French report on the unfairness of France’s nuclear history in Algeria

French report grapples with nuclear fallout from Algerian War  https://thebulletin.org/2021/03/french-report-grapples-with-nuclear-fallout-from-algerian-war/?utm_source=Newsletter&utm_medium=Email&utm_campaign=ThursdayNewsletter03042021&utm_content=NuclearRisk_AlgerianWar_03042021&cf_chl_captcha_tk=32bfe924bf6171eab26d9deb08cd73459b5e69dc-1614896664-0-AWxxiguytXLkG_ERcOpFeDyCqmv7X1FYZmZBNGAnlwY6ZlI8PgWd2By Austin R. Cooper | March 4, 2021 n January, the French historian Benjamin Stora filed a report commissioned by the French President Emmanuel Macron aimed at “reconciliation of memories between France and Algeria,” which France ruled as the jewel of its colonial empire for more than 130 years.

The Stora Report addressed several scars from the Algerian War for Independence (1954–62), a bloody struggle for decolonization that met savage repression by French troops. One of these controversies stems from French use of the Algerian Sahara for nuclear weapons development.

France proved its bomb in the atmosphere above this desert, naming the inaugural blast , or Blue Jerboa, after the local rodent. Between 1960 and 1966, France detonated 17 nuclear devices in the Algerian Sahara: four atmospheric explosions during the Algerian War, and another 13 underground, most of these after Algerian Independence.

French nuclear ambitions became inextricable from the process of Algerian decolonization. The Saharan blasts drew international outrage, stalled ceasefire negotiations, and later threatened an uneasy peace across the Mediterranean.

The Stora Report signaled that radioactive fallout from the Algerian War has remained a thorn between the two nations. But the document comes up short of a clear path toward nuclear reconciliation.

A United Nations dispute. The French bomb collided with the Algerian War before the first mushroom cloud rose above the Sahara. In November 1959, Algerian allies representing independent states in Africa and Asia contested French plans for the desert in the First Committee on Disarmament at the United Nations.

Part of the French strategy at the United Nations was to drive a wedge between the nuclear issue and what French diplomats euphemistically termed the “Question of Algeria.” French obfuscation continued for decades.

France would not, until 1999, call the bloodshed a war, preferring the line that what happened in Algeria, as part of France, amounted to a domestic dispute, rather than UN business. Macron became, in 2018, the first French president to acknowledge “systemic torture” by French troops in Algeria.

The Afro-Asian challenge to Saharan explosions hurdled France’s diplomatic barricades at the United Nations. The French delegation tried to strike references to the Algerian War as irrelevant. But their African and Asian counterparts painted the desert blasts as a violation of African sovereignty.

The concern was not only for contested territory in Algeria, but also for independent states bordering the desert, whose leaders warned that nuclear fallout could cross their national borders. Radiation measurements taken in the wake of Gerboise bleue proved many of them right.

Nuclear weapons represented another piece of French imperialism on the continent.

Secret negotiations resumed in September 1961, with US Ambassador to Tunisia Walter N. Walmsley serving as France’s backchannel. The US State Department worried that French attachment to the test sites might thwart the decolonization process.

Lead Algerian negotiator Krim Belkacem asked Walmsley if prospects for a ceasefire still hinged on France retaining control of the test sites. Krim got his answer when Franco-Algerian talks resumed the following month, at the end of October 1961.

France did not abandon its goal to continue nuclear explosions in the Sahara. But the Algerian position appeared to have softened. So long as further blasts did not impinge on Algeria’s “eventual sovereignty” over the desert, as one archival document put it, a deal looked possible.

The Evian Accords marked a nuclear compromise. Finally signed in March 1962, the landmark treaty granted France a five-year lease to the Saharan test sites but did not specify terms of use.

Going underground. Advice from the French Foreign Ministry played a key role in pushing France’s weapons program beneath Saharan mountains. French diplomats suggested that underground explosions would present, according to one archival document, “significantly less serious” challenges than atmospheric ones for future relations with Algeria and its African neighbors.

This did not stop Algeria’s first president, Ahmed Ben Bella, from winning political capital with the nuclear issue. In public, Ben Bella cast Saharan blasts as an intolerable violation of Algerian sovereignty, as had his allies at the United Nations. In private, however, Ben Bella acquiesced to the Evian terms and reportedly tried to squeeze French financial aid out of the deal.

The Hoggar Massif shook 13 times before France handed over its two Saharan test sites to Algeria in 1967. An accident occurred during one of these underground blasts, dubbed Béryl, when containment measures failed. Several French soldiers and two high-ranking French officials suffered the highest radiation exposures, but roughly 240 members of “nomadic populations” in the region received lower doses.

Meanwhile, France began construction on its Pacific test range in French Polynesia, the site of nearly 200 nuclear explosions between 1966 and 1996. Most took place underground, but France also conducted atmospheric detonations in Polynesia, and these continued into the 1970s. Even though the Limited Test Ban Treaty had gone into effect in 1963—prohibiting nuclear blasts in the atmosphere, underwater, and in outer space—France refused to sign it.

Contamination and compensation. As part of its reconciliation proposal, the Stora Report encouraged Franco-Algerian cooperation on environmental remediation of the Saharan test sites. An expert report from the International Atomic Energy Agency, however, concluded in 2005 that environmental interventions were “not required” unless human traffic near the sites should increase.

The Stora Report briefly mentioned compensation linked to radiation exposure from French nuclear weapons development, but this deserves a closer look. In 2010, the French Parliament passed a law recognizing these victims and establishing funds and procedures to provide compensation for illness and injury. So far, France has earmarked 26 million euros for this purpose, but almost none of that has gone to Algerians.

Decades earlier, France’s nuclear allies turned to compensation programs in an attempt to reconcile with marginalized groups affected by weapons development without disclosure or consent. In 1993, for example, the United Kingdom settled with Australia as redress for indigenous people and personnel involved in UK explosions conducted in the former colony.

Facing similar lawsuits, the United States provided monetary compensation and health benefits to the indigenous people of the Marshall Islands, where US nuclear planners “offshored” their most powerful blasts during the Cold War arms race. Other US programs have made compensation available to communities “downwind” of the Nevada Test Site and surrounded by the uranium mines fueling the US nuclear arsenal, including Tribal Nations in the Four Corners region.

Compensation programs map a global history of colonial empire, racial discrimination, and dispossession of indigenous land, but postcolonial inequalities look particularly stark from the Sahara. Including appeals, France has granted 545 of 1,739 total requests filed by French soldiers and civilian participants in the nuclear detonations, as well as exposed populations in Algeria and Polynesia. Only 1 of 52 Algerian dossiers has proven successful.

French officials responsible for evaluating these files report that the ones from Algeria often arrive incomplete or in a shoddy state, and pin the blame on the Algerian government’s inability or unwillingness to provide the geographical, historical, and biomedical evidence that French assessment procedures demand. Claims must demonstrate that an individual worked or lived in a fixed area surrounding one of the two Saharan test sites, between February 1960 and December 1967, and suffered at least one of 21 types of cancer recognized as radiation-linked by French statute.

A step toward reconciliation. If Macron really wants to tackle France’s nuclear history in Algeria—and its aftermath—his government should start here. The French Parliament opened the door to Algerian compensation in 2010, and important revisions to the evaluation procedures took place in 2017, but there has never been a level playing field. Macron could, for example, require that French diplomats posted in Algeria help Algerians build their cases and locate supporting documents.

Another option: Macron could declassify archival materials documenting the intensity and scope of radioactive fallout generated by French nuclear blasts. Draconian interpretations of French statutes on the reach of military secrecy continue to block access to the vast majority of military, civil, and diplomatic collections on France’s nuclear weapons program—including radiation effects. Foreign archives have provided useful information, but official documentation from the French government would help exposed populations—like those in the Sahara—understand what happened, evaluate the risks, bolster their claims, and likely find these more successful.

The Stora Report did well to acknowledge nuclear fallout from the Algerian War. Giving Algerians a fair shot at compensation should mark France’s first step toward reconciliation.

Hiroshima and the normalisation of atrocities

Death from the sky: Hiroshima and normalised atrocities  https://www.onlineopinion.com.au/view.asp?article=21049 By Binoy Kampmark , 10 August 2020 When US President Harry S Truman made the decision to drop the atomic bomb on Hiroshima on August 6, 1945, followed by another on Nagasaki a few days later, he was not acting as an agent untethered from history. In the wheels of his wearied mind lay the battered Marines who, despite being victorious, had received sanguinary lashings at Iwo Jima and Okinawa. A fear grew, and US military sources speculated about, the slaughter that might follow an invasion of the Japanese homeland. They also pondered the future role of the Soviets, and wondered whether there were other means by which Japan’s involvement in the war might be terminated before Moscow got its hands on the battered remains of North East Asia. Much is made about the moral dilemma Truman faced. He knew there was the nastiest of weapons at hand, born from the race to acquire it from Nazi Germany. But on a certain level, it was merely another weapon, one to use, a choice sample in the cabinet of lethal means and measures. By that stage of the war, killing civilians from the air, not to mention land, was banal and common place; enemy populations were to be experimented upon, burned, torched, gassed, shelled and eradicated in the program of total war. By the time Truman made his decision, Japan had become a graveyard of strategic aerial bombing. General Curtis E. LeMay of the US Air Force prided himself on incinerating the enemy, and was encouraged by various study commissions advocating the use of incendiary bombs against Japan’s flammable urban architecture. He was realising the dreams of such figures as the pioneering US aviator and air power enthusiast Billy Mitchell, who fantasised in the 1920s about Japanese cities being “the greatest aerial targets the world has ever seen”. In 1941, US Army chief of staff George Marshall spread the word to journalists that the US would “set the paper cities of Japan on fire”. Civilians would not be spared. Towards the end of the war, daylight precision bombing had fallen out of favour; LeMay preferred the use of Boeing B-29 Superfortresses, heavily laden with firebombs, to do the work. His pride of joy in conflagration was Tokyo. During the six-hour raid over the night of March 9 and 10, 1945, the US Strategic Bombing Survey concluded that 87,793 had perished, with 40,918 injuries. There was little novel in LeMay’s blunt approach. Britain’s Air Force Marshall Arthur “Bomber” Harris fertilised the ground, and the air, for such an idea. He made it his mission to not only kill Germans but kill German civilians with a cool determination. He did so with a workmanlike conviction so disturbing it chilled the blood of many Britons. As he put it, “The cities of Germany, including their working populations, are literally the heart of Germany’s war potential.” It was his intention to, he explained to personnel, “in addition to the horrors of fire … to bring masonry crashing down on top of the Boche, to kill the Boche and to terrify the Boche”. The Teutonic enemy came, not so much in all shades, but one. Saturation bombing, regarded after the Second World War as generally ineffective, a ghastly failure to bring the population to its knees, received its blessing in Bomber Command. This entire process neutered the moral compass of its executioners. Killing civilians had ceased to be a problem of war, one of those afterthoughts which served to sanction mass murder. Britain’s chief of the air staff for a good deal of the war, Charles Portal, called it a “fallacy” that bombing Germany’s cities “was really intended to kill and frighten Germans and that we camouflaged this intention by the pretence that we would destroy industry. Any such idea is completely false. The loss of life, which amounted to some 600,000 killed, was purely incidental.” When 600,000 becomes an incidental matter, we are well on the way to celebrating the charnel houses of indiscriminate war. When the issue of saturation bombing creased the legal minds behind the Nuremberg and Tokyo war crimes trials, an admission had to be made: all sides of the Second World War had made the air a realm of convenience in the killing of humanity, uniformed or not. To win was all that mattered. While the Nuremberg Charter left it open to criminalise German aerial tactics, the International Military Tribunal hedged. As chief of the Luftwaffe, Herman Göring was singled out for air attacks on Poland and other states but the prosecutors refrained from pushing the point, likely reflecting the cold fact, as Matthew Lippmann puts it, “that both Germany and the Allies engaged in similar tactics.” It is true that Germany and Japan gave a good pioneering go at indiscriminate aerial slaughter. But the Allied powers, marshalling never before seen fleets of murderous bombers, perfected the bloody harvest. The war had to be won, and, if needed, over the corpses of the hapless mother, defenceless child and frail grandparent. As the historian Charles S. Maier notes with characteristic sharpness, a tacit consensus prevailed after the Second World War that the ledger of brutality was all stacked on one side. German bombings during the Spanish Civil War, notably of Guernica; Warsaw, Rotterdam, London and Coventry during the world war that followed, were seen as “acts of wanton terror”. The Allied attacks on Italian, German and Japanese urban centres, in proportion and scale far more destructive, were seen as “legitimate military actions”. Distinctions about civilian and non-civilian vanished in the atomic cloud. Hiroshima’s tale is the apotheosis of eliminating distinctions in war. It propagated such dangerous beliefs that nuclear wars might be won, sparing a handful of specialists and breeders in bunkers planning for the new post-apocalyptic dawn. It normalised, even as it constituted a warning, the act of annihilation itself. Prior to the twin incinerations of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the redoubtable nurse and writer Vera Brittain issued a warning that remains salient to those who wish to resort to waging death from the sky: “If the nations cannot agree, when peace returns, to refrain from the use of the bombing aeroplane as they have refrained from using poison gas, then mankind itself deserves to perish from the epidemic of moral insanity which today afflicts our civilisation.”

Inhumanity, racism, sheer immorality, in the decisions to nuclear bomb Hiroshima and Nagasaki

Don’t let the victors define morality – Hiroshima was always indefensible,  https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/aug/09/dont-let-the-victors-define-morality-hiroshima-was-always-indefensible

Kenan Malik

The decision 75 years ago to use atomic bombs was fuelled not by strategy but by sheer inhumanity   “If we’d lost the war, we’d all have been prosecuted as war criminals.” So said Curtis LeMay after America obliterated Hiroshima and Nagasaki with two atomic bombs in August 1945. LeMay was no bleeding-heart liberal. The US air force chief of staff who had directed the assault over Japan in the final days of the Second World War, he believed in the use of nuclear weapons and thought any action acceptable in the pursuit of victory. Two decades later, he would say of Vietnam that America should “bomb them back into the stone ages”. But he was also honest enough to recognise that the incineration of Hiroshima and Nagasaki was not regarded as a war crime only because America had won the war. Last week marked the 75th anniversary of the world’s first nuclear attacks. And while Hiroshima has become a byword for existential horror, the moral implications of the bombings have increasingly faded into the background. Seventy-five years ago, LeMay was not alone in his verdict. “We had adopted an ethical standard common to the barbarians of the Dark Ages,” Fleet Admiral William Leahy, chair of the chiefs of staff under both presidents Roosevelt and Truman, wrote in his autobiography, I Was There. Dwight Eisenhower, too, had, as he observed in the memoir The White House Years, “grave misgivings” about the morality of the bombings. Almost as soon as the bombs had dropped, however, attempts began to justify the unjustifiable. On 9 August, the day of the Nagasaki bombing, the US president, Harry Truman, broadcast to the nation, claiming that “the first atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima, a military base… because we wished… to avoid the killing of civilians”. In fact, more than 300,000 people lived in Hiroshima, of whom up to 40% were killed, often in the most grotesque fashion. Many commentators, including Truman, have also argued that without the bombings, hundreds of thousands, perhaps millions, of US troops would have been killed in any invasion of Japan. What the casualty figures may have been is in the realm of speculation and estimates vary widely. Most Allied military leaders did not, however, see the necessity for the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.  Chester W Nimitz, the commander in chief of the US Pacific fleet, insisted that they were “of no material assistance in our war against Japan”. Eisenhower agreed that they were “completely unnecessary” and “no longer mandatory as a measure to save American lives”. General Douglas MacArthur, supreme commander of the southwest Pacific area, saw “no military justification for the dropping of the bomb”. The official Strategic Bombing Surveys in 1946 concluded that “Japan would have surrendered even if the atomic bombs had not been dropped”. There is evidence that the Americans had been preparing to use the A-bomb against the Japanese as early as 1943 and that, in the words of General Leslie R Groves, director of the Manhattan Project, the US nuclear weapon programme, “the target… was always expected to be Japan”. It’s an attitude that may have been driven by the different ways in which the Allies saw their enemy in Europe and in Asia. Germans were depicted as brutal and savage, but the bigotry was restrained to some extent by the fact that they were European and white. The Japanese, however, were particularly despised because they were non-white. As the historian John Dower observes in his pathbreaking book, War Without Mercy, the Pacific war was especially brutal because both sides saw the conflict “as a race war” that was “fuelled by racial pride, arrogance and rage”. It was common for western diplomats to refer to the Japanese as “monkeys” and “yellow dwarf slaves”. A former marine, Andrew Rooney, observed that US forces “did not consider that they were killing men. They were wiping out dirty animals.” Truman himself wrote: “When you have to deal with a beast you have to treat him as a beast.” “The entire population of Japan is a proper military target,” wrote Colonel Harry F Cunningham, an intelligence officer of the US Fifth Air Force. “There are no civilians in Japan.” The deliberate firebombings of Japanese cities are believed to have killed some 350,000 civilians. Against this background, the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki become more explicable. The Japanese too were vicious, cruel and racist. But Japanese attitudes and atrocities are well known; those of the Allies are often forgotten, because they were the “good guys”. So much so that simply to question the morality of the bombings now can be deemed unpatriotic. When, 25 years ago, Washington’s National Air and Space Museum planned an exhibition to mark the 50th anniversary of the end of Second World War, part of which put the bombings in historical context, it faced fierce criticism from politicians and veterans. It was forced to rework the exhibition and its director, Martin Harwit, had to resign. He later reflected: “Those who in any way questioned the bomb’s use were, in this emotional framework, the enemies of America.” At a time when Black Lives Matter protests have thrust the history of slavery and of empire into public debate, it is striking that there remains such historical amnesia about Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We seem much less aware today of the sheer inhumanity and moral indefensibility of the bombings than even the military hawks were at the time. In the 2003 documentary The Fog of War, Robert McNamara, the former US defence secretary who had been LeMay’s military aide during the Second World War, reflected on the question of war crimes: “LeMay recognised that what he was doing would be thought immoral if his side had lost. But what makes it immoral if you lose and not immoral if you win?” That’s not just a historical question. It’s as relevant today, and to today’s wars, as it is about the destruction of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. History may be written by the victors, but morality should not be defined solely by them.

Sustainability of nuclear power

Ethics, Nuclear Power, and Global Heating ,  Ethics of Nuclear Energy  Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com  [Extract]   (used as post) 

4- Sustainability

Environmental Ethics is perceived as the practical dimension of ethics concerning environmental issues. It is also conceived by some as an “education for sustainability”, and “an important vehicle to transmit values, to change attitudes and to motivate commitment” ⁽⁴⁰⁾. Therefore, sustainability is a crucial element in our moral decision over the choice of energy.

The new technologies in shale-gas extraction are expected to extend the life-time of gas reserves worldwide many folds the life span predicted for oil reserves, which are unlikely to last more than 40 years. On the other hand, uranium reserves of high concentrations (above 1000 ppm) mainly exist in Canada and Australia ⁽⁴¹⁾, as can be seen in Figure 2: [on original]

Therefore, considering the present consumption of uranium U₃O₈ per year, which stands at around 70,000 tonnes, the world reserves of around 3.5 million tonnes will not last more than 50 years. A report published in the International Journal of Green Energy in 2007 suggests that if a nuclear renaissance is expected soon, according to the myth of a nuclear renaissance which the nuclear lobbies and the IAEA are trying to promote, the uranium reserves will only be sufficient to keep the world’s nuclear reactors functioning for only 16.5 years ⁽⁴²⁾. In another words, most of the reactors that are proposed now for future investment would practically be out of enriched fuel soon after they are commissioned.

The other choice out of this impasse would be to acquire fuel from reprocessing of depleted fuel and from the plutonium of nuclear warheads that has been neutralized after the cold-war. However, this industry is extremely complicated, risky and it’s environmental impact is highly controversial; two reprocessing plants had already been shut down after Fukushima, one in Japan; the Rokkasho Reprocessing Program; which economical feasibility has already been questioned by Sakurai Yoshiko and Inose Naoki. A governmental committee estimated the cost of reprocessing existing nuclear waste in Japan at 18.8 trillion yen ⁽⁴³⁾; around 200 Billion US$; the second facility shut down was in the UK at Sellafield.

After the Japanese disaster at Fukushima on March 11, 2011 the maximum world capacity of fuel reprocessing at the present time has become around 20% of the total depleted fuel produced all around the world, thus causing a serious set-back; not only for providing a new source of fuel, but also to depositing depleted fuels at lower radioactive level and less segregating radioactive isotopes.

We can thus conclude that fission-fuel technology is not a sustainable source of energy for the future……

Even if the depletion of uranium is postponed much further, it remains an unsustainable source of energy per excellence, particularly if water, energy and CO₂ emissions are taken into consideration as shown in Figure 3.

If we take the Olympic Uranium Project as an example we can see that more than 3402 KL of water is needed for each tonne of U₃O₈ mined, this number is more than doubled at the Beverley Mines. If we add the amount of water needed for all the by-products, such as enrichment of fuel, cooling the reactors, etc. we can say that huge amounts of water are consumed in the overall process. The poorer the grade of uranium ore is the more water is needed. The Australian Olympic and Beverly mines ore grade are around 640-1800 ppm, so we can postulate the much larger amount of clean water are needed for poorer quality, at 200 ppm or even less!

Each tonne also consumes more than 1700 GJ of energy and can emit more than 320 tonnes of CO₂ for each tonne U₃O₈ produced. [table on original]

Ethics – conclusion on ethics of nuclear industry

Ethics of Nuclear Energy  Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com  [Extract] “………Conclusion:   It is believed that background radiation instigated evolution of our species along millions of years passed; however, mutations induced by radioactivity from the nuclear industry produce species that cannot adapt, such as the genetically damaged children of Chernobyl and the Fukushima Butterflies and other species of the rich biodiversity around us. Hitherto, we have proved that nuclear energy is neither safe, sustainable nor economic and eventually accumulates debts, poverty, water scarcity, and enmity between nations as well as it enhances environmental and health degradation for millions of years.

We have also reached a conviction that sustainability presupposes peace. Conflicts and wars over natural, unsustainable and risky resources, such as the nuclear industry and fossil fuels, present an acute danger, not only to human life but also to the integrity of the environment and the eco-system at large.

Nuclear Energy advocates are thus anthropocentric in their perception to the world; we ought to change that into a biocentric or an ecocentric perception if we seek a sustainable future for life on Earth. Our moral duty cannot accept such a diabolic source of pollution that can be avoided by using safer and more sustainable available alternatives, such as renewable clean energy solutions: solar, wind, bio-gas, geothermal and ocean energies?

We believe that Sustainable Development is only possible through the Energy of Peace: Renewable Energy; the source of energy that no one would fight over and can eventually sustain Energy Equity and Environmental Justice. No one can shade the Sun or stop the wind or monopolize ocean tidal and wave energy!!!

Is it true that our moral decisions and ethical responsibilities can play a role in decision making over serious issues, such as nuclear power?

We believe it is possible to make a difference, which is why we promised an ecosophical conclusion in the abstract. Our example comes from Germany when the report of the Ethics Commission for a Safe Energy Supply in 2011 drew the future for nuclear-free Germany in 2022. Our inspiration comes also from H. Horsburgh while reflection on the possibility of nuclear annihilation: “only the non-violent can inherit the Earth …the violent can only deny them a world to inherit” ⁽⁴⁹⁾. We agree with Alan Carter ⁽⁵⁰⁾ that the only ethics which can survive is Environmental Ethics.

If we thus agree that we did not inherit the world from our ancestors, but rather “we have borrowed it from our children”, then we “ought to” resort to the precautionary Principle in our moral decisions, perhaps as defined by the United Nations: 

The precautionary principle (United Nations Conference on Environment and Development 1992) holds forth that “a point can presumably be reached when human well-being and environmental health are put at risk by a large-scale human activity or man-made system over which humans have control. At such a point the problem could be identified, a course charted, and precautionary actions taken to ameliorate or prevent a potential threat to human and environmental health on behalf of current and future generations”.

Since Copenhagen`s (COP 17) 2009 behind-the-stage deal over a policy of “mitigation” we ought to continue advocating for more stringent measures if Earth is to be saved the consequences of Global Warming. It is now verified that the point of no-return for Global Warming is 450 ppm CO₂ which is probably a decade away if something serious is not done right now, so why has no serious action been under way at present, particularly by China and the USA who are producing almost 42% of the world’s global emissions? Why, on the other hand, have we acted so swiftly when the Ozone Hole was discovered over the South Pole in 1985?

 Surprisingly, only two years after the discovery of the Ozone Hole, the Montreal protocol was signed, amended in 1990 in London and Copenhagen. By the year 2000 the world can no longer produce harmful products to the Ozone layer, such as CFC_s, and consequently invented much less damaging replacements such as HCFC_s. By 2003 recovery of the Ozone was on its way! So, why were we so efficient in dealing with the Ozone issue while GHG_s are still short of a world’s consensus, although it is life threatening too?

The answer to this question we wish to leave open for further research!

(copious references on original)

Ethics of burdening developing countries with nuclear debts and nuclear wastes

Ethics of Nuclear Energy  Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com  [Extract]

“…..5- Nuclear energy in the South!

“If all the latter costs were reallocated to consumers, an increase in the price for electricity between €0.139 and €2.36 for each kilowatt-hour will have to be administered for a period of commitment of 100 years”⁽⁴⁵⁾. These estimates explicate the true cost of electricity produced from nuclear sources, similar to some predictions discussed earlier in the Japanese case, and thus urge few more reflections on the issue, such as:

Can developing countries in the South afford the actual prices of each KWh?

Is it ethical to overburden these developing nations with loans and radioactive waste management for millions of years?

To what extent can developing countries afford the risk of experiencing a major nuclear accident?

If small developing nations disintegrate due to a nuclear catastrophe, does this outcome open the way to asylum seekers flocking towards the North?

If a nuclear catastrophe strikes in the South, is the North ready to accommodate environmental refugees from the South?

If the answer is still yes, we suggest reminding the North that corruption risks are much higher in the South compared to the North, which thus dooms the investment in nuclear energy a failure! Furthermore, extra load management, upgrading the electricity grid, providing cooling water, constructing desalination plants for the cooling towers and facilitating the proper infra-structure are all factors to consider. Not to mention that a higher risk of a catastrophe would be predicted in the South due to shortages in skilled labor and because of the loose ends of cultural safety values typical of under developed countries.

As for non-proliferation, each nuclear power plant of around 1000 MW produces around 200 kg of plutonium every year, which is enough to arm 20 nuclear warheads. Wouldn’t that be an incentive for some countries to plunder the resources of others by force?

Enriching uranium U₂₃₅ to 3.5%, for use in nuclear reactors, produces huge amounts of U₂₃₈ (depleted Uranium), enough to encase tonnes of missiles annually. Who can guarantee these lethal weapons not to be used in the future for the destruction of humanity, as it has already been used in Yugoslavia, Iraq and Afghanistan?

Environmental degradation already accounts for 3-5% of GDP for some countries in the Middle East and North Africa, such as Jordan and Egypt. Uranium mining in these countries will worsen the environmental conditions which are already out of control, such as phosphate tailings in Rusaifa and Hasa in Jordan, which have bewailed the natural environment beyond recovery!

Creation of jobs is essential too when considering any investment in the South as unemployment is very high there. In a country like Namibia, were uranium mines had been utilized for a long time, the percentage of unemployment reached 51.2% in 2008⁽⁴⁶⁾. What about construction and operating nuclear facilities, are they labor intensive?

Energy source-jobs per tera watt hours are underlined in the following table:

Natural Gas	250 jobs / TWh
Coal	370 jobs / TWh
Nuclear	75 jobs / TWh
Wood	733 jobs / TWh
Hydro	250 jobs / TWh
Wind	918 – 2400 jobs / TWh
Photo-voltaic	29580 – 107000 jobs / TWh

Table 1: Jobs per tera watt hours of electricity production ⁽⁴⁷⁾

It looks quite obvious that the nuclear industry is the poorest concerning jobs per energy production. Hence, developing countries need to be motivated to resort to intensive labor energy sources, away from logging and deforestation, by promoting wind and solar energy which provide far more jobs than the nuclear industry. Renewable and clean energy jobs are both decentralized, require no high skilled labor and are safe and secure energy sources; decentralization and jobs are badly needed in the South as migration from rural areas to cities is intensifying and many skilled labor had already migrated to the North.

As for safety and security, we wonder! With the present reputation of safety and security in the South, can developing countries minimize the risks of a nuclear disaster?

Expert nuclear engineer David Lochbaum responds to our question:

“It is not if we are going to have nuclear accidents but when” ⁽⁴⁸⁾!

If developing countries can afford nuclear accidents and can recover from such catastrophes, like what happened in Japan at Fukushima, developing countries of the South cannot for the reasons discussed earlier.,,,,,”

Health Risk Analysis of nuclear power

Ethics of Nuclear Energy  Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com  [Extract]

“…..2- Health Risk Analysis

If “risk” is defined as the product of probability of an accident happening with its severity, we ought to start this title by considering first major commercial nuclear accidents of level 7 on the INES scale, as a priority in analysis, so we must consider 1986 Chernobyl catastrophe where “Emissions from Chernobyl reactor exceeded a hundredfold the radioactive contamination of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki”⁽¹⁰⁾.

The latest New York Academy report on Chernobyl catastrophe has published horrendous facts of more than a million causalities; the new book concludes: Chernobyl death toll: 985,000, mostly from cancer ⁽¹¹⁾. A paper by Kristina Voigt and Hagen Scherb also showed that after 1986, in the aftermath of Chernobyl, around 800,000 fewer children were born in Europe than one might have expected. The overall number of “missing” children after Chernobyl could have reached about one million ⁽¹²⁾; not to mention that the researchers have not covered all countries in their count!

According to UNSCEAR (United Nations Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation), adding to the latter casualties, between 12,000 and 83,000 children who lived in the vicinity of Chernobyl were born with congenital deformations, and also estimate that around 30,000 to 207,000 genetically damaged children were born worldwide ⁽¹³⁾. Amongst the interesting findings was that only 10% of the overall expected damage was actually seen in the first generation; the worse is yet to come with the offspring. A similar research on butterflies around Fukushima has yielded a similar result which will be discussed later.

As for the level 6 on the INES scale, it is classified as a serious nuclear accident that includes the accident at the Kyshtym facility in Russia in 1957, unfortunately not much research was published! on level 5, accidents with wider consequences include United Kingdom Windscale facility in the year 1957, Chalk River – Canada in 1952 and the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, after which the USA only licensed few new reactors; At present, only three nuclear reactors are being constructed in the United States: Watts Bar 2 reactor (1180 MW) which started  decades ago, and was put on hold till 2007, expected by the IAEA to commercially operate in 2015. Another two reactors; vogtle 3 and Summer 2 of 1200 MW each, are expected to operate in 2017⁽¹⁴⁾.

The Fukushima-Daitii nuclear accident in Japan on March 2011 is also classified as level 5. However, nuclear accidents of level 4 with local consequences include a long list, so are levels 4,3,2 and 1; a non-ending list of accidents⁽¹⁵⁾.

In one year only (2008), according to an IRSN report, 205 accidents were recorded in nuclear facilities (safety and environmental), a noticeable 56% increase compared to the accidents recorded in 2005 which accounted for 131 accidents only. A typical example of those accidents is the leakage of 20 m³ of radioactive water from Socatri facility at Tricastin – France. Some of the radioactive water followed rain water drainage into the eco-system while the rest radioactive water seeped underground polluting the soil and under-ground water aquifers ⁽¹⁶⁾.

Since March 2011 funds of hundreds of billions of dollars are being allocated by TEPCO, the Tokyo Electricity Company, as to cover for the direct damages of the Fukushima disaster; however, the scale of damage on biodiversity and genetic disorders is not clearly understood.

The early mutations of butterflies around Fukushima are alarming as the mutations disorders have been increasing with the offspring. Mutations caused by Fukushima disaster radiation had affected 12% of adult pale grass blue butterflies in the surrounding area two months after the March 2011 disaster. When that batch mated, it produced an offspring with an 18% mutation rate. In the following generation, mutations were found in 34% of the butterflies born. In September 2011, a new study disclosed that the adult butterflies displayed 28% mutation rate and their offspring had a whopping 58% mutation rate ⁽¹⁷⁾.

In a similar study on mice after 25 years of the Chernobyl catastrophe, it yielded the following outcome: “The rate of mutation amongst the field mice is one hundred thousand times higher than normal” ⁽¹⁸⁾.

Another environmental damage connected with the nuclear industry is thermal pollution which is basically the form of water pollution that refers to degradation of water quality by any process that changes ambient water temperature. The main cause of thermal pollution is attributed to one particular industry, or to be more precise to nuclear power plants that use water as a coolant. After this water has been used as a coolant it is returned to the natural environment at a higher temperature. This change in water temperature decreases the amount of oxygen in the water which can lead to negative ecological effects.

Less oxygen in the water can harm fish population, as it can increase the metabolic rate of fish population and other aquatic animals so that they would more likely eat a lot more food in a shorter period of time than if their environment was not changed. This change can lead to imbalance in the food chain, thus resulting in significant long-term damage to many aquatic ecosystems.

Warmer water temperatures are known to lead to reproduction problems for many aquatic animals, and can further cause huge bacteria and plant growth. Warmer waters can even lead to algae bloom resulting in a consequent loss of more oxygen in the water. However, this damage is likely to be ethically benign compared to the mutations that result from radioactivity.

As for the effects of radioactivity on humans, scientists from the universities of Moscow and Leicester examined blood samples from 79 families, the parents of who had been living within a 300 km radius of nuclear reactors. The scientists were surprised by children born between February and September 1994 as cases of mutations had doubled ⁽¹⁹⁾. Peter karamoskos, a nuclear radiologist, quotes the following: “There is a linear dose-response relationship between exposure to ionizing radiation and the development of solid cancers in humans. It is unlikely that there is a threshold below which cancers are not induced”⁽²⁰⁾. Radiation can cause the breakdown in chromosomes, causing Down’s syndrome in babies as well as mental and physical disorders. Children exposed to radiation have a higher risk to develop leukemia ⁽²¹⁾.

Higher incidence of leukemia in UK children has been reported in the environment of the Sellafield (Windscale) fuel reprocessing facility in England ^(22-23), not far from the Dounreay reprocessing plant in Scotland ^(24-25), and also in similar children who lived within a few kilometers from the Aldermaston or Burghfield military weapons facilities in England ⁽²⁶⁾. In a comprehensive survey done by Forman et al⁽²⁷⁾ and Cook-Mozaffari et al ^(28-29) reported excess mortality rate due to leukemia and Hodgkin’s disease particularly in young persons living in the vicinity of fourteen nuclear facilities, eight of them electricity generating nuclear plants.

In the United Kingdom, studies of populations living near nuclear power plants have yielded mixed results. Ewings et al ⁽³⁰⁾ found increased incidence of leukemia and lymphoma in young persons near the Hinckley Point power station. Clap et al ⁽³¹⁾ reported an excess incidence of leukemia in men in five towns near the Pilgrim nuclear power station in Massachusetts…….”

 

Ethics of Nuclear Energy- climate change

Ethics of Nuclear Energy Ayoub Abu-Dayyeh (P.hD) Amman – H.K. of Jordan Ayoub101@hotmail.com E_case Society (President) www.energyjo.com  [Extract]

Abstract:

This paper attempts to refute the myth of “clean nuclear energy”, and discusses the unethical impact on the environment of the overall process of the nuclear energy electricity production industry, from mining to decommissioning, through the problematic framework of “health risk analysis”, “economical feasibility” and “sustainability”. It also focuses on the economic and safety fragility of developing countries in the South to deal with big loans or a possible catastrophe, not to mention managing nuclear waste for a very long period of time.

Finally, the paper diverges all the inductions of the different criteria discussed towards inferring a global categorically imperative ethical perception based on a biocentric stance that takes United Nations recommendations into consideration, such as the “Precautionary Principle”, the declarations on Human Rights and the rights of future generations to a healthy and sustainable environment, in order to settle down to an “ecosophical” conclusion.

1- Introduction: The “clean nuclear energy” myth!

Nuclear energy is still one of the options used today across the world, thought to be a clean source of energy that produces neither CO2 nor other Ozone related pollutants into the atmosphere. However, it is now been verified that the complete fuel cycle of nuclear energy production is generous in producing GHG as well as CFCs; from mining and milling to fuel enrichment, constructing and operating the nuclear facility, transportation of nuclear fuel, safety and security measures, reprocessing and recycling the depleted nuclear fuel, manufacturing by-products, encasing and burying the nuclear waste and eventually decommissioning the nuclear facility and its surrounding environment, including the contaminated soil(1).

Concerned communities in Japan who are removing contaminated soil and conducting clean up operations are using independent researchers because they have lost faith in their government: “The roots of mistrust came out after authorities issued radiation readings that often turned out to be incorrect”(2). This comes as a proof that governments don’t consider life cycle assessment mechanisms in calculating accurate GHG emissions, insurance, cost of KWh of electricity produced or genome radioactive infuriation. Most of the research is government sponsored or controlled by nuclear commissions, thus falling in “conflict of interest” controversy.

The nuclear fuel cycle is a generous CO2 emitter that can exceed 288 grams of CO2 e/KWh, or (66)g as a mean value, even when existing studies fail to consider emissions of co-products (3) which cause global warming too. Research on light water nuclear reactors showed CO2 emission up to 220 g/KWh (4), yet this value is expected to rise as uranium ore grade worldwide is deteriorating by time. The USA ore grade average, for example, dropped from 0.28% U3O8 to 0.07 – 0.11% (1100 ppm) in 40 years (5). The complete life cycle assessment mechanism considered to calculate CO2 equivalent (CO2 e/KWh) in the previous analysis can raise this value significantly!……”

Russia’s nuclear weapons and the religious connection

BLESSED BE THY NUCLEAR WEAPONS: THE RISE OF RUSSIAN NUCLEAR ORTHODOXY, War on the Rocks, MICHAEL KOFMAN     June 21  2019 Dmitry Adamsky, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy (Stanford University Press, 2019).

Russia’s Federal Nuclear Center, the All-Russian Institute of Experimental Physics (RFNC-VNIIEF), recently placed a somewhat unusual government tender: It is seeking a supplier of religious icons with the images of Saint Seraphim of Sarov and Saint Fedor Ushakov. Meanwhile, a private foundation, backed by President Vladimir Putin and Minister of Defense Sergei Shoigu, has been gathering funds to build a massive temple to the Russian Armed Forces at Patriot Park,. Artisans are crafting a new icon for the temple, while the steps are to be made from melted-down Nazi equipment captured by the Red Army in World War II.

Viewed in isolation, these may seem to be the occasional eccentric habits of a latter-day authoritarian state. However, Dima Adamsky’s new book, Russian Nuclear Orthodoxy: Religion, Politics, and Strategy, demonstrates convincingly that there are indeed important signs being missed all around us, pointing to a longstanding nexus between the Russian Orthodox Church and the country’s nuclear-military-industrial complex.

Adamsky’s groundbreaking book lays out the largely unstudied history of how a nuclear priesthood emerged in Russia, permeated the units and commands in charge of Russia’s nuclear forces, and became an integral part of the nuclear weapons industry.

How Russia’s nuclear industry co-opted religion

How the Russian Church Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb https://www.foreignaffairs.com/articles/russian-federation/2019-06-14/how-russian-church-learned-stop-worrying-and-love-bomb

Orthodoxy’s Influence on Moscow’s Nuclear Complex

By Dmitry Adamsky  very year on May 9, Russia celebrates Victory Day—the day on which Nazi Germany surrendered to the Soviet Union in 1945—with its biggest annual military parade. This year, the ceremonies opened as they always do, with the Russian defense minister entering Red Square to inspect the troops and report to the president. When passing through Spasskaya Tower, the Kremlin’s main ceremonial gate, Defense Minister Sergei Shoigu’s cabriolet stopped. The minister took off his peaked cap and made the sign of the cross according to Orthodox tradition. Shoigu was the first minister to introduce this gesture into the ceremony in 2015. Whether he did so as a genuine expression of his faith, a public relations gambit, or both, his crossing himself on such an occasion reflects the tightening of bonds between church and state in today’s Russia.
Since the Soviet collapse, the Russian Orthodox Church (ROC), and the Orthodox faith more broadly, has exerted a growing influence on public and private life. Although relatively few Russians are actual practitioners, the majority of the population (about 80 percent) identifies as Orthodox, and many citizens consider the religion to be a defining element of Russian national identity. Officials across the Russian government—including ministers, members of the State Duma and of the Federation Council, senior military commanders, and President Vladimir Putin himself—have taken to openly professing their Orthodox faith. At times, some parts of the public have objected to the state’s privileging of the ROC, but such criticism has done little to diminish the church’s status.That the church carries extraordinary weight on Russia’s domestic scene is well-known and not that unusual. What is more surprising, and less often explored, is the church’s influence within Russia’s nuclear weapons complex—the most significant wing of one of the world’s most powerful militaries. There the nexus between church and state runs deepest, widest, and longest. During the last three decades, the priesthood has entered all levels of command and positioned itself as a guardian of Russia’s nuclear potential. It’s impossible to fully understand the strategic reality in Russia today without scrutinizing the remarkable conjunction between the Kremlin, the ROC, and the nuclear weapons community.

THE TRINITY AND THE TRIAD

In Russia, each of the three components of the nuclear force structure—air, land, and sea—has its own patron saint. Icons adorn the walls of the sanctified headquarters, the command posts, and even the nuclear weapons platforms. Each large military base houses a garrison church, chapel, or prayer room. Aerial, ground, and naval processions of the cross are routine. Supplication services and the sprinkling of holy water mark oaths of allegiance, parades, exercises, and space and nuclear launches. Pilots of strategic bombers sanctify their jets prior to combat sorties and attach icons to the maps they take to the cockpit. Mobile temples accompany land-based intercontinental ballistic missiles, and nuclear-armed submarines house portable churches.

The military clergy provides regular pastoral care to the nuclear corps’ servicemen and function as official assistants to the commanders. The nuclear priesthood and servicemen jointly celebrate religious and professional holidays, and religious instruction is integral to the higher education of both military and civilian nuclear personnel. Priests participate in professional activities through the whole chain of command and join their flock in operational missions on the ground and underwater. Within the Russian military, in particular within the nuclear forces, clerics so frequently lead activities to boost morale and foster patriotism that they play a role nearly equivalent to that of Soviet-era political officers, who were responsible for the ideological education of troops and for ensuring the Kremlin’s control over the military.

Russia’s nuclear theory and practice have become increasingly assertive over the last decade, as ties between the military and the church have deepened. Russian strategists more readily incorporate nuclear tools into their planning and use Russia’s status as a nuclear power to coerce the behavior of others. The church is not the only or even the main force behind this posturing, but its open backing burnishes the domestic legitimacy of the Kremlin’s gambits, generating public support both for Moscow’s foreign policy and for the modernization of the nuclear arsenal.

At first glance, the Russian Orthodox Church’s support for the current Russian nuclear posture may seem counterintuitive. The Russian stance condones escalation for the sake of de-escalation and first use of nuclear weapons in some circumstances. These positions run counter to the principles of most Western branches of Christianity and Catholic “just war” theory, which stress discriminating between combatants and noncombatants, weighing the military value of an attack against the civilian destruction it may cause, and viewing nuclear weaponry as malum in se (an evil in itself). The Orthodox Church, however, seems to brook no such concerns and has promoted a pro-nuclear worldview in Russia.

THE POWER AND THE GLORY

With each passing decade since the fall of the Iron Curtain, the church’s influence on Russia’s nuclear establishment has grown stronger. In the early 1990s, the disarmament agreements that followed the collapse of the Soviet Union made nuclear weapons much less of a priority. The nuclear wing of Russia’s military-industrial complex found itself adrift—and the Russian Orthodox Church, seeking to expand its base of influence, saw a target of opportunity. The church shielded the nuclear establishment from political and social ostracism, lobbied for its funding, and helped it to reinvent itself, injecting new meaning into its professional life. Over the course of the decade, the nuclear corps of the military introduced religious ceremonies into its everyday activities, designated patron saints for its institutions, and built churches into its installations and garrisons. Clergymen, from the patriarch on down to priests, openly interacted with nuclear force commanders and industry officials.

Official state policy converged with the grassroots embrace of Russian Orthodoxy in the first decade of this century. The Kremlin restored property to the church, established a military clergy, and enhanced the church’s role in educational, social, and foreign policies. By 2010, the church had become part and parcel of the nuclear officialdom. The commanders of the nuclear corps and senior members of the nuclear industry signed cooperation agreements with the Russian Orthodox Church and established close contacts with the patriarch and clergy. From this nexus emerged the belief, which Putin himself seems to hold, that Orthodoxy and the nuclear deterrent are equally important bulwarks of Russian statehood, guaranteeing the nation’s security internally, in the case of the church, and externally, in the case of the nuclear arsenal.

Since 2010, Russia’s clergy has reached a new peak of influence over the state. Putin’s religious, ideological, and philosophical views seem to have matured and become integrated into his geopolitical vision and policy choices. He and his entourage express a religiosity that seems to a certain extent genuine and has created favorable conditions for the church to expand its influence in all dimensions of social and political life. In turn, the church lends moral authority to the Kremlin’s foreign policy initiatives. The clergy has become part and parcel of the military, primarily within the nuclear command, where the priests are now integrated at the tactical and operational levels, working in immediate proximity to the weapons and participating in exercises by land, air, and sea.

A LASTING INFLUENCE

That the Russian Orthodox Church has so deeply penetrated the country’s nuclear complex will likely have significant and lasting effects. When nuclear organizations compete for resources within and outside the Russian military, the church may become a tool of influence. It already helps recruit qualified youth to elite units, and nuclear corps commanders may come to see Orthodox draftees as particularly reliable and motivated, and so to seek them out. Indeed, the Orthodox faith has become so associated with national identity and patriotism that those seeking the fast track to promotions within the military and foreign policy communities may see fit to profess the faith. Ambitious military officers and even politicians can similarly enhance their careers by associating with influential senior clerics within the Kremlin’s court.

There are, of course, limits to the influence of religion within Russia’s foreign policy establishment. But the theocratization of Russia’s military and foreign policy establishment is real and significant, and the trend has flown under the radar for too long. We can no longer understand the Kremlin’s political mentality and strategic culture without factoring in the influence of the Orthodox Church and faith.