This article was previously published in The Hill Times.

The legacy of strikes on nuclear sites has made evident that nuclear power plants and waste disposal sites could become targets in conflict zones.

By Erika Simpson| September 2, 2024

Rafael Grossi, the director-general of the International Atomic Energy Agency says he will visit the Kursk nuclear power station in south-west Russia this week. He is taking “very seriously” the risk that the facility could be damaged during Ukraine’s incursion into the region.

The nuclear station is situated about 40 kilometres west of the city of Kursk, home to about 500,000 people. The station has two active reactors, two decommissioned older units, and two partly built ones. The two operating reactors have no protective dome. “It’s a Chernobyl-type plant,” Grossi said, with the reactor core “totally exposed.”

Ukrainian forces are advancing within range of the Kursk Nuclear Power Plant (KNPP), according to open sources, and Grossi noted that it is located “technically within artillery range” of Ukrainian positions. On Aug. 22, a Ukrainian drone carrying an anti-tank grenade was intercepted and downed near the spent fuel storage at the KNPP, Russian state-owned news agency TASS reported. The drone was brought down by electronic warfare countermeasures. The unmanned aircraft bore the logo of Ukraine’s Army of Drones project, and the Russian Federation informed the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) on Aug. 22 that its remains were found within the territory of the nuclear plant.

It may be possible to seriously damage a spent nuclear fuel pool with a drone. Spent fuel-pools contain some of the highest concentrations of radioactivity on the planet. Should a pool lose its cooling water, exposing spent fuel rods to steam or air, the rods will heat to the point of rupture, releasing enough radiation to seriously contaminate thousands of square kilometres.

Ukraine is deploying thousands of troops into the Kursk region, which includes the nuclear plant. Russian officials, including President Vladimir Putin, have accused Ukraine of targeting the facility during the incursion.

Natural Resources Canada and the Nuclear Waste Management Organization (NWMO) can learn valuable lessons from the attacks on Kursk, and on Ukraine’s own Zaporizhian nuclear power plant, which has been under Russian control since early 2022.

The first lesson is that we need to keep radioactive waste out of the biosphere, but Canada’s new radioactive waste policy appears to provide the nuclear industry with free license to abandon radioactive waste quickly and cheaply. That will leave North Americans with little protection from radioactive wastes that will remain hazardous for tens of thousands of years.

According to critics, Canada’s new policy fails to address problems identified by the IAEA which explicitly said defunct nuclear reactors should not be entombed in place except in extreme circumstances. Yet the new policy enables the abandonment of reactors beside Lake Huron (the Bruce reactors), Lake Ontario (Darlington and Pickering reactors), and the Ottawa and Winnipeg rivers.

Ukrainians and Russians did not give free, prior, and informed consent before the Russian-designed nuclear reactors were built. But Canada must obtain permission to store or dispose of waste on Indigenous Peoples’ territories, as laid out in article 29(2) of the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. Canada affirmed the declaration, but a proposed radioactive waste site in unceded Algonquin territory is close to approval, and would violate this principle.

Broad-stroke reassurances from supporters of another proposed deep geological repository for Canada’s nuclear waste have failed to allay important environmental and serious security concerns for current and future generations.

This October, the tiny community of Teeswater, Ont., will hold a municipal referendum on the plan to store all of Canada’s high-level nuclear waste in one deep geological repository (DGR). An earlier plan had proposed burying intermediate- and low-level nuclear waste in limestone caverns constructed under the Bruce reactor, but was met with a “no” vote from members of the Saugeen-Ojibway Nation. That led to Bruce Power withdrawing its own proposal in June 2020.

The current proposal for a $23-billion DGR project may be constructed 50 kilometres away from the Bruce Nuclear Generating Station, the world’s largest operating nuclear site that supplies 30 per cent of Ontario’s power. Whether the proposal goes ahead in partnership with a willing host community will be decided by the Governor in Council. Once one of the two remaining possible host communities—either Teeswater or Ignace, Ont.—is selected, the Canadian Nuclear Safety Commission and the Impact Assessment Agency of Canada will continue to lead decades-long consultation processes.

The legacy of strikes on nuclear sites, like the Russian assault on Ukraine’s Zaporizhzhia nuclear plant, has made evident that nuclear power plants and waste disposal sites could become targets in conflict zones. Few people in Canada are publicly asking about terrorist threats, and whether the site could become hostage to nefarious bargaining.

In light of the attacks on nuclear power plants in Europe, the NWMO—which is responsible for developing and implementing Canada’s plan—should reconsider other options, such as a rolling stewardship model, which actively plans for retrieval and periodic repackaging of nuclear waste.

Erika Simpson is an associate professor of international politics at Western University, the author of Nuclear Waste Burial in Canada? The Political Controversy over the Proposal to Construct a Deep Geologic Repository, and Nuclear waste: Solution or problem? She is also the president of the Canadian Peace Research Association.

Climate Intervention for Human Survival

By Robin Collins

Review of two books: Intervention Earth: Life-Saving Ideas from the World’s Climate Engineers, by Gwynne Dyer (2024); and Pandora’s Toolbox: The Hopes and Hazards of Climater Intervention, by Wake Smith (2022). This review was previously published in Peace Magazine, April-June 2024.

If you think the climate situation is noticeably worse than five years ago, you are not imagining it. The two books under review here agree and focus on why “net zero” and an energy transition away from fossil fuels are insufficient solutions to the crisis. Gwynne Dyer and Wake Smith cover similar territory. Dyer is a storyteller with an emphasis on quoting from the 100 climate experts he consulted (including Wake Smith) about climate interventions, and in particular Solar Radiation Modification (SRM) and carbon dioxide removal (CDR). Both authors lead us ultimately, convincingly, even reluctantly towards SRM advocacy: The reflection of the sun’s heat back out into space. If you are inclined to be skeptical of human engineered solutions, their arguments should challenge. Smith and Dyer both support the adage that only loss instructs, and they see resistance by many environmentalists and activists, not to mention governments, to embrace climate engineering.

Robin Collins is a CPG Board member.

For the full reviews, continue here: CollinsReview_Dyer.Smith.PMJuly2024

 

By Sean Howard

Published in The Cape Breton Post, July 27, 2024

On February 4, 2022, defence journalists William Arkin and Marc Ambinder warned in Newsweek that the “Ukraine crisis could lead to nuclear war” under a “new strategy” dangerously blurring the lines between nuclear and non-nuclear capabilities. The secret masterplan, whose existence was unearthed through a Freedom of Information act request by Federation of American Scientists nuclear expert Hans Kristensen, also shifts the focus from preventing to prevailing in nuclear war, in preparing American – and allied – forces for what the Pentagon calls a “post-NUDET [nuclear detonation] radiological environment”. Or, to resurrect the wretched WW1 rallying cry, to get ‘ready, aye, ready’ for WW3.

Twenty days later, Russia’s illegal invasion of Ukraine ironically helped bury the story, along with routinely reckless nuclear rhetoric from President Putin. Yet Putin’s strange love for the Bomb is just the latest variation of a recurrent nuclear-age theme: the tendency of states that possess these monstrous weapons to become in turn possessed by them, tempted by their ‘trump card’ into overplaying their hand, as the US did so catastrophically in Iraq in 2003. And two and a half years into ‘Putin’s war,’ we drift toward unparalleled disaster not only because of his apparent, poker-face willingness to ‘go nuclear’ and do so first, or because of NATO’s identical posture and doctrine, but because of America’s fantastical new ‘strategy’.

As Arkin and Ambinder outline, the 1,000+page plan, adopted by President Trump and endorsed by President Biden,  integrates conventional, nuclear, cyber, space and other ‘assets’ in a way that radically “obscures the nuclear firebreak and makes escalation more likely,” as “an adversary such as Russia can be confused about where preparations for nuclear war start, and whether a multi-domain attack is merely a defense or the makings of a first strike”: ‘makings’, in turn, making a Russian (or, in a Taiwan crisis, a Chinese) first strike dramatically more likely.

Incredibly, the Trump-Biden plan, anticipating such a catastrophic turn of events, directs US nuclear bombers to get ready, in the pinch of crisis, to spread themselves as thinly and widely as possible, thus increasing the number of targets Russia/China will then feel obliged to ‘nuke’! America’s 400 silo-based Intercontinental Ballistic Missiles (ICBMs), spread across Wyoming, Montana, and North Dakota, would be sitting ducks (creating a classic ‘use them or lose them’ scenario); its nuclear-armed submarines, carrying hundreds of warheads, would be hidden in deep ocean, crews awaiting orders from a possibly smoldering homeland; but its 60 long-range bombers, carrying around 300 warheads, could, in a cunning ruse known as “agile combat employment,” be dispersed to as many airfields as possible, enabling some of them to survive and engage, as one planner blandly told Arkin and Ambinder,  in “extended warfighting.”

And not just American airfields, for as the Newsweek article notes, in December 2021 nuclear-capable B-52s “hopscotched to an airbase in western Canada called Shilo,” 35 miles east of Brandon, Manitoba, one of “a growing list of remote locations”: and another bull’s-eye for Russia to hit. The object of such exercises, according to one officer involved, is “challenging predictability”; but the predictable effect will be to make nuclear escalation more probable.

And what that means, as General Robert Kehler, former Commander of US Strategic Command, told defence journalist Annie Jacobsen, is that “the world could end in the next couple of hours.” In her new book Nuclear War: A Scenario, Jacobsen shows, in atrocious detail, just how credible this incredible claim is, how human civilization could “get zeroed out” in a day. Her scenario involved a sneak North Korean attack, rather than a Russia-NATO conflagration; but with nine nuclear-armed nations, and more in the wings, multiple pathways to Hell lie open. As we approach the 79th anniversary of the atomic destruction of Hiroshima (August 6) and Nagasaki (August 9), shouldn’t we be trying to disarm the Monster, dismantle the Bomb, rather than disperse the bombers?

Dr. Sean Howard is adjunct professor of political science at Cape Breton University, and campaign coordinator for Peace Quest Cape Breton. He is a member of Canadian Pugwash Group.

Nuclear disarmament agreements have collapsed and a renewed nuclear arms race is underway (though the “nuclear club” of states in possession of these weapons calls it “modernization”). An existential nuclear crisis of frightening proportions is unfolding.

Nine countries currently possess around 12,000 nuclear weapons, with 90 per cent of these held by Russia and the U.S. All told, some 2,100 nuclear weapons are kept in a state of high operational alert, meaning they could be fired with 15 minutes’ notice. Just one of these weapons would inflict far more damage than the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945, which together killed an estimated 214,000 people.

In 1970, the Treaty on the Non-Proliferation of Nuclear Weapons (NPT) came into existence. Now comprising 191 countries, it obliges states to pursue comprehensive negotiations in “good faith” toward the elimination of nuclear weapons. At the 2000 NPT review conference, all states pledged an “unequivocal undertaking” to accomplish total elimination. But instead of proceeding toward negotiations, the nuclear states reneged on their legal obligations under the treaty and ignored a unanimous ruling by the International Court of Justice in 1996, which determined that the use or threat of the use of nuclear weapons by a state is generally illegal, and that nuclear disarmament negotiations must be concluded.

Two successive meetings of the NPT parties in 2015 and 2022 fell apart. The U.S./Russia New START Treaty, limiting deployed strategic nuclear warheads to 1,550 on each side, is the only remaining bilateral nuclear disarmament agreement, and it expires in 2026. Talks to extend the New START Treaty have broken down, with each side blaming the other for the impasse, and so the world enters a nuclear jungle. What do the Canadian Prime Minister and Foreign Minister say about all this?

The answer is nothing. You can search all day, but you will find that neither has made a single speech or substantive statement to Canadians on this, the gravest crisis – the threat of global humanitarian catastrophe – facing the world since the Second World War.

Canada, as a member of the Manhattan Project as well as the NPT, clearly has the credentials and duty to speak on this subject. But Ottawa’s deafening silence is broken only when it affirms NATO’s Orwellian characterization of these weapons of mass destruction as the “supreme guarantee” of our security. Canada refuses to join the new Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons, which bans the possession of nuclear weapons for those who sign up (70 states have so far ratified the treaty). And it has ignored the desperate plea made by UN Secretary-General Antonio Guterres in March for a concerted drive by all countries to lessen the risk of nuclear Armageddon.

In this desperate global situation, Canada needs to show the same resolve it showed on earlier occasions regarding nuclear weapons. Canada showed its leadership when Lester Pearson sent a UN peacekeeping mission to the Suez crisis in 1957, as Nikita Khrushchev threatened to fire nuclear weapons at Western Europe. We showed leadership when Pierre Trudeau proposed a strategy to “suffocate” the nuclear arms race in 1978; when Brian Mulroney declined, in 1985, to participate in the U.S. “Star Wars” anti-missile space program; and when Jean Chrétien kept Canada out of the Iraq war in 2003 over dubious claims regarding “weapons of mass destruction.”

The current nuclear crisis calls for the bold reassertion of Canadian leadership. The Prime Minister and the Minister of Foreign Affairs both have the moral and political duty to speak directly and regularly to Canadians about the nuclear crisis the world faces, to elaborate Canada’s posture in response to that crisis, and to set out the measures and policies it has and will continue to pursue in international settings to mitigate it.

At a minimum, Canada should be a leading voice urging the nuclear powers, including the NATO nuclear alliance, to undertake mutual commitments to never be the first state to use nuclear weapons and to take all nuclear weapons off of high-alert status. Canada should be calling for and monitoring progress toward a New START successor treaty and should promote intensified strategic dialogue among the major powers.

This leadership must start with the Prime Minister. The failure to publicly address the nuclear crisis is a shocking failure of leadership – a failure these perilous times cannot afford.

______________________________________

Originally published in the Globe and Mail, June 27, 2024

* Ernie Regehr is the founding executive director of Project Ploughshares. Douglas Roche is a former senator and Canadian ambassador for disarmament. They are members of Canadian Pugwash Group.

Re Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament

Letter to Bev Delong (co-ordinator), Canadian Pugwash Group, Canadians for a Nuclear Weapons Convention, Canadian Network to Abolish Nuclear Weapons and Project Ploughshares. This is a response to a letter sent to Global Afairs Canada on October 30, 2023.

GAC Response to CNWC – Canada’s Role in Nuclear Disarmament