Yesterday, I talked about Pakistan’s development of tactical nuclear weapons. They announced this work just before their Prime Minister came to Washington, D.C. to talk to President Obama. There has been speculation that Obama is seeking a major treaty with Pakistan concerning its nuclear arsenal now that a deal has been struck with Iran on nuclear issues. Today, it was announced by the Pakistani Prime Minister that Pakistan will not accept any restrictions on its development and manufacture of tactical nuclear weapons.

        Currently it is estimated that Pakistan and India both have around one hundred nuclear warheads. Pakistan recently started up its fourth nuclear reactor which will allow it to double the amount of weapons grade plutonium it can produce in a year. Pakistan has embarked on a major expansion of its nuclear arsenal and is poised to become the fifth nuclear nation in terms of the nuclear of nuclear weapons possessed. In five to ten years, Pakistan could have more nuclear weapons than any nation other than the U.S. and Russia.

        Obama may be trying to get Pakistan to accept limitations on its nuclear weapons programs in return for being given access to research and technology for peaceful nuclear applications such as power generation. The U.S. and India recently signed an agreement along these lines and a deal with Pakistan could help wind down tensions and the threat of nuclear exchanges between India and Pakistan.

        The White House is trying to reduce expectations for any sort of major nuclear deal during the meetings this week. The Pakistani Foreign Minister said that no deal was being discusses and that Pakistan intends to “to maintain a full- spectrum deterrence capability in order to safeguard our national security, maintain strategic stability and deter any kind of aggression from India.” Analysts say that Pakistan has little motivation to stop the development of nuclear weapons and delivery systems.

        Although the U.S. has given Pakistan more than thirty billion dollars in aid since 2002, the Obama administration has serious concerns about Pakistan trustworthiness. When Osama Bin Laden was located and killed in Pakistan, the U.S. did not alert Pakistan to the raid. It was obvious that the Pakistani government must have been aware that Bin Laden was living near a major government military installation. There are also questions about how serious the Pakistanis are about rooting out the refuges used by the Taliban in the Northwest Tribal territories across the border from Afghanistan. A U.S. Congressman has pointed out that while Pakistani soldiers are dying fighting against terrorists, branches of the Pakistani military are provide money and aid to terrorists.  

       The relationship of the U.S. with Pakistan is complex. Their government contains different factions that cover a range from friends of the U.S. to those who would prefer an end to any cooperation between the two countries. Pakistan is turbulent and divided along ethnic, religious and ideological lines. This raises the problem of control of nuclear weapons. While the big warheads are tightly controlled, tactical nuclear weapons will have to be distributed along the four thousand mile border with India in order to be useful. This will make it much harder to secure and control every single tactical nuke. If terrorists got their hands on one, they could injure and kill millions of people in one of Pakistan’s densely packed cities. 

Tokyo Electric Power Co. for the first time has inserted remote-controlled cameras into the containment vessel of reactor 3 at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant to gauge the extent of the damage from the core meltdown. japantimes.com.jp

The health ministry Tuesday certified a man with leukemia as having suffered an industrial accident and being entitled to benefits after he was exposed to radiation as a construction worker at the Fukushima No. 1 nuclear plant, though it did not confirm there was a link between the radiation and the cancer. japantimes.com.jp

Pakistani Prime Minister Nawaz Sharif will tell U.S. President Barack Obama this week that Islamabad will not accept limits on its use of small tactical nuclear weapons, Pakistani officials said on Wednesday. reuters.com

Pakistan is on track to become the world’s fifth largest nuclear power by 2025, according to a report released by a U.S.-based independent research organization on Monday. time.com

        I have talked about tactical nuclear weapons in posts about the situation in Ukraine and Russian threats. Unlike the huge megaton nuclear weapons meant to annihilate cities, tactical nuclear weapons are intended for use on battlefields against tactical targets. There are many different designs for tactical nuclear weapons from warheads on short range missiles to mortar rounds fired from special guns. Their yields are in the hundreds of tons to thousands of tons of TNT equivalent. The U.S. has developed such tactical weapons and recently sent a batch of tactical nuclear bombs to airbases in Germany to counter the Russians. Now, another country is talking about tactical nuclear weapons.

       It has been known for some time that Pakistan has nuclear weapons. They were developed to counter the nuclear arsenal of India. Pakistan has never publicly discussed its nuclear arsenal until now. At a press briefing in Washington, D.C. last Monday, the Foreign Secretary of Pakistan made an announcement that Pakistan has developed low-yield tactical nuclear bombs for use in case of a “sudden attack” by India. Tomorrow, the Pakistan Prime Minister is going to meet with President Obama at the White House. The Pakistani nuclear arsenal and policy is expected to be one of the topics for discussion and the announcement by the Foreign Secretary is thought to related to the impending meeting.

      Independent analysts have assumed that Pakistan was working on such tactical low-yield weapons as long as they have been working on the type of missiles that could be used to deliver such weapons. In 2011, Pakistan tested the nuclear capable Nasr missile with a forty mile range. Some analysts believe that Pakistan is also working on nuclear artillery shells. In fact, Pakistan may have greater numbers of such weapons with greater accuracy than any possessed by India. U.S. military experts think that Pakistan may have had help in the development of tactical nuclear weapons by China, a long time enemy of India.

      One of the big concerns about the existence of such weapons in Pakistan is the fact that in order to be useful, they will need to be widely distributed so that they can be useful anywhere along the more than four thousand mile border between Pakistan and India. It will be difficult if not impossible for proper command and control nuclear procedures to be applied to tactical nuclear weapons spread over such a wide area. With the instability in Pakistan, the possibility of such weapons falling into the hands of terrorists and fanatics cannot be easily dismissed.

       Unfortunately, neither Pakistan or India are signatories of major non-nuclear proliferation treaties. This makes it difficult for the international community to discourage the buildup of the Pakistani nuclear arsenal. It has been suggested that the U.S. may offer Pakistan membership in the Nuclear Supplier’s club which would grant Pakistan access to nuclear research and technology in return for curbing its production of weapons grade nuclear materials and short range missiles.

      The military in Pakistan is a powerful institution with the ability to apply serious political pressure to the civilian government. They will most probably oppose any such deal if it is offered while the Pakistan Prime Minister is in Washington, D.C. this week. The recent statements about Pakistan’s nuclear arsenal by the Foreign Secretary may have been for the purpose of reassuring the Pakistani people that Pakistan will not “sell out” to Western attempts to curb its nuclear program. It could also serve as a warning to India about what will happen if Pakistan is attacked. A big danger of tactical nuclear weapons is that they are more easy to use and more easy to justify than the big city killers. The tensions between Pakistan and India are a threat to the whole world and the danger of the use of nuclear weapons in that area is rising.

Nasr missile being tested:

 

The Japan Atomic Energy Agency officially christened its new facility here on Oct. 19 that will develop technologies to decommission the reactors at the crippled Fukushima No. 1 nuclear power plant. ajw.ashahi.com

TEPCO has released a set of images taken inside the containment structure of unit 3 on March 20th. This is the first work since the 2011 disaster to look inside the containment structure of unit 3. What was found was both expected and surprising. fukuleaks.org

The decision to allow China to build nuclear power stations in the UK is sheer folly, especially at a time when Cameron is shutting the door on renewable energy. the guardian.com

KazAtomProm and Centrus Energy have signed a memorandum of cooperation that “specifies the development of mutually beneficial relations on competitive supplies of Kazakhstan’s uranium to the world market”, the Kazakh state-run company said today. world-nuclear-news.org

 

 

        The nuclear industry is always telling us how economical, low-carbon, efficient and safe nuclear power is. Nuclear waste is sort of like the unwanted child who is banished to the cellar. The spent nuclear fuel keeps piling up at each nuclear power reactor in the U.S. and there is no permanent storage available. It is difficult to factor in the cost of eventual waste disposal because these costs lie in the uncertain future. It is my feeling that, in retrospect, nuclear power will be seen to have cost far more than the nuclear industry claims.

        The U.S. intended to have a permanent geological repository for spent nuclear fuel from all the nation’s power reactors by 1999. The site that was chosen at Yucca Mountain was abandoned by the federal government in 2009. It is now estimated that there will be no permanent repository for spent nuclear fuel before 2050 at the soonest. There is a county in Texas and another in New Mexico which have offered to create “centralized interim storage sites”, but neither of these would be ready to accept spent nuclear fuel for decades.

        Illinois gets about half of its electricity from nuclear power. There are eleven operating nuclear power reactors in six power plants. The nuclear fuel rods used in the reactor are placed in cooling ponds after removal from the reactors. In a few years, the worse of the radiation dissipates and the rods are ready to move to storage but the spent fuel rods will remain deadly for more than ten thousand years.

        Illinois currently possesses more spent nuclear fuel than any other state in the country. There are nine thousand tons of spent nuclear fuel temporarily stored at the reactors in Illinois. Eighty percent is stored in deep cooling pools at forty five locations. The other twenty percent is stored in air-cooled concrete and steel dry casks at nuclear power plants.

        If one of the cooling pools is drained, the fuel rods would spontaneously heat up, catch fire and spread radiation and radioactive particles around the landscape. An estimate from the U.S. Brookhaven National Laboratory in 1997 suggested that there could be up to seventy immediate deaths and thirty thousand delayed deaths within a fifty mile radius of such an accident. Operators of power reactors claim that the spent fuel pools are well-protected and safe. Engineers claim that dry cast storage is sufficient to protect spent fuel rods from any anticipated threat such as earthquakes, terrorism, extreme weather, etc. Critics of nuclear power beg to differ on the ultimate safety of both pools and casks.

       There are calls for reinstating a moratorium on licensing new nuclear power reactors in Illinois until a solution can be found for the permanent disposal of spent nuclear fuel. In the meantime, centralized interim storage sites should be created. Considering that it will be decades before either of these goals can be reached, critics of nuclear power in Illinois are effectively calling for an end to the expansion of nuclear power in Illinois for the foreseeable future. In any case, it may be a moot point because operators of nuclear power reactors in Illinois are losing the competition for power generation in the open market and have recently threatened to shut down existing power reactors unless the state government makes special arrangements to help the nuclear industry. Illinois may be a model of what will happen to the nuclear industry across the country in the coming years. We can only hope.

In the aftermath of Japan’s Fukushima nuclear power meltdown following the tsunami of March 11, 2011, the international community has totally failed in keeping the public properly informed and protected from the fallout. rt.com

Japan has acknowledged a possible first casualty from radiation at the wrecked Fukushima nuclear power plant — a worker who was diagnosed with cancer after the crisis broke out in 2011. nbcnews.com

North Korea is preparing for a new nuclear test, South Korea’s spy agency said Tuesday, according to the Yonhap news agency. usatoday.com

China is to take a one-third stake in a French-led project to build the first in a new generation of UK nuclear power plants, investing billions of pounds under a landmark commercial deal to be announced on Wednesday. ft.com

        I have been blogging lately about the Hinkley Point C reactor project in the U.K. This is a complex deal involving the British, the French and the Chinese. The French company EDF will construct the two reactors while the Chinese will help with finances. One aspect of the deal is the possibility that the Chinese will be allowed to build a reactor of their own design in England at Bradwell in Essex with Chinese labor. Many groups in England opposed the project on a variety of grounds including labor issue, environment concerns, finances and security.         

         The project has opened a big rift in the environmental movement in England. Some environmentalists have been supporting nuclear power as a way to reduce carbon emissions. Other environmentalists vehemently oppose any expansion of nuclear power on the grounds of cost as well as threats to the environment and public health. A recent article in the Ecologist, part of the Guardian Environmental Network, outlined the charges leveled at the pro-nuclear environmentalists by the anti-nuclear environmentalists.

         The support for nuclear power by some environmentalists has confused the public. This support may have been the decisive factor in the acceptance of the Hinkley Point C project by the British government. Friends of the Earth did support nuclear power on climate change grounds for a time but has recently reversed its stance and now publicly opposes the Hinkley Point C project.

         Critics of the project pointed out to the pro-nuclear supporters that even if nuclear power might be useful in climate change mitigation, the specific technologies being planned for Hinkley Point C were suspect. The only reactors based on the French EPR design to be built so far have encountered significant and costly design and construction problems. Pro-nuclear supporters in Britain have recently admitted that Hinkley Point C is ” overpriced, overcomplicated and overdue” and that, “The Government should kill the project.”

        The pro-nuclear environmentalists were warned that their support for nuclear power would deal a serious blow to the development of sustainable alternative power in the U.K. The critics point out that the government has dumped the zero-carbon agenda for the built environment, has ridiculed the idea of energy efficiency and destroyed any chance that the U.K. will meet its obligations under the Climate Change Act.

        The anti-nuclear environmentalists say that the pro-nuclear group’s support has helped pave the way for the Chinese nuclear industry to assume a leading role in the development of nuclear power in the U.K. This has serious implications for nuclear security and regulation in the U.K. and may ultimately prove disastrous for the citizenry.

        The global nuclear industry has a very bad track record of ignoring regulations, ignoring public safety, incompetence, construction short cuts, bribery and other serious crimes and breaches of public trust. The contracts for nuclear power reactors involve huge sums of money and are often connected explicitly or implicitly to nuclear weapons programs. Once struck, these deals are almost always over budget, behind schedule and extremely hard to cancel. The construction and operation of a nuclear power reactor commits the government and the citizenry of a country to around a century of regulation, danger and escalating costs.

         The government of the U.K. is responsible for the Hinkley Point C deal but the anti-nuclear environmentalists believe that they might not have been able to proceed without sufficient public support from misguided pro-nuclear environmentalists who are now against the Hinkley Point C project. The pro-nuclear group recently said, ” We urge the Government to scrap this plant (Hinkley C), and use the money promised to its investors to accelerate the deployment of other low carbon technologies, both renewable and nuclear. We would like to see the Government produce a comparative study of nuclear technologies, including the many proposed designs for small modular reactors, and make decisions according to viability and price, rather than following the agenda of the companies which have its ear.”