Javier Bardem on Gaza: ‘We cannot remain indifferent’ in call for hostage release and cease-fire

LINDSEY BAHR
Updated Wed, October 2, 2024 


People-Javier Bardem-Gaza
This undated photo provided by Peter Singer shows from left, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan. (Peter Singer via AP)

Jordan Strauss/Invision/AP

Javier Bardem was no longer comfortable being silent on Gaza.

The Spanish actor spoke out about the Israeli-Hamas conflict upon accepting an award at the San Sebastian Film Festival last week. In his nuanced remarks, Bardem condemned the Hamas attacks as well as the “massive punishment that the Palestinian population is enduring.”

He called for immediate cease-fire, Hamas’ release of hostages and for Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu and the Hamas leaders — some of whom are now dead — who ordered the Oct. 7 attacks to be judged by the International Criminal Court.


In an interview with The Associated Press, Bardem explained why he chose to speak out.

“I believe that we can and must help bring peace. If we take a different approach, then we will get different results,” Bardem told the AP, speaking prior to Iran’s attack on Israel Tuesday. “The security and prosperity of Israel and the health and future of a free Palestine will only be possible through a culture of peace, coexistence and respect.”

Israel’s offensive has already killed over 40,000 Palestinians, according to Gaza health officials, displaced the vast majority of Gaza’s 2.3 million residents and destroyed much of the impoverished territory. Palestinian militants are still holding some 110 hostages captured in the Oct. 7 attack that started the war, in which they killed around 1,200 people, mostly civilians. Around a third of the 110 are already dead, according to Israeli authorities.

The war has drawn sharp divisions in Hollywood over the past year, where public support of Israel or Palestine has provoked backlash and bullying, with accusations of antisemitism and Islamophobia, and cost people jobs. Even silence has had its consequences. The #blockout2024 movement pressured celebrities who hadn’t said anything — or enough — to take a stand.

“Why now?” Bardem said. “Because to continue to stall negotiations and return to the previous status quo, as they say, or as we are seeing now, embark on a race to further violations of international law would be to perpetuate the war and eventually lead us off a cliff.”

Bardem stressed that while antisemitism and Islamophobia are real and serious problems in the U.S., Europe and beyond, that the terms are being used to divert attention away from the “legitimate right to criticize the actions of the Israeli government and of Hamas.

“We’re witnessing crimes against human rights, crimes under international law, such as, for example, the banning of food, water, medicines, electricity, using, as UNICEF says, war against children and the trauma that’s being created for generations,” Bardem said. “We cannot remain indifferent to that.”

The Oscar-winner, who was born in the Canary Islands and raised Catholic but no longer practices, has spoken up on global issues before, signing an open letter calling for peace during a 2014 conflict between Israel and Hamas, and a few years earlier speaking to a United Nations committee about refugees in Western Sahara, which he narrated a documentary about. He's also an environmental advocate, and spoke to the UN in 2019 about protecting the oceans.

“My mother educated me on the importance of treating all human beings equally, regardless of skin color, ethnicity, religion, nationality, socio and economic status, ability or sexuality,” Bardem said. “Actions inform us and that alone interests me about people. That's why I have always been concerned about discrimination of any kind. That includes antisemitism and Islamophobia."

Bardem is married to Penélope Cruz, with whom he shares two children.

He said that beyond a fear that the framework of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights is in danger, he has seen the effects of the conflict up close and the promise of a different approach. Two of his close friends, one Israeli, one Palestinian, both lost daughters to violence years ago and have bonded together in their shared pain and desire to help create positive change.

Those fathers, Bassam Aramin and Rami Elhanan, are members of a nonprofit organization called The Parents Circle Families Forum that emphasizes reconciliation. They wrote a letter that Bardem shared: “What happened to us is like nuclear energy. You can use it for more destruction. Or you can use it to bring light. Losing your daughter is painful in both situations. But we love our life. We want to exist. So we use this pain to support change. To build bridges, not to dig graves.”

Bardem added: “That’s what it should be about: Building bridges, not digging graves. That’s why it’s urgent and important.”

___

For the latest updates on the Israel-Hamas war, visit: https://apnews.com/hub/israel-hamas-war

The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory: Studies of Schmitt, Oakeshott, Strauss and Rand





Larry Alan Busk

Rowman and Littlefield, Lanham MD, 2023. 276 pp., $105.00 hb
ISBN 9781666929638

Reviewed by Matt McManus
About the reviewer
Matt McManus is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Michigan 

For many decades now, anti-foundationalism has been a very popular position on the academic left. Influenced by an array of post-structuralist and post-modern thinkers such as Foucault, Derrida and Gayatri Spivak, many have argued that ideas of justice, reason and universalism were conceptually flawed at best and dangerous at worst. These thinkers all stressed how bellicosely universalistic conceptions of reason and morality served as the ideological basis of Western and Soviet imperialism, the emergence of the disciplinary carceral state and neoconservative military interventionism. Rather than run the risk of repeating these errors, the left needed to adopt a position of depthless skepticism towards any system that sought to instantiate itself through power. To the extent we put forward a constructive political programme, it would need to be focused on a micropolitics that gradually enacted big change through small and very particular forms of activism.

In his new book The Right Wing Mirror of Critical Theory, Marxist theorist Larry Alan Busk asks us to question this intellectual transition and to stop ‘throwing out the baby with the bathwater’. While acknowledging the dangers of appealing to Enlightenment ideals of progress, reason and ‘intelligent design’, Busk claims that ‘if our ambition is to create a world in which everyone has enough to eat, in which no one is victimized for arbitrary reason, in which structural conditions do no keep most in a state of poverty and a select few in preposterous opulence, and in which we can look forward to a habitable climate future and an ecologically sustainable level of material comfort, then appeals to the figures of progress are inevitable’ (25). His main argument for this is that, curiously, the repudiation of ‘figures of progress’ so emblematic of much critical theory, brought it squarely and comfortably into line with the main thrust of reactionary philosophy.

The Enlightenment was a moment of triumph for many of the progressive and revolutionary forces which had been developing for many generations. Radicals like Thomas Paine and Mary Wollstonecraft attacked the ancien regimes as contrary to ‘common sense’ and basic reason, stressing the transparently ideological character of mythological justifications for aristocratic inequality. In Poisoning the Minds of the Lower Orders, political theorist Don Herzog stressed how conservatives were shocked that ancient conceptions of the great hierarchical ‘Chain of Being’, which held that God and nature intended everyone to have their place, not only failed to resonate by provoked mockery from Enlightenment radicals. Edmnund Burke sneered that the philosophes wanted to strip away ‘all the pleasing illusions’ that elevated a man or a woman into a king or queen and made subordination easy, and recommended we infuse ‘sublime principles’ onto those who’d been erected above others. In response, Mary Wollstonecraft accused him of having a ‘moral antipathy to reason’ who’d excuse injustice on the perplexing basis that the injustice had gone on for a such a long time that we ought to excuse and even revere it.

Busk stresses how this deep wariness of Enlightenment’s ambition to remake the world permanently stamped the reactionary tradition, down through its greatest twentieth century thinkers à la Schmitt, Oakeshott, Hayek, Strauss and Ayn Rand.

Busk points out how Schmitt was deeply skeptical of both the liberal and Marxist belief in reason, holding instead that our basic moral beliefs were ‘secularized theological concepts’ organized into myths. On that basis Schmitt felt that the fascist myth propagated by Mussolini and later Hitler had an


advantage over socialist myths because the ‘former is more effective: more emotionally resonant, more “irrationally” powerful, and above all, more historically successful. This is, in fact, the most consistent criticism of Marxist politics that Schmitt undertakes-he does not criticize it for being false or immoral, only for lacking the imaginative power capable of unifying and mobilizing the masses, at least relative to the affective charms of nationalism (63).

Michael Oakeshott was similarly critical of ‘rationalism’ in politics, arguing that it is an illusion that there are ‘correct’ answers to practical questions that can be settled by an appeal to either facts, norms or history. Over and against those, like the British utilitarian socialists, who proposed to reinvent society to promote the human good, Oakeshott endorsed a conservatism wherein we ‘enjoy what is present and available regardless of its ability to satisfy any want.’ While superficially benign, Busk stresses how in concrete terms Oakeshott’s anti-rational conservatism led him to express deep reservations about women’s suffrage till near the end, and then only endorsing it because near the end of his long life Oakeshott acknowledged women’s voting was an established part of the British ‘tradition’ – it had nothing to do with ideals of ‘rights’ or ‘justice’.

Undoubtedly, the heart of the book is Busk’s deep chapter on Hayek, which constitutes one of the richest attempts to answer the Austrian economist from a Marxist perspective. Busk points out how Hayek argued that we need to see society as evolving through a process of ‘natural selection’ rather than the result of conscious, rational design. Hayek was famously critical of both Nazism and the communist command economies for attempting to ‘plan’ entire societies, failing to recognize how the complexity required to understand society enough to organize planning far outstripped anything of which human mind was capable. Busk points out that there is nonetheless a deep ‘logical hole in Hayek’s argument’ (116). That is, for Hayek,


societies evolve through a process of natural selection, and inhibitions in old arrangement provoke new ones to emerge and develop. Socialism, however, is not treated as a natural outgrowth of other social forms – it is only an aberration of the intellect. He establishes justification-by-existence, but the project of intelligent design remains unjustified in spite of its existence. Likewise, this positivistic criterion, which legitimates a political system insofar as it is established, not insofar as we can imagine it, does not prevent him from imagining a liberal utopia. He declares at once that the human ship is guided by winds that we cannot control and that we should self-consciously try to change course (116).

This is indeed a serious problem in Hayek’s position which even other libertarians have acknowledged. While he endorsed an evolutionary rather than planning oriented approach to society, Hayek unfailingly insisted that there must be a major role for the state to play in establishing the conditions for market society, ‘designed’ new kinds of constitutional orders that would put constraints on democratic will, and even called for the introduction of markets in states which had previously been non-capitalist. Whatever else one thinks, this blurs the boundaries between evolution and planning which Hayek elsewhere makes central to the argument against socialism. For all that, Busk could have spent more time dealing with the more nuanced dimensions of Hayek’s thinking. While Busk acknowledges that ‘Hayek and company advanced a perfectly coherent (which is not to say compelling) critique of socialist planning’, he doesn’t address many of the specific epistemic underpinnings of Hayek’s position (115). This is more important than may seem because, as some of the more sophisticated commentaries have pointed out, there is an undeniable sense in which Hayek follows Marx in being an heir to the German critical tradition, a tradition which, following Kant and Hegel, has been uniform in stressing the limitations of utopian rationalism. A deep dive into this problem is a necessary one for socialists seeking to answer Hayek comprehensively. As is a response to his own acknowledgement that a certain kind of welfarism was compatible with capitalism, particularly once one abandoned the meritocratic mythologies characteristic of earlier liberalism.

Busk’s analysis of right-wing thought is always illuminating and fresh, and is a welcome contribution to the growing array of sophisticated left-wing interpretations of the right. What’s sure to be more controversial is his spicy claim that contemporary left theory is a ‘mirror’ to its right-wing counterpart, internalizing many of the same arguments about needing to be skeptical of reason, not hope for too much and focus on militant particularism over structural transformation. The consequences are dire. For Busk, it means that ‘the Right has no real opposition, but only a reflection. If our opponent has already anticipated all of our moves, at a certain point we are no longer playing against this opponent-we are merely pushing the pieces around in a performative display, going through the motions of a process whose outcome, defeat, is determined in advance’ (50). Grim stuff.

This argument is being made more and more forcefully in a number of different quarters. Some are even more explicit than Busk. In his excellent The Seduction of Unreason, philosopher Richard Wolin sardonically points out how generations of critical theorists abandoned Marx and socialism in the mid-century and rushed to embrace figures associated with the German ‘Conservative Revolution’ à la Nietzsche, Schmitt and Heidegger. The result was a left that turned on the very Enlightenment heritage it had once advanced. In a very different register, historian Samuel Moyn’s latest book Liberalism Against Itself argues that twentieth-century liberals, shocked by the Holocaust and Soviet atrocities, also chose to abandon the more ambitiously egalitarian goals of their doctrine. Ironically this took place amongst liberal intellectuals at the very moment when liberal politicians, often inspired by democratic forms of socialism, were constructing the welfare states that brought the ideal of a free and equal society closer to realization than any other. Internalizing arguments about the limitations of reason and human nature long propagated by conservatives, Moyn argues Cold War liberals came to agree with Hayek that the best which could be hoped for was a neoliberal society with a very minimal floor of economic redistribution. The hopes of a liberal socialist like Mill or Irving Howe gave way to the pessimism and ultimately cynicism of Bill Clinton and Tony Blair.

It is undeniably possible to push it too far. Anyone who has spent any time with the ‘facts don’t care about your feelings’ or ‘race realist’ crowd knows that the potential of Enlightenment rhetoric to validate reactionary politics is alive and well. We cannot throw out the insights and caution of critics like Adorno, Foucault or Spivak through an uncritical return to faith in a left-Enlightenment. But Busk is absolutely right that such a return is needed, and needed now. For too many decades the intellectual left has retreated into ‘trashing’ and criticizing in lieu of offering an inspiring alternative to the status quo. There will always be a place for this critical disposition, but it must once more be complemented by an optimism of the will and an ambition of the intellect. During what he entitled the ‘Age of Reason’, Thomas Paine declared the intelligent men and women had it in their power to rationally make the world anew. That power is still the left’s if we want to grasp it.

7 May 2024


URL: https://marxandphilosophy.org.uk/reviews/21504_the-right-wing-mirror-of-critical-theory-studies-of-schmitt-oakeshott-strauss-and-rand-by-larry-alan-busk-reviewed-by-matt-mcmanus/

Everyone agrees there's a homeless crisis in the US. Plans to address it vary among mayor candidates

JANIE HAR and GEOFF MULVIHILL

AP
August 10, 2024



SAN FRANCISCO (AP) — San Francisco Mayor London Breed has launched a new crackdown on people sleeping outside in a campaign to clear the sidewalks of homeless encampments that have come to define the city.

Her four challengers in November's election, all Democrats, say she hasn't handled the crisis effectively, though the city last month counted only 300 tents and other temporary structures, which is half as many as a year earlier.

But her opponents don't agree on a strategy.

“You can truly change the reputation of San Francisco from a place that today people believe they can come to our city, pitch a tent and stay as long as they want, to a city where — if that is the lifestyle they’re choosing — they look elsewhere,” said Mark Farrell, perhaps the most conservative of the challengers.

It's a similar story in other big U.S. cities electing mayors this year.

Most are in the West, where a long-running homelessness crisis was spurred by high housing costs and has deepened during the coronavirus pandemic, which upended the nation four years ago. There are thousands of people without a place to live, and for many residents who are housed it has become a quality-of-life concern, which has made it a prime political issue.

California Gov. Gavin Newsom, a Democrat and former San Francisco mayor, threatened last week to pull state money from cities and counties that do not do more to get people out of encampments and into shelters.

A 2023 count found there were 653,000 people experiencing homelessness at a given time across the country, an increase of 63,000 from a decade earlier. The problem has become far more visible: 257,000 people were living on the streets or other places not intended for habitation, 61,000 more than in 2013.

Most of the big-city mayors and candidates — nearly all Democrats — say that more affordable housing and additional services for people experiencing homelessness are needed. The heart of the debate, as in San Francisco, is whether it's acceptable to force people off the streets.

In two of the largest cities in the West, challengers are emphasizing the homeless crisis in their races against incumbents who won handily four years ago.

Larry Turner, a police officer trying to unseat San Diego Mayor Todd Gloria, says the incumbent is overemphasizing temporary housing, including a plan to turn a warehouse into a 1,000-bed shelter. Gloria's campaign says he is working on both short-term and permanent housing.

In Phoenix, Matt Evans is arguing that incumbent Kate Gallego hasn't done enough to enforce laws and clear encampments. Gallego opposes what she calls the criminalization of homelessness and has added hundreds of shelter beds.

Elections could turn on the issue. And the situation on the streets can, of course, change depending on who is elected.

“Mayors can make a huge difference,” said Ann Oliva, executive director of the National Alliance to End Homelessness.

But she is critical of arresting or fining people who don't have places to live.

“You cannot pursue criminalization as your primary way of pursuing homelessness and also drive the numbers down,” Oliva said.

Some new mayors have made a dent in homelessness numbers without relying on penalties, she said.

In Los Angeles, the city with the biggest unsheltered population in the U.S., Karen Bass took office in December 2022 and immediately signed an emergency order making it easier for the city to contract with hotels to provide shelter. According to the homeless tally in January, the city's total dropped by 2%, the first decrease after years of increases. Bass has more than two years before she faces re-election.


In Mike Johnston's first six months as mayor of Denver last year, the city moved 1,000 people into hotels, a community of cabin-like structures and other transitional housing.

Other new mayors, such as Philadelphia's Cherelle Parker, have incorporated a get-tough approach that many candidates are calling for, and which the Supreme Court validated with a ruling in June that allows bans on sleeping outside.

A dozen candidates are vying for the job in November's open mayoral election in Portland, Oregon, the center of a metro area where a January 2023 count found nearly 4,000 people living outside.

City council member Rene Gonzalez pressured Multnomah County, home to Portland, to pause distributing tents and tarps to homeless people.

Gonzalez pushed for a tougher city ordinance last year but joined a unanimous city council decision in May to allow officials to fine or even jail homeless people who reject an offer of shelter.

In San Francisco, Breed’s office issued a memo in July saying homeless people who continue to turn down offers of shelter and services will face increasing penalties including arrest if they continue to camp in public.

Breed also ordered that homeless people who are not from San Francisco be offered bus or train tickets to return home before they are provided shelter or services, adding in a statement that “we cannot solve everyone’s individual housing and behavioral health needs.”

One of Breed's challengers, San Francisco Supervisor Aaron Peskin, opposes encampment sweeps. Another challenger, Supervisor Ahsha Safaí, says the sweeps are cruel unless sufficient shelter is available.

Challenger Daniel Lurie, an heir to the Levi Strauss fortune who has a nonprofit that funds temporary tiny homes, promised to build 1,500 shelter beds in the first six months of his administration so people forced out of encampments have somewhere to go.

"There’s just been no plan for the last three years with this administration,” Lurie said.

Breed's administration has added thousands of temporary and more permanent shelter beds, but there is still a significant shortage.

“Her opponents aren’t offering locations where they will build shelters, how they will get it done, and how they plan to pay for their plans,” said Joe Arellano, a Breed campaign spokesperson.

Michael Johnson, who is homeless in San Francisco, the city where he grew up, was preparing to move recently in advance of an expected tent sweep to avoid what he said happened in a previous sweep when he was given 10 seconds by police and city street cleaners to move his tent and belongings. He didn't, and lost everything.

Homeless people often reject offers of shelter if it means giving up their belongings or pets, being separated from significant others or sleeping in places surrounded by strangers, including some who may be violent.

Johnson, 41, doesn’t like living outdoors. But he says no one has offered him appropriate housing and, wherever he goes, he's always moved again by authorities.

“This is a merry-go-round,” he said. “It don’t matter if I stay at the location I’m at or find a new one. Eventually, they’ll be here.”

___

Mulvihill reported from Cherry Hill, New Jersey. AP reporters Terry Chea in San Francisco and Claire Rush in Portland, Oregon, contributed to this article.

Re-Opening a Permanently Shut Nuclear Reactor is a Dangerous Gamble

BY JOSEPH MANGANO

 JULY 19, 2024
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Palisades Nuclear Generating Station on the shore of Lake Michigan, 1974. Photo: US Nuclear Regulatory Commission.

Forty U.S. nuclear power reactors have shut permanently. But for the first time, an attempt is being made to re-start a closed reactor – the Palisades reactor in southwest Michigan.

The American experience with nuclear power began as Cold War fears of nuclear war and health hazards from bomb test fallout were widespread. President Eisenhower’s 1953 “Atoms for Peace” speech to calm these concerns included using radioactive uranium atoms to generate electricity. It was advertised as cleaner than other sources like coal, and cheaper (most famously described by Atomic Energy Commission chair Lewis Strauss as “too cheap to meter”).

The federal government’s massive efforts to encourage nuclear power were met with problems. Grassroots movements concerned about health dangers damaged its public profile. Reactors also took an excessively long time to plan and construct, at costs far above initial expectations. Banks stopped lending money to build reactors in 1978, and reactor startups ended in the mid-1990s.

As the years passed, reactors aged, and a total of 40 closed (including 13 since 2013). Others threatened to close, but were saved by multibillion-dollar infusions from governments in several states. The recent opening of two reactors in Georgia – which took 18 years and cost $35 billion, far above the $14 billion expected – are likely the last new reactors ever built in the country.

Aging reactors will only get older and require more maintenance. Government bailouts will not last forever. Safe, renewable sources such as wind and solar power are growing rapidly, and now account for 25% of the nation’s electricity – at costs well below nuclear. Nuclear reactors are fading into the sunset.

But in the past year, a new idea has circulated to halt the inevitable–to bring permanently closed reactors back to life. Of the U.S. reactors that have shut, none have ever been re-started. The concept is now being pilot-tested at the Palisades nuclear plant, in southwest Michigan.

Palisades is one of the oldest U.S. reactors; only 7 of 94 reactors now operating are older. It was not a large reactor, with just over half of the capacity of later models, and never generated more than 6% of Michigan’s electricity. Entergy Nuclear, which operated Palisades, closed it in May 2022, as it faced with operating losses and huge costs for mechanical necessities and repairs. Entergy sold the plant to Holtec International, with the stated intention of decommissioning the plant.

As Palisades was closing, lobbyists were swarming the halls of Congress, in a desperate attempt to revive the sagging nuclear industry. Lobbyists presented nuclear as 1) “emission-free”; 2) needed to meet energy demands; and 3) safe. Their efforts were rewarded by Congress and President Biden, who signed the Inflation Reduction Act in August, 2022. The Energy Act contained billions of dollars for nuclear power, including funds to restart closed reactors.

While political leaders went along with lobbyist talking points, each point is misleading:

 “Emission-Free”. Reactors produce some carbon (e.g., carbon-14), albeit less than coal or gas plants. Preparing uranium for reactors, through mining, milling, fabrication, enrichment, and purification, requires much greenhouse gas. And the term “emission-free” ignores routine environmental emissions of radioactive gases and metals from reactors.

Needed to Meet Energy Demands. Reactors have never produced more than 22% of U.S. electricity, and now produces 19%. Conversely, renewable sources produce 25%, a number that grows sharply each year. Given the extremely long time needed to build new reactors and the aging of the current fleet, renewables are much better poised to meet future needs.

Safe. Reactors generate over 100 radioactive isotopes – the same mix of chemicals only created in nuclear weapons explosions. Each can cause cancer, and is especially hazardous to infants and children. Most is contained as high-level waste at each plant, but some is routinely released into the environment, and can enter human bodies through breathing, food, and water.

Any possibility of bringing Palisades back to life would not have happened without massive government bailouts. In mid-2023, Michigan legislators provided $150 million towards restarting the reactor, and designated another $150 million just last month. This $300 million is contingent on the $1.52 billion pledge by the Energy Department under the Inflation Reduction Act, which in turn is contingent on the reactor restarting. Some believe that the eventual amount for a Palisades restart is upwards of $8 billion.

The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission must go through a review process before making any decision on Palisade’s future. While Holtec is requesting a Nuclear Regulatory Commission final decision by August 2025, legal challenges could delay, or even block, a second life for Palisades.

Regulations governing the NRC review are complex, but the definition of safety has been a point of contention for decades. Government officials have set “permissible” limits of routine emissions and environmental levels of toxic chemicals. Companies operating reactors must measure and publicly report these levels released and levels; if they are below “permissible” amounts – which they always are – officials pronounce reactors to be safe, and pose no threat to health, without conducting studies of local health.

Van Buren County, Michigan is the site of Palisades. Its population is about 75,000 – a number unchanged for decades – and consists of small towns and farming areas. The county is on Lake Michigan, making it a popular tourist site in the summer.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention website on mortality statistics includes each U.S. county, for each year from 1968 to 2023. In the period just before and after Palisades started operating, the Van Buren County cancer death rate was 8% below the U.S. However, in the most recently available period (since 2005), the county rate was 15% above the U.S. Thus, Van Buren has shifted from a low-cancer to a high-cancer county (see below). If the Van Buren rate had remained 8% below the U.S. after 1978, about 1,000 fewer cancer deaths would have occurred.

More importantly, the county’s cancer death rate for people who died by age 35 shifted from 39% below to 52% above the U.S. rate, a dramatic change. The fact that those most affected by radiation exposure during infancy and childhood raises a red flag – whether early-life exposure to radioactive emissions from Palisades posed harm to young residents of Van Buren County.

Palisades is being watched by nuclear reactor owners across the country; a re-start of Palisades may lead to attempts for similar actions. Already, reports have surfaced that re-start is being considered for several reactors recently closed permanently. Among these is the Duane Arnold reactor in Iowa. Another is reactor 1 at Three Mile Island, Pennsylvania, which shut in 2019. Constellation Energy, which owns the plant, has begun talks with state lawmakers about potential restart.

Three Mile Island is an important name in the U.S. nuclear power story. In 1979, reactor 2 (which only had been in operation for three months) suffered a meltdown that destroyed half of its core. Governor Dick Thornburgh recommended that pregnant women and young children evacuate the area. It took 15 years to ship the parts of the stricken reactor to permanent storage. Nuclear power was already skidding, but the meltdown only accelerated the skid.

The nuclear power industry has failed to live up to original expectations. Of the 1,200 reactors predicted by the Atomic Energy Commission during the Nixon Administration, only 131 ever opened. For years, it has been in decline, and has scrambled to find various ways to halt the fall. Its latest scheme is to try and bring closed reactors back to life – buoyed by large amounts of taxpayer dollars. The outcome remains to be seen, but it appears that Palisades will be a seminal point in the U.S. nuclear odyssey.

Joseph J. Mangano, MPH MBA, is executive director of the Radiation and Public Health Project, a research and education group based in New York.

Fukushima Toxic Dumping

BY ROBERT HUNZIKER

 JULY 19, 2024
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Photo by Unsplash+ and Getty Images.

Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Power Plant is the world’s leading epicenter of toxic radioactive water released into the ocean. Yet, these activities are no longer closely monitored by mainstream media. As it happens, Tokyo Electric Power Company is the electric utility that manages the decommissioning of the collapsed nuclear reactors. This controversial ongoing release of radioactive water is mostly unopposed by the nations of the world. No problem, dump it!

But there is another side to this story.

“This is a time bomb.” (Robert Richmond, Ph.D. Kewalo Marine Laboratory)

A nationwide symposium on Zoom entitled: Radioactive Contamination of US Food and Water and What Congress Can Do About It, August 15, 2024, discussed several aspects of Fukushima’s dumping scheme. The details are disturbing and maybe horrifying.

Tokyo Electric Power Company (“TEPCO”) with the blessing of the government of Japan commenced dumping treated radioactive water into the ocean August 24^th, 2023. Since 2011, TEPCO has been wrestling with one of the most recognizable industrial accidents in human history, three nuclear power plants still in a difficult to define meltdown thirteen (13) years after the initial meltdown.

It’s important to note that subsequent to the meltdown in March 2021 five ex-Japan prime ministers called for an end to nuclear power. In sharp contrast to those five former PM’s opposition, as of August 2022, current PM Fumio Kishida (2021 -) went all-in for nuclear power reactors, build, build, build.

Beginning in 2023 TEPCO commenced dumping treated radioactive water used to cool sizzling hot highly radioactive corium within the core of the crumpled reactors into the Pacific Ocean. Essentially, TEPCO unofficially christened the ocean “an open sewer.” It’s free! Yes, it’s free but not free for abuse. And why would anyone authorize broken-down crippled nuclear power plants to release toxic radioactive wastewater into the ocean?

According to TEPCO and several experts quoted in a BBC article, the low level of tritium radiation released is acceptable risk. One expert said he’d drink it. Well, can somebody please arrange for him to receive a supply of TEPCO’s radioactive wastewater to drink for one year. That’d be comparable to the ocean’s experience of one year. According to Emily Hammond, Ph. D., an expert in energy and environmental law with George Washington University: “The challenge with radionuclides (such as tritium) is that they present a question that science cannot fully answer; that is, at very low levels of exposure, what can be counted as ‘safe’? (Source: The Science Behind the Fukushima Waste Water Release, BBC, August 25, 2023)

But seriously, are there really, truly tolerable levels? According to the National Academy of Sciences, there are no safe doses of radiation. “Decades of research show clearly that any dose of radiation increases an individual’s risk for the development of cancer.”

TEPCO’s dumping is a testament to human frailty, not strength, endangering its own, and it’s difficult to stomach. There’s nothing positive about it, not one positive. Instead, it’s a boldfaced insult and slap in the face. Intuitively, logically, ethically, it’s impossible to justify turning the world’s oceans into open sewers. Oh, please!

The International Atomic Energy Administration (IAEA) greeted the TEPCO/Japan government dumping scheme with open arms, as did the G7. But, in the process, IAEA violated its own stated principles, see: TEPCO’s ALPS-Treated Radioactive Water Dumping Plan Violated Essential Provisions of IAEA’s General Safety Guide N0. 8.

Indeed, IAEA’s endorsement begs a critical question of whom the public can trust when the IAEA overstates well-known facts about the dangers of tritium while violating its own policies for nuclear safety.

The July 15th symposium discusses the risks of Fukushima that are generally ignored by society at large. Some highlights of that exposé follow:

Arjun Makhijani, Ph.D. Institute for Energy and Environmental Research. Focus on tritium, Exploring Tritium Dangers to Protect Future Generations and Ecosystems, Congressional Briefing, 2024-07-15:

Tritium found in Fukushima’s wastewater, when exposed in humans is detrimental to the basic core of a person’s internal energy system, aka: the mitochondrial DNA, a bodily function that allows people to walk to talk to blink to process food, etc. This significant aspect of human DNA is very susceptible to damage by tritium. And the risk is identical for plants and animals.

A little tritium goes a long way. One teaspoon of tritiated water can contaminate 100 billion gallons of water (equivalent to 150,000 Olympic pools), a calculation that is based upon US drinking water standards. “Tritium turns water radioactive, so our most crucial ‘stuff of life’ becomes radioactive.” How many teaspoons will Fukushima produce?

The risks of internal exposure to tritium: “There’s clear evidence of neurological damage, according to the International Commission on Radiological Protection.”

Congress needs to address tighter regulations of tritium exposure for both humans and ecosystems.

Robert Richmond, research professor Kewalo Marine Laboratory, University of Hawaii, Achieving Healthier Oceans and People, Dumping of Nuclear Waste Undercuts Progress: A marine biologist viewpoint.

Already, the state of the ocean is in serious decline because of anthropogenic stressors. We need to reduce stressors, not add radionuclides to a very fragile marine ecosystem. Radionuclide effects are transboundary and transgenerational issues in addition to the complication of PFAS or “forever chemicals” starting to show up in alarming quantities. Compounding these dangers, the Fukushima discharge program will take 30+ years.

Fukushima’s discharge, according to Richmond: “This is a time bomb… Once the radionuclides are detected in fish, it will be too late to act. There’s no way to put the genie back in the bottle.”

The way the plumes of radionuclides are modeled for Fukushima dumping, they’ll reside in major Pacific fishing grounds for 7-12 years at peak levels of impact. Tritium is not evenly distributed throughout the ocean. Statements that tritium will be widely dispersed/diluted do not hold up at all. Tritium ends up in fish that people eat, bio-accumulating within human bodies that have no defenses against organically bound tritium.

(Footnote: As tritium moves up the food chain it bioconcentrates and biomagnifies. Pro-nuclear advocates claim tritium passes thru the body within days, no harm done. This is not true. It bioaccumulates in living organisms. Numerous studies have proven this, e.g., Benedict C. Jaeschke, et al, Bioaccumulation of Tritiated Water and Trophic Transfer, etc. National Library of Medicine, January 2013.)

Additionally, “the Fukushima discharges violate numerous international protocols and established principles (1) the Precautionary Principle, and IAEA GSG-8 (2) ALARA principle – nobody should be exposed to radiation unless it is as treatment for cancer (3) UNCLOS (4) London Convention and Protocol (5) the newly passed High Seas Treaty (6) PIF 2050 Blue Continent Strategy (7) the spirit of the UN Ocean Decade.” Fukushima dumping violates all seven of these internationally recognized principles against dumping toxic substances into the world’s oceans.

Why is Fukushima given a pass on seven (7) internationally recognized violations?

Accordingly, new approaches and alternatives and regulations for toxic ocean dumping must be researched and established. Congress needs to address this as soon as possible.

James Gormley – Editor-in-Chief, Better Nutrition magazine, award-winning journalist, pioneer of science-centered coverage and a member of the US trade delegations in Paris and Rome for FAO/WHO Codex Alimentarius.

A multinational approach is required for assessment and radioactivity mitigation. We need a “whole-of-government approach” in the US inclusive of EPA, NOA, DOE, FDA, and Fish and Wildlife Service all-in tackling issues such as Fukushima’s radioactive ocean dumping. Congress needs to bring all federal assets together in unison to tackle this understudied and largely ignored risk to marine and human health.

Kimberly Roberson – Founder and executive director Fukushima Fallout Awareness Network (“FFAN”) est. June 2011.

A citizen’s petition regarding the risks associated with Fukushima was filed with the FDA on behalf of FFAN in 2013. Even though the FDA is required to respond to a citizen’s petition, to date, 11 years later, the only response has been a letter stating: “More time was needed.”

Meanwhile, according to Roberson: “TEPCO struggles to get Fukushima under control, and there is no end in sight. They say it will take 30 or 40 years, but nobody really knows for sure. In August of 2023, TEPCO began systematically dumping radioactive wastewater into the Pacific, but it is only partially filtered. TEPCO filled over 1,000 tanks with wastewater, and more water is added every day, and there are hundreds of thousands of gallons contained in each tank… tritium is difficult to filter, and TEPCO is not currently attempting to filter it. Cesium is the radionuclide at the center of the FDA petition… where one radionuclide is detected, others are found as well.” (Footnote: High levels of radioactive cesium cause nausea, vomiting, bleeding, coma, and death.)

At present the US has the highest levels allowable for manmade radiation from nuclear accidents at 1200 Bq/kg for all citizens. By comparison, Japan’s allowable level for adults is 100 Bg/kg and 50 Bg/kg for children.

“Food that is too radioactive for Japan can legally be exported to the US…. It has been reported that food, including seafood, that Japan would ordinarily export to countries that have instituted food bans of Japan’s radioactive food products is now being sold and served to US military service members and their families in Japan. The National Academy for Sciences biologic effect of ionizing radiation states there is a linear relationship between ionizing radiation and the development of solid cancers.” (Roberson)

(Footnote: Because ionizing radiation has enough energy to break an electron away from an atom, it certainly has enough umph to change the chemical composition of any material it connects with. A human body is defenseless.)

The FDA should monitor for cesium in foodstuff, as stated in the FFAN petition. Additionally, food imported from Japan should adhere, at the least, to Japan’s own standards of 100 Bg/kg for adults and 50 Bg/kg for young children before export to the United States.

The International Physicians for the Prevention of Nuclear War in Germany suggest 8 Bg/kg for children and 16 Bg/kg for adults as safe tolerable levels.

Congress should start the process to establish adequate testing and establish a viable limit.and verification that food imported from Japan does not exceed Japan’s own restrictions. Other nations have banned Japan’s exports.

The public has a right to information. FFAN is asking Congress to direct the FDA to do its job. It’s in the public interest to know what people are putting in their mouths. If imported foodstuff exceeds Bg/kg limits set by the exporter in Japan, the public should be informed that they are purchasing food from Japan that exceeds Japan’s allowable levels of radioactivity for its own people.

“The myth is being perpetuated that discharges are necessary for decommissioning. But the Japanese government itself admits there is sufficient water storage space in Fukushima Daiichi. Long-term storage would expose the current government decommissioning roadmap as flawed, but that is exactly what needs to happen. The Fukushima Daiichi nuclear station is still in crisis, posing unique and severe hazards, and there is no credible plan for its decommissioning,” Shaun Burnie, Senior Nuclear Specialist at Greenpeace East Asia.

As for Fukushima discharges, Greenpeace claims that the radiological risks have not been fully assessed, and the biological impacts of tritium, carbon-14, strontium-90 and iodine-129 – to be released with the water – “have been ignored”. (Source: Fukushima: Why is Japan Releasing water and is it Safe? Reuters, Aug. 24, 2023) That statement should be a gamechanger, but most likely it won’t.

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

Nuclear Lunacy Down Under

BY BINOY KAMPMARK

 JULY 19, 2024
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Photo by Mick Truyts

Politics and facts are not necessarily good dinner companions.  Both often stray from the same table, taking up with other, more suitable company.  The Australian opposition leader, Peter Dutton, has never been discomforted by facts, preferring the chimera-like qualities demagoguery offers.  His vision for Australia is admirably simple and simplistic.

In foreign policy, he supports US interventions in any theatre of the globe without question.  Ditto such allies as Israel.  To the distant north, the evil Yellow Horde is abominated.  Domestically, matters are similarly one dimensional.  Irregular boat arrivals are to be repelled with necessary cruelty.  And then there is a near pathological hatred of renewable energy.

Needing to find some electoral distraction to improve the Liberal-National coalition’s chances of returning to office, Dutton has literally identified a nuclear option.  Certainly, it is mischievous, throwing those wishing to invest in the problematic Australian energy market into a state of confusion.  The business of renewables, as with any investment, is bound to also be shaken.

Last month, Dutton finally released some details of his nuclear vision.  Seven nuclear projects are envisaged, using sites with currently working or shuttered coal fired power stations. These will be plants up to 1.4 gigawatts (GW) to be located at Loy Yang in Victoria, Liddell in NSW’s Hunter Valley and Mt. Piper near Lithgow, Tarong and Callide in Queensland.  Small modular (SMR) reactors are planned for Port Augusta in South Australia and Muja near Collie in Western Australia.

The SMR gambit is particularly quixotic, given that they have yet to come to viable fruition.  Besides, the entire reactor venture already faces glaring legal impediments, as nuclear power is prohibited by Commonwealth and state laws.  (The ban on nuclear energy was, with sweet irony, legislated by the Howard Coalition government a quarter of a century ago.)

Already, the handicaps on the proposal are thick and onerous.  Ian Lowe of Griffith University witheringly describesthe proposal as “legally impossible, technically improbable, economically irrational and environmentally irresponsible.”

The greatest of all handicaps is the fact that Australian governments, despite tentatively flirting with the prospect of a civilian nuclear sector at points, have never convinced the citizenry about the merits of such power.  The continuous failure of the Commonwealth to even identify a long-standing site for low-level radioactive waste for the country’s modest nuclear industry is a point in fact.

Aspects of the proposed program also go distinctly against the supposedly free market individualism so treasured by those on Dutton’s side of politics.  If nuclear power were to become the fundamental means to decarbonise the Australian economy by 2050, it would entail crushing levels of debt and heavy government stewardship.

By its very nature, the Commonwealth would have to take the reins of this venture, given that private investors will have no bar of it.  Tom Dusevic, writing in the otherwise pro-Dutton outlet The Australian, put it thus: “There is no other way because private capital won’t go anywhere near this risky energy play, with huge upfront costs, very long lead times and the madness that has pervaded our energy transition to meet international obligations.”

The extent of government involvement and ownership of the proposed nuclear infrastructure made The Age and Sydney Morning Herald search for a precedent.  It seemed to have an element of “Soviet economics” to it, directly at odds with the Liberal Party’s own professed philosophy of “lean government that minimises interference in our daily lives; and maximises individual and private sector initiative”.

It would also further add to the already monstrous AUKUS obligations Australia has signed up to with the United States and United Kingdom, a sovereignty shredding exercise involving the transfer and construction of nuclear-powered submarines to Canberra costing upwards and above A$368 billion.  The Smart Energy Council has been good enough to offer its own estimate: the seven nuclear plants and reactors would cost somewhere in the order of A$600 billion, securing a mere 3.7% of Australia’s energy share by 2050.

While draining the treasury of funds, the nuclear-in-Duttonland experiment would do little to alleviate energy costs.  The CSIRO, Australia’s national science agency, along with the Australian Energy Market Operator (AEMO), have concluded that nuclear power in Australia would not be prudent in terms of cost relative to other sources of power.  The obstacles noted in their 2023-4 report are impressively forbidding.

Australia, for instance, lacks existing nuclear power projects.  “Therefore, although it is true that all technologies have extensive pre-construction development times, nuclear is unique in that it has an empty development pipeline in Australia.”  Throw in the layers of legal, safety and security steps, any pioneering nuclear plant in Australia would be “significantly delayed”, rendering nuclear power’s role in achieving net zero emissions by 2050 a nonsense.

The Dutton plan is scratched of all empirical shape.  Estimates are absent.  Numbers, absent.  Capacity, absent.  Figures, if supplied, will be done immediately prior to the next election, or while in government.  Such moves teeter on the edge of herculean stupidity and foolhardiness, at least in Australian conditions.  The exercise is also, quite rightly, being seen as an attempt to stealthily retain coal fired stations while starving continued investment to the renewable sector.

Dutton’s junior partner, the Nationals, have also shown much candour on where they stand on renewable energy projects.  Party leader David Littleproud nailed his colours to the mast on that subject early last year.  By August 2023, he was explicitly calling for a “pause” to the roll out of wind and solar and transmission links, calling the Albanese government’s pursuit of their 82% renewables target a “reckless” one.  His implicit suggestion: wait for the release of the nuclear genie.

The Coalition opposition’s nuclear tease continues the tendency in Australia to soil climate policy with the sods of cultural conflict.  On any matter, Dutton would be happy to become a flat earther were there any votes in it.  The problem here is that his proposal might, on some level, be disruptively attractive – in so far as the voters are concerned.  With Labor dithering in office with the smallest of majorities, any disruption may be one too many.

Binoy Kampmark was a Commonwealth Scholar at Selwyn College, Cambridge. He lectures at RMIT University, Melbourne. Email: bkampmark@gmail.com