CND Press Roundup Wednesday 18th May 2022

War in Ukraine

• The head of Ukraine’s nuclear energy agency has confirmed that construction work will begin on two new nuclear Westinghouse AP1000 reactors at the Khmelnitsky plant “as soon as the war is over.” The agreement with Westinghouse will also see three other reactors built at other Ukrainian plants.

• The host of a Russian TV programme which recently showed a mock simulation of a ‘nuclear tsunami’ engulfing Britain and Ireland has refused a request to apologise by Irish Taoiseach Micheál Martin. Host Dmitry Kiselyov instead described Ireland as “collateral damage” if an escalation over the war in Ukraine led to a Russian nuclear attack on Britain.

Trident

• Some letters to The Herald on recent commitments by Nicola Sturgeon to ditch Trident in the event of an independent Scotland. Isobel Lindsay notes that the UK’s nuclear system isn’t fully independent, noting: “The Trident missiles are rented from the United States and have to be returned regularly for servicing. The warheads and submarines are made in the UK but cannot be completed until the US has made its design decisions. The claim that the UK controls targeting has always been met with scepticism by many.”

AUKUS

• The US Air Force announced Tuesday that it successfully conducted a hypersonic missile test which flew at five times the speed of sound. The air-launched weapon was released by a B-52 bomber off the coast of California on Saturday. It comes nearly a month after reports Russia used its own Kinzhal hypersonic missiles during military action in Ukraine. The US has already quietly conducted hypersonic missile testing this year, avoiding loud publication in case it risked escalating tensions with Russia. Washington is in a race with both Moscow and Beijing to develop the weaponry – which could be fitted with nuclear warheads. Last month, it was announced that the remit of the AUKUS military pact of Australia, the UK, and US, would be extended from building nuclear-powered submarines to include co-operation on hypersonic and anti-hypersonic weapons.

• Australian Prime Minister Scott Morrison’s AUKUS middleman has not lobbied US officials about the pact since it was announced last September. Professor Donald Winter, who served as US Navy Secretary under both George W Bush and Barack Obama, had been employed as Morrison’s special adviser on naval shipbuilding when the AUKUS deal was announced. Part of Winter’s remit is to engage with senior US officials, particularly the Navy in order to “further AUKUS implementation.” Filings seen by The Guardian show that Winter received AUS$62,560 in payments for shipbuilding consultation between October 2021 and March 2022. But the same filings show that he hadn’t carried out any representations to US officials over the same time period. Winters said his recent activities for the project have involved supporting an “18-month study phase.”

• Meanwhile, Australia’s Opposition leader, Anthony Albanese, accused the Morrison government of “playing politics” with the country’s defence – after it was revealed that Morrisons kept the Albanese’s Labor in the dark over discussions about AUKUS. That’s despite a desire in Washington for the pact to have enduring bi-lateral Australian support for the programme as it would last for decades and across governments. Australian media reported at the weekend that Labor only found out about the pact the day before its announcement in September. Morrison defended the move saying he wasn’t going to risk sharing details with Labor until the deal was finalised while Albanese said Morrison was putting his own political interest ahead of the country’s.

• The reprocessing of spent nuclear fuel at Sellafield’s Magnox site will wrap up in July – bringing to an end commercial nuclear fuel processing in the UK. During its time as a nuclear reprocessing and recycling site, it handled nearly 55,000 tonnes of spent fuel from other UK, Italian, and Japanese reactors. Activities at the site will now focus on clean-up and decommissioning.

• Power Engineering International looks at Boris Johnson’s drive to increase nuclear power production. It says that while at best, nuclear power can provide a “low-carbon, cheap source of energy” for consumers and business and reduce reliance on foreign oil and gas imports, it is one of the few technologies to see its costs continue to rise when compared to renewables such as wind or solar. It also asks: “In the era of many crises – the cost-of-living crisis, Ukraine crisis, COVID and Brexit – can taxpayers really afford to pay their share towards dozens of new nuclear projects without seeing a return on investment for over a decade? Or perhaps large-scale nuclear build-out will serve the country well in the long-term?”

• Japan’s nuclear regulator has tentatively approved a plan to dump over a million tonnes of irradiated water from the defunct Fukushima power plant into the sea. The Nuclear Regulation Authority (NRA) said on Wednesday that they found no issues with the plan put forward by the plant’s owner – Tokyo Electric Power (TEPCO). According to Reuters: “Tepco plans to filter the contaminated water to remove isotopes, leaving only tritium, a radioactive isotope of hydrogen hard to separate from water. Tepco will then dilute the water until tritium levels fall less than 1/40th of regulatory limits, before pumping it into the ocean.” However, the tunnel that will bring the water from the plant to the sea still needs to get approval from local communities and political leaders before construction work can begin.

North Korea

• Employers have been warned by US officials to be wary of inadvertently hiring North Korean IT workers – who are taking advantage of work from home opportunities to earn money for Pyongyang. An advisory note issued by the FBI, State, and Treasury Department said the money earned could be used to finance the North’s ballistic missile and nuclear programmes. “There are thousands of DPRK IT workers both dispatched overseas and located within the DPRK, generating revenue that is remitted back to the North Korean government. These IT workers take advantage of existing demands for specific IT skills, such as software and mobile application development, to obtain freelance employment contracts from clients around the world, including in North America, Europe, and east Asia,” the advisory said.

• Power Engineering International looks at Boris Johnson’s drive to increase nuclear power production. It says that while at best, nuclear power can provide a “low-carbon, cheap source of energy” for consumers and business and reduce reliance on foreign oil and gas imports, it is one of the few technologies to see its costs continue to rise when compared to renewables such as wind or solar. It also asks: “In the era of many crises – the cost-of-living crisis, Ukraine crisis, COVID and Brexit – can taxpayers really afford to pay their share towards dozens of new nuclear projects without seeing a return on investment for over a decade? Or perhaps large-scale nuclear build-out will serve the country well in the long-term?”

• Residents of the village of Katsurao in Fukushima prefecture will soon be allowed to return to their homes – over a decade after the Fukushima nuclear disaster forced them to evacuate. The area’s ‘difficult-to-return’ zone status will be lifted on 12 June. 160,000 people in Fukushima were initially forced to evacuate after the 2011 disaster, with some 33,000 still unable to return.