Experimental Nuclear Reactor Design Could Come to ID https://www.publicnewsservice.org/2021-01-25/nuclear-waste/experimental-nuclear-reactor-design-could-come-to-id/a72914-1January 25, 2021
BOISE, Idaho — The public can weigh in this week on an experimental nuclear reactor which could be coming to the Idaho National Laboratory. The U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) has released a draft Environmental Impact Statement (EIS) for a new design known as a “versatile nuclear reactor.” The DOE said it will be used to test nuclear-energy innovations, helping to push the sector forward. Edwin Lyman, director of nuclear power safety for the Union of Concerned Scientists, believes its construction would pose risks for eastern Idaho. “People should ask questions about whether the DOE has really done the accident analysis that it needs to, and is being honest with the people about the potential consequences of accidents at that reactor,” Lyman contended. The versatile nuclear reactor is cooled by liquid sodium, which Lyman noted is highly potent. Reactors currently in operation in the U.S. are cooled by water. The public hearings on the EIS will be held online Wednesday and Thursday. Lyman added there is another concern with the fuel the reactor would use. “Unlike the fuels that are used for light-water reactors, which is called low-enriched uranium fuel, that fuel is not directly usable in a nuclear weapon,” Lyman explained. “But plutonium is directly usable.” Lyman argued it raises questions about the potential for nuclear proliferation. The DOE estimated the project will cost between $2.6 and $5.8 billion dollars. Lyman cautioned that’s a lot of money for an experimental project. “The DOE needs to reconsider this whole project, and whether they can spend that money more wisely in helping to improve the safety of existing technologies,” Lyman concluded. |
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Archive for February, 2021
Dangers of plutonium fuelled, sodium cooled “Versatile Nuclear Reactor”
February 18, 2021South Africa the only country to have nuclear weapons, then abandon them
February 18, 2021……..The final death knell for South Africa’s nuclear weapons program was the presidency of F. W. de Klerk, who came to power in 1989, deciding to do away with it. There was apparently no significant opposition from the military, whose experience in years cross-border campaigns had not revealed any requirement for a weapon of this type. Ultimately, the actual utility of a nuclear weapon in the conflict in Angola was always negligible, and its use would represent an unprecedented escalation while further ostracizing the South African regime. Moreover, the end of apartheid now seemed to be in sight, and possession of weapons of mass destruction would do nothing to enhance South Africa’s international position then, or in the future. While a veil of secrecy remained over the program, de Klerk oversaw the removal of enriched uranium from the weapons that had been completed.
How the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Impacts the United States
February 18, 2021How the Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons Impacts the United States, and Why the United States Must Embrace its Entry into Force, Columbia SIPA Journal of International Affairs, ALICIA SANDERS-ZAKRE AND SETH SHELDEN, JAN 15, 2021 The United Nations Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (TPNW) will enter into force on January 22, 2021, two days following the inauguration of Joseph Biden as the 46th president of the United States. Despite the TPNW’s widespread support throughout the world, the United States has attempted to thwart the treaty’s progress at every step, boycotting the negotiations from the start and urging other countries to withdraw as the treaty neared its entry into force. These efforts have proven unsuccessful. This article explores the implications of the entry into force of the TPNW, with special attention to the United States and how the new Biden administration can play a more constructive role in the international treaty regime.
With the TPNW, nuclear weapons will be subject to a global ban treaty for the first time, at last aligning nuclear weapons with other weapons of mass destruction, all already the subject of treaty-based prohibitions. The TPNW provides a framework to verifiably eliminate nuclear weapons and requires its States Parties, i.e., states that have ratified or acceded to the treaty, to assist victims and remediate environments affected by nuclear weapons use and testing. The treaty was negotiated in recognition of the increasing likelihood of use of nuclear weapons, whether intentionally or accidentally, and the catastrophic humanitarian consequences that would result from any such use.
The United States has aggressively attempted to thwart the TPNW despite support for the treaty from more than two-thirds of the world’s states. These efforts have been unsuccessful. If President-elect Biden truly intends “to prove to the world that the United States is prepared to lead again—not just with the example of our power but also with the power of our example,” his administration must reverse the U.S. position on the TPNW.
Past United States Approach to TPNW
Before treaty negotiations had begun, in a 2016 nonpaper the United States urged NATO members to vote against proceeding with the initiative, claiming that such a treaty would “undermine…long-standing strategic stability.” Despite U.S. urging, the resolution to proceed with negotiations was adopted in December 2016 with clear global support. After Donald Trump assumed the presidency, the United States intensified its opposition, publicly dismissing and ridiculing the TPNW while privately pressuring countries not to support it. On the first day of treaty negotiations, U.S. Ambassador to the UN, Nikki Haley, hosted a press conference outside the room where negotiations were to take place, criticizing the pursuit of a prohibition treaty and questioning if nations participating were “looking out for their people.”
In October 2020, as the treaty approached the threshold of 50 ratifications for its entry into force, the United States sent a letter to countries that had joined the TPNW, restating its “opposition to the potential repercussions” of the treaty and encouraging states to withdraw their instruments of ratification. Once the treaty reached 50 States Parties, U.S. Assistant Secretary of State Christopher Ford retweeted his remarks from 2018 in which he had called the treaty “harmful to international peace and security.” China, France, Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States have consistently issued joint statements disparaging the treaty at various international fora, including the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) General Conference, the United Nations General Assembly, and Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty (NPT) meetings.
U.S. opposition to the TPNW is predicated on the falsehood that nuclear weapons provide security, as well as mischaracterizations about the treaty itself. Despite legal obligations and decades of commitments to bring about a world without nuclear weapons, in truth the United States relies steadfastly upon deterrence doctrines that are incompatible with these obligations and commitments, and it views any threat to the legitimacy of nuclear weapons as a threat to its national security. In clutching to deterrence doctrines, despite recognition—even from conservatives and libertarians—that nuclear weapons offer no military or practical value, U.S. policymakers undoubtedly are influenced also by the trillion dollar industry supporting its nuclear weapon arsenal. They thus have advanced spurious claims about the TPNW’s failings, arguing that the treaty will undermine the NPT, weaken IAEA safeguards, and only impact democracies, all of which are untrue.
These false assertions have been debunked in numerous more thorough examinations, so it suffices to say that the majority of countries do not share U.S. and like-minded states’ concerns about the TPNW
…………Nuclear-armed states aggressively denouncing an initiative with global support impairs unity in other international fora needed to advance other nuclear disarmament, nonproliferation, and risk reduction measures.
Implications of Entry Into Force
U.S. denouncements of the TPNW also ignore the significant impact of this treaty internationally, and on the United States itself. When the TPNW enters into force, States Parties will immediately need to adhere to the treaty’s Article 1 prohibitions, prohibiting them from developing, testing, producing, manufacturing, acquiring, transferring, possessing, stockpiling, using, or threatening to use nuclear weapons, or allowing nuclear weapons to be stationed in their territories. It also prohibits States Parties from assisting, encouraging, or inducing anyone to engage in these activities.
Under Articles 6 and 7 of the TPNW, States Parties also are obligated to assist victims of and remediate environments contaminated by nuclear weapon use and testing. These “positive obligations” break new ground in international nuclear weapons law. States with affected victims and contaminated lands under their jurisdiction have the primary responsibility for providing assistance, in a nod to state sovereignty and practical facilitation. However, Article 7 requires all States Parties to cooperate in implementing the treaty and, particularly for those in a position to do so, to assist affected states. ………..more https://jia.sipa.columbia.edu/online-articles/how-treaty-prohibition-nuclear-weapons-impacts-united-states-and-why-united-states
Thyroid cancer at ages 0 and 2 at the time of the nuclear accident-Health survey in Fukushima Prefecture January 2021
February 18, 2021”Small Modular Reactors”’- governments are being sucked in by the ”billionaires’ nuclear club”
February 18, 2021SNC-Lavalin Scandal-ridden SNC-Lavalin is playing a major role in the push for SMRs.
Terrestrial Energy….. Terrestrial Energy’s advisory board includes Dr. Ernest Moniz, the former US Secretary of the Dept. of Energy (2013-2017) who provided more than $12 billion in loan guarantees to the nuclear industry. Moniz has been a key advisor to the Biden-Harris transition team, which has come out in favour of SMRs.
The “billionaires’ nuclear club” …“As long as Bill Gates is wasting his own money or that of other billionaires, it is not so much of an issue. The problem is that he is lobbying hard for government investment.”
Going after the public purse
Bill Gates was apparently very busy during the 2015 Paris climate talks. He also went on stage during the talks to announce a collaboration among 24 countries and the EU on something called Mission Innovation – an attempt to “accelerate global clean energy innovation” and “increase government support” for the technologies.
Gates’ PR tactic is effective: provide a bit of capital to create an SMR “bandwagon,” with governments fearing their economies would be left behind unless they massively fund such innovations.
governments “are being suckers. Because if Wall Street and the banks will not finance this, why should it be the role of the government to engage in venture capitalism of this kind?”
It will take a Herculean effort from the public to defeat this NICE Future, but along with the Assembly of First Nations, three political parties – the NDP, the Bloc Quebecois, and the Green Party – have now come out against SMRs.
Mini-Nukes, Big Bucks: The Interests Behind the SMR Push https://watershedsentinel.ca/articles/mini-nukes-big-bucks-the-money-behind-small-modular-reactors/ Why Canada is now poised to pour billions of tax dollars into developing Small Modular Reactors as a “clean energy” climate solution, by Joyce Nelson, January 14, 2021 Back in 2018, the Watershed Sentinel ran an article warning that “unless Canadians speak out,” a huge amount of taxpayer dollars would be spent on small modular nuclear reactors (SMRs), which author D. S. Geary called “risky, retro, uncompetitive, expensive, and completely unnecessary.” Now here we are in 2021 with the Trudeau government and four provinces (Saskatchewan, Ontario, New Brunswick, and Alberta) poised to pour billions of dollars into SMRs as a supposed “clean energy” solution to climate change. It’s remarkable that only five years ago, the National Energy Board predicted: “No new nuclear units are anticipated to be built in any province” by 2040.So what happened? The answer involves looking at some of the key influencers at work behind the scenes, lobbying for government funding for SMRs. |
Donald Trump the Worst President in the History of the United States
February 18, 2021Anna Thurlow, 9 Jan 21, Donald Trump Has Been the Worst President in the History of the United StatesBy Eve ottenburg and Karl Grossman
“For those who concluded from the Covid-19 debacle that Trump simply wasn’t up to the job, it looks unlikely, to say the least, that his China legacy will be anything other than catastrophic. U.S. and Chinese economies are intertwined and, as we’ve already seen, decoupling hurts lots of Americans, starting with farmers. Trump’s executive order on December 28, prohibiting investments in firms reportedly controlled by the Chinese military does little besides ratchet up tensions. Hostilities between the two navies in the South China Sea could explode into regional war at any time. And how that war would be prevented from becoming nuclear is a very well-kept secret. But the geniuses in the Pentagon aren’t concerned. They believe in their new generation of small, “smart” nuclear weapons and “winnable” nuclear wars, as does Trump, the president who arguably has done more to promote nuclear war than perhaps any predecessor since mankind first split the atom.
Donald Trump has been the worst president in the history of the United States.”
Eve ottenburg
The attack by his supporters on the Capitol was a capstone of his presidency — lawless, an attack on democracy, a U.S. counterpart of the rise of Nazism in Germany in the 1930s.
It was a horror representative of his tenure.
Thank heavens and thanks to successful and hard political work, he will in days be out of office. And there must be criminal prosecutions on the state and local levels as well the federal level, which he’ll likely try to wrangle out of with a pardon.
There must be consequences to his horrendous term in office.
“An American Tragedy” was the title of a piece by David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker magazine, right after Election Day 2016. “The election of Donald Trump,” Remnick wrote, “is nothing less than a tragedy for the American republic, a tragedy for the Constitution, and a triumph for the forces, at home and abroad, of nativism, authoritarianism, misogyny, and racism.” There would be “miseries to come”– and there have been.
Remnick warned against an “attempt to normalize” the election of Trump. “Trump is vulgarity unbounded, a knowledge-free national leader”, “a twisted caricature of every rotten reflex of the radical right…a flim-flam man” with “disdain for democratic norms.”
The attack on the Capitol by the Trumpsters was an attempt at a coup to undo a presidential election in which a record number of voters came out to dump Trump and elect Joe Biden.
It was an act of insurrection incited by Trump.
As he tweeted to followers on December 20th — “Big protest in DC on January 6th. Be there, will be wild!”
Yes, and indeed it was wild.
And then, in a speech in front of The White House on Wednesday, addressing his backers who had arrived, said: “We’re going to walk down Pennsylvania Avenue…and we’re going to the Capitol.” He added: “You have to be strong.”
His call was preceded by his lawyer, Rudy Giuliani, proclaiming “let’s have trial by combat.”
Giuliani, who took an oath to be an attorney and adhere to rule of law, represented Trump in many courts in challenges to his election defeat with claims that judges found totally untrue–but Giuliani opted instead, in violation of that oath, for “trial by combat.”
Remnick warned about an “attempt to normalize” Trump, but so much of media have engaged in “both sides-ing” the situation, as Julie Hollar of Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting has written.
When a person tells an out-and-out lie, there is no journalistic obligation to “balance” a story with a falsehood
And Trump, The Washington Post report has recorded, has uttered more than 20,000 falsehoods in his term in office.
And then there have been the Trump disinformation machines led by Fox -about which Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels would smile.
But this is far more than a media problem.
Trump tapped into a vein of racism and other poisons in the United States.
He soon will be out of The White House but Trumpism, so horribly, will still be here.
“You have to summon an act of will, a certain energy and imagination, to replace truth with the authority of a con man like Trump,” George Packer wrote in the current issue of The Atlantic.
Trump’s “barrage of falsehoods — as many as 50 daily in the last fevered months of the 2020 campaign — complemented his unconcealed brutality,” writes Packer.
“Two events in Trump’s last year in office broke the spell of his sinister perversion of the truth,” he says: COVID-19 and a free election.
“The beginning of the end of Trump’s presidency arrived on March 11, 2020, when he addressed the nation for the first time on the subject of the pandemic and showed himself to be completely out of his depth. The virus was a fact that Trump couldn’t lie into oblivion or forge into a political weapon — it was too personal and frightening, too real. As hundreds of Americans died and the administration flailed between fantasy, partisan incitement, and criminal negligence, a crucial number of Americans realized that Trump’s lies could get someone they love killed,” says Packer.
He continues: “The second event came on November 3”– the election.
And that is what Trump and his followers who attacked the Capitol sought to undo. And, on the same day, Trump enablers in Congress were trying to undo it by having the votes of the Electoral College denied.
“The election didn’t end his lies — nothing will…But we learned that we still want democracy. This, too, is the legacy of Donald Trump,” Packer concluded.
Yes, most Americans still want democracy, but the history of authoritarian takeovers shows that a relatively small group of fanatics can beat the majority.
And we still are left with those toxic issues that Trump capitalized on.
Another component here is the enabling of Trump by all those Republicans.
Margaret Sullivan wrote a piece earlier this week in The Washington Post, headed “We must stop calling Trump’s enablers ‘conservative.’ They are the radical right.”
She wrote: “These days the true radicals are the enablers of President Trump’s ongoing attempted coup: the media bloviators on Fox News, One America and Newsmax who parrot his lies about election fraud; and the members of Congress who plan to object on Wednesday to what should be a pro forma step of approving the electoral college results, so that President-elect Joe Biden can take office peacefully on Jan. 20.
“But instead of being called what they are, these media and political figures get a mild label: conservative. Instead of calling out the truth, it normalizes; it softens the dangerous edges,” she continued. “It makes it seem, well, not so bad. Conservative, after all, describes politics devoted to free enterprise and traditional ideas. But that’s simply false. Sean Hannity is not conservative. Sen. Josh Hawley of Missouri and Sen. Tommy Tuberville of Alabama are not conservative. Nor are the other 10 (at last count) Senators who plan to object” to the Electoral College vote.
She notes Tim Alberta wrote on Politico that “‘There is nothing conservative about subverting democracy.’ He suggests ‘far right’ as an alternative descriptor. Not bad. But I’d take it a step further, because it’s important to be precise. I’d call them members of the radical right.
“Members of the radical right won’t like this, of course. They soak in the word ‘conservative” like a warm bath.”
“On Jan. 20, we can still presume Trump will be gone from the White House,” she writes. “But his enablers and the movement that fostered him, and that he built up, will remain. That’s troubling. We should take one small but symbolic step toward repairing the damage by using the right words to describe it. It would be a start.”
Journalist Carl Bernstein, of Watergate fame, says Trump “will be in our history books as a dark, dark stain unlike any president of the United States.” And he investigated Nixon.
Courts threaten freedom of Russian nature protector
February 18, 2021Courts threaten freedom of Russian nature protector, 10 Jan 2021,
Lyubov Kudryashova loves nature. Now she may be jailed for defending it
By Jack Cohen-Joppa
In Russian, her name means love. And it’s true. Lyubov Kudryashova loves the broad valley of Russia’s Tobol River, where it meanders out of Kazakhstan into the Kurgan Oblast. Her grandfather is buried there, she was born there, and she’s raised three sons there. As far as she knows, her ancestors have always lived there.
There, below the southern Urals, frigid continental winters give way to spring floods that inundate a landscape of oxbow lakes, wetlands, forests and fields. The waters sustain a large aquifer that Russia recognizes as a strategic reserve of fresh water.
“We, native people of the land, are against a barbaric attitude towards nature,” she says. “But our voices are too low.”
Which is why the passion of this campaigning environmentalist and entrepreneur has been met with fabricated charges of encouraging terrorism via the internet. She’s now on trial in a military court in Yekaterinburg, six hours away from her small town.
But Lyubov Kudryashova will not be spurned. “My ecological activity is going to continue. Well, I guess till the day the unjust court could takes away my freedom.”
In 2017, the government awarded an operating license for borehole leeching of uranium to Dalur, a uranium mining subsidiary of the Russian state nuclear agency Rosatom. The license to tap the Dobrovolnoye deposit around the village of Zverinogolovskoye condemned the very farmland Kudryashova’s father managed when she would accompany him as a child.
Dalur has two other leaky in-situ uranium projects in the Kurgan.
Many Tobol Valley residents feared environmental disaster when they learned that hundreds of exploratory wells would be drilled through the aquifer into the mineral deposit lying beneath it, without any public environmental review. Borehole leeching would eventually involve drilling thousands of wells and the injection of a million tons of sulfuric acid over 20-30 years, then withdrawing the dissolved minerals and chemically extracting the uranium.
Several times, activists tried to start a referendum and demand an independent environmental review, but met only refusals from the local officials.
Last fall, environmentalists surveyed some of Dalur’s other boreholes in Kurgan and documented much higher radiation levels than permitted. Despite the concerns, construction began on an in-situ leaching pilot plant and the huge clay-lined “mud pits” needed to receive the massive volume of toxic, acidified sludge produced in the process.
Beginning in 2017, Kudryashova was involved in the legal case against the Russian Federation over its refusal to conduct an environmental impact assessment before awarding the license to develop the mine.
That year, she also co-founded the Public Monitoring Fund for the Environmental Condition and the Population Welfare with the regional branch of the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. One month later, a judge of the Kurgan Regional Court issued an order giving the Russian Federal Security Service (FSB) authority to wiretap her telephone.
The Fund publishes information on the environmental impact of Dalur’s mining activity. Kudryashova writes, “Shortly after the completion of the case in the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation and the registration of the environmental fund, a hidden judgment of another court was rendered that allowed the FSB to begin wiretapping my phone and, I believe, begin to look for fictitious crimes in order to stop my work.
“I guess money is more important than the radioactive contamination of land,” she observed.
So it was that on January 29, 2019, armed men led by an FSB captain broke into her family’s home and spent the day searching it. That summer the FSB got a local court to involuntarily commit Kudryashova to the Kurgan District Psychiatric Hospital for most of the month of July. She was kept from speaking with family or others outside without permission of the agency.
Then in March 2020, the FSB charged Kudryashova with 12 counts of “public justification of terrorism using the Internet” based on a specious forensic analysis of posts on the social network VKontakte, which, according to Kudryashova, never belonged to her page. The actual source of those posts remains unknown because the protocol and the DVD-R capturing those posts show evidence of fabrication and forgery. And at the most recent session of her trial in late December, a CD-R the defense had presented to the court for evidence was found to have been erased by an FSB operative.
Prosecutors say she advocated for violent overthrow of the constitutional order by re-posting memes with such seditious phrases as, “The fate of Russia is determined by each of us, what you personally or I do, then Russia will. A correct position can only be revolutionary” and “If the nation is convinced that the ruling power in the state is directed not at the development of its cultural, economic and other needs, but, on the contrary, at trampling them, then it is not only the right, but also the duty of the nation to overthrow that power and establish one corresponding to the national interests of the people.”
Kudryashova writes, “Nonviolent ecological activism, in the understanding of the rulers of my country, is a crime. That’s why prisons are full of people who wanted to protect nature, but those who harmed it are free… Ecological crimes against present and future generations are not subject to the judgement of a military court.
“I’m 55 years old and my life is not as important as the preservation of nature. My duty and responsibility are to make a small contribution in a great cause — to stop violence against nature and people. The price of atomic energy is the life of future generations.”
Her trial is in the Central District Military Court of Yekaterinburg, where the next hearing is scheduled for 28-29 January, 2021. Agora International Human Rights Group and the Memorial civil rights society in Russia have provided an attorney and other support for Kudryashova.
Letters in support of Lyubov Kudryashova and seeking dismissal of the charges against her should be addressed to the chair of the court collegium examining the case, Judge Sergei Gladkih, st. Bazhova 85, Yekaterinburg, Russia 62005, or by email to opo.covs.svd@sudrf.ru. Refer to Case №: 2-42/2020, Lyubov Kudryashova.
Jack Cohen-Joppa is the co-editor of The Nuclear Resister, the co-founder of the eponymous organization and co-winner with Felice Cohen-Joppa of the 2020 Nuclear Free Future Award in the category of Education.
Human Rights and the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons
February 18, 2021
Australia: The UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons: Corrs Human Rights Day event recap https://www.mondaq.com/australia/human-rights/1019602/the-un-treaty-on-the-prohibition-of-nuclear-weapons-corrs-human-rights-day-event-recap
23 December 2020 Corrs Chambers Westgarth On 10 December 2020, Corrs marked Human Rights Day with an ‘In Conversation’ event focused on the UN Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons (Treaty).
The event brought together leading experts in the field of nuclear disarmament and the humanitarian impacts of a nuclear event, including;
Discussion between the panellists focused on the significance of the Treaty and how it may shape future obligations of states and corporates in connection with nuclear weapons and nuclear disarmament. The Treaty currently has 51 parties and 86 signatories and is set to enter into force on 22 January 2021, cementing a categorical ban on nuclear weapons, 75 years after their first use. Australia has yet to ratify the Treaty. A number of themes that emerged from the conversation are explored below. Why is this conversation so critical?The panellists agreed that the prohibition of nuclear weapons is perhaps more urgent now than ever before. In early 2020, the Doomsday Clock – which symbolises the gravest existential dangers facing humankind – was moved to 100 seconds to midnight, indicating that humankind was closer to the apocalypse than ever in history. This movement was attributed to the increased threats of nuclear war and the continued global failure to address climate change. The adjustment was described as indicative of ‘the most dangerous situation that humanity has ever faced’. This is unsurprising. Today, there remain around 13,500 nuclear weapons in the hands of only a few states. Many are in a high operational readiness, and have the ability to be rapidly deployed. It is well understood that the use of even a fraction of these weapons would result in unimaginable loss of human life and have long-term effects on human health, the environment and global food supplies. The World Health Organisation (WHO) has consistently found that all the world’s health resources would not be effective in responding to even a singlenuclear attack. A paradigm shiftThe Treaty was born out of a shift in focus from the assumed defence and international security benefits of nuclear weapons to the catastrophic humanitarian consequences they would incur. The Red Cross, ICAN and members of civil society played a vital role in shaping that discussion. Dr Durham noted that this shift in momentum began when then President of the ICRC Jakob Kellenberger addressed the Geneva Diplomatic Corp in the lead up to the Non Proliferation Treaty Review Conference in 2010, declaring that the debate on nuclear weapons must be guided not by ‘military doctrine and power politics’, but by ‘human beings, . the fundamental rules of international humanitarian law, and . the collective future of humanity’. The humanitarian focus of the discourse continued its momentum with a series of conferences convened to consider the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons in Norway (2013), Mexico (2014) and Austria (2014). Dr Durham and Dr Ruff reflected on their respective involvement in these conferences, observing how they provided a platform to discuss the humanitarian consequences of nuclear weapon use at the international level, significantly shifting the debate and bringing to bear increased urgency in the need to ban nuclear weapons. Legal significance and relationship with other treatiesWhen the Treaty enters into force, it will be the first international legal instrument which makes nuclear weapons illegal, prohibiting their development, testing, production, acquisition, stockpiling, use, deployment or threat of use. The Treaty will also prohibit the provision of assistance to any state in the conduct of prohibited activities. It is notable that, even with all their destructive power, nuclear weapons are the last form of weapons of mass destruction to be prohibited. The Treaty will only bind those states which have formally signed and ratified it, which means that non-parties (such as Australia) do not have any formal obligations under the Treaty. Other nuclear weapons treaties, including the nearly universal Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which has been in force since 1970, will continue as a cornerstone in the international legal framework governing nuclear weapons. In this regard, Dr Durham observed that the NPT and the Treaty are complimentary rather than conflicting in their shared aspiration to eliminate nuclear weapons. Legal ramifications for the commercial sectorFor businesses, the Treaty will begin a process of stigmatisation of companies that are involved in the production of nuclear weapons. It may also render their operations unlawful. Tara Gutman observed that the impact of the Treaty’s prohibitions is already being felt, noting that:
In addition, state parties to the Treaty are expected to make the manufacture of nuclear weapons or their components unlawful under domestic laws in their territories. How these matters impact the commercial sector in the coming years will be interesting to follow. What’s next?The panellists reminded us that the entry into force of the Treaty is but a step on what has been a long path towards nuclear disarmament. Other nuclear weapons treaties, including the nearly universal Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) which has been in force since 1970, will continue as a cornerstone in the international legal framework governing nuclear weapons. In this regard, Dr Durham observed that the NPT and the Treaty are complimentary rather than conflicting in their shared aspiration to eliminate nuclear weapons. Legal ramifications for the commercial sectorFor businesses, the Treaty will begin a process of stigmatisation of companies that are involved in the production of nuclear weapons. It may also render their operations unlawful. Tara Gutman observed that the impact of the Treaty’s prohibitions is already being felt, noting that:
In addition, state parties to the Treaty are expected to make the manufacture of nuclear weapons or their components unlawful under domestic laws in their territories. How these matters impact the commercial sector in the coming years will be interesting to follow. What’s next?The panellists reminded us that the entry into force of the Treaty is but a step on what has been a long path towards nuclear disarmament. |
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