CND Press Roundup Monday 11th April 2022

War in Ukraine

• Coverage of anti-war voices in the Morning Star ahead of last Saturday’s peace events and online rally. CND’s Kate Hudson quoted: “Nato’s decision to intensify the scale and type of its weapons deliveries to Ukraine is another step closer to World War III. Even the warnings of senior military figures are being ignored. Will the deliveries include so-called ‘battlefield’ nukes? If they keep on escalating, at some point nukes will be the next rung on their ladder to annihilation. We have to stop this.” CND’s campaign to get NatWest to divest from nuclear weapons is also mentioned.

• Vladimir Putin was photographed with the ‘nuclear football’ nearby, while attending the funeral of a far-right Russian politician on Friday – but not before the church was cleared of mourners. An aide was spotted carrying the briefcase, which is believed to hold the launch codes needed to authorise a nuclear attack when on the move.  

• Pictures have emerged from inside the defunct Chernobyl nuclear power plant – where over 100 Ukrainian staff 169 Ukrainian guards were held hostage by Russian forces for over a month. They had been kept in an underground bunker at the complex reportedly living on one meal of bread and porridge a day. Russian forces left the facility at the end of March for neighbouring Belarus – with Ukrainian officials believing the Ukrainian guards were taken with them.

Trident

• The CND finds itself wrapped up in tit-for-tat arguments between Tory and Labour MPs in this piece for the Mirror. Labour is set to remind voters with a social media blitz where “clown” Conservatives “desperate to run away from their record” use parliamentary resources to inflame division with “nonsense” fringe issues. Those fringe issues, according to the Mirror include: “It marks a step-up in campaign tactics from Starmer’s team and follows Wolverhampton South West Conservative MP Stuart Anderson writing a two-page letter to the Labour leader claiming frontbench MPs are anti-NATO and have links to the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament – a protest group which last had prominence in the 1980s and is not proscribed by any political party.”

• The committee that awards medals to UK service personnel is under fire – after emails released under a Freedom of Information request show it meddled to repeatedly deny veterans of the UK’s nuclear testing. The email makes false claims about Britain’s nuclear tests, including that no men were used in experiments, they were well-monitored, and there is no “evidence of excess illness or mortality”. It follows recent revelations that the government’s own studies show the opposite is true and that the number of those impacted by nuclear testing was far higher than initially claimed.

• The Mirror also looks at the UK’s network of Cold War era bunkers, which no one seems interested in preparing for future use.

AUKUS

• More coverage of the recent expansion of the AUKUS military alliance to include hypersonic missiles in New Age: “Australia, just as it became real estate to park British nuclear weapons experiments, is now looking promising as a site for hypersonic missile testing, development, and manufacture.”

Iran Nuclear Deal

• Iran will continue to develop its nuclear technology as talks to revive the 2015 nuclear deal continue, according to Iran’s president. Ebrahim Raisi made the comments on Saturday during a ceremony to mark Iran’s national day of nuclear technology. “Our knowledge and technology in the nuclear field is not reversible. Iran’s (continuation of) research in peaceful nuclear fields will not depend on others’ demands or viewpoints,” he said. It comes as Iran’s foreign minister suggested that the US should lift some sanctions imposed on Iran as a gesture of goodwill towards renewing the nuclear deal.

UK Nuclear Energy

• The pendulum of public opinion predictably swings away from Boris Johnson’s big bet on nuclear energy, in a new poll by Opinium for the Observer. It found: “79% of Tory voters said they were strongly or somewhat in favour of windfarms being installed in the UK, compared with 83% of Labour voters and 88% of Lib Dems. Two-thirds of all voters said they would be happy for a windfarm to be built near them. By contrast, only 46% of all voters favoured new nuclear power stations in principle, while a mere 32% favoured gas power plants. Less than a third of voters would be happy with a nuclear power station being built near them, while less than a quarter would approve of having a gas power station in their neighbourhood.”

• Some excellent letters to the Guardian on Boris’ energy strategy. Morag Carmichael highlights the omission of “a major reason for opposing more nuclear power: there is still no method of disposing of highly toxic nuclear waste safely. Jon Reeds asks “why does its strategy make no mention of tidal power?” While Ian Jones of Waste Knot Energy mentions the glaring omission of “our ability to produce energy from waste (EfW) and our ability to sell UK EfW products to UK customers.” Josie Bassinette and Linda Rogers both highlight the planning applications at Wylfa and Sizewell and call for them to be rejected.

• The Times talks to nuclear historian Serhii Plokhy on the dangers of nuclear power. On the decommissioning of the Sizewell and Hinkley Point B power plants he notes: “This is one of the most dangerous periods, given how little money there is in the nuclear industry and the old reactors.” He adds that instead of spending on new reactors, funding should go on making sure plants see out the rest of their life safely, while the world invests in renewable energy to replace them. “In terms of the new reactors, in terms of the future, my argument is that we have to look in a different direction.”

• Michael Glackin bemoans the nuclear refuseniks in Scotland as a key roadblock for Boris Johnson’s nuclear strategy. But adds that at least the Nuclear Energy (Financing) bill, which received royal assent last week, will help “to cut the cost of investing in new plants for pension funds and other institutional investors.” Let’s just hope Glackin is right in his prediction that Sizewell C ends up like Johnson’s “plans to build a bridge to Northern Ireland.”

• The Independent continues with another explainer on nuclear power, asking why would a nuclear power plant dump wastewater into a bay? It looks at plans by Holtec International to dump a million gallons of wastewater into Cape Cod in Massachusetts.

CND History

• CND gets a mention in a Cambridgeshire Live story on rock band Pink Floyd reuniting to release a song for the first time in 30 years – with proceeds going to Ukrainian Humanitarian Relief. It says bassist Roger Waters was chair of Cambridge Youth CND while a teenager.