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Sunday, June 04, 2023

Rare green fireball explodes over Australia, creating bright flash visible for hundreds of miles

Video footage of a flash lighting up the night sky above an airport runway. — **Video footage of the meteor exploding. (Image credit: Carins Airport)**

By Harry Baker published 11 days ago

An unusual green meteor recently exploded as it plummeted through the sky over Australia, giving off a brilliant flash of light that could be seen for miles and a loud bang that stunned local residents below.

Cameras at Cairns Airport in Queensland captured a video of the exploding meteor, known as a bolide, at 9:22 p.m. local time on May 20. Video footage uploaded to the airport's Facebook page shows an initial green flash lighting up the night sky before a secondary white flash.

Additional footage captured on smartphones, dashcams and security cameras showed that the flash was visible as far away as Normanton, which is around 370 miles (600 kilometers) west of Cairns, The Guardian reported. The sound of the explosion could be heard most clearly above the town of Croydon, which is around 60 miles (100 km) east of Normanton, suggesting that the meteor exploded somewhere overhead.

The space rock was likely quite small, between 1.6 and 3.2 feet (0.5 and 1 meter) across, and could have been traveling up to 93,000 mph (150,000 km/h), Brad Tucker, an astrophysicist at Australian National University in Canberra, told The Guardian. Any fragments that crashed to Earth would likely have been very small and were likely still frozen, he added.

Bolides are meteors that blow up in Earth's atmosphere due to a buildup of friction that eventually causes the space rocks to instantaneously shatter with enough force to trigger a sonic boom, according to the American Meteor Society.

The meteor "essentially does a belly flop," Tucker said. "The friction builds up and causes that glow and then it hits breaking point, which causes the huge flash and the sonic boom."

Most bolides emit a white or yellow light when they explode. The unusual green flash of the meteor that exploded above Croydon was caused by a high concentration of metals such as iron and nickel in the meteor, Tucker said.

Similar green light can also be given off by fireball meteors, which are extremely bright meteors that break apart in Earth's atmosphere but do not explode with the same intensity. In August 2022, a green fireball was spotted above New Zealand, and in November 2022, another one crashed into Lake Ontario.

US and European powers scramble to acquire critical minerals necessary for EV vehicle production

Gabriel Black
26 May 2023
WSWS.ORG

Electric vehicle (EV) sales are surging around the world. In just three years, between 2019 and 2022, global EV sales increased from 2 million to over 10 million units. The International Energy Agency (IEA) estimates that by 2030, EVs will compose 60 percent of all car sales in the combined area of China, Europe and the United States.

This rapid growth in electric cars has important implications for the global economy. While total spending on the renewable energy transition remains substantially below the levels required to halt global warming, a transition of sorts is occurring.

About 7 percent of all greenhouse gases comes from cars. Unlike other sources of emissions, such as flying, shipping or the production of steel and cement, passenger cars can be relatively easily transitioned out of dependency on fossil fuels.

Amid highly volatile and increasingly expensive gas prices, as well as a general concern over the catastrophic effects of climate change, electric cars are being widely adopted.

The growth of EVs has enormous implications: for the capitalist economy, for workers around the world, but above all in the context of the United States’ struggle to maintain its role as the dominant imperialist power.

The United States, China and batteries

As the US economic situation deteriorates, and its relative economic power declines, the planners in the Pentagon increasingly see China as a mortal threat to a US-dominated capitalist system.

The US has now been preparing to wage a war against China for over 10 years. Just this March, a leaked memo showed a top US general predicting the US would be at war with China by 2025.

A major problem, however, exists for the military strategists and policy experts in Washington. China controls a large portion of both the mining and processing of the minerals required to make EV batteries. In other words, they control the supply chains for a new technology that is rapidly becoming central to the global economy.

Share of Chinese control of select critical minerals in refining and mining. This chart uses data from the New York Times and the IEA. Refining refers to the physical refinement of these minerals in China. Mining, however, refers both to their mining in China as well as ownership through Chinese firms in other countries. Data from the New York Times and the International Energy Agency. [Photo: WSWS]

A previous report by the New York Times, basing itself on data from the CRU consulting group, shows that China is responsible for the global production of:

54 percent of electric cars
66 percent of battery cells
77 percent of cathodes (the positive electrode in a battery)
92 percent of anodes (the negative electrode)

While China does not directly produce most minerals (except for rare earths and graphite), the country dominates the processing of minerals. China refines:

95 percent of the world’s manganese (used primarily as a key alloy in steel)
73 percent of cobalt
70 percent of graphite
67 percent of lithium
63 percent of nickel

Meanwhile, by these same estimates, through its companies, China indirectly controls more than half of lithium mining operations and 41 percent of cobalt operations, largely in the Congo.

For decades, the US and its European allies have been content with this situation. While US and European companies owned much of the world’s intellectual property and leading corporate brands, China was made into the sweatshop of the world. Hundreds of millions of Chinese workers have ground their lives away, six days a week, 10 hours a day, in the sprawling factory complexes largely controlled by US and European capital.

Exploiting China’s lower environmental regulations and cheaper labor, Western suppliers have relied on China to perform the toxic task of refining and processing mineral ores into usable material. The fact that most of the minerals would ultimately then be used in production chains located in China further cemented this relationship.

But now, as the Biden administration more imminently prepares for war, the US, Japan and its main imperialist allies in the EU are all scrambling to find alternative sources for these minerals.

The energy transition and minerals

In order to produce the batteries for EVs, a significant quantity of lithium, nickel, cobalt and graphite are required, alongside several rare earth minerals and a host of other so-called “critical minerals.”

The IEA predicts that under a modest renewable energy development scenario, global demand for lithium alone will multiply by 42 times between 2020 and 2040. For cobalt, the demand will grow 21 times, and for nickel 19 times. In short, an unprecedented surge of mining and processing of these minerals must now rapidly unfold.

This chart shows the International Energy Agency's projections for increasing demand of certain critical minerals in 2040 relative to 2020. This chart presumes the IEA's Sustainable Development Scenario, which is based on pledged but not enacted climate policies. [Photo: WSWS]

Because electricity, without batteries, must be consumed when it is produced, energy storage is central to the renewable transition, beyond just EVs.

When electricity is generated by a solar farm, its height of production will be in the middle of the day. Peak power use, however, happens in the morning and evening when workers are home. To better coordinate renewable energy production with its consumption, massive batteries will be required to hold charge.

These problems, known as “intermittency” problems, complicate all forms of renewable energy production. They necessitate, alongside EVs, a massive expansion in battery and thus critical mineral production.

It is in this context of the explosive growth of mineral demand for various types of batteries, and China’s dominance in their supply chain, that the Biden administration has launched a series of measures to develop a new US- and European-controlled supply chain.

Scrambling for contracts, excluding China

A recent New York Times article reports that “U.S. officials have begun negotiating a series of agreements with other countries to expand America’s access to important minerals like lithium, cobalt, nickel and graphite.”

However, the Times notes, “it remains unclear which of these partnerships will succeed, or if they will be able to generate anything close to the supply of minerals the United States is projected to need.”

Here are just a few of the known national agreements that have been made or are being negotiated:

Japan and the US signed an initial deal in March 2023 over critical mineral supplies. It pledges shared “standards” for mining and processing as well as reviewing foreign investors.
During the G7, the US and Australia announced a similar new partnership on shared standards for “sustainable supply chains” of critical minerals.
The EU and the US are in the midst of negotiating a new comprehensive trade deal, of which EVs and critical minerals are an important part. Biden said the agreement “would further our shared goals of boosting our mineral production and processing and expanding access to sources of critical minerals that are sustainable, trusted, and free of labor abuses.”
Indonesia, the world’s largest producer of nickel and main alternative to Russian nickel, has also approached the US regarding some kind of critical mineral agreement.

The common thread in all of these initial series of trade agreements are words like “sustainable,” “trusted,” “standards, and “free of labor abuses.”

All of these terms are just euphemisms, however, for excluding China and Chinese-owned suppliers.

If Biden or his European or Japanese counterparts were seriously concerned about “labor abuses,” all they would have to do is look outside their own window. In the US, over a dozen people die every day due to workplace accidents overwhelmingly caused by poor safety standards. Meanwhile, child labor is returning to the US with children as young as 12 working in factories.

By pledging themselves to “trusted” and “sustainable” mineral supply chains, the major imperialist powers are signaling their commitment in creating an alternative supply network not dominated by Chinese companies. Among other things, such a supply chain would guarantee some degree of production of these essential minerals in the event of war between the US and China.

However, in the words of Scott Kennedy, an adviser at the Center for Strategic and International Studies quoted by the Times, “There is no way anybody is going to become successful in electric vehicles without having some type of cooperation with China, either directly or indirectly.”

It is, in this sense, unimaginable how a war between the Untied States and China would not lead to a catastrophic breakdown of the global economy given how central this—and many other—Chinese supply chains are. Such a situation would also lead to a doubling-down of oil and gas dependency (something the United States, unlike China, dominates).

Inter-imperialist conflict and the EU

A central feature of the growing scramble for critical minerals is the resurgence of inter-imperialist rivalries and conflicts.

From left, Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, French President Emmanuel Macron, Japan's Prime Minister Fumio Kishida, US President Joe Biden, German Chancellor Olaf Scholz, British Prime Minister Rishi Sunak and European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen at the G7 Hiroshima Summit in Hiroshima, Friday, May 19, 2023. [AP Photo/Franck Robichon]

At the G7, European Commission President Ursula von der Leyen stressed in a speech that the renewable energy transition should “not come at each other’s expense.”

Two months earlier, in March, the EU released a major act called the European Critical Raw Materials Act, which aims to build a so-called “Critical Minerals Club” to lead €20 billion worth of investment by 2030 into critical minerals. The act is seen as a response to and based off of the US CHIPS act.

Underlying von der Leyen’s comments is a growing concern among the US’s imperialist allies that they will be left behind as the US implements a series of protectionist, wartime, non-market measures to create a new critical mineral supply chain.

For example, a major issue at the G7 is the fact that the new US Inflation Reduction Act excludes European car makers from EV tax benefits. This essentially makes American-made electric vehicles more competitive in the massive American car market.

The EU has strongly petitioned the US to include European-made EVs and critical minerals in these tax credit schemes. Under the Inflation Reduction Act, consumers can get up to $7,500 in credit for buying EVs if both the battery components and final assembly have 50 percent or more of their value originating from North America (the NAFTA trio of Mexico, the US and Canada).

Von der Leyen speaks for an entire layer of European capitalists who, in joining the US-led drive to oppose China, fear that they will suffer from the growing nationalist protectionism of the US.

Russia and the war in Ukraine

Previously, the WSWS explained that the war in Ukraine plays a key role in the effort of the American ruling class to acquiring critical minerals.

The eastern expansion of the US-led NATO alliance has always had as its primary goal subduing or even breaking apart Russia, with a particular eye to controlling its natural resources.

Russia plays a particularly important role in high quality nickel production—the demand for which is expected to multiply 19 times in the coming two decades—as well as the platinum-group metals, especially palladium. Russia is also the world’s largest producer of diamonds, the second largest reserve holder of coal and gold, the third largest of iron, and the fifth in silver. This is not to mention Russia’s massive oil and gas reserves. Russia produced 12 percent of the world’s oil prior to the Ukraine war.

The reports coming out of the G7, showing a flurry of activity to develop a new critical mineral chain, confirm this analysis of the central role of critical minerals in the war in Ukraine.

Noting the growing importance of critical minerals to a host of new technologies, the WSWS wrote:

The deep need of American finance capital to dominate current and future sources of critical minerals, as well as the disproportionate control of China over them, forms an important part of the backdrop to the drive to war against Russia…
The breaking apart of Russia and its domination by American capital would be a strategic stepping stone in the efforts of the American ruling class to impose a “new American century” through the subordination of China and Eurasia more broadly to its aims. Resources play a role in this. Amid the enduring need for oil and natural gas, as well as the rapidly growing need for critical minerals, Russia is seen as a vital landmass with a vast array of riches.

The US-EU-Japanese push to secure new minerals forms part of this larger effort to impose a “new American century.” They see the development of alternative supply chains to China as an urgent necessity.

Further implications

The implications of the EV revolution and the new scramble for critical minerals are not just geopolitical.

Leaving aside the cataclysmic impact that a war between the US and China would have, there are other ways in which this transformation in car and energy production—two of the world’s largest industries—will affect workers, workplaces and capitalist society.

For one, EV production assemblies involve substantially less labor than combustion engine-based cars. The offshoring of most EV production (at major car manufacturers in the US, Japan and the EU) leaves significantly less work to be done. Additionally, with the need to retool and construct a more modern assembly line, car companies use EVs as an opportunity to introduce other far-reaching automation.

The auto companies are planning massive layoffs and an enormous increase in the exploitation of workers as part of the transition to EV production.

A truck drives past brine evaporation ponds at Albemarle Corp.'s Silver Peak lithium facility, Thursday, October 6, 2022, in Silver Peak, Nevada. [AP Photo/John Locher]

Another impact of this shift in global production will be in the labor-intensive mining industry. If the IEA’s estimates of a 4,100 percent increase in lithium production and similar giant leaps for other minerals is to be believed, a vastly expanded mining industry will emerge. Centers of global mineral production, such as the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), Chile, Russia, Indonesia, Australia, China and others are poised for explosive booms around their key mineral reserves.

While the US, EU, and Japan claim to be seeking “sustainable” modes of producing such goods, with better labor practices, the profitability of these operations will ultimately rely on slashing wages and cutting back on safety to better compete on the global market.

Whether an autoworker in Detroit assembling a new EV or a critical mineral miner in Chile, China, the DRC or Australia—all will be squeezed and pressed by this new, ferocious drive to dominate renewable energy production.

Nuclear Turns Fashionable

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER COUNTERPOINT MAY 26, 2023

MAY 26, 2023

Screen grab from Westinghouse promotional video.

Small Modular Reactors (SMR) are the new nuclear craze, especially with the U.S. Congress, as America’s representatives see SMRs as a big answer to energy needs and reduction of greenhouse gases, advertised as a green deal for clean energy that skirts the heavy costs of paying the Middle East billions upon billions. However, the devil in the details is dangerously overlooked.

Notable nuclear accidents: NRX (1952) Kyshtym (1957) Windscale (1957) SL-1 (1961) Wood River Junction (1964) K-27 (1968) Three Mile Island (1979) Constituyentes (1983) Mohammedia (1984) K-431 (1985) Chernobyl (1986) Tokai (1997, 1999) Fukushima (2011) … but wait, hundreds, possibly thousands, of Small Modular Reactors (nuclear SMRs) are about to pop up around the world. What could possibly go wrong?

“Multiple and unexpected failures are built into society’s complex and tightly coupled nuclear reactor systems. Such accidents are unavoidable and cannot be designed around.” (Charles Perrow, Normal Accidents (Princeton University Press, 1999)

“On dozens of occasions because of human error or technical miscue or active threat, the world has come dangerously close to the brink of nuclear conflagration… it is a terrifying history of which most people remain ignorant.” (Julian Cribb, How to Fix a Broken Planet, Cambridge University Press, 2023.)

Should nuclear power really circumnavigate the planet with mini-power plants?

For Germany, which closed its last three nuclear plants in April 2023, the country’s Federal Office for the Safety of Nuclear Waste Management conducted a study: “SMRs have been the subject of repeated discussion in recent times. They promise cheap energy, safety, and little waste. BASE commissioned an expert report (in German) to evaluate these concepts and the risks associated with them. The report provides a scientific assessment of possible areas of application and the associated safety issues. It concludes that the construction of SMRs is only economically viable for a very large number of units and poses significant risks if widely deployed.”

Yet, “resistance to nuclear power is starting to ebb around the world with support from a surprising group: environmentalists… This change of heart spans the globe, and is being prompted by climate change, unreliable electrical grids and fears about national security in the wake of Russia’s invasion of Ukraine.” (Source: Why Even Environmentalists are Supporting Nuclear Power Today, NPR, August 30, 2022

U.S. senators recently introduced a nuclear energy bill called the Advance Act with bipartisan support, hopefully enhancing and advancing America’s world leadership role in nuclear energy by deploying SMRs by the bucketful, idealized as a “cleaner smarter safer solution” to today’s bulky nuclear power plants. Advance Act will cut red tape and make it easier and much faster for SMRs to gain a foothold in the marketplace.

Meanwhile, like the U.S., China has the same red hot nuclear fever. It has set aside $440B for its nuclear program, planning to build 150 new reactors by 2037, which equates to 10 per year, which, by almost all standards, seems unachievable. It tops cumulative world production over the past three decades.

Fearful of being left in China’s nuclear dust, on May 18^th, a proposed House bill by Wittman (R-VA) speeds-up the building process for SMRs. And Joe Manchin (D-WV) has proposed the Nuclear Fuel Security Act to set up a nuclear fuel security program promoting domestic production of uranium.

The excitement over nuclear is palpable, as politicians’ hands tremble with excitement, introducing what’s billed as the perfect green clean way to solve energy needs. There are cheerleaders galore. The U.S. Congress for one is a very influential cheerleading group, but it’s more pervasive than that. Big players like Japan and China are going all-in for nuclear. Japan Adopts Plan to Maximize Nuclear Energy, in Major Shift, AP News, December 22, 2022.

Wait a moment… isn’t Japan currently being criticized in several quarters of the world for dumping Fukushima toxic radioactive water into the ocean? After all, the U.S. National Association of Marine Laboratories, with over 100 member laboratories, issued a position paper strongly opposing the toxic dumping because of a lack of adequate and accurate scientific data in support of Japan’s assertions of safety.

Regardless, last week the G7 nations gave its blessing for Japan to dump Fukushima’s toxic water into the Pacific Ocean. Hmm.

Interestingly, PM Shinzo Abe (1954-2022) shortly after Fukushima’s meltdown 10 years ago, assured the International Olympic Committee in consideration of holding the games in Tokyo, that “everything was under control.” Notwithstanding numerous assurances by Japanese authorities of no harm, no foul, over the years, several independent journalists in Japan have reported numerous deaths because of the Fukushima meltdown and its aftermath but never acknowledged by the government. Assurances are not always assurances!

Therefore, it’s only fair that the darker side of nuclear cheerleading — yea yea yea no nuclear no nuclear — deserves some notoriety. For starters, the results of a recent study by Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation published in the prestigious Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, May 31, 2022, entitled Nuclear Waste from Small Modular Reactors.

Stanford News also published the study: Sandford-led Research Finds Small Modular Reactors Will Exacerbate Challenges of Highly Radioactive Nuclear Waste. The study concludes that SMRs will generate more radioactive waste than conventional nuclear power plants. Stanford and the University of British Columbia jointly conducted the study, e.g., SMRs will be manufactured in factories and industry analysts claim SMRs will be cheaper and produce fewer radioactive byproducts than the big bulky conventional reactors; however, the study discovered the upsetting fact that, pound-for-pound when compared to the big bulky conventional nuclear plants, SMRs will increase nuclear waste… considerably!

“Our results show that most small modular reactor designs will actually increase the volume of nuclear waste in need of management and disposal, by factors of 2 to 30 for the reactors in our case study,” said study lead author Lindsay Krall, a former MacArthur Postdoctoral Fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation: “These findings stand in sharp contrast to the cost and waste reduction benefits that advocates have claimed for advanced nuclear technologies.” (Stanford study)

U.S. nuclear plants have already produced over 88,000 metric tons of “spent nuclear fuel” with nowhere to put it other than risky open pools of water at plant locations and some dry casks setups. Throughout America nuclear facilities contain open pools of spent fuel rods. According to Paul Blanch: “Continual storage in spent fuel pools is the most unsafe thing you could do.” (Paul Blanch, registered professional engineer, US Navy Reactor Operator & Instructor with 55 years of experience with nuclear engineering and regulatory agencies, widely recognized as one of America’s leading experts on nuclear power)

Accordingly, “the most highly radioactive waste, mainly spent fuel rods, will have to be isolated in deep-mined geologic repositories for hundreds of thousands of years. At present, the U.S. has no program to develop a geologic repository, after spending decades and billions of dollars on the Yucca Mountain site in Nevada. As a result, spent nuclear fuel is currently stored in pools or in dry casks at reactor sites, accumulating at a rate of about 2,000 metric tonnes per year.” (Stanford)

Nobody wants it in their backyard. Furthermore, what’s the message behind the fact that humanity has humiliatingly endangered itself by utilizing the most potent toxic material on Earth to boil water that results in highly radioactive spent fuel rods that can only be stored in deep-deep geologic repositories as far away from civilization as possible, locked away for centuries upon centuries? Rubbing two sticks together a million years ago was much smarter.

The Stanford study claims that few, if any, developers of SMR have analyzed the management and disposal of nuclear waste. “The study concludes that, overall, small modular designs are inferior to conventional reactors with respect to radioactive waste generation, management requirements, and disposal options.”

Meanwhile, SMRs are about to enter a world of nuclear power that has sharp critics. For example, crib notes of a detailed analysis of nuclear by Greenpeace, which has considerable nuclear expertise on staff, provides an offset to the ringing applause around the world for SMRs: 6 Reasons Why Nuclear Energy is not the Way to a Green and Peaceful World d/d March 18, 2022.

Greenpeace is not at all hesitant about exposing the “myths being perpetuated by the nuclear industry.”

For starters the scale of proposed nuclear energy installations does not come close to meeting the needs to go to net zero emissions in a timely fashion, according to projections by the World Nuclear Association, greenhouse gas emissions would only drop by 4% by 2050, assuming 37 new large nuclear reactors brought onto the grid per year from now to 2050. Yet only 57 new reactors are schedule for construction over the next 15 years. A number for SMRs is unknown currently.

Nuclear power plants are extremely dangerous as easy targets for terrorists, cyberattacks or acts of war. Moreover, they are unique hazards for accidents by nature like Fukushima and/or by human error like Chernobyl, and some accidents never go away.

“For the first time in history, a major war is being waged in a country with multiple nuclear reactors and thousands of tons of highly radioactive spent fuel. The war in southern Ukraine around Zaporizhzhia puts them all at heightened risk of a severe accident…. Nuclear power plants are some of the most complex and sensitive industrial installations, which require a very complex set of resources in ready state at all times to keep them operational,” Ibid.

Nuclear power plants are a water-hungry technology that must, must, must have a lot of water to cool the radioactive hot stuff. Nuclear power facilities are vulnerable to water stress, warming rivers, and rising temperatures. Facilities in the US and France have often been shut down during heatwaves or have scaled down activity, especially France’s shakiness in 2022. Global warming is nuclear power’s biggest enemy.

And, then there’s this: “Electricite de France SA’s fleet of 56 atomic power plants has long been the backbone of Europe’s energy system, but in 2022 it was more of a millstone. As reactors were shut down to fix cracked pipes, the company’s nuclear power generation slumped to the lowest since 1988, making the region more dependent on fossil fuels just as Russia squeezed natural gas exports.” (Source: French Nuclear Revival Hits Trouble as New Reactor Defects Found, Bloomberg March 10, 2023)

Not only does nuclear power put enormous stress on structural facilities, a huge incalculable risk, but water flowing past the nuclear fuel in the reactor cores gets heated to over 500°F. It can be heated to this temperature because it is pressurized to over 1,000 pounds per square inch (psi). The reactor vessel and its attached piping must be robust to remain intact and contain this high-pressure fluid. Abnormally high pressure can break even robust containers. (Union of Concerned Scientist) The strongest known pressure relief valves and piping must endure enormous pressure 24/7/365. This is an extreme high-risk category of nuclear operations.

Nuclear energy is also too expensive. According to a World Nuclear Industry Status Report, nuclear energy per MWh (megawatt-hour) costs 3-to-5 times more than wind or solar. Moreover, according to the same source, total costs of building and running a plant to lifetime for utility scale operations over the past decade have dropped by 88% for solar and by 69% for wind whilst nuclear has increased by 23%. Duh!

“Stabilizing the climate is an emergency. Yet, Nuclear Power is slow” (Greenpeace). The World Nuclear Industry Status Report says is takes 10 years on average in the world to construct a plant.

It’s impossible to get around the issue of radioactive waste, which is a huge problem that haunts the industry. Some isotopes remain highly radioactive for several thousand years. What to do with it? The costs are outrageous. The US Energy Dept. projected cost for long-term nuclear waste cleanup jumped more than $100B in just one year. According to Stanford’s study, SMRs will exaggerate this problem by factors of 2-to-30. (Stanford study)

But, of course there’s always the easy way out of handling toxic waste: According to a Greenpeace International 2021 Tweet: “French companies are exporting nuclear waste to Siberia dumping barrels in unsafe conditions completely exposed to the elements.” Hmm.

Moreover, it’s oxymoronic to claim nuclear power is “sustainable green energy” and should be eligible for green funding. Oh, please! Only radioactive waste is sustainable. Interestingly, in 2021 Austria, Denmark, Germany, Luxembourg, and Spain objected to an inclusion of nuclear power in the EU’s green finance category.

And nuclear energy has always overpromised and underdelivered: “Hypothetical new nuclear power technologies have been promised to be the next big thing for the last forty years, but in spite of massive public subsidies, that prospect has never panned out. That is also true of Small Modular Reactors, SMRs,” Ibid.

As explained in a press release d/d November 18, 2020, regarding SMR development: “The proposed reactors are still on the drawing board and will take a decade or more to develop. If built, their power will cost ten (10) times more than wind or solar energy. The most advanced SMR project to date in the US has already doubled its estimated costs from $3B to over $6B,” Ibid.

However, Russia has already launched a floating 70MW reactor in the Arctic Ocean (of all places!). China is also working on a floating design SMR. And three provinces in Canada are looking into SMRs. Rolls-Royce in the UK is working on a 440MW SMR. SMRs are generally designed to produce 50 to 300MW of electricity compared to the typical 1,000MW of traditional large-scale reactors.

In fairness to advocates, according to Nuscale, one of the engineering firms behind SMR development: “Even under worst case scenarios, where we lose all off-site power, the reactor will safely automatically shut down and remain cool for an unlimited time.’ adding, ‘this is the first time that’s been done’ for commercial nuclear power.” (Source: The Countries Building Miniature Nuclear Reactors, Future Planet, Yale e360, March 9, 2020).

Still, every nuclear conversation turns to radioactive waste and safety regardless of claims made by industry and with good reason. In fact, the repercussions of nuclear accident deaths and disfigurements are always buried from public view, until years later when the brutal truth finally comes out.

A BBC Future Planet article d/d July 25, 2019, The True Toll of the Chernobyl Disaster: “According to the official, internationally recognized death toll, just 31 people died as an immediate result of Chernobyl while the UN estimates that only 50 deaths can be directly attributed to the disaster. In 2005, it predicted a further 4,000 might eventually die as a result of the radiation exposure… Brown’s research, however, suggests Chernobyl has cast a far longer shadow.”

According to an article in USA Today d/d February 24, 2022, What Happened at Chernobyl? What to Know About Nuclear Disaster: “At least 28 people were killed by the disaster, but thousands more have died from cancer as a result of radiation that spread after the explosion and fire. The effects of radiation on the environment and humans is still being studied.”

As of 2023, the death count is much more than the 4,000 calculation of 2005.

The legacy of nuclear accidents, as deaths and deformities mount over time, kills the dream of a carbonless, clean power future. But legacies take years to form. Given enough time, radioactive waste will greet 30^th century archeologists.

For a prize-winning compelling read about the most toxic place in America and a terrifying look at the radioactive nuclear materials produced at Hanford for four decades: Atomic Days, The Untold Story of the Most Toxic Place in America (Haymarket Books, 2022)

Regardless of the strongest assurances, nuclear accidents happen. They just happen!

Robert Hunziker lives in Los Angeles and can be reached at rlhunziker@gmail.com.