Beyond Nuclear International Weekly Digest MONDAY, APRIL 10, 2023

Posted: 10th April 2023

By the time it is finished, if ever, the International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor, known as ITER, will have cost $65 billion, estimates the US DOE, without generating a single watt of electricity. And a ProPublica investigation has revealed a significant and incompetent legacy of inadequate cleanup around America’s old uranium mills.

ITERly futile fusion fantasy

An international consortium of 35 countries has been working on the ITER fusion reactor in France since 2006. Its goal is to operate at 500 MW for at least 400 continuous seconds. But it won’t produce any electricity. At the current trajectory, those 400 seconds could end up costing $16 million a second. If we really have a collective $16 million a second to squander, let’s put it toward our most urgent needs, writes Linda Pentz Gunter. READ MORE

Uranium mills: a deadly legacy

The uranium mills that were first used to produce nuclear weapons and then fuel for nuclear power plants, dumped their toxic wastes into rivers, streams, aquifers and across communal lands. Today, groundwater is still polluted. Cancers are widespread and infighting and incompetence among regulators has left a deadly legacy, mainly in Indigenous communities. READ MORE

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