Why ASEAN finally took a stand on Myanmar

Regional bloc has a bevy of good reasons to block junta representatives from attending this month's summit meeting

By BERTIL LINTNER

ASIATIMES

OCTOBER 18, 2021

The Myanmar national flag (C) is seen with flags of member countries attending the 35th Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) Summit in Bangkok, November 2019. Myanmar's junta chief will be excluded from an upcoming ASEAN summit, the group said on October 16, 2021, a rare rebuke as concerns rise over the military government's commitment to defusing a bloody crisis. 

Photo: AFP / Romeo Gacad

Has the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) for the first time foregone its longstanding policy of “non-interference” in the internal affairs of one of its ten member states by blocking a representative of Myanmar’s junta from attending the bloc’s upcoming summit in Brunei? And, if so, why?

Is it concern over a February 1 coup and the brutal repression of massive public opposition to the military power grab, which has left more than a thousand dead and many more who have been arrested and tortured?

Or is it simply a face-saving gesture from a regional bloc that has come under increasing criticism for being ineffective and therefore is losing its credibility at a time when global superpowers are playing a rising role in the region’s power politics?


ASEAN is heavily dependent, especially on what may come after the pandemic, on the goodwill of the US and other Western nations that in no uncertain terms have condemned Myanmar’s coup and urged the bloc to do more to restore normalcy in the country.

Myanmar demonstrators have also condemned the bloc for its inactivity and set ASEAN flags alight at public protests in the old capital of Yangon.

To be sure, ASEAN can hardly be described as a gathering of liberal democracies. The bloc’s current chair, Brunei, is an absolute monarchy. Two of its members — Vietnam and Laos — are communist-ruled one-party states.

Cambodia is governed by Prime Minister Hun Sen, who has recently outlawed the political opposition and in the process made the country into an even harsher autocracy.

Singapore also lacks fundamental freedoms when it comes to the media and civil rights and Malaysia is best described as a semi-democracy. Rodrigo Duterte, the president of the Philippines, is known for his disdain of the media and all opposition to his rule.

In Thailand, the military has staged several coups to oust elected governments and retains an outsized political role despite 2019 elections. That leaves, ironically given its history of autocratic rule, Indonesia as the most, some would argue the only, democratic ASEAN member.

Commander-in-Chief of Myanmar’s armed forces and head of Myanmar’s coup regime Senior General Min Aung Hlaing attends the 9th Moscow Conference on International Security in Moscow, Russia on June 23, 2021. 

Photo: AFP via Anadolu Agency / Sefa Karacan

ASEAN’s two cardinal principles, non-interference and consensus, have until now made it impossible for the bloc to take any decisive action when there has been trouble in or between its non-democratic member states. But it is also clear that ASEAN leaders are running out of patience with the Myanmar junta, known as the State Administration Council (SAC).

Its leader and now self-appointed prime minister, Senior General Min Aung Hlaing, paid a one-day visit to Jakarta on April 24, where he and his ASEAN partners agreed on what was called “a five-point consensus” comprising calls for an immediate cessation of violence and the exercise of utmost restraint and a dialog among all parties concerned to seek a peaceful solution to the crisis.

It was also decided to appoint a special envoy by the ASEAN chair to “facilitate mediation in the dialogue process” and to provide humanitarian assistance through AHA, the ASEAN Coordinating Center for Humanitarian Assistance on disaster management.

Even Min Aung Hlaing agreed that the special envoy and his delegation should be given the right to visit Myanmar and there meet with “all parties concerned.”

ASEAN’s decision to prevent junta representatives from participating in the summit, which is scheduled to take place on October 26-28 via videoconference, was explained in a statement issued at the bloc’s foreign ministers’ meeting — also online — on October 15.

While noting “the principles enshrined in the ASEAN charter”, meaning non-interference, the ministers stated that “the situation in Myanmar was having an impact on regional security as well as the unity, credibility and centrality of ASEAN as a rules-based organization.”

ASEAN would, therefore, “invite a non-political representative from Myanmar to the upcoming Summits.” Who that “non-political” individual will be is unclear, nor how and by whom he or she would be appointed.

The junta’s response was that it had cooperated on the five-point consensus by accepting the appointment of Brunei’s Foreign Minister Erywan Pehin Yusof as ASEAN’s special envoy — and that it had distributed aid delivered through AHA “to those in need.” But the envoy was not allowed to meet the deposed and detained president Win Myint and state counselor Aung San Suu Kyi because they are facing criminal charges in Myanmar courts.

In other words, the SAC has closed the door to any dialogue with the ousted leaders and opponents to military rule. The Myanmar foreign ministry also remarked that Myanmar “hopes that he [the ASEAN envoy] will be able to avoid actions from anyone with the intention of putting politically motivated actions and pressures on Myanmar.”

Protesters hold posters with the image of detained civilian leader Aung San Suu Kyi during a demonstration against the military coup in Naypyidaw on February 28, 2021. (Photo by STR / AFP)

SAC has always claimed that it assumed power constitutionally, because the president had decided to hand over power to the generals, which he has the right to do under the country’s 2008 constitution.

According to the SAC, the military-appointed First Vice President Myint Swe, a retired lieutenant-general, had taken over the presidency from Win Myint, who the military body claimed had resigned for health reasons.

But during court testimony on October 12, Win Myint let it be known that he was in good health. According to his lawyer Khin Maung Zaw, the military had tried to force him to relinquish his post hours before the February 1 coup by warning him he could be seriously harmed if he refused.

Win Myint replied that he “would rather die than consent”, the lawyer stated in an English language text message sent to reporters. That undermined any SAC claim of legality, even under the 2008 constitution, which was drafted under the auspices of the military.

ASEAN’s initiative to block Myanmar appears to have been taken by Malaysia’s Foreign Minister Saifuddin Abdullah who, on October 6, even said that his country is ready to consider holding dialogue with Myanmar’s National Unity Government (NUG) — consisting of ousted MPs and other opposition figures — if SAC does not fully cooperate with the five-point consensus.

Indonesia’s outspoken Foreign Minister Retno Marsudi went even further in a Twitter message on October 15 that said Myanmar “should not be represented at the political level until Myanmar restores its democracy through an inclusive process.”

But, regional security analysts argue, ASEAN’s annoyance with the SAC’s intransigence and the bad rap the bloc has received because of Myanmar’s membership may not be directed solely by concerns about democracy and human rights.

Malaysia and Indonesia have for years been at the receiving end of a flood of Muslim Rohingya refugees from Myanmar. According to UNHCR, at the end of August, there were 179,390 refugees and asylum seekers registered with the international body in Malaysia.

Of those, 102,990 are Rohingyas, 22,470 Chins (a mainly Christian minority) and 29,390 from other ethnic groups from conflict-affected areas in Myanmar. Although the exact number is unknown, thousands of Rohingya refugees have also ventured in rickety boats to Indonesia.

A wooden boat carrying suspected Rohingya migrants detained in Malaysian territorial waters off the island of Langkawi on April 5. 

Photo: AFP / Malaysian Maritime Enforcement Agency

Attempts to have them repatriated have failed; neither Malaysia nor Indonesia is in a position to integrate the high number of people fleeing oppression and persecution in Myanmar.

The February 1 coup has also been bad for intra-ASEAN business. Singapore exported US$2.7 billion worth of goods to Myanmar in 2020, mainly mineral fuels, oil, electronics and machinery. But companies from Singapore and other ASEAN members may now face sanctions and boycotts for dealing with Myanmar.

Trade with Vietnam was also booming before the coup, with Vietnamese companies investing in real estate and a huge new modern shopping mall in Yangon. Mytel, one of Myanmar’s top telecom operators, is a joint venture between the military-controlled Myanmar Economic Corporation and Viettel, which is owned by the Vietnamese military.

Vietnam, hardly a democracy, would not normally have cared about a military takeover in a foreign country, but the Vietnamese can hardly be pleased to see their co-owned communication towers being blown up by anti-junta protestors and other investments being ruined because of the coup.

No serious observer of the post-coup situation in Myanmar believes that the SAC would ever engage in a meaningful dialogue with Win Myint, Aung San Suu Kyi and other ousted — and now detained — leaders.

So ASEAN is stuck with an ostracized member that had dragged its reputation in the mud and there is little it can do about it than what it has done already: wait and see what happens next.

In true ASEAN manner, the foreign ministers’ statement “reiterated that Myanmar is an important member of the ASEAN family” so Myanmar should be given “the space to restore its internal affairs and return to normalcy.”

But not many will be holding their breath on that one. Myanmar is in turmoil, and there is very little ASEAN can do about it apart from symbolic summit snubs.

US elites’ imperial corruption compares to Opium War

Starting this column, I couldn't have envisioned what smartphones and social media would do to a generation

By SPENGLER AKA DAVID P. GOLDMAN

ASIATIMES.COM

OCTOBER 18, 2021

Opium War fighting. Source: National Army Museum

This series of essays debuted in January 2000 with a meditation on tech stocks. I forecast that – contrary to the then-prevailing wisdom – internet equities would blossom by feeding on the moral rot of the society underneath them.

Not in my darkest rumination could I have envisioned the corruption of a whole generation of American youth through smartphones and social media, as documented by Professor Jean Twenge of the University of California San Diego. I repost below my maiden essay, “What if Internet Stocks Aren’t a Bubble?”

This has a direct bearing upon Professor Justin Yifu Lin’s thesis that China today stands with respect to the United States as the United States and Germany stood with respect to Great Britain at the end of the 19th century. An excerpt from Professor Lin’s new book was published by Asia Times on October 11.

China, he maintains, will lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution just as America and Germany led the Second Industrial Revolution.

It was Britain that had the technology in the late 19th century, not America. (Germany invented the modern chemical industry and some key features of modern metallurgy.)

Thomas Edison did not invent the light bulb, contrary to the fable told to American schoolchildren. British scientist Joseph Swan invented the light bulb, Edison’s industrial laboratory tried thousands of materials until it discovered that a bamboo filament would last ten times longer than previous materials, and made it commercially viable.

Edison engaged in flagrant intellectual property theft. Swan sued him successfully for patent infringement and won a huge settlement.

Why didn’t Britain commercialize the light bulb? The answer lies in the corruption of empire. Britain’s best and brightest left Eton and Harrow and went into colonial service, and made fortunes on the sale of British textiles to India, Indian opium to China, and Chinese tea and silks to the West.

Britain’s country houses were built on the quick money that was there to be earned from empire, and the British upper class eschewed the dirty work of manufacturing in favor of the faux-aristocracy of the nouveau riche masquerading as landed gentry. Ambitious Americans built factories, and ambitious Germans earned doctorates in chemistry while ambitious Englishmen went East of Suez.

America has no empire in the old sense of the world; when Americans occupy foreign countries they lose money rather than make money. But America’s financial and tech monopolies have the same effect. During the 2000s, Wall Street’s derivatives desks picked off the brightest engineers, and during the 2010s, the tech companies recruited the smartest engineers and computer scientists.

America graduates barely 40,000 mechanical engineers each year, not surprising considering that Americans lost interest in manufacturing two decades ago.

The tech monopolies offer rewards beyond the imagination of greed and have concentrated American wealth in the hands of the smallest number of people in history. And they feed on a culture of insouciant hedonism that values individual self-expression as a matter of religious dogma while enforcing a vicious conformity upon young people

.

Social media are the opium of the 21st century, and the young tech wizards who infest Silicon Valley are the moral successors of the young Etonians who forced India to grow the drug and forced China to buy it.

The tech elite displays an arrogance that puts to shame Rudyard Kipling’s idea of a “white man’s burden.” It believes that it can change human nature by melding man and machine through artificial intelligence, and that its success in spellbinding young Americans through entertainment portends a new sort of humanity brought about by social engineering.

Many of its doyens believe that human consciousness can be downloaded onto computer chips, achieving a sort of silicon-based immortality. Its arrogance and pretensions exceed those of Alexander and Caesar. It has contempt for the homely values of family and nation that knit the lives of ordinary Americans.

That is why China is likely to emerge as the dominant force in the world during the 21st century. It isn’t that the Chinese are smarter or more innovative. America’s virtual empire has become a sinkhole for the country’s enterprise and talent, and its spectacular profitability derives from activity that enervates and corrupts the American character.

Here, for reference, is my maiden “Spengler” essay from January 2000:

What if internet stocks aren’t a bubble?

By now, every business publication in the known universe has printed black-and-white evidence that Internet stocks are a bubble. The evidence generally boils down to one calculation, namely that the popular dot.com names would have to achieve annual earnings growth rates several times larger than Microsoft’s in order to justify their present equity price.

What if it isn’t a bubble? What if consumers want to double or quadruple their spending on whatever it is the Internet has to offer every year for the next 20 years? What if they will pay a premium to watch their favorite episode of Pee-Wee Herman or the Lone Ranger rather than the latest sit-com? What if they will spend heavily to explore the cutting edge of anatomical possibility on the porn sites?

Recall the dying, drug-addicted Howard Hughes, a recluse in the penthouse suite of a Las Vegas hotel, hair and fingernails untrimmed for months. That was in the 1960s, and Hughes passed the time watching film after film in his private screening room, a plutocrat’s privilege. With the wonder of the Internet, cable hookups, and the Time Warner-AOL film library, every Internet user can turn into a dissipated freak like Howard Hughes. That’s American democracy at work.

Internet stocks just might offer good value in a world of Howard Hughes wannabees. Consumers of the world unite: you have nothing to lose but your brains. Ask yourself: are you sure, really sure, that this isn’t happening?

Long white hair, outgrown fingernails, pills, dark rooms and tissues to keep away the dirt were among the descriptions of the life of billionaire Howard R. Hughes in his last years. 

Photo: AFP / Getty Images

Why should it surprise anyone? There’s nothing new under the sun. The silly cant about the ”new economy” and the ”Internet Age” ultimately will go the way of other imposters. That does not reduce the likelihood that the great fortunes of our epoch will continue to be made on the Internet for some time. Yes, electronic auctions save the trouble of attending the live sort, and an electronic marketplace has advantages over the medieval fair (although it is less entertaining).

What enthralls the Internet’s true believers is the limitless download of cheap and salacious entertainment: pornography, popular music, gossip, flirting, fantasy role-playing, and, of course, shopping.

Now that the market capitalization of Internet companies enables them to gobble up traditional providers of goods and services, the Internet seems like the driving force of global markets. The world economy will depend upon the adolescent tastes of computer owners in the industrial world.

The bubble could pop, or – frightening thought – it might actually succeed. Reordering the priorities of the world economy around the vices of affluent people is nothing new. We went through all of this before in the 17th century.

Item: After the conquest of the New World, Spain’s entire capture of precious metals went to India and China to pay for luxury cloth and spices. That did for approximately 90 percent of the indigenous pre-Colombian population.

Item: The African slave trade instituted by the Portuguese and later the British first produced sugar in Brazil and the Caribbean, to be turned into cheap intoxicants for the European market. Tobacco was a second absorber of slave labor. Cotton became important much later. Production of these vices did for a third of the West African population.

Item: In order to sell cheap cotton cloth to India, the East India Company arranged for Indians to grow opium and for Chinese to buy it. All the silver mined in Latin America, which two centuries earlier had passed to China to pay for silks, found its way back to Europe to pay for opium. That did for untold millions of Indians and Chinese.

Does the Internet shrink the world? How can we compare it to an earlier technological revolution, namely ocean navigation – including breakthroughs in astronomy, shipbuilding, time measurement, map-making? At the end of the day, silks, cottons, coffee, tea, spices, sugar, rum and tobacco ruined four continents as the world’s capital flowed to Western Europe.

This time the world’s capital is flowing to the United States. America’s capital account surplus (equal to its current account deficit) presently stands at 4 percent of Gross Domestic Product, the largest proportion on record. A billion dollars a day in foreign capital makes its way to the American capital markets. Three-quarters of the world’s free savings flow to the US, from emerging Asia as well as from Europe and Japan. Rather than borrow money from the rest of the world, non-Japan Asia on balance now lends money to the United States.

If the rest of the world wants to put its savings at the service of turbo-charged pop culture, no one should blame the Web promoters. Tobacco, rum, silks and slaves were a sustainable growth industry three hundred years ago. Why not the Web today?

China marches on towards Fourth Industrial Revolution

Pundit predictions of China's demise are the latest self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite who can't see the AI writing on the wall

By DAVID P. GOLDMAN

AKA SPENGLER

ASIATIMES.COM

OCTOBER 8, 2021

China's is investing more in productivity-enhancing technologies than the United States. 

Image: Twitter


NEW YORK – When Covid-19 hit China before it hit the rest of the world, the meme in the Western media called it China’s “Chernobyl moment.” China’s remarkable success in suppressing the pandemic put that to rest. But every hiccup in Chinese markets elicits new predictions of Chinese economic decline.

Stratfor’s George Friedman declares that “China’s power has been vastly overestimated” and that China will have to dial back its global ambitions due to straitened circumstances.

Hal Brands and Michael Beckley write in Foreign Policy that “the problem is that China is declining.” “Since the late 2000s,” they claim, “the drivers of China’s rise have either stalled or turned around entirely.”

These are self-consoling illusions of a lazy elite that has allowed America’s manufacturing, technological and education advantages to erode over the past 20 years – an elite that has nothing to say about reversing the decline.

China has a nasty financial problem in an over-leveraged real estate sector, but countries with large current surpluses and huge saving rates don’t have crises. They have reorganizations. And China does have a demographic problem, not nearly as serious as in Japan, South Korea or Taiwan, and only slightly more serious than America’s.

What the punditeska thinks is light at the end of the tunnel is, rather, the headlamp of the oncoming express, namely the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

Americans don’t remember the Panic of 1873 and the six-year Long Depression that followed – nor the Panics of 1893, 1896, 1901, or 1907. They remember the transcontinental railroad, the McCormack reaper, Andrew Carnegie’s leadership in steel-making, John D. Rockefeller’s provision of cheap kerosene for lighting, the electrification of cities and Henry Ford’s mass production of the Model T. All that really mattered in fin-de-siècle America was the Second Industrial Revolution that lifted America to the status of a world power.

Carnegie borrowed his steelmaking process from the British inventor Henry Bessemer and Edison lifted the electric light bulb from the British inventor Joseph Swan (who successfully sued Edison for patent violations). Britain’s talent earned easy money from the Empire, leaving Americans to turn British ideas into mass production on a hitherto unknown scale.

Today it’s the Americans who don’t want to get their hands dirty, and the best American talent programs smartphone apps in the hope of instant wealth.

The US is playing catch-up with China in the 5G race. 

Photo: AFP / Getty Images / Josep Lago

A generation from now, the Chinese won’t remember the misery of Ant Financial, or the failure of property giant Evergrande, or this year’s power shortage, or any number of minor interruptions of the Fourth Industrial Revolution. They will remember automated warehouses, smart ports running on 5G networks, mines operated by remote control, factories run by self-programming robots and driverless taxis.

All of this is happening now in China, and at scale. The linked videos on Youtube provide more information than anything you will read in the Western media. China’s artificial intelligence (AI) applications look like science fiction, but they are real as rain, and happening before our eyes.

The application of big data and AI to flexible manufacturing, smart logistics, health care and other fields promises to transform economic life as profoundly as the Second Industrial Revolution changed the United States and Germany.

Historians well may date the AI revolution to January 2020 when the Covid-19 pandemic hit China. As former Google CEO Eric Schmidt and Harvard historian Graham Allison wrote last August:

The virus has also pulled back the curtain on one of this century’s most important contests: the rivalry between the United States and China for supremacy in artificial intelligence (AI). The scene that has been revealed should alarm Americans. China is not just on a trajectory to overtake the US; it is already surpassing US capabilities where it matters most.

Most Americans assume that their country’s lead in advanced technologies is unassailable .… In fact, China is already a full-spectrum peer competitor in terms of both commercial and national-security AI applications. China is not just trying to master AI; it is mastering AI ….

To stop the spread of the virus, China locked down the entire population of Hubei province – 60 million people. That is more than the number of residents in every state on the US East Coast from Florida to Maine. China maintained this massive cordon sanitaire by using AI-enhanced algorithms to track residents’ movements and scale up testing capabilities while massive new health-care facilities were being built ….

Top Chinese tech companies responded quickly by creating apps with “health status” codes to track citizens’ movements and determine whether individuals needed to be quarantined. AI then played a critical role in helping Chinese authorities enforce quarantines and perform extensive contract tracing. Owing to China’s large-scale datasets, the authorities in Beijing succeeded where the government in Washington, DC, failed.

I broke this story in Asia Times in March 2020.

All of China’s major ports are at or close to full automation. Industrial automation, although impressive, is still in pilot phase: Huawei says that it has 16,000 private 5G networks under development for factory automation, a small fraction of the country’s 2.8 million factories (as of 2015), but more than enough for proof of concept. And the Chinese telecom giant has installed 5G networks in 1,800 of the country’s 34,000 hospitals.

China turned a population of subsistence farmers into industrial workers, moving 600 million people from countryside to city in less than 40 years, increasing per capita income tenfold in the process.

China has built out its 5G infrastructure faster than the US.

 Photo: Facebook

It took the US from 1870 to 1995 to dectuple its real per capita GDP. China did this in the 28 years from 1992 to 2020. It certainly is the case, as Brand and Beckley write, that China has taken advantage of this source of growth. China’s leadership is bad at many things, but it is very good at one big thing, and that is planning for future productivity.

Deng Xiaoping turned China’s peasants into factory workers, and Xi Jinping is turning the sons of factory workers into engineers. Only 2% of Chinese aged 55 or older – those in their 20s when Deng Xiaoping began China’s economic reforms in 1989 – received university education. But 27% of Chinese now in their 20’s have university degrees, and the proportion will keep rising.

China now graduates seven times as many STEM baccalaureates as the US and three times as many STEM doctorates. A 2020 Chinese survey claims that the proportion of Chinese high school students who intend to pursue tertiary education is higher than is the case with their American counterparts.

An industrial nation with Western living standards is already gestating inside China. Economist Lin Yifu, a former World Bank official, points out that China’s most developed provinces and cities are a country within a country, with per capita GDP approaching that of the United States. In a book scheduled for release later this month, he writes:

At the end of the 19th century, the United States and Germany led the second industrial revolution. At that time, the highest income and technology levels were in the United Kingdom. The United States and Germany were at a stage of catching up in terms of income levels. In terms of purchasing power parity, the per capita GDP of the United States in 1870 was 76.6% of that of the United Kingdom, and that of Germany was 57.6% of that of the United Kingdom.

The seven provinces and cities with the highest per capita GDP in my country – Beijing, Shanghai, Tianjin, Jiangsu, Zhejiang, Fujian, and Guangdong – have a total population of 350 million. The per capita GDP of these seven provinces and cities has reached 54.5% of that of the United States, which is roughly the same level as Germany’s per capita GDP relative to UK’s per capita GDP when Germany began to lead the second industrial revolution.

Yin adds, “In technology R&D, human capital is the main input.” China, he notes, has a much larger talent pool with a population four times that of the United States. “China’s sheer size gives it “economies of scale,” with “lower marginal cost of products and services,” and “stronger competitiveness in the international market. When new technological standards are set in competition with developed countries, my country’s population and the size of its market gives it a comparative advantage.”

In addition, “My country is the country with the most complete set of industries, so that the time required for new technology to advance from concept to production will be the shortest, and at the lowest cost.”

China is serious, focused and disciplined in its campaign to lead the Fourth Industrial Revolution. The US at best gives lip service to the concept, and at worst ignores the problem, the better to focus on “diversity” and “equity.”

Pakistan’s spy agency gets shaken, but not stirred

Out is ISI chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed – who some say engineered the Taliban's rise to power in Afghanistan

By FM SHAKIL

OCTOBER 14, 2021

An Afghan national paints over a picture of Pakistan's now former Inter-Services Intelligence Chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed at a protest in New Delhi on September 10, 2021. The general has now been transferred. 

Photo: AFP / Sanjeev Rastogi / The Times of India

PESHAWAR – A routine transfer of a spymaster in Pakistan, believed to have been encouraged by China, has embroiled the powerful army and the prime minister’s office in a controversy on who appoints or transfers the head of the premier spy agency.

Prime Minister Imran Khan, who was resisting the transfer of Inter-Service Intelligence (ISI) chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed and holding on to the transfer notification, told a cabinet meeting Tuesday that he wanted him to stay on at least until the Afghanistan situation stabilizes.

Earlier, Army Chief Qamar Javed Bajwa and Prime Minister Khan had a lengthy meeting on Monday night to try to resolve the gridlock stemming from the transfer of Faiz Hameed. The next day Information Minister Faud Chowdhry, however, further complicated the issue.

Addressing a post-cabinet meeting press conference, Fuad emphatically declared that the power to appoint the ISI director-general rests with the prime minister, who would follow the set procedure before issuing the notification of the transfers.

After days of intense speculation about the change of the country’s premier intelligence chief, a military press release issued last week finally ended the rumors.

Lieutenant General Nadeem Ahmed Anjum was appointed as the new chief of the ISI, replacing Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed, who was posted to command the Peshawar-based Corps XI on Wednesday.

Prime Minister Imran Khan was against the transfer.

 Photo: AFP / Muhammad Reza / Anadolu

Was Beijing behind the move?

Some analysts claimed that at the heart of the controversy was Beijing, which may have pushed the army leadership for Hameed’s transfer for purportedly failing to hunt down the terrorists who killed Chinese personnel in different parts of the country.

The analysts argue that an increase in terror attacks on Chinese nationals working on the China-Pakistan Economic Corridor (CPEC) and non-CPEC projects in Pakistan had panicked Chinese officials.


The mid-July killing of nine Chinese engineers in the Dasu Hydel Power Plant and attacks on Chinese nationals in Gwadar and Karachi have put a question mark on the security arrangements the Pakistan army has taken to provide safety to Chinese workers.

China has officially conveyed its concerns to Pakistani officials over the poor security arrangements and repeatedly demanded the arrest of those involved in terror activities. Some insiders claimed Beijing wanted a reshuffle in the premier security agency at the highest level to firm up the safety of its citizens and to put an end to such happenings through an efficient espionage system.

Some say that the kerfuffle over the transfer of ‘the mastermind of the Taliban project’ has brought home the scale of involvement of Pakistan’s military establishment in national and regional politics and the role it played to shape events in Afghanistan, leading to a rapid and unexpected military victory of the Taliban-led extremists.

With a view to cashing in on the friction between the civil and military institutions, the main opposition front, the Pakistan Democratic Movement (PDM), has taken a pro-army stance, demanding snap elections to stem the growing polarization in the country.

A change in the highest position of the premier spy agency was on the cards for some time, but last week’s corps commanders’ meeting ratified the changes and after that, the announcement was made.

Chief of the Army Staff General Qamar Javed Bajwa met with Prime Minister Khan Wednesday for a consultation on the new pick after the corps commanders approved the new appointments. Khan had reportedly shown his reservations on the transfer of the ISI chief and wanted the transfer order taken back.

Coup claim

Najam Sethi, a senior journalist and editor at Friday Time, revealed during a talk show that Prime Minister Khan had told the military chief that he was not taken on board about the change of the Director-General of the ISI. Sethi said the announcement about the new posting and transfer should have come from the Prime Minister’s house because procedurally, the prime minister appoints the Director-General of the ISI.

Days before the transfer order of then ISI chief Lieutenant General Faiz Hameed was released, the bête noire of the Pakistan army, Maryam Nawaz, lodged a petition in the Islamabad high court, claiming Faiz had engineered a judicial coup to get rid of Nawaz Sharif.

The daughter of deposed Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, in her application, challenged the legality of the entire legal proceedings that resulted in the conviction of Maryam Nawaz, her father and spouse.

She argued that in light of the 2018 speech of former Islamabad High Court judge Shaukat Aziz Siddiqui, the country’s top intelligence agency was involved in manipulating judicial proceedings. “These proceedings were a classic example of outright violations of law and political engineering hitherto unheard of in the history of Pakistan,” the application reads.

In 2018, an accountability court convicted former Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif, his daughter Maryam Nawaz and her husband, retired Captain Mohammad Safdar, in the Avenfield Apartment case and handed them jail terms of 10, seven and one years respectively for owning assets beyond their known sources of income.

The verdict came 19 days before the general elections.

A senior Pakistani politician who preferred not to disclose his identity told Asia Times that General Faiz Hameed massively manipulated the 2018 elections.

“During the 2018 polls, Faiz Hameed who was then the deputy chief of the ISI, overlooking the internal security, had created a new front in South Punjab to cut into Pakistan Muslim League-Nawaz (PML-N) votes. This group later en-mass joined Pakistan Tehrik-e-Insaf (PTI) to ramp up its parliamentary strength in the center and Punjab.

“Moreover, he also supported the Barelvi extremist party Tehrik-e-Labbaik Pakistan (TLP) to get the vote bank of the PML-N in the Punjab province trimmed,” he claimed. He went on to add General Faiz Hameed was also accused of hacking the Results Transmission System (RTS) on polling day to pave the way for large-scale rigging in the 2018 elections.

The media report claimed Prime Minister Khan wanted Faiz Hameed at his back at least until the next elections in 2023, to help him win the electoral battle, as he had manipulated electioneering in the 2018 polls.

On the other hand, the army reportedly had some more persuasive reasons to remove Hameed from his post. The incumbent ISI chief had played an imposing role in domestic and regional politics, which did not sit well with the highest levels of military circles.

Taliban fighters stand guard along a road in Herat on August 19, 2021. 

Photo: AFP / Aref Karimi

Welcomed in Kabul

His unexpected visit to Kabul days after the Taliban took over, and his snapshot in Kabul, sipping green tea with a triumphant smile, earned him the disdain of the global media. His conduct was equally embarrassing for his superiors in the armed forces, which the media says, felt a need to cut him to size to ramp up the dwindling civil-military relationship.

Some analysts believe that the transfer of General Faiz Hameed to XI Corps was made with the understanding that the Peshawar corps has assumed added significance because of the Afghanistan situation.

Hameed’s stint in the ISI during which he developed very close contacts with the Taliban, especially the Haqqanis, was probably the reason he was picked for the Peshawar Corps. Secondly, they argue that with the spike in terror attacks, the Tehreek-e-Taliban Pakistan (TTP) has now become a real threat to Pakistan’s security.

Hameed and his successor in the ISI were supposed to play a pivotal role in the peace negotiations with some of the Pakistani Taliban.

Zahid Khan, a spokesperson for the Pashtun nationalist Awami National Party (ANP), told Asia Times that those who ‘selected’ Khan would now regret their selection because Khan had played havoc with all the state institutions, including the army.

He said that the posting and transfers in the army were the prerogatives of the army chief and the notification under the prime minister’s signature was just a formality. Lashing out at the outgoing ISI chief, Zahid claimed that his lopsided policies had made more enemies than friends in regional diplomacy.

A good example, he maintained, was Afghanistan, where they thrust the Taliban upon Afghan people against their will.

“General Faiz Hameed has overstepped his constitutional parameters by playing a larger than life role in the domestic politics and in the Afghan internal affairs, which put the country in international isolation. His gratuitous visit to Kabul and hobnobbing with the Haqqanis has smashed the image of the country, which is now running a risk of being sanctioned by the US Senate,” Zahid added.

Mars’ nuclear technology lands back on earth

A group of former SpaceX engineers are making safe and cheap nuclear power portable on Earth

By DAVE MAKICHUK

ASIATIMES.COM

OCTOBER 17, 2021

Radiant’s microreactor is being developed for use in locations where other forms of power generation may not be practical, or even available. The company’s 1-MW-plus design makes it suitable to remote commercial sites, and military bases. Credit: Radiant.

Remote military and commercial installations often rely on environmentally and polluting fuels such as diesel to create the necessary electric power they need, to carry on.

And in some areas of the world, reliance on diesel, solar and wind power are either unavailable, impractical or untenable, say experts.

So what if you had a reliable, safe and portable means of power, that would not need refuelling for 4 to 8 years?

Thanks to the aerospace technologies and software developments that have occurred over the past 20 years, there is now another option.

A team of former SpaceX engineers is developing the “world’s first portable, zero-emissions power source” that can bring power to remote areas and also allows for quick installation of new units in populated areas, Nuclear power is going portable in the form of relatively lightweight, cost-effective microreactors, Interesting Engineering reported.

That’s right, nuclear power is going portable in the form of relatively lightweight, cost-effective microreactors.

Last year, the team secured US$1.2 million in funding from investors for their startup Radiant to help develop its portable nuclear microreactors, which are aimed at both commercial and military applications.

According to the statement, Radiant’s in-development technology brings a whole new dimension of portability to the once feared nuclear reactor.

Their microreactor, which is still in the prototype phase, outputs more than 1MW, which Radiant says is enough to power approximately 1,000 homes for up to eight years.

Each unit delivers over 1 MegaWatt of electricity and can operate for up to 8 years, providing enough power to support over 1,000 homes per unit. Remote monitoring, centralized fueling and maintenance enable microgrids without any permanent impacts. Credit: Radiant.

Designed to fit in a shipping container, it can be easily transported by air, sea, and road, meaning it will bring affordable energy to communities without easy access to renewable energy, allowing them to reduce their reliance on fossil fuels.

Radiant founder and CEO Doug Bernauer is a former SpaceX engineer who worked on developing energy sources for a future Mars colony during his time at the private space enterprise.

During his research into microreactors for Mars, he saw an opportunity for developing a flexible, affordable power source here on Earth, leading to him founding Radiant with two other SpaceX engineers.

“The nuclear industry can benefit greatly from aerospace technologies and software developments that have occurred over the past 20 years, and have not made their way into nuclear,” Bernauer said in an interview with Power Magazine.


“A lot of the microreactors being developed are fixed location. Nobody has a [commercial] system yet, so there’s kind of a race to be the first.”

Radiant announced last year that it had received two provisional patents for its portable nuclear reactor technology.

One of these was for a technology that reduces the cost and the time needed to refuel their reactor, while the other improves efficiency in heat transference from the reactor core.

The microreactor will use an advanced particle fuel that does not melt down — a crucial factor in safe operation — and is capable of withstanding higher temperatures than traditional nuclear fuels.

Helium coolant, meanwhile, reduces the corrosion and contamination risks associated with traditional water coolant. Radiant has signed a contract with Battelle Energy Alliance to test its portable microreactor technology at its Idaho National Laboratory (INL).

Technology garnered from potential Mars exploration is now benefitting the creation of safe and portable nuclear power on earth. Credit: Medium.com.

The use of microreactors to expand distributed power generation is part of a trend toward providing electricity to remote areas, as well as to military bases and commercial operations that need access to power but are far from the traditional grid.

“Cost optimization, a reduced power peaking factor … that’s all part of our design,” Bernauer told Power, noting the microreactor’s portability provides “freedom and optimization. One of the benefits of the portable system is that it’s so small, we can autonomously operate it.”

Not only is the portable microreactor better for the environment, but it is also more practical as it doesn’t rely on constant shipments of fuel. Instead, the clean fuel used for Radiant’s microreactors can last more than 4 years.

There are many remote locations around the world that require portable power such as arctic villages and remote military bases.

These locations currently rely on fossil fuel-powered generators, which is not only bad for the environment, but also challenging logistically, because generators require constant shipments of fuel over rural roads.

In the military, transporting fuel can be dangerous: according to an October 2018 US Army report titled, “Mobile Nuclear Power Plants For Ground Operations,” about half of the 36,000 casualties in the nine-year period during Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom2 occurred from hostile attacks during land transport missions.

Bernauer said Radiant is operating under the auspices of the US Department of Energy during testing, and looking at the Department of Defense (DOD) as its primary market, as the DOD seeks a way to provide power to military bases in areas where access to electricity is not available.

The DOD, like other enterprises, also is looking at ways to reduce or eliminate the use of diesel and other fuels to provide power generation in remote areas.

“We target 72 hours from setting it down onsite, to full power production capacity,” Bernauer told Power.

He said the unit could be moved to a new location “after waiting just one week. It’s a self-contained system after you hit your site. The operating life is four to eight years, and that’s of course demand dependent. It can sync with other units and with the grid as well.”

Bernauer said portability of Radiant’s microreactor is key to its deployment, unlike small modular reactors that may be designed specifically to scale up.

“We can do a modular configuration, but we’re more interested in keeping it portable,” he said.

A company investor said the engineering and aerospace background of the Radiant team is an important aspect of his decision to support the effort.

“The innovative and ambitious team at Radiant has expertise from SpaceX as well as impressive nuclear industry credentials,” said investor Tom McInerney. “They have what it takes to bring new clean-energy solutions to market, and I’m excited to be part of their journey.”

“Clean, safe nuclear power — which is now embraced by both political parties in the US — is the best alternative to fossil fuels in many environments,” said Bernauer.

“Our team’s combined expertise in nuclear technology, rapid product iteration, and commercializing complex technologies give us a huge competitive advantage in this market, and we’re grateful to our investors as well as partners such as the Idaho National Laboratory who are helping us get to our first prototype.”

Sources: Interesting Engineering, Power Magazine, Global Newswire

 

Geomagnetic Storm: Solar Eruption Arrives at Earth

By NASA OCTOBER 16, 2021

The CME associated with the October 9, 2021, M1 flare arrived as anticipated early on October 12, UTC-day. The CME shock front arrived at the DSCOVR spacecraft (1 million miles from Earth) at 12/0147 UTC (Oct 11 / 9:47 pm EDT) as solar wind speed increased by nearly 100 km/s and total interplanetary magnetic field (IMF) strength quickly elevated to over 15 nT. Geomagnetic activity increased as expected with the CME arrival and G1-G2 (Minor-Moderate) storm conditions were met. The CME progression remains fluid at this time and a G2 Watch is still in effect for the remainder of October 12 and a G1 Warning continues until 12/2200 UTC (6:00 pm EDT). Continue to visit our SWPC webpage for the latest updates, warnings & alerts, and forecasts. Credit: NOAA

A mass of solar material that erupted from the Sun on October 9, 2021, reached Earth on October 12. The Earth-directed coronal mass ejection, or CME, elevated the Kp index, a measure of disturbance to Earth’s magnetic field, to 6 (moderate level). Kp index levels range from 0 (quiet) to 9 (intense).

The CME was associated with an M1.6 class solar flare from Active Region 2882 on that peaked on October 9 at 6:38 UTC (2:38 a.m. EDT). M-class flares are a tenth the size of the most intense flares, the X-class flares. The number provides more information about its strength. An M2 is twice as intense as an M1, an M3 is three times as intense, etc. The flare also generated a solar energetic particle eruption that was detected by NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-Ahead, or STEREO-A spacecraft, at 7:51 UTC (3:51 a.m. EDT).

Active Region 2882, shown here near the middle of the Sun’s disk, erupted with a moderate level solar flare on October 9, 2021. This animated gif shows images from the 131 Angstrom channel of NASA’s Solar Dynamics Observatory spacecraft/Atmospheric Imaging Assembly instrument. Credit: NASA/SDO

STEREO-A also detected the CME from its vantage point away from Earth. The CME’s initial speed was estimated by NASA’s Moon to Mars Space Weather Operations Office to be approximately 983 kilometers per second (610 miles per second). This and other information about the event is reported in the Space Weather Database Of Notifications, Knowledge, Information (DONKI) catalog.

The COR2 coronagraph on NASA’s Solar Terrestrial Relations Observatory-A spacecraft, which views the Sun’s corona by occluding its bright surface, detected this Earth-directed CME on October 9, 2021. Credit: NASA/STEREO

NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center is the official source for space weather forecasts, watches, warnings, and alerts. Visit http://spaceweather.gov for information about potential impacts from this event.

NASA and ESA tech geeks posted an 'unboxing' of the Hubble telescope's successor

Who among us can't related to unboxing hype?

By Adam Rosenberg on October 16, 2021

Is there anything more relatable to the tech-lovers of the internet than the thrill of tearing open the packaging on the latest, shiniest gadget? NASA and the European Space Agency get it.

On Friday, the Twitter account for Ariane 5, an ESA launch vehicle, shared a series of "unboxing" photos for the James Webb Space Telescope. For those who might not know, that's the powerful successor to the Hubble Space Telescope, which has been peering into the furthest reaches of space since 1990.

In December, Ariane 5 will carry the new space telescope into orbit where it will bring its fancier optical technology to bear on the same kinds of tasks that Hubble once handled on its own. While it's a big moment for space research, the future satellite has been dogged by controversy due to its connection to Webb, a former NASA administrator who presided over the federal agency in the '50s and '60s when gay and lesbian employees faced discrimination there.

That controversy hasn't slowed down the launch plans, or led to a name change. But the concerns some have voiced continue to loom large as the Dec. 18 launch approaches. One NASA adviser even quit over their dissatisfaction with the agency's handling of naming concerns.

These photos nonetheless offer a fascinating look behind the scenes at how a massive and wildly expensive piece of space tech like this is transported. At roughly the size of a tractor trailer, the $10 billion satellite isn't exactly the easiest thing to ship.

The James Webb Space Telescope is currently set for its one-way trip to outer space to launch on Dec. 18, 2021. Although construction was completed in 2016, the launch has been delayed multiple times, first for further testing and later as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic. For now, all indications are that the December launch will proceed as planned, barring any of the usual temporary weather hiccups that often disrupt space launch plans

ONTARIO

Witches sweep through downtown Blind River as part of Witches Dance (6 photos)

The fifth annual event brought nearly 30 participants and an array of vendors to downtown Blind River

By: Kris Svela

Saturday marked the fifth annual Witches Dance in downtown Blind River.

Kris Svela for ElliotLakeToday

About 28 witches made a clean sweep of Blind River’s core business area descending on the downtown twice and setting a spell on the large crowd who came to watch.

Saturday’s event marked the fifth year the Witches Dance has been held and was augmented by an array of vendors who set up shop along the sidewalk under partially sunny skies.

There were the traditional Halloween decorations along the street and games eagerly played by children.

Organizer Kristy Blanchet said the original Witches Dance was set up by her and two friends after seeing a similar event on YouTube and has grown with more witches and more spectators taking part each year.

“We saw this on YouTube and we said this looks kind of interesting do you think we could do this,” Blanchet said of the original idea to stage it in their hometown. “Now I have a big mouth and they said if you organize it, we’ll help you.”

They started out with nine witches and now have 28 witches. The organizers are hoping to expand with more witches next year.

Members are not part of any dance class and “it’s just for fun,” according to Blanchet who was dressed as the lone good witch.

Those who want to take part must attend the regular practices.

“We practice in the elements and all we ask you to do is bring your broom.”

The practices are held in open areas by the river, at a local school and at the firehall where they can be safely held.

Blanchet said she has already been approached by two men wanting to take part next year and hopes more will join in a Warlock Dance.

Dancing witches take over Blind River

Christian D'Avino
CTVNewsNorthernOntario.ca 

Videojournalist
Published Oct. 16, 2021 

SAULT STE. MARIE -

A group of witches in Blind River have brewed up a new concoction for residents, with an eye on getting them moving and grooving.

The annual "Witches Dance" has returned for its fifth year in the town, with this year's event coinciding alongside its fall fair.

"It really started off a YouTube video, where we found a group of dancing women in Germany," said Kristy Blanchet, organizer. "I turned to the girls and they said they thought we could do this."

Only nine witches joined in the dance through its first year, which saw them dance down the sidewalk of Woodward Avenue, the towns main street.

"Everybody was like, what's going on, and then we were like, okay lets go down the street with a stop sign, we stopped traffic and then it kind of escalated after that," said Shari Gosselin, who has taken part in the event every year.

The witches dance was one of the few events not to get cancelled by COVID-19 last year.

It's also grown tremendously since it first began, according to Blanchet.

"This year I asked the town council to close down the main street," she said. "We were able to set up games, crafts, vendors, everything has really turned out great."

Blanchet said roughly thirty witches took part in the event this year, but is looking for more in the future.

Japan’s carbon goal is based on restarting 30 nuclear reactors

BLOOMBERG
Oct 17, 2021
Japan’s goal of reducing carbon emissions by 46% by 2030 is based on the assumption it will restart 30 of its nuclear reactors, a top ruling party executive said.

Akira Amari, secretary-general of the Liberal Democratic Party, made the remarks Sunday in a televised debate broadcast by NHK ahead of the Oct. 31 general election.

Much of the nation’s nuclear capacity has been offline since the 2011 Fukushima disaster and Amari said only nine reactors are currently in service. Surveys generally show the electorate is against restarting the plants.

The LDP has also been promoting the idea of building small modular reactors, saying they are safer than Japan’s existing atomic plants. Amari said Japan was in a particularly difficult situation in meeting carbon targets, because it has no power links with other countries and doesn’t have reliable prevailing winds,

Why Crypto Mining Needs Nuclear Power

Florent Heidet, Milos Atz
Wed, October 13, 2021

Opponents of cryptocurrency often cite its energy and pollution footprint as major reasons against adoption. However, the natural synergies between cryptocurrency mining and nuclear power could take that issue off the table altogether.

Cryptocurrencies are digital currencies secured by cryptography. Unlike physical money, like dollars, cryptocurrencies are not minted by national institutions. Instead, they are created through complex algorithms that take place over computer networks. While not all crypto currencies have a specific function, the most valuable ones, such as BTC and ETH, exist primarily to carry financial transactions embedded in the blockchain – the cryptographic transaction record.

Dr. Florent Heidet is a scientific manager for a large public research institution. He has worked on advanced nuclear technologies for over 15 years, contributing to many types of advanced nuclear reactor technologies. Dr. Milos Atz is a nuclear engineer at a large public research institution where he works on a variety of advanced reactor analysis and waste management research projects.

Recently, the values of many cryptocurrencies have skyrocketed, due in part to increased acceptance as well as speculation about future competition between a cryptocurrency-based decentralized financial system and the existing centralized financial system controlled by banks and governments.

The incredible rise in cryptocurrency value, associated with the ease to contribute to the cryptocurrency mining process with common computer hardware, has resulted in an ever-larger number of miners joining cryptocurrency networks. Increasing the number of miners benefits the system by further decentralizing, and therefore securing, the cryptocurrency.

Most of the major cryptocurrencies operate following the proof-of-work (PoW) scheme. In PoW, miners compete to leverage computer resources to perform cryptocurrency transactions and in return receive a reward in the form of the cryptocurrency they are enabling. Although there exist energy-efficient alternatives to the PoW scheme such as the proof-of-stake (PoS) or proof-of-space schemes, those methods haven’t been widely adopted yet by the major cryptocurrencies.

Read more: Greenidge Generation to Expand Bitcoin Mining With South Carolina Plant

Total power consumption used by mining across the major cryptocurrencies is tens of gigawatts electrical, or GWe, based on current network size and average mining equipment power. That is about the same as the power demand of Sweden or Montana. New generations of computing hardware are more efficient and progressively reduce power consumption per hashrate, but the high profitability of mining attracts more participants, yielding a net increase of the overall power used by the network. In fact, as long as the combined costs of electricity and hardware remain lower than the value of the generated cryptocurrency, the networks and their power consumption will continue growing and will soon surpass that of most countries.

Although cryptocurrency mining requires huge amounts of energy, the process itself is not directly polluting. The natural resource requirement is limited to what is needed to manufacture computer hardware and to generate electricity for the mining operations. Cryptocurrency mining is a 24/7 process using constant power with minimal downtime. Additionally, larger mining operations can require in excess of 100 megawatts of power for facilities with the footprint of a medium-size factory. Mining operations need a highly reliable and dense power supply.

The environmental impact of electricity generation depends in large part on the source used. Primary impacts include carbon emissions and air pollution from burning fossil fuels. The mix of available electricity generation sources is highly dependent on the region and when cryptocurrency miners purchase electricity from the grid, and the environmental impact is tied to the local energy mix. The cryptocurrency carbon footprint is the greatest if the grid is supplied primarily by fossil fuels.

Headlines regarding links between cryptocurrencies and the environmental impact associated with mining have become common, and resulting geopolitical decisions have hurt their valuations. That dynamic ought to concern the crypto industry, and industry participants should want to seek cleaner sources of electricity to minimize its impact on the environment.

To guarantee a share of carbon-free electricity, cryptocurrency mining operations may seek agreements with local grid operators or electricity generators. Some larger cryptocurrency mining operations may choose to own and operate their own electricity generation facilities.

Available sources of carbon-free electricity include renewables (primarily wind and solar), hydropower and nuclear power. Hydropower is geographically limited and season dependent, which leaves renewables and nuclear power as the most technically mature options. The intermittency of renewables means that they require large energy storage systems or fossil fuel backups to ensure the constant electricity supply needed for mining. Because of their footprint, large-scale energy generation through renewables in desired locations is much less flexible than other energy sources are. Those attributes make renewable sources a less attractive energy partner for cryptocurrency mining.

The power demands of the cryptocurrency mining industry create a unique opportunity for synergizing with nuclear power. Nuclear reactors harness energy from fissioning elements such as uranium. Because it isn’t burning carbon-based fuels, energy produced from nuclear reactors is carbon free. In 2020, nuclear power accounted for 50% of all carbon-free electricity generation in the U.S.

Lifecycle nuclear power greenhouse gas emissions – including mining uranium, fuel enrichment and fuel fabrication – are comparable with those of other renewable sources of electricity, shown in the chart below. In addition to being carbon free, nuclear power now comes from the kilowatt to the gigawatt levels and exhibits two particular characteristics that make it a prime partner for cryptocurrency mining.


First, nuclear power is immensely reliable. Reliability is measured by the “capacity factor,” the ratio between a plant’s actual electricity generation and the amount of electricity it could produce if it ran at 100% power with no interruptions. Nuclear power in the U.S. has the highest capacity factor of any electricity source. As such, nuclear is often described as “baseload” electricity – always up, always running, reliably meeting the electricity demand. For crypto-mining operations requiring constant power, that is a huge benefit.

Second, nuclear power is incredibly energy dense. A single fission reaction produces over 1 million times more energy than one combustion reaction. As such, the fuel and footprint requirements for nuclear reactors is very small. That pairs well with the compactness of crypto-mining facilities.

Nuclear energy comes with the stigmas of nuclear waste and nuclear accidents. Despite a few high-profile nuclear accidents in the past, nuclear power plants remain one of the safest human-made constructs, and nuclear power is among the safest sources of electricity. While nuclear waste is unavoidably generated through nuclear reactions, high resource utilization leads to extremely compact waste forms that can be safely managed with minimal footprint. Worldwide, benefits from nuclear power have far outweighed its challenges.

Engaging with the burgeoning cryptocurrency industry is advantageous for the nuclear industry, as well. Despite producing carbon-free, reliable electricity, nuclear power plants struggle to compete against the cheap natural gas that dominates electricity markets. By contrast, the cryptocurrency industry specifically demands the unique benefits of nuclear power, making partnerships an ideal opportunity. Annual crypto-mining energy costs represent tens of billions of dollars, based on total power consumption and U.S.-average electricity costs. Cryptocurrency network growth will only further propel energy cost increases. The fact that cryptocurrency valuations are likely to increase further stresses the importance of cryptocurrency clean-energy partnerships.

Read more: The Frustrating, Maddening, All-Consuming Bitcoin Energy Debate | Nic Carter

Intentional collaboration with nuclear power could reduce the cost of electricity for crypto-mining operations. The cost to generate the electricity is a small fraction of the total, with various taxes, transmission costs and delivery costs accounting for the rest. Although nuclear power does not offer the lowest electricity generation cost, crypto mining would take full benefit of its reliability, energy density and geographical flexibility. Crypto-mining farms that use nuclear power, either through collocation with existing plants or by ownership of their own plants, would pay less for their carbon-free electricity than they would if they purchased carbon-intensive electricity from the grid.

Partnerships between the crypto-mining and the nuclear industries have already started to blossom. Recent reporting has showcased agreements forged between cryptocurrency mining operations and both nuclear utilities and nuclear reactor vendors. Given the synergies between cryptocurrency energy demands and nuclear power, we hope that these industries continue to engage with each other to explore mutually beneficial opportunities for growth and collaboration.

The opinions expressed in this article are the authors’ own.