CND Press Roundup Monday 4th April 2022

War in Ukraine

• A Russian soldier has reportedly died from radiation after their unit camped in a toxic area near the Chernobyl nuclear power plant known as the Red Forest. It’s said the troops stayed within the 20-mile exclusion zone around the plant, where they dug trenches into the radioactive ground, and drove their trucks around muddy roads. The soldiers who camped in the forest have been moved back into neighbouring Belarus.

• Poland’s deputy Prime Minister and leader of the Ruling Law and Justice Party, Jaroslaw Kaczynski, has called on the US to station nuclear weapons on Polish soil. Speaking to Germany’s Welt am Sonntag newspaper, Kaczynski said if Washington requested that nuclear weapons be stored in Poland, “we would be open to that” adding that it would “significantly increase deterrence towards Moscow.”

• The Guardian writes on coping with nuclear anxiety.

• The Independent has a piece on nuclear tensions between Russia and NATO and how the West would respond in the event of a Russian nuclear attack on Ukraine. It does note: “One overarching concern is that by casting some nuclear weapons as tactical weapons to be used in battle, Russia could break the nearly eight-decade global taboo against using a nuclear weapon against another country. Even comparatively small tactical nuclear weapons approach the strength of the atomic bomb the United States dropped on Hiroshima, Japan, in World War II.”

• A mention for CND here in this look at the thought of liberal political philosopher Francis Fukuyama, famous (or infamous) for proclaiming “the end of history” after the collapse of the Soviet Union. With tensions between NATO and the USSR’s successor Russia at their highest since the Cold War, the article says: “The great virtue of the original Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament in the 1950s and 1960s was that it broke with the NATO consensus, and thus with right-wing pro-American liberalism, of the type fronted by the CIA’s cultural magazine ‘Encounter.’”

Trident

• Labour’s shadow minister for peace and disarmament is under pressure after comments made at a CND rally in 2019 suggested he’d be happy if Russian hackers knocked out the UK’s Trident submarines. The Times writes that leader Keir Starmer has distanced himself from Fabian Hamilton’s remarks which said: “Now, I don’t know enough about this to know whether that’s true or not, but imagine for a minute that it is true. Not that they could actually set the weapons off, but that they could render them entirely useless. I’d be quite happy about that, as long as we could do the same to theirs. It seems to me that once it becomes generally known that it’s possible for someone to hack into the software system that controls our nuclear weapons then they stop being a deterrent altogether. It seems to me that now, more than any other time in our history, is the time to reconsider the weapons.” A shocked Secretary of Defence Ben Wallace, who once described Vladimir Putin as “going full Tonto,” said Hamilton’s remarks were “treasonous” and called for Starmer to sack him.  

• Hamilton’s remarks are also picked up in this EU Today piece which claims that “CND itself has long been considered to have been a KGB operation from day one. Its leadership has always displayed strong anti-west sentiments, whilst generally avoiding any criticism of the Soviet Union.”

Iran Nuclear Deal

• Having washed his hands of Brexit, David Frost gives his two cents on the talks to revive the Iran nuclear deal. Writing in the Telegraph, he likens the quest to secure a deal as “our Bridge over the River Kwai.” His solution to the ongoing impasse in talks? “We have become obsessed with completing it, but have forgotten why. Let’s blow it up and face down our enemies properly instead”...Just like the Northern Ireland protocol I guess.

Nuclear Japan

• The push to restart Japan’s mothballed nuclear reactors continues with this piece in Japan Forward. Economist Tetsuya Wantanabe argues that by restarting the country’s nuclear production and reducing the demand for Liquid Natural Gas, those gas supplies could then be transferred to Europe and help resolve the supply crisis caused by sanctions imposed on Russia over its invasion of Ukraine.

UK Nuclear Energy

• A flurry of reports on Boris Johnson’s plan to “bet big” on nuclear energy over the weekend, including this Guardian piece on Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s reluctance to loosen the purse strings to fund Johnson’s ambitions: “The Treasury is understood to have concerns about expanding nuclear power in the UK, with the cost of new plants due to be loaded on to people’s energy bills under the fresh funding system. The government would also be likely to take minority stakes in new projects, and has set aside an estimated £1.7bn on getting one plant, Sizewell C, in a position to go ahead.”

• The site of the decommissioned Wylfa nuclear power plant in Anglesey in Wales, is the front-runner among government ministers looking at the next wave of nuclear power stations, according to the Telegraph. The plan would see two reactors installed there which would increase the UK’s energy capacity by about 2.3 gigawatts.

• Business Secretary Kwasi Kwarteng told the Telegraph that a bonfire of planning red tape would be accompanied by a new development vehicle – Great British Nuclear- which would help deliver seven new nuclear power stations by 2050.

• Boris Johnson’s delayed energy strategy is expected to be published on Thursday, with nuclear power set to dominate the paper at the expense of onshore wind turbines. The government had planned to triple the amount of energy from wind from 14GW to 30GW by 2030, with the majority to be built in Scotland. But the PM is apparently facing pressure from Tory MPs opposed to them being built in their constituencies.

• Rocket and electric car enthusiast Elon Musk is in talks with the government to build a fleet of mini-nuclear power stations across the UK. The firm, Last Energy, is looking to invest £1.4bn on 10 reactors, giving Rolls Royce a run for their money in the race to capitalise on the rush to build Small Modular Reactors (SMRs).

• Oliver Shah writes in the Times that the government’s energy plan will do nothing to spare the country “five more years of pain” when it comes to rising energy prices and insecurity: “After more than a decade of dithering over nuclear power by successive governments, which has alienated potential investors, it could be a decade or more until the lights go on at Johnson’s first new plants. In the meantime, a revised funding model announced in October by Kwasi Kwarteng, the business secretary, will actually increase energy bills by passing some of the upfront costs of nuclear projects on to consumers.”

• Hundreds of workers at the Hinkley Point C nuclear plant staged a walkout on Friday over concerns about working conditions. The staff were employed by engineering firm Bylor on behalf of EDF, the French nuclear energy firm in charge of the site.

• The i newspaper has revealed that four serious nuclear safety incidents were reported to the government last year due to their severity. Safety breaches occurred at Heysham One in Lancashire in July, two safety incidents at Sellafield in Cumbria, and an incident involving the discovery of a package of radioactive material being found on the street, after it was lost in transit between two London hospitals. It comes as the overall number of Incident Notification Forms documenting security issues at UK nuclear facilities in the first ten month of 2021 totalled 368 – 74% higher than the 214 submitted in 2018. Experts say that a decline in the number of inspections undertaken by the Office for Nuclear Regulation was a cause for concern.