Dear all,

Please find today’s press roundup below. Thank you all for your continued support.

 Nukes in Britain

•  East Anglian Daily Times: RAF Lakenheath CND demonstration to take place November 2.

Middle East

• The Guardian: US investigates leaked documents alleging Israel plans to attack Iran. US officials say documents appear to be legitimate and House speaker says leak is very concerning.

NATO / Europe

• Euronews: Does Ukraine really want to go nuclear? Ukraine’s Zelenskyy clarified that Ukraine is not pursuing nuclear weapons but stressed the need for NATO membership for security amidst Russian aggression.
• Kyiv Post opinion: Why it must be ‘nukes and NATO.’ Ukraine cannot afford to view its security options as a binary choice between nuclear armament and NATO membership.
• Reuters: NATO would need to agree conditions for Ukraine invitation, Dutch minister says.
• UK Defence Journal: NATO forces train to deter Russian attack against Europe. Next week, NATO’s Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers Europe (SHAPE) will launch Exercise Steadfast Duel 2024, focusing on strengthening defence strategies for the Euro-Atlantic region.
• Al Jazeera: Why is Ukraine’s army facing a desertion crisis? Thousands of men have abandoned their posts, blaming poor conditions on the front lines and open-ended service.

UK Nuclear Energy

• Somerset Live: Somerset village would be devastated by salt marsh plans. One young farmer warned her home and all of her land was in the area that could become a salt marsh. A North Somerset village is urging bosses at the Hinkley Point C nuclear power station to drop plans to turn huge swathes of local farmland into a salt marsh. EDF, who are building Somerset’s new nuclear power station, are proposing creating new salt marsh habitats along the Severn to compensate for the number of fish that will die by being sucked into the power station’s cooling systems. But the sudden announcement of plans has shocked communities where the salt marshes are planned — such as Kingston Seymour in North Somerset.
• East Anglian Daily Times: Pupils from Alde Valley Academy have joined the Sizewell C Youth Council. This initiative aims to provide the nuclear power project with insights into the needs of local young people. The students, from Years 7 to 11, will have regular meetings with joint managing director, Julia Pyke, and other project leaders. They will discuss local needs, aspirations, and the project’s progress. Julia Pyke, Sizewell C joint managing director, said: “Consultation for big infrastructure projects can sometimes be skewed towards older people.
• Politico: Britain’s heading for a nuclear power crunch. Blame the French. A once proud fleet of power plants is about to be reduced to one last, lonely nuke. By 2028, the country will be down to its one last, lonely nuke. The government insists nuclear, a source of carbon-free energy, remains vital to its climate goals. It will mean “energy security and clean power while securing thousands of good, skilled jobs,” Labour promised before the election. It is part of Energy Secretary Ed Miliband’s plan to lower energy bills and take the fight to Vladimir Putin. But experts are not convinced. The lack of new nuclear capacity poses a “significant risk” to the U.K. hitting those net zero goals, the independent Climate Change Committee said last year. “[T]here is little room for delay in technology development, site identification, certification, planning and delivery” of new nuclear energy, researchers at the Energy Systems Catapult said in April. French state-owned energy giant EDF is majority owner of the U.K.’s five remaining nuclear power plants: Hartlepool in Durham, Heysham 1 and Heysham 2 in Lancashire, Torness in East Lothian and Sizewell B in Suffolk. All are already operating beyond their sell-by dates. Four are slated for closure in the next five years. Only Sizewell B is scheduled to stay open — and when it shutters for maintenance in 2029, the U.K. will be nuclear free for the first time in over seven decades.
• Dominic Lawson in the Times: Should you wish to sum up the staggering strategic short-sightedness of British political leaders in their neglect of nuclear power, exhibit 1 is an interview with Nick Clegg in 2010, in which the future deputy prime minister airily dismissed its potential to provide the energy we would need: “By the most optimistic scenarios from the government itself there’s no way they are going to have new nuclear come on stream until 2021, 2022, so it’s just not even an answer.” So here we are in 2024, with British electricity supply facing something close to a collapse of our only developed source of zero-carbon non-intermittent energy: four of our five active remaining nuclear power stations are due to close within the lifetime of this government. The risk from radiation is not linear: only vast doses are lethal. This helps explain why, as the website Our World in Data sets out, in terms of deaths per terawatt hour of electricity generated, nuclear power is even safer (marginally) than wind power and thousands of times safer than biomass — which successive British governments have chosen to subsidise, at a cost of about £500 million a year, to the sole benefit of shareholders in the Drax wood-burning power station. Yet, while the new administration recently chose to pledge billions more in subsidies for Drax’s untested scheme to “capture” the carbon it emits, it abjectly failed, at its investment summit last week, to announce the “final investment decision” for the Sizewell C nuclear reactor. It is amazing, and not in a good way, that the last British nuclear plant to have been connected to the grid was that approved by my late father as energy secretary almost four decades ago: Sizewell B.

Nuclear Energy

• Yahoo News: Democratic candidates in several key Senate races are breaking with a long-standing taboo among liberal voters: They’re increasingly embracing nuclear power as tech companies, banks and governments pour money into building new reactors to shore up a US electrical grid that’s heaving under pressure from data centers, air conditioning and extreme weather. Asked during last week’s televised debate against Republican Kari Lake what he would do to deal with Arizona’s rising temperatures, Ruben Gallego, the Democratic nominee for the state’s open U.S. Senate seat, pitched just one big solution: more nuclear power.
• Japan Times: Glinting in the sun by the world’s biggest nuclear plant, the Sea of Japan is calm now. But as the huge facility gears up to restart, Kashiwazaki-Kariwa has a new tsunami wall, just in case. Japan pulled the plug on nuclear power after the 2011 Fukushima disaster, but with the Group of Seven’s dirtiest energy mix, it is seeking to cut emissions, and atomic energy is making a steady comeback, in part because of artificial intelligence.
• The Guardian: Dutton and the Coalition’s proposal is to build seven nuclear power plants across Australia along with two proposed small modular reactors. The opposition wants them in Tarong and Callide in Queensland; Mount Piper and Liddell in New South Wales; Collie in Western Australia; Loy Yang in Victoria; and the former site of the Northern power station in Port Paterson, South Australia. The sites are mostly in Coalition seats. The Queensland LNP’s leader, David Crisafulli, facing an election, has been steadfast in his defiance of Dutton’s plan for the Queensland sites. He says he would oppose them if elected at the 26 October poll and has repeatedly ruled out repealing the state’s nuclear ban under any circumstances.

Nuclear Waste

• BBC: Campaigners opposed to plans for a nuclear waste disposal site on the Lincolnshire coast say it could be “disastrous” for the seaside economy. The former Theddlethorpe gas terminal on the Lincolnshire coast is one of three sites being considered for an underground facility. Guardians of the East Coast (GOTEC) said a survey of more than 1,000 visitors to the resorts of Mablethorpe and Skegness found the “great majority” would be put off coming to the area. Nuclear Waste Services (NWS), the government agency behind the plans, said the multi-million pound project would create jobs, improve transport links and boost the local economy. GOTEC said it had carried out “extensive research” into the potential impact of the facility. The group has produced a 60-page booklet called The Nuclear Option. According to chairman Mike Crookes, the facility would “blight this area” and the economic impact on tourism could be “profound” and “catastrophic”.
• BBC: Nuclear waste remains toxic for thousands of years. How do you build a storage facility that will keep it safely buried for millennia? How do you go about designing, building and operating structures that take decades to plan and even longer to build, that operate over centuries and must survive for 100,000 years, and that contain some of the most dangerous materials on the planet? Four hours’ drive east of Paris, the 2.4km (1.5 miles) of tunnels are home to countless scientific experiments, construction technique testing and technological innovations. France’s National Radioactive Waste Agency (Andra) needs these to demonstrate to the regulators if it is to be awarded a licence to build a geological disposal facility (GDF) next to the tunnels. Geological disposal facilities for nuclear waste are, or will be, some of the largest underground structures humanity has ever built. They are planned, in development, about to start construction or about to open in the UK, France, Sweden, Finland and around 20 other countries.

AI

• Financial Times: Nuclear energy stocks hit record highs on surging demand from AI. Amazon and Google deals to deploy small modular reactors are latest step in sector’s revitalisation. The share prices of US-listed SMR developers Oklo Inc and NuScale power rose by 99 per cent and 37 per cent respectively in the past week, after rivals X-energy and Kairos Power, two private SMR developers, announced the financing agreements. Shares in Cameco, Oklo, NuScale, Constellation and BWX Technologies all traded at record highs over the week.
• Financial Times: Big Tech is going nuclear. In the past week, Amazon agreed with utilities in Washington state to support development of four next-generation “small modular reactors”, with a similar deal in Virginia, and took a stake in X-energy, an SMR developer. Google agreed to buy power from SMRs to be built by a start-up, Kairos Power. And last month Microsoft agreed a 20-year power purchasing deal that will entail Constellation Energy reopening a unit at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania that was shuttered in 2019 (not the one closed in 1979 after a partial meltdown). The tech industry’s dash for nuclear reflects in part the take-off of power-guzzling artificial intelligence; an AI query consumes up to 10 times the energy of a standard Google search. Goldman Sachs reckons power demand from data centres will grow 160 per cent by 2030. In the US, data needs on top of electrification of transport and a manufacturing revival sparked by “reshoring” efforts are forecast to at least double electricity demand growth in the next decade compared with the prior one. The surge in AI-driven data demand even before 2030 means Big Tech will probably have to invest still more in wind and solar. Amid the competition for resources, regulators will have to ensure deep-pocketed tech companies do not lock up large parts of the new energy supply. One option might be to insist clean energy projects for data centres are made large enough also to supply the grid or other customers. There is also scope to use AI to improve energy efficiency in factories, offices and across grids. In the new age of electricity, AI must be not just another energy-hungry mouth to feed, but a central part of the green solution.

AUKUS / Indo-Pacific

• Indian Defence Research Wing: As the AUKUS submarine deal stalls, should India offer its SSN programme to Australia.  

Best,

Pádraig McCarrick

Press and Communications Officer

Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament