 2018 paper by Juan A Vitali, Joseph G. Lamothe, Charles J. Toomey, Jr., Virgil O. Peoples, and Kerry A. Mccabe entitled ‘Study on the Use of Mobile Nuclear Power Plants for Ground Operations’[iii] it is proposed that, beyond revolutionizing commercial distributed energy, distributed nuclear might be a game changer for military applications. The US Army has investigated the use of mobile reactors to support ground operations, to reduce the risk of casualties from fuel convoys.

The US DOD has signed engineering contracts with mobile reactor vendors, observe Gilbert & Bazilian. “Mobile reactors could also serve as disaster response, with distributed nuclear replacing damaged power plants or bypassing damaged transmission lines,” they say.

Microreactors, or micro-modular reactors (μMRs), are a significant departure from conventional nuclear designs, according to Gilbert & Bazilian. “Derived from reactor designs originally investigated in the 1950s and 1960s, microreactor designs feature innovations inspired by the drawbacks of conventional designs,” they say. “While a conventional reactor is 1 GW-electric or larger and a small modular reactor (SMR) is 50–300 MW-electric, μMRs are usually 10 MW-electric or less. This is equivalent in power output to 1–5 wind turbines or a small solar farm. At the extreme end, the Department of Energy and NASA are developing Kilopower for space exploration, with a size as low as 1 kW electric.”

New fuel types, fission cycles, passive safety features, and other changes could enable ultra-small reactors to improve safety, report Gilbert & Bazilian. “Their small sizes decrease the heat to surface area of the reactor, allowing for passive cooling instead of the complex active cooling required for light-water reactors. By using new fuel forms and requiring vastly smaller amounts of uranium, off-site risks from a microreactor accident are limited. The designs used by small reactors are often termed as featuring inherent or passive safety,” they say.

Operational Drawbacks

For Gilbert & Bazilian, there are also potential operational disadvantages to downsizing nuclear power. The greater ratio of surface area to reactivity and reduced number of neutrons decreasing fuel efficiency means that activated materials may pose a greater issue. “Materials innovation and the use of HALEU could mitigate such challenges. More worryingly, the largest constraint for distributed nuclear remains one of the factors motivating their innovation: economics,” they say.

According to Gilbert & Bazilian, distributed energy addresses some main public policy challenges of the electric industry, as carbon-free sources of energy, they concur to climate mitigation. “If microreactors are to substantially contribute toward bolstering energy resilience and alleviating energy poverty, they have many barriers they must overcome. As with other energy technologies, future projects are expected to drive costs down as innovations and production economies of scale are achieved,” they affirm.

According to the Organisational Capability Working Group in a 2018 document ‘The UK Nuclear Industry Guide To: Organisational Capability and Resilience’ published on behalf of the Nuclear Industry Safety Directors’ Forum [iv], the industry faces key challenges in maintaining organisational capability and resilience. Among the challenges, the critical shortage of individuals with specific skills has driven competition between organisations in their quest to secure the personnel they need. “Nuclear facilities are generally located away from high density population areas so localisation is an issue,” the document says. “Recruitment is often hampered by long lead times due to security vetting. Delivery of goods, works and services may be outsourced to the supply chain so sustaining an effective intelligent customer capability is vital."

Summing Up

While operational drawbacks to downsizing nuclear power need to be considered and the nuclear and power sector has faced various challenges and issue, there are solutions – such as new fuel types, fission cycles, passive safety features, and other changes – that could improve the resilience of the nuclear and power sector.

References

[i] Sherry Stout, Nathan Lee, Sadie Cox, and James Elsworth, Jennifer Leisch, POWER SECTOR RESILIENCE PLANNING GUIDEBOOK - A Self-Guided Reference for Practitioners, 2018. https://www.nrel.gov/resilience-planning-roadmap/.
[ii] Alexander Q. Gilbert and Morgan D. Bazilian, Joule 4, 1839-1851, September 2020 Elsevier Inc.
[iii] Vitali, J.A., Lamothe, J.G., Toomey, C.J., Jr., Peoples, V.O., and Mccabe, K.A. (2018). Study on the Use of Mobile Nuclear Power Plants for Ground Operations (US Army). https://apps.dtic.mil/dtic/tr/fulltext/u2/ 1064604.pdf.
[iv] The Organisational Capability Working Group on behalf of the Nuclear Industry Safety Directors’ Forum (SDF) (September 2018), The UK Nuclear Industry Guide To: Organisational Capability and Resilience.

China, Brazil Lead in Chipping Away at U.S. Economic Power Abroad

BY W. T. WHITNEY

 APRIL 14, 2023
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Photograph Source: Palácio do Planalto – CC BY 2.0

The United States proclaimed the Monroe Doctrine 200 years ago and ever since has arranged Latin American and Caribbean affairs to its advantage. Nevertheless, struggles for national and regional independence did continue and the poor and marginalized classes did resist. Eventually there would be indigenous movements, labor mobilizations, and progressive and socialist-inclined governments. Cuba’s revolutionary government has endured for 63 years.

The U.S. political hold may have weakened, but U.S. control over the region’s economies remains strong; after World War II it extended worldwide. Now cracks are showing up. In particular, the U.S. dollar’s role as the world economy’s dominant currency may have run its course.

In 1944, 44 allied nations determined that the value of their various currencies would correlate with the value of the U.S. dollar instead of the value of gold. The nations since then have relied on the U.S. dollar for their reserve currencies, for foreign trade and in banking transactions.

There seemed to be good reason. The United States was supreme in producing and marketing goods and so, presumably, the dollar’s value would remain stable and predictable. The dollar would be readily accessible to bankers and traders and its valuation would be unambiguous. Nations could also build their currency reserves through the dollars they accumulated in the form of bonds sold by an increasingly indebted United States.

The United States has benefited. In currency exchanges involving the dollar, U.S. companies and individuals experience only minor add-on costs. U.S. importers know that the more the dollar strengthens in value, the less expensive will be products they buy abroad. U.S. borrowing costs overseas are relatively low because U.S. bonds, and the investments they represent in dollars, are appealing abroad, for a variety of reasons.

Dollar dominance has caused pain abroad. Exporters to the United States take a hit when the exchange value of the dollar weakens. Importers of U.S. goods are hurt when the dollar strengthens.

Most importantly, the U.S. government gains an opening to punish enemy countries through their use of dollars in international transactions. It imposes economic sanctions requiring that dollars not be used in a targeted country’s overseas transactions. The U.S. Treasury Department penalizes foreign banks and companies that disobey. Sanctioned nations have included Cuba, Iran, North Korea, Syria, Venezuela, Nicaragua, and more recently, China and Russia.

The U.S. government’s frequent resort to economic sanctions has greatly contributed to new stirrings on behalf of a new international currency system. Confiscation of currency reserves deposited in U.S. and European banks that belong to Iran, Venezuela, and Afghanistan have likewise encouraged calls for change.

On March 29 China and Brazil announced they would use their own currencies in trading with each other. China is Brazil’s biggest trade partner. China’s renminbi currency presently constitutes a major share of Brazil’s currency reserves.

Earlier in 2023, Brazil and Argentina proposed cooperation toward creating a common currency for themselves. At the January meeting of the Community of Latin American and Caribbean States (CELAC), Brazilian President Lula da Silva opined that, “If it were up to me, I would promote a single currency for the region.” He would call it the “SUR” (South).  The ALBA regional alliance in 2009 proposed an electronic currency called the “Sucre” aimed at reducing dollar dependency.

Former Brazilian President Dilma Rousseff is the recently named head of the New Development Bank which, headquartered in Shanghai, serves the BRICS nations (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa). The bank represents an alternative to the U.S. -dominated International Monetary Fund and the World Bank.

The shift away from dollar dependency is evident elsewhere.

At a Russian-Indian “Strategic Partnership …Forum” recently, a Russian official announced that the BRICS states would be creating a new currency and that the formal announcement would be made at the BRICS summit meeting in Durban South Africa in August.

The BRICS countries account for “40% of the global population and one-fourth of the global GDP.” According to People’s Dispatch, Iran and Saudi Arabia, having recently signed a peace accord, will soon be joining BRICS. Egypt, Algeria, the UAE, Mexico, Argentina, and Nigeria apparently are giving consideration. The values of new currencies will rest not on another currency but on the value of “products, rare-earth minerals, or soil.”

Iran and Russia in January agreed on methods useful for bypassing the SWIFT banking system, the U.S. tool for servicing its dollar dominance. To evade U.S. sanctions, the two countries reply on their own currencies for most transactions.

At their summit in March, Russian and Chinese leaders reiterated their intention to expand bilateral trade and utilize their own currencies. China increasingly is using its own currency in transactions with Asian, African, and Latin American countries. The yuan “has become the world’s fifth-largest payment currency, third-largest currency in trade settlement and fifth-largest reserve currency,” according to Global Times.

Saudi Arabia is on the verge of selling oil and natural gas in currencies other than the dollar, and China occasionally pays Arabian Gulf nations in yuan for those products.

The finance ministers and governors of the central banks of the member states of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) met in Indonesia on March 28. At the top of their agenda were “discussions to reduce dependence on the US Dollar, Euro, Yen, and British Pound from financial transactions and move to settlements in local currencies”. The ASEAN nations, an alliance of 10 southeast Asian nations, are developing a digital payment system for member states’ transactions.

Dollar dominance may be losing its appeal closer to home. Former Goldman Sachs chief economist Jim O’Neill claims that, The U. S. dollar plays a far too dominant role in global finance … Whenever the Federal Reserve Board has embarked on periods of monetary tightening, or the opposite, loosening, the consequences on the value of the dollar and the knock-on effects have been dramatic.”

Gillian Tell, chair of the Financial Times’ editorial board notes that, “concerns are afoot that this month’s US banking turmoil, inflation and looming debt ceiling battle is making dollar-based assets less attractive.” Plus, “a multipolar pattern could come as a shock to American policymakers, given how much external financing the US needs.”

There are wider implications. Argentinian economist Julio Gambina bemoans “disorder in the world economy …[and] this attitude of unilateralism represented by the US sanctions.” Interviewed on March 29, Gambina points out that “wealth has a father and a mother: labor and nature.”

He adds that, “Latin America and the Caribbean … where inequality is growing the most … have a highly skilled working class, willing to carry forward the production of wealth. We have the resource of assets held in common for sovereign development through which the interests of our peoples and the reproduction of nature, life and society are defended.”

W.T. Whitney Jr. is a retired pediatrician and political journalist living in Maine.