Tag Archives: nuclear issues

Most activists have heard this news by now. Rest assured we won’t be silent. Details of actions will be posted.

Today’s Salt Lake Tribune: Bomb Test: The Pentagon says it’s just a test and won’t lead to nuclear development

The “Divine Strake Test” is what it has been dubbed. It would
would use ammonium nitrate and fuel oil – a common explosive combination and the same used in the Oklahoma City bombing, only 280 times larger.
It is expected to throw a plume of dust as high as 10,000 feet into the air. Computers on the ground will measure the shockwaves and damage to the tunnel so models can be made, according to Pentagon budget documents, “to improve the warfighter’s confidence in selecting the smallest proper nuclear yield necessary to destroy underground facilities while minimizing collateral damage.”
The blast would be five times larger than the largest existing conventional weapon, but many times smaller than the smallest nuclear weapon in the U.S. stockpile. Similar tests have been conducted in the past at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico.

The Pentagon has said it plans to detonate 700 tons of explosives above a buried tunnel at the Nevada Test Site in June.

Congressman Jim Matheson says:
“I think this is a precursor for the development of nuclear weapons. I’ve had that suspicion about this administration all along,” Matheson said. “I want to get answers to this before they have the test in June.”

While this is a noble statement, I just don’t believe the latter part of it. Matheson has been a supporter of the Bush Administration’s Iraq campaign and war efforts. I know this from personal experience with Mr. Matheson, having been part of an arrest action in his office in 2003 and then in a meeting with him and several of my activist colleagues as a follow-up to that action. I would like to think the Mr. Matheson is sincere, but actions speak louder than words and his past actions just have not proven that he is opposed to nuclear anything.

This week in Washington, D.C. the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability’s “DC Days” attracted anti-nuclear activists from around the nation. Representatives from Utah included Vanessa Pierce from HEAL Utah and Mike Fife, a member of HEAL.

The Deseret News reports:
Pierce met with Deputy Energy Secretary Clay Sell on Tuesday, who expressed the same disinterest in PFS that Bodman did with Hatch.
The two Utahns also met with Rep. Jim Matheson, D-Utah, and staff members of the rest of the delegation to talk about the PFS project and other nuclear matters.
Pierce’s main goal was to encourage Utah’s senators to support an existing bill that would expand a federal program designed to compensate those ill from radiation exposure to government testing to northern Utah.
The compensation program has been around for almost two decades but only includes the 10 most southern counties in Utah, she said.
Pierce and Fife also wanted the delegation, particularly Bennett who has a seat on the Senate Appropriations subcommittee that writes the energy spending bill, to reject funding for the Energy Department’s new nuclear power proposals.

The Global Nuclear Energy Partnership (GNEP) is pushing for the building of more nuclear power plants to be built in the U.S. The “bait” is that fuel can be reused. But, according to Pierce, nothing could be further from the truth.
It can actually create more waste and not much of the reprocessed fuel can be used again safely.
“It delays the day of reckoning and just create a bigger price tag,” she said.
Pierce fears that if Private Fuel Storage (PFS) moves forward and reprocessing becomes a reality Utah will become “a nuclear waste version of California’s Silicon Valley” with companies popping up that would want to reprocess waste stored at PFS or more types of waste going to EnergySolutions.

Other nuclear waste storage issues were discussed at the conference and are mentioned in the article.

Needless to say, I’m unhappy with this Deseret News headline:
New nuclear threat for Utah? Britain may be creating, testing weapon in West.

There is suspicion that Britain’s sub-critical test at the Nevada Test site last month (named “Krakatau” on Feb 23) is leading to further testing there.

Let me get this straight (A—GAIN):
U.S. – nukes o.k.
Iran – nukes not o.k.
Britain – nukes o.k.
India – nukes o.k.
Korea – nukes not o.k.
Iraq – nukes not o.k.
Israel – nukes o.k.
France – nukes o.k. (french fries….not)

There’s something wrong with this picture.

Kevin Rohrer, spokesman for the National Nuclear Security Administration’s Nevada Site, told the Deseret Morning News that nothing in the test was designed “to help develop a new weapon.”
But Steve Erickson, director of the Citizens Education Project in Utah and a longtime opponent of nuclear testing in Nevada, believes the British press reports — and is worried by them, and about U.K.-U.S. mutual defense agreements that allow testing in Nevada.
“We have never fielded a brand-new design for a warhead without nuclear testing it first,” Erickson said.
“They’ve crossed a crucial threshold with that last test,” Erickson added. “With it, we charge that they have moved into weapon development as opposed to stockpile sustainment. . . . Why are we doing this to help the British?”
Erickson worries that underground nuclear tests could occur again, but not the open-air tests that led to cancer downwind in Utah. Congress later apologized for those tests and created a compensation fund for some downwind cancer victims.

The Times of London, however, quoted unnamed British defense officials saying they figured they would need to develop new warheads without full nuclear testing because of the Comprehensive Test Ban Treaty. They said they instead likely would have to depend on “subcritical” tests coupled with analysis by supercomputers.

How is this keeping in adherence to the Non-Proliferation Treaty????

The Deseret News states that “underground tests are safer” (but can still leak radiation).

SAFER FOR WHAT AND FOR WHOM???? There is no such thing as a safe nuclear test. No matter the form of the test, it is UNSAFE FOR OUR PLANET.