Monthly Archives: April 2016

Is it the end? BP’s arts sponsorship runs aground

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On Monday, almost a hundred cultural figures, politicians and academics published a letter calling on the new director of the British Museum to end its sponsorship deal with BP.

They argued that to receive sponsorship from BP is to condone its business plan – one that is incompatible with a stable climate.

Since then, cynics have tried to discredit the signatories – but yesterday they were stopped in their tracks.

After a 34-year partnership with BP, Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) launched its new programme – but this time without BP’s cash.

BP blamed the end of the deal on a “challenging business environment” – oddly enough, exactly the same excuse it gave just weeks ago when the end of its sponsorship deal with Tate was announced.

It’s clearly not true. The amount of money the company provides to Tate – and to the British Museum – represents just a couple of hours’ worth of the £2 billion profit they made last year. In reality, public pressure and protest had become too great for these deals to continue.

The truth – ‘big oil’ provides small potatoes

Writing in the Telegraph on Monday, Tom Harris claimed to be concerned about the “shed-loads of cash” the British Museum would lose if it decided to drop BP. I’m also concerned about cuts to arts funding but BP’s so-called ‘donations’ make up just 0.8% of the British Museum’s budget. And with the EIF launching a blockbuster programme without BP sponsorship, it’s clear that these institutions are far from reliant on oil money.

But what would happen if the British Museum did take a stand? Cutting out BP would not put the museum’s core work at risk, and it’s likely that the majority of staff would welcome such a move.

A survey by the PCS union last month found that 66% of British Museum workers are supportive of the anti-BP protests. And in a poll commissioned by the campaign group Platform, 49.6% of Londoners agreed that the British Museum should drop BP as a sponsor.

Tom Harris rightly points out that “expecting the public to dig even deeper at this time of austerity is a non-starter.” So maybe he should consider the vast amounts taxpayers are currently giving to fossil fuel companies, including BP, in the form of misguided tax breaks and subsidies that run into billions of pounds.

Redirecting a tiny fraction of this to the arts would provide far more money than BP’s current contribution. It could also be shared around theatres, museums and galleries across the UK in desperate need of the cash (and in which BP has no interest at all).

Right wing media condoning corporate criminality

Writing in The Times, Stephen Pollard scoffed at the idea that “BP is beyond the pale as it produces not arms or cigarettes, but oil.” But like with cigarettes, we know the risks of not quitting. For BP to continue extracting new sources of oil – when we must leave around 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change – marks it out as a company on the wrong side of history.

And did he miss the announcement this week of BP’s historic $20 billion settlement over its Gulf of Mexico spill? Or the record-breaking fines that made BP the world’s biggest corporate criminal?

In an attempt to sound more balanced, Michael Skapinker argued in the FT that refusing oil sponsorship would not advance the fight against climate change. But he’s wrong. BP has been relentlessly lobbying against crucial climate change legislation for decades – it knows that its profits depend on keeping society hooked on fossil fuels.

And BP’s ability to influence policy-makers is only possible with the crucial social legitimacy that comes from, amongst other things, sponsoring respected cultural institutions.

It is vital to delegitimise the fossil fuel industry, by divesting and denying it the PR-benefits of sponsorship, in order to reduce its power over policy-makers. With that obstacle to progress removed, we might actually have a chance of tackling dangerous climate change.

‘They are sponsoring death in our communities’

The irony for the British Museum though is that while it preserves the past, BP is putting the future at risk, and not just through its contribution to climate change. Many communities have had their rights trampled by BP, from Indigenous communities opposing the Canadian tar sands extraction to its partnerships with repressive regimes, such as in West Papua, Egypt and Azerbaijan.

BP’s values are fundamentally at odds with those claimed by the British Museum and if the museum does decide to renew its BP sponsorship this year, it will have firmly placed BP’s tainted money above the public’s trust in it.

We believe the people we should really listen to are those living with the realities of BP’s operations. US Gulf Coast residents contributed some genuine crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill to A History of BP in 10 Objects, our recent unsanctioned exhibition in the British Museum’s Great Court.

Cherri Foytlin, from that community, puts it starkly: “Since 2010, there are a lot more graves in the Gulf of Mexico than there were before, and that’s just the truth. So any time we see arts organisations take on BP as a sponsor, we want to make sure those institutions understand that they are sponsoring death.

“They are sponsoring death in our communities.”

 

 

Chris Garrard is a composer and member of the campaign group, BP or not BP? which is part of the Art Not Oil coalition.

 

Patrick Holden: ‘cheap’ food is costing the Earth, and our health

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The post war drive for food security through industrial farming and ever-cheaper food has, ironically, put both our health and the future of farming at risk.

Food prices have been kept artificially low, while the true costs of food production have been obscured – and are increasingly unaffordable. A conference taking place next week in San Francisco aims to put this right: The True Cost of American Food.

Patrick Holden – dairy farmer, sustainable food campaigner and organiser of the conference – believes that sustainable farming is being held back by the way that food prices are kept artificially low through mechanisms which hide the real cost of foods and place those costs elsewhere – on communities, our health, and the environment.

“When we unravel the hidden costs of food and farming, we find that our food systems are generating diets which we pay for many times over in hidden ways”, he says. “They are making us sick and degrading the environment, which is vital to the future of our food security and health.

“Everyone has a right to good food that is affordable and nutritious, but the belief that making food cheap was the most important goal, facilitated damage to our natural environment and public health. This was made possible by cheap oil and technological innovation. It was hard for consumers to see the changes to the food we eat, as companies increasingly obscured the story of how our food is produced.

“If you told the real story of farming, what goes on behind closed doors would be upsetting. It’s covered up by brands with images of outdoor mixed farms, with cows in meadows and hedgerow-lined hay fields blooming with wild flowers.”

Milk cheaper than bottled water

Patrick had an urban childhood, like millions of other people who live in cities now, but his family moved back to the land in the 1970s to live on a farm. His deep understanding of agricultural practice developed from farming his mixed dairy farm in Wales, where he still farms as sustainably as possible.

This produces food that appears cheap on the supermarket shelves. Seems more affordable and cheap for many people, more so now than ever before in history, as we  But Patrick is involved in research with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that traces the true costs of food.

That means he knows from personal experience the plight faced by many farmers: “Dairy farmers are now slaves to the commodity market. To survive economically, they need more and more cows, kept more and more intensively. Milk is sold for much less than the cost of its production – it costs less than a bottle of water now. How on earth can this be? Milk is a vital source of nutrition and farmers should be paid for the true cost of its production.”

Of course for many families it’s great that we spend less now than ever before on food: most of us spend less than 10% of our disposable income on food – and this is seen as a good thing. But that cheap food comes at a high price:

“The apparent cheapness of food is an illusion, because behind the price tag lie a series of hidden costs, none of which are reflected in the price of food. These hidden costs are paid in damage to the environment, depletion of the Earth’s resources, and public health.”

Adding up the impacts

Patrick is involved in research with the UN’s The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) initiative that traces the true costs of food. But to make all those statistics real, he says, take a carton of milk, and consider the costs of its that we have to pay for without realizing it – on top of the suffering that’s routinely inflicted on animals under industrial farming systems.

“You’ve got damage to the environment from the pollution of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, degradation of the soil and declining biodiversity, along with the contribution that agriculture makes to climate change.

“Then there’s a high cost in human health, especially, at the moment, in the rise of untreatable infectious diseases from the over-use of antibiotics in humans and farm animals. But this also includes the costs of the obesity epidemic caused by industrialised diets.

“And there are significant social costs – agricultural workers suffer unduly from labour abuses across the world which sometimes extend to the condition of slavery. These costs are not currently paid in the price of our food and this is not being recognized by politicians nor properly addressed by the people who should be addressing them.”

The True Cost of American Food

What is needed, he says, is a ‘True Cost’ account of our food system. That’s one of the core missions of the Sustainable Food Trust, which Patrick launched in 2013 at a major conference on the topic in London, bringing together the world’s leading experts on True Cost Accounting.

“For obvious reasons all farmers have to follow the best business case”, says Patrick. “But right now if you farm intensively and cause damage to the environment and public health, you will make more money than if you switch to sustainable methods. The aim of the San Francisco conference is to do something about that – we want to create the conditions where producing food in a sustainable way is the most profitable option for producers and the most affordable for consumers.

“We believe there are many opportunities to intervene and shift the dial in this direction. For instance, we can redirect Farm Bill subsidies to favour sustainable practices, we can tax farming which causes damage to the environment or public health, we can harness the power of the financial community to preferentially invest in sustainable agriculture and food companies.

“It’s all about carrots and sticks, we want to encourage the right kind of farming which benefits the environment and public health and discourages food systems which lead to climate change, pollution and disease.”

Next week’s ‘The True Cost of American Food’ conference will bring together leading experts on the environmental, human health, and cultural impacts and costs of American food systems with a clear objective in mind: to fulfil the right of every citizen to affordable, healthy, sustainable food.

 

 

Conference: The True Cost of American Food conference will begin with a reception on Thursday 14th April, and will feature keynote addresses, local and artisan food, and a cultural program.

This will be followed by a full two days of plenary and two sets of 8 parallel sessions on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th April at the Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. The Sunday offers a variety of field trips to local food businesses and farms.

World class speakers will discuss the reasons why food from the most damaging production systems appears cheap, when its real cost to the environment and public health is very high. They will also explore ways in which the food and agricultural economics can be made more honest, thus creating the conditions for a major global transition to more sustainable food production and consumption.

Register for the conference online.

Find out more about the Sustainable Food Trust.

 

Is it the end? BP’s arts sponsorship runs aground

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On Monday, almost a hundred cultural figures, politicians and academics published a letter calling on the new director of the British Museum to end its sponsorship deal with BP.

They argued that to receive sponsorship from BP is to condone its business plan – one that is incompatible with a stable climate.

Since then, cynics have tried to discredit the signatories – but yesterday they were stopped in their tracks.

After a 34-year partnership with BP, Edinburgh International Festival (EIF) launched its new programme – but this time without BP’s cash.

BP blamed the end of the deal on a “challenging business environment” – oddly enough, exactly the same excuse it gave just weeks ago when the end of its sponsorship deal with Tate was announced.

It’s clearly not true. The amount of money the company provides to Tate – and to the British Museum – represents just a couple of hours’ worth of the £2 billion profit they made last year. In reality, public pressure and protest had become too great for these deals to continue.

The truth – ‘big oil’ provides small potatoes

Writing in the Telegraph on Monday, Tom Harris claimed to be concerned about the “shed-loads of cash” the British Museum would lose if it decided to drop BP. I’m also concerned about cuts to arts funding but BP’s so-called ‘donations’ make up just 0.8% of the British Museum’s budget. And with the EIF launching a blockbuster programme without BP sponsorship, it’s clear that these institutions are far from reliant on oil money.

But what would happen if the British Museum did take a stand? Cutting out BP would not put the museum’s core work at risk, and it’s likely that the majority of staff would welcome such a move.

A survey by the PCS union last month found that 66% of British Museum workers are supportive of the anti-BP protests. And in a poll commissioned by the campaign group Platform, 49.6% of Londoners agreed that the British Museum should drop BP as a sponsor.

Tom Harris rightly points out that “expecting the public to dig even deeper at this time of austerity is a non-starter.” So maybe he should consider the vast amounts taxpayers are currently giving to fossil fuel companies, including BP, in the form of misguided tax breaks and subsidies that run into billions of pounds.

Redirecting a tiny fraction of this to the arts would provide far more money than BP’s current contribution. It could also be shared around theatres, museums and galleries across the UK in desperate need of the cash (and in which BP has no interest at all).

Right wing media condoning corporate criminality

Writing in The Times, Stephen Pollard scoffed at the idea that “BP is beyond the pale as it produces not arms or cigarettes, but oil.” But like with cigarettes, we know the risks of not quitting. For BP to continue extracting new sources of oil – when we must leave around 80% of known fossil fuel reserves in the ground in order to avoid catastrophic climate change – marks it out as a company on the wrong side of history.

And did he miss the announcement this week of BP’s historic $20 billion settlement over its Gulf of Mexico spill? Or the record-breaking fines that made BP the world’s biggest corporate criminal?

In an attempt to sound more balanced, Michael Skapinker argued in the FT that refusing oil sponsorship would not advance the fight against climate change. But he’s wrong. BP has been relentlessly lobbying against crucial climate change legislation for decades – it knows that its profits depend on keeping society hooked on fossil fuels.

And BP’s ability to influence policy-makers is only possible with the crucial social legitimacy that comes from, amongst other things, sponsoring respected cultural institutions.

It is vital to delegitimise the fossil fuel industry, by divesting and denying it the PR-benefits of sponsorship, in order to reduce its power over policy-makers. With that obstacle to progress removed, we might actually have a chance of tackling dangerous climate change.

‘They are sponsoring death in our communities’

The irony for the British Museum though is that while it preserves the past, BP is putting the future at risk, and not just through its contribution to climate change. Many communities have had their rights trampled by BP, from Indigenous communities opposing the Canadian tar sands extraction to its partnerships with repressive regimes, such as in West Papua, Egypt and Azerbaijan.

BP’s values are fundamentally at odds with those claimed by the British Museum and if the museum does decide to renew its BP sponsorship this year, it will have firmly placed BP’s tainted money above the public’s trust in it.

We believe the people we should really listen to are those living with the realities of BP’s operations. US Gulf Coast residents contributed some genuine crude oil from the Deepwater Horizon spill to A History of BP in 10 Objects, our recent unsanctioned exhibition in the British Museum’s Great Court.

Cherri Foytlin, from that community, puts it starkly: “Since 2010, there are a lot more graves in the Gulf of Mexico than there were before, and that’s just the truth. So any time we see arts organisations take on BP as a sponsor, we want to make sure those institutions understand that they are sponsoring death.

“They are sponsoring death in our communities.”

 

 

Chris Garrard is a composer and member of the campaign group, BP or not BP? which is part of the Art Not Oil coalition.

 

Patrick Holden: ‘cheap’ food is costing the Earth, and our health

Leave a reply

The post war drive for food security through industrial farming and ever-cheaper food has, ironically, put both our health and the future of farming at risk.

Food prices have been kept artificially low, while the true costs of food production have been obscured – and are increasingly unaffordable. A conference taking place next week in San Francisco aims to put this right: The True Cost of American Food.

Patrick Holden – dairy farmer, sustainable food campaigner and organiser of the conference – believes that sustainable farming is being held back by the way that food prices are kept artificially low through mechanisms which hide the real cost of foods and place those costs elsewhere – on communities, our health, and the environment.

“When we unravel the hidden costs of food and farming, we find that our food systems are generating diets which we pay for many times over in hidden ways”, he says. “They are making us sick and degrading the environment, which is vital to the future of our food security and health.

“Everyone has a right to good food that is affordable and nutritious, but the belief that making food cheap was the most important goal, facilitated damage to our natural environment and public health. This was made possible by cheap oil and technological innovation. It was hard for consumers to see the changes to the food we eat, as companies increasingly obscured the story of how our food is produced.

“If you told the real story of farming, what goes on behind closed doors would be upsetting. It’s covered up by brands with images of outdoor mixed farms, with cows in meadows and hedgerow-lined hay fields blooming with wild flowers.”

Milk cheaper than bottled water

Patrick had an urban childhood, like millions of other people who live in cities now, but his family moved back to the land in the 1970s to live on a farm. His deep understanding of agricultural practice developed from farming his mixed dairy farm in Wales, where he still farms as sustainably as possible.

This produces food that appears cheap on the supermarket shelves. Seems more affordable and cheap for many people, more so now than ever before in history, as we  But Patrick is involved in research with the UN’s Food and Agriculture Organisation (FAO) that traces the true costs of food.

That means he knows from personal experience the plight faced by many farmers: “Dairy farmers are now slaves to the commodity market. To survive economically, they need more and more cows, kept more and more intensively. Milk is sold for much less than the cost of its production – it costs less than a bottle of water now. How on earth can this be? Milk is a vital source of nutrition and farmers should be paid for the true cost of its production.”

Of course for many families it’s great that we spend less now than ever before on food: most of us spend less than 10% of our disposable income on food – and this is seen as a good thing. But that cheap food comes at a high price:

“The apparent cheapness of food is an illusion, because behind the price tag lie a series of hidden costs, none of which are reflected in the price of food. These hidden costs are paid in damage to the environment, depletion of the Earth’s resources, and public health.”

Adding up the impacts

Patrick is involved in research with the UN’s The Economics of Ecosystems and Biodiversity (TEEB) initiative that traces the true costs of food. But to make all those statistics real, he says, take a carton of milk, and consider the costs of its that we have to pay for without realizing it – on top of the suffering that’s routinely inflicted on animals under industrial farming systems.

“You’ve got damage to the environment from the pollution of chemical fertilisers and pesticides, degradation of the soil and declining biodiversity, along with the contribution that agriculture makes to climate change.

“Then there’s a high cost in human health, especially, at the moment, in the rise of untreatable infectious diseases from the over-use of antibiotics in humans and farm animals. But this also includes the costs of the obesity epidemic caused by industrialised diets.

“And there are significant social costs – agricultural workers suffer unduly from labour abuses across the world which sometimes extend to the condition of slavery. These costs are not currently paid in the price of our food and this is not being recognized by politicians nor properly addressed by the people who should be addressing them.”

The True Cost of American Food

What is needed, he says, is a ‘True Cost’ account of our food system. That’s one of the core missions of the Sustainable Food Trust, which Patrick launched in 2013 at a major conference on the topic in London, bringing together the world’s leading experts on True Cost Accounting.

“For obvious reasons all farmers have to follow the best business case”, says Patrick. “But right now if you farm intensively and cause damage to the environment and public health, you will make more money than if you switch to sustainable methods. The aim of the San Francisco conference is to do something about that – we want to create the conditions where producing food in a sustainable way is the most profitable option for producers and the most affordable for consumers.

“We believe there are many opportunities to intervene and shift the dial in this direction. For instance, we can redirect Farm Bill subsidies to favour sustainable practices, we can tax farming which causes damage to the environment or public health, we can harness the power of the financial community to preferentially invest in sustainable agriculture and food companies.

“It’s all about carrots and sticks, we want to encourage the right kind of farming which benefits the environment and public health and discourages food systems which lead to climate change, pollution and disease.”

Next week’s ‘The True Cost of American Food’ conference will bring together leading experts on the environmental, human health, and cultural impacts and costs of American food systems with a clear objective in mind: to fulfil the right of every citizen to affordable, healthy, sustainable food.

 

 

Conference: The True Cost of American Food conference will begin with a reception on Thursday 14th April, and will feature keynote addresses, local and artisan food, and a cultural program.

This will be followed by a full two days of plenary and two sets of 8 parallel sessions on Friday 15th and Saturday 16th April at the Fort Mason Center, San Francisco. The Sunday offers a variety of field trips to local food businesses and farms.

World class speakers will discuss the reasons why food from the most damaging production systems appears cheap, when its real cost to the environment and public health is very high. They will also explore ways in which the food and agricultural economics can be made more honest, thus creating the conditions for a major global transition to more sustainable food production and consumption.

Register for the conference online.

Find out more about the Sustainable Food Trust.

 

Radiation harm deniers? Pro-nuclear environmentalists and the Chernobyl death toll

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With few if any exceptions, self-styled pro-nuclear environmentalists peddle flapdoodle and tommyrot regarding the Chernobyl death toll.

Before considering their misinformation, a brief summary of credible positions and scientific studies regarding the Chernobyl cancer death toll (for detail see this earlier article in The Ecologist).

Epidemiological studies are of course important but they’re of limited use in estimating the overall Chernobyl death toll. The effects of Chernobyl, however large or small, are largely lost in the statistical noise of widespread cancer incidence and mortality.

The most up-to-date scientific review is the TORCH-2016 report written by radiation biologist Dr Ian Fairlie. Dr Fairlie sifts through a vast number of scientific papers and points to studies indicative of Chernobyl impacts:

  • an increased incidence of radiogenic thyroid cancers in Austria;
  • an increased incidence of leukemia among sub-populations in ex-Soviet states (and possibly other countries – more research needs to be done);
  • increases in solid cancers, leukemia and thyroid cancer among clean-up workers;
  • increased rates of cardiovascular disease and stroke that might be connected to Chernobyl (more research needs to be done);
  • a large study revealing statistically significant increases in nervous system birth defects in highly contaminated areas in Russia, similar to the elevated rates observed in contaminated areas in Ukraine; and more.


So what else have we got?

Without for a moment dismissing the importance of the epidemiological record, let alone the importance of further research, suffice it here to note that there is no way that one could even begin to estimate the total Chernobyl death toll from the existing body of studies.

Estimates of collective radiation exposure are available – for example the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) estimates a total collective dose of 600,000 person-Sieverts over 50 years from Chernobyl fallout. And the collective radiation dose can be used to estimate the death toll using the Linear No Threshold (LNT) model.

If we use the IAEA’s collective radiation dose estimate, and a risk estimate derived from LNT (0.1 cancer deaths per person-Sievert), we get an estimate of 60,000 cancer deaths. Sometimes a risk estimate of 0.05 is used to account for the possibility of decreased risks at low doses and/or low dose rates – in other words, 0.05 is the risk estimate when applying a ‘dose and dose rate effectiveness factor’ or DDREF of two. That gives an estimate of 30,000 deaths.

Any number of studies (including studies published in peer-reviewed scientific literature) use LNT – or LNT with a DDREF – to estimate the Chernobyl death toll. These studies produce estimates ranging from 9,000 cancer deaths (in the most contaminated parts of the former Soviet Union) to 93,000 cancer deaths (across Europe).

Those are the credible estimates of the cancer death toll from Chernobyl. None of them are conclusive – far from it – but that’s the nature of the problem we’re dealing with.

Moreover, LNT may underestimate risks. The 2006 report of the US National Academy of Sciences’ Committee on the Biological Effects of Ionising Radiation (BEIR) states: “The committee recognizes that its risk estimates become more uncertain when applied to very low doses. Departures from a linear model at low doses, however, could either increase or decrease the risk per unit dose.”

So the true Chernobyl cancer death toll could be lower or higher than the LNT-derived estimate of 60,000 deaths – a point that needs emphasis and constant repetition since the nuclear industry and its supporters frequently conflate an uncertain long-term death toll with a long-term death toll of zero.

Another defensible position is that the long-term Chernobyl cancer death toll is unknown and unknowable because of the uncertainties associated with the science. The UN Scientific Committee on the Effects of Atomic Radiation (UNSCEAR) states (p.64):

“The Committee has decided not to use models to project absolute numbers of effects in populations exposed to low radiation doses from the Chernobyl accident, because of unacceptable uncertainties in the predictions. It should be stressed that the approach outlined in no way contradicts the application of the LNT model for the purposes of radiation protection, where a cautious approach is conventionally and consciously applied.”

Pro-nuclear environmentalists

So there are two defensible positions regarding the Chernobyl cancer death toll – estimates based on collective dose estimates (with or without a DDREF or a margin of error in either direction), and UNSCEAR’s position that the death toll is uncertain.

A third position – unqualified claims that the Chernobyl death toll was just 50 or so, comprising some emergency responders and a small percentage of those who later suffered from thyroid cancer – should be rejected as dishonest or uninformed spin from the nuclear industry and some of its scientifically-illiterate supporters.

Those illiterate supporters include every last one of the self-styled pro-nuclear environmentalists (PNEs). We should note in passing that some PNE’s have genuine environmental credentials while others – such as Patrick Moore and Australian Ben Heard – are in the pay of the nuclear industry.

James Hansen and George Monbiot cite UNSCEAR to justify a Chernobyl death toll of 43, without noting that the UNSCEAR report did not attempt to calculate long-term deaths. James Lovelock asserts that “in fact, only 42 people died” from the Chernobyl disaster.

Patrick Moore, citing the UN Chernobyl Forum (which included UN agencies such as the IAEA, UNSCEAR, and WHO), states that Chernobyl resulted in 56 deaths. In fact, the Chernobyl Forum’s 2005 report (p.16) estimated up to 4,000 long-term cancer deaths among the higher-exposed Chernobyl populations, and a follow-up study by the World Health Organisation in 2006 estimated an additional 5,000 deaths among people exposed to lower doses in Belarus, the Russian Federation and Ukraine.

Australian ‘ecomodernist‘ academic Barry Brook says the Chernobyl death toll is less than 60. Ben Heard, another Australian ‘ecomodernist’ (in fact a uranium and nuclear industry consultant), claims that the death toll was 43.

In 2010, Mark Lynas said the Chernobyl death toll “has likely been only around 65.” Two years earlier, Lynas said that the WHO estimates “a few thousand deaths” (actually 9,000 deaths) but downplays the death toll by saying it was “indiscernible” in the context of overall deaths. Yes, the Chernobyl death toll is indiscernible … and the 9/11 terrorist attacks accounted for an indiscernible 0.1% of all deaths in the US in 2001.

There doesn’t appear to be a single example of a PNE – or a comparable organisation – providing a credible account of the Chernobyl death toll. They’re perfectly entitled to follow UNSCEAR’s lead and argue that the long-term death toll is uncertain. But conflating or confusing that uncertainty with a long-term death toll of zero clearly isn’t a defensible approach.

The Breakthrough Institute comes closest to a credible account of the Chernobyl death toll (which isn’t saying much), stating that “UN officials say that the death toll could be as high as 4,000”. However the Breakthrough Institute ignores:

  • the follow-up UN/WHO study that estimated an additional 5,000 deaths in ex-Soviet states;
  • scientific estimates of the death toll beyond ex-Soviet states (more than half of the Chernobyl fallout was deposited beyond the three most contaminated Soviet states);
  • scientific literature regarding diseases other than cancer linked to radiation exposure;
  • and indirect deaths associated with the permanent relocation of over 350,000 people after the Chernobyl disaster.


Cherry-picking

Cherry-picking is abundantly evident in PNE accounts of the Chernobyl death toll. In a review of Robert Stone’s ‘Pandora’s Promise’ propaganda film, physicist Dr Ed Lyman from the Union of Concerned Scientists writes:

“One after another, the film’s interviewees talk about how shocked they were to read the 2005 report of the Chernobyl Forum – a group under of UN agencies under the auspices of the International Atomic Energy Agency and the governments of Russia, Belarus and Ukraine – and discover that ‘the health effects of Chernobyl were nothing like what was expected.’ The film shows pages from that report with certain reassuring sentences underlined.

“But there is no mention of the fact that the Chernobyl Forum only estimated the number of cancer deaths expected among the most highly exposed populations in Ukraine, Belarus and Russia and not the many thousands more predicted by published studies to occur in other parts of Europe that received high levels of fallout.

“Nor is there mention of the actual health consequences from Chernobyl, including the more than 6,000 thyroid cancers that had occurred by 2005 in individuals who were children or adolescents at the time of the accident. And the film is silent on the results of more recent published studies that report evidence of excesses in other cancers, as well as cardiovascular diseases, are beginning to emerge.

“Insult is then added to injury when Lynas then accuses the anti-nuclear movement of “cherry-picking of scientific data” to support their claims. Yet the film had just engaged in some pretty deceptive cherry-picking of its own. Lynas then goes on to assert that the Fukushima accident will probably never kill anyone from radiation, also ignoring studies estimating cancer death tolls ranging from several hundred to several thousand.”

Shaky understanding

Evidence of PNE ignorance abounds. For the most part, PNEs had a shaky understanding of the radiation/health debates (and other nuclear issues) before they joined the pro-nuclear club, and they have a shaky understanding now.

Ed Lyman writes: “When Lynas says that in his previous life as an anti-nuclear environmentalist he didn’t know that there was such a thing as natural background radiation, or Michael Shellenberger [Breakthrough Institute] admitted to once taking on faith the claim that Chernobyl caused a million casualties, the audience may reasonably wonder why it should accept what they believe now that they are pro-nuclear.”

James Hansen’s understanding of the radiation/health debates is shaky, to say the least. He falsely claims there is a “generally accepted 100 millisievert threshold for fatal disease development.” But the accepted scientific position is that there is no threshold. Thus a 2010 UNSCEAR report states that “the current balance of available evidence tends to favour a non-threshold response for the mutational component of radiation-associated cancer induction at low doses and low dose rates.”

Barry Brook is another example of someone whose understanding was shaky before and after he joined the PNE club. Brook says that before 2009 he hadn’t given much thought to nuclear power because of the ‘peak uranium’ argument. By 2010, Brook was in full flight, asserting that the LNT model is “discredited” and has “no relevance to the real world”.

In fact, LNT enjoys heavy-hitting scientific support. For example the US National Academy of Sciences’ BEIR report states that “the risk of cancer proceeds in a linear fashion at lower doses without a threshold and … the smallest dose has the potential to cause a small increase in risk to humans.”

Likewise, a report in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences states: “Given that it is supported by experimentally grounded, quantifiable, biophysical arguments, a linear extrapolation of cancer risks from intermediate to very low doses currently appears to be the most appropriate methodology.”

Conspiracy theories

On Chernobyl, Brook said: “The credible literature (WHO, IAEA) puts the total Chernobyl death toll at less than 60. The ‘conspiracy theories’ drummed up against these authoritative organisations rings a disturbingly similar bell in my mind to the crank attacks on the IPCC, NASA and WMO in climate science.”

But the WHO, IAEA and other UN agencies estimated 9,000 deaths in ex-Soviet states in their 2005/06 reports, and more recently UNSCEAR has adopted the position that the long-term death toll is uncertain.

Brook repeatedly promotes the work of Ted Rockwell from ‘Radiation, Science, and Health’, an organisation that peddles dangerous conspiracy theories such as this: “Government agencies suppress data, including radiation hormesis, and foster radiation fear. They support extreme, costly, radiation protection policies; and preclude using low-dose radiation for health and medical benefits that apply hormesis, in favor of using (more profitable) drug therapies.”

Brook promotes the discredited ‘hormesis’ theory that low doses of radiation are beneficial to human health (for a scientific assessment see Appendix D in the BEIR report). Lynas lends support to the hormesis theory and uncritically quotes a contrarian scientist who argues that the annual public radiation dose limit should be increased from 1 millisievert to 1,200 millisieverts!

And for comic relief Brook promotes his citation as one of the ‘Outstanding Scientists of the 21st Century’. But in fact the citation comes from the International Biographical Centre, an organisation whose raison d’etre is to separate the gullible and the narcissistic from their money. One of Brook’s academic colleagues nominated a squeaky toy lobster and Prof. Lobster was accepted for inclusion in the list of Outstanding Scientists.

Good for wildlife?

If Brook, Lynas and contrarian scientists are right, Chernobyl (and Fukushima) have been beneficial by spreading health-giving, life-affirming ionising radiation far and wide. And according to some PNEs, Chernobyl has been a boon for wildlife and biodiversity.

The region surrounding Chernobyl is one of Europe’s “finest natural preserves” according to Stewart Brand. Lynas says the Chernobyl “explosion has even been good for wildlife, which has thrived in the 30km exclusion zone” and he says that restrictions on fishing around Fukushima “will improve the marine environment there”.

James Lovelock says the land around Chernobyl “is now rich in wildlife” and – bless – he follows this asinine argument to its logical conclusion: “We call the ash from nuclear power nuclear waste and worry about its safe disposal. I wonder if instead we should use it as an incorruptible guardian of the beautiful places on Earth. Who would dare cut down a forest which was a storage place of nuclear ash?”

According to most PNEs, radiation exposure from Chernobyl has been harmless (except for those exposed to extremely high doses), and according to some it has been beneficial to human health. And Chernobyl has been good for wildlife and biodiversity (mutations aside). Follow the PNEs down these rabbit-holes and you come up with Hansen’s claim that the nuclear industry’s safety record is “superior to any other major industry”, or Lynas’ claim that nuclear power is “extraordinarily safe”, or Brook’s claim that “nuclear power is the safest energy option”.

Nuclear power the safest energy option? Safer than wind and solar? To arrive at that conclusion, Brook and others understate the death toll from Chernobyl (and Fukushima) by orders of magnitude. They conflate an uncertain long-term Chernobyl death toll with a long-term death toll of zero.

They also trivialise or ignore the greatest hazard associated with nuclear power – its repeatedly-demonstrated connections to WMD proliferation – and they trivialise or ignore related problems such as conventional military strikes against nuclear plants, nuclear terrorism and sabotage, and nuclear theft and smuggling.

Psychological trauma

Finally, PNEs also trivialise Chernobyl by peddling the furphy that the psychological trauma was greater than the biological effects from radiation exposure. There’s no dispute that, as the WHO states, the relocation of more than 350,000 people in the aftermath of the Chernobyl disaster “proved a deeply traumatic experience because of disruption to social networks and having no possibility to return to their homes.”

How to compare that psychological trauma to estimates of the death toll, such as the UN/WHO estimate of 9,000 cancer deaths in ex-Soviet states? Your guess is as good as mine.

Perhaps the biological damage and psychological trauma can be compared and ranked if we consider the second of the two defensible positions regarding the long-term death toll – UNSCEAR’s position that the death toll is uncertain. Does the psychological trauma outweigh the 50 or so known deaths, around 6,000 non-fatal thyroid cancers (with another 16,000 to come), and an uncertain long-term death toll?

The argument only begins to make sense if you accept the third of the two defensible positions regarding the death toll – the view that there were no deaths other than emergency workers and a small number of deaths from thyroid cancers. Thus Mark Lynas asserts that “as Chernobyl showed, fear of radiation is a far greater risk than radiation itself in the low doses experienced by the affected populations” and he goes on to blame anti-nuclear campaigners for contributing to the fear.

But the trauma isn’t simply a result of a fear of radiation – it arises from a myriad of factors, particularly for the 350,000 displaced people. Nor is the fear of radiation necessarily misplaced given that the mainstream scientific view is that there is no threshold below which radiation exposure is risk-free.

Most importantly, why on earth would anyone want to rank the biological damage and the psychological trauma from the Chernobyl disaster? Chernobyl resulted in both biological damage and psychological trauma, in spades.

Psychological insult has been added to biological injury. One doesn’t negate the other.

 

 

Dr Jim Green is the national nuclear campaigner with Friends of the Earth Australia and editor of the Nuclear Monitor newsletter, where a version of this article was originally published. Nuclear Monitor, published 20 times a year, has been publishing deeply researched, often critical articles on all aspects of the nuclear cycle since 1978. A must-read for all those who work on this issue!

 

Nuclear industry reveals its unsolved problem: waste

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A very unusual exchange is about to take place over the Atlantic.

The UK is sending some 700kg of highly enriched uranium to be disposed of in the US, the largest amount that has ever been moved out of the country.

In return, the US is sending other kinds of enriched uranium to Europe to help diagnose people with cancer.

The vast majority of the UK’s waste comes from its fleet of nuclear power stations. Most of it is stored at the Sellafield site in north-west England. But the material being sent to the US is a particularly high (weapons usable) grade of enriched uranium.

And you wouldn’t want to move that to Sellafield from its current location at Dounreay in the north of Scotland without building a new storage facility – presumably more expensive than the cost of transportation.

The decision to move this radioactive waste out of the UK has been presented as making it harder for nuclear materials to get into the hands of terrorists, but this is implausible. The UK is capable of managing homegrown highly enriched uranium itself. The plan also contradicts the principle that countries are responsible for managing their own nuclear legacy.

The announcement draws new attention to an old issue: how to find a long-term solution to nuclear waste. Countries with atomic weapons or civilian nuclear power have been wrestling with this for several decades. This is partly because the problem was neglected for years, but more fundamentally because governments have failed to develop a strategy acceptable to the communities affected.

This reflects the uniqueness of the problem, of course – we are talking about substances which could harm human health for tens of thousands of years into the future. It raises profound ethical issues of equity between generations.

Deep burial: decide, announce, defend – abandon?

The scientific community does in fact agree on how to dispose of these materials safely: deep underground in appropriate geology such as clay or granite, with well engineered radiation barriers as an extra defence. Yet only Sweden and Finland, with political systems built on more trust and consensus than most countries, have a clear repository plan – and it will be several years before they become operational.

Most of the storage facilities at Sellafield are designed to last mere decades. The UK has been sporadically focused on deep disposal since the early 1980s, but for a long time approached it top-down and secretively. This became known as the ‘DAD’ method – decide, announce, defend. But it has always led to ‘abandon’ when local communities, having had no part in the siting decision, have rebelled successfully.

It was not until 2008 that the government introduced a system of rules under which local communities would conditionally volunteer a site and then negotiate a deal with the authorities. So far it has produced no result: attempts by district councils around Sellafield to volunteer it were overruled in 2013 by Cumbria county council, the local-authority tier above them, and no other communities have come forward. The government has reserved the right to override the voluntary process but shows no sign of doing so yet.

In such circumstances it becomes tempting to look for short cuts. One occasionally raised is to put all the world’s problematic waste somewhere very remote like the west Australian desert. This is a non-starter. The Czech and Slovak experience illustrated this. As a single country they planned a single repository, but after their ‘velvet divorce‘ each insisted it would not permanently manage the other’s waste. Such an international solution also contradicts the aforementioned issue of being responsible for your own legacy.

The other major hope is that science will find a convincing way either to use waste as fuel for reactors, and/or that ‘partitioning and transmutation‘ would drastically reduce the half-lives of the relevant isotopes. Yet these approaches are complex and expensive, involving molten salt reactors or accelerator-driven systems.

And critically, there would still be some volume of long-lived waste that needed to be managed – no method can yet promise to drastically reduce the half-lives of all the different waste types. The only credible way forward is deep burial.

The £100 billion Sellafield problem

In the absence of a deep-disposal plan, the UK has a more immediately pressing issue – what to do with Sellafield’s contaminated materials and waste from the UK’s near-70 years in the nuclear power and weapons business, much of which is housed in dilapidated facilities that are not fit for purpose.

The Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (NDA) expects it will cost some £68 billion to clean up Sellafield by stabilising and safely packaging the waste and building new stores. This will only be completed by around 2120.

This problem is at least now getting serious attention and resource – despite the climate of public austerity. Currently the country is spending over £1.5 billion a year on the site, which is one of the most hazardous in Europe.

Sellafield stores a further 140 tonnes of waste plutonium that also stems from British and some overseas nuclear power. If used in bombs this amount could obliterate humanity several times over. The NDA is now focusing on what to do about this too, after years of political inattention.

Yet the decision-making is laboured and the currently favoured solution of using the plutonium as fuel for conventional reactors lacks credibility – no operator wants to use plutonium-based fuel because it is more difficult and expensive to manage than conventional fuel; and moving it around the country is a security risk.

So nuclear waste remains the Achilles heel of the nuclear industry, in the UK and elsewhere. While the financial problems behind the proposed new nuclear station Hinkley Point C attract most of the headlines, the waste problem hangs over the industry behind the scenes.

Until we find a way forward that is scientifically and politically acceptable, it will continue to do so.

 

 

Gordon MacKerron is Professor of Science and Technology Policy, University of SussexThe Conversation.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

 

 

It’s the tax havens that own the politicians!

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The Panama Papers are a key moment to again expose how all three major UK political parties have for decades been in the pockets of the tax haven 1%.

Corbyn’s call for direct rule for the UK’s cabal of corrupt off-shore tax-havens, is the most radical positive proposal to emerge in years from a British politician. This is because unlike Blair he is not funded by tax haven donors.

This is the analysis of the Tories top donors that I included in the Tax Haven chapter of The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought:

Largest donations to Conservatives

The Electoral Commission list of the largest individual donors to the Tory Party demonstrate the political strength of the tax-haven and hedge-fund pillars of The Prostitute State:

  • £1,999,967 – David Rowland: Appointed Treasurer by Cameron in 2010. Tax exile based in Guernsey tax-haven for 40 years. Personal worth £730 million.
  • £553,000 – Michael Farmer: Hedge fund manager – Founder of Red Kite, one of the world’s largest industrial metal hedge-funds. Appointed Treasurer by Cameron in 2012. Personal worth £120 million.
  • £500,000 – Jonathan Wood: Manager SRM Global Hedge-fund Monaco. A former non-dom in the tax-haven of Switzerland.
  • £335,000 – Michael Bishop: Given a peerage by David Cameron in 2011. Personal worth estimated at £440 million.
  • £300,000 – May Makhzoumi: Wife of Lebanese-based former arms dealer and billionaire Fouad Makhzoumi. Most of the family fortune is based offshore.
  • £250,000 – Paul Beecroft: Venture Capitalist, Chair of Wonga.com. Estimated worth £100 million.
  • £250,000 – Mark Bamford: Joint owner of the JCB empire, most of which is owned by a series of offshore tax-haven based trusts.
  • £250,000 – Chris Rokos: Hedge Fund Manager. Personal worth £230 million.
  • £250,000 – Lord Sainsbury: Sainsbury’s, despite only selling to the UK market, has 14 offshore tax-haven subsidiaries.

Donors are invited to meet Cameron and other senior party figures at dinners, post-Prime-Minister’s Questions’ lunches, drink-receptions, election-result events and important campaign launches. Cameron has even handed the writing of various government reports to top party donors.

Adrian Beecroft was asked to report on employment law, which shockingly recommended the abolition of almost all workers’ employment rights and Anthony Bamford on UK manufacturing, which unsurprisingly recommended even further reductions in corporation tax and taxes on rich individuals.

For decades through their control of the three main UK political parties, the thieving tax-haven 1% have ensured that Britain has been starved of over £100 billion in taxes every year, which has resulted in a huge deficit and massive cuts in services, with social housing building stalled for years, with dire social impacts on the 99%.

David Cameron – tax haven Enabler in Chief!!

Make no mistake, all the current propaganda about Cameron “cracking down on tax-havens” is a joke.

I wrote extensively in The Prostitute State about how Cameron and Osborne, whilst pretending to be cracking down on tax-havens, are actually doing the oppposite i.e. making it ever easier for UK firms and the 1% to avoid taxation.

But on his personal level, below is an extract from what I wrote about Cameron’s own connections to tax havens, as opposed to how he is abusing our government to facilitate tax-avoidance by the rest of the 1%.

A key question if we had a free-press that Cameron needs to answer is where did the missing £7.3 million from his dad’s tax haven derived fortune go when he died?

Cameron’s connections with tax-havens are numerous. In April 2012, the Guardian reported that his father’s wealth accrued from setting up tax-haven investment funds. Ian Cameron was chair of Close International Asset Management Jersey, a director of Blairmore Holdings Panama and a shareholder in Blairmore Asset Management Geneva.

Blairmore Holdings was not named after the lucrative lobbying activities of Tony Blair but rather after the Cameron ancestral home in Scotland. In 2006, the hedge-fund’s prospectus said it was basing itself in Panama, whose laws impose zero taxation on hedge-fund earnings made outside Panama. Investors had to invest a minimum of $100,000 in the fund, so it was explicitly aimed at the tax-avoiding super-rich.

The Guardian said that the prospectus boasted that “The Directors intend that the affairs of the Fund should be managed and conducted so that it does not become resident in the United Kingdom for UK taxation purposes. Accordingly the Fund will not be subject to United Kingdom corporation tax or income tax on its profits.”

In 2009, the Sunday Times Rich List estimated Ian Cameron’s wealth at £10m. Yet when he died in late 2010, his will left only £2.7 million from which David Cameron received the sum of £300,000. A possible explanation lies in the fact that the family will only details the estate’s assets in England and Wales.

The Guardian said his “Offshore investments would only be listed in submissions to HMRC for inheritance tax purposes. It is unclear what those assets (if any) are worth and which family member owns them.” As with his father, so it was with his father-in-law Lord Astor. In June 2012, the Daily Record reported that Astor’s Scottish estate was owned by a Bahamas tax-haven registered company.

Despite the government’s rhetoric condemning tax avoidance, Cameron, like Blair before him, has rewarded his tax-avoiding funders with actual seats at the government table. Philip Green is one of Britain’s ten richest billionaires, with a fortune estimated at £4.1 billion. He owns the Arcadia fashion empire which includes Topshop, Burtons, Miss Selfridge and British Home Stores.

However on paper Philip Green does not actually own Arcadia. Instead, it is held in the name of his wife Tina Green. But she ‘officially’ lives in Monaco, where she pays no income tax.

In 2005, Green awarded himself £1.2bn, the biggest pay-cheque in British corporate history. This dividend was paid through a network of offshore accounts, via tax havens in Jersey, to his wife’s Monaco bank account. According to the BBC this saved Green £285 million in UK taxes. This single tax manoeuvre would pay the salaries of 20,000 nurses.

Despite public outrage, this tax arrangement remains legal. The next time he fancies a billion pound dividend Green can do it again – no problem. Yet Cameron rewarded him by appointing him to oversee the government’s cuts programmes. These are the same cuts to services for the poor, happening because billions in pounds of corporation tax are being legally avoided by people like Green.

Meanwhile, the Sun, Express and Mail fan the flames of hatred against EU democracy or are totally up in arms over looters caught stealing some bottled water, rather than the real corporate thieves in our midst.

The thieving tax havens are one of the crucial four pillars of The Prostitute State and they must be closed down.

Jeremy Corbyn is absolutely right.

 

 

Donnachadh McCarthy is an environmental campaigner and author.

Book: ‘The Prostitute State – How Britain’s Democracy Has Been Bought‘ is available as an E-book and paper (100% recycled).

Free ebook version of The Prostitute State is available to Occupiers, Fractivists, Momentum / Green Party members and students who cannot afford to buy a copy by emailing contact@3acorns.co.uk.

 

‘Dirty bomb’ security risk at Belgian nuclear power plants

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Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels.

The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country.

Occurring a week before a major international summit on nuclear security, these events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns.

The US repeatedly has voiced concerns about Belgium’s nuclear security arrangements since 2003. That year, Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national and former professional footballer, planned to bomb the Belgian Kleine-Brogel airbase under the aegis of Al-Qaeda.

The airbase, which holds US nuclear weapons, has seen multiple incursions by anti-nuclear activists who have gained access to the site’s ‘protected area’, which surrounds hardened weapons storage bunkers. Yet Belgium only started using armed guards at its nuclear facilities weeks before the March 2016 attacks.

Beyond incursions, so-called ‘insider threats’ have also cost Belgium dearly. The nation’s nuclear industry comprises two ageing power stations first commissioned in the 1970s (Doel and Tihange), and two research facilities, a research reactor facility in Mol, and a radioisotope production facility in Fleurus.

In 2014, an unidentified worker sabotaged a turbine at the Doel nuclear power station by draining its coolant. The plant had to be partially shut down, at a loss of €40 million per month. Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.

Islamic State is watching you

Islamic State is believed to have taken possession of radiological materials, including 40kg of uranium compounds in Iraq. This suggests a possible interest in fabricating a radiological dispersal device – or ‘dirty bomb’ – that would spread dangerous radioactive materials over a wide area.

It had been assumed that IS was concentrating this activity in the Middle East. But that all changed in late 2015. A senior nuclear worker at the Mol research facility was found to have been placed under ‘hostile surveillance‘ by individuals linked to the Islamic State-sanctioned attacks in Paris.

Reports suggested that the terrorist cell may have planned to blackmail or co-opt the worker to gain access to either the facility or radiological materials. Alongside the 2014 Doel sabotage incident, this raises the spectre of an ‘insider threat’. A worker could use their access, authority and knowledge to sabotage a nuclear plant or remove material for malicious purposes.

This concern is furthered by reports of a worker at the Doel plant, who was associated with the radical Salafist organisation Sharia4Belgium, joining Al-Qaeda-inspired militants in Syria in late 2012. Following his death in Syria, the Belgian nuclear regulator reported that “several people have … been refused access to a nuclear facility or removed from nuclear sites because they showed signs of extremism”.

There were fears that the Brussels cell of the Islamic State terror group may have been plotting a radioactive nuclear bomb attack. Although there was no official confirmation, media reports claim that two brothers were believed to have been involved in an Isis plan to create a bomb to scatter radioactive material over a populated area.

Since then, the authorities temporarily revoked the security clearances of 11 nuclear workers at Tihange nuclear plant over fears of inside help.

Tightening security worldwide

Meanwhile, the fourth and final meeting in a series of international nuclear security summits took place in Washington DC last Friday. This brought together high-level decision makers, including heads of state, to try to improve the international nuclear security regime (which has been described as “a rather messy and complicated affair.”)

While strict processes are in place to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there are far fewer shared rules on securing nuclear facilities and materials. This summit has aimed to address this imbalance. The first summit was held in 2010, after US president Barack Obama described nuclear terrorism as the “most immediate and extreme threat” to global security.

So far, the summits have seen significant successes. They have led to the removal of highly enriched uranium from 14 jurisdictions and upgrades to security at 32 material storage facilities. Equipment to detect nuclear materials has also been installed at 328 international borders.

But no further summits are planned after the 2016 meeting and no mechanism has been identified to replace the summit process. That means the future progress of nuclear security is uncertain. And as can be seen in Belgium, the threat remains as real as ever.

 

 

Robert J Downes is the MacArthur Fellow in Nuclear Security at King’s College London.The Conversation

Daniel Salisbury is a Research Associate at King’s College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

 

‘Dirty bomb’ security risk at Belgian nuclear power plants

Leave a reply

Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels.

The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country.

Occurring a week before a major international summit on nuclear security, these events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns.

The US repeatedly has voiced concerns about Belgium’s nuclear security arrangements since 2003. That year, Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national and former professional footballer, planned to bomb the Belgian Kleine-Brogel airbase under the aegis of Al-Qaeda.

The airbase, which holds US nuclear weapons, has seen multiple incursions by anti-nuclear activists who have gained access to the site’s ‘protected area’, which surrounds hardened weapons storage bunkers. Yet Belgium only started using armed guards at its nuclear facilities weeks before the March 2016 attacks.

Beyond incursions, so-called ‘insider threats’ have also cost Belgium dearly. The nation’s nuclear industry comprises two ageing power stations first commissioned in the 1970s (Doel and Tihange), and two research facilities, a research reactor facility in Mol, and a radioisotope production facility in Fleurus.

In 2014, an unidentified worker sabotaged a turbine at the Doel nuclear power station by draining its coolant. The plant had to be partially shut down, at a loss of €40 million per month. Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.

Islamic State is watching you

Islamic State is believed to have taken possession of radiological materials, including 40kg of uranium compounds in Iraq. This suggests a possible interest in fabricating a radiological dispersal device – or ‘dirty bomb’ – that would spread dangerous radioactive materials over a wide area.

It had been assumed that IS was concentrating this activity in the Middle East. But that all changed in late 2015. A senior nuclear worker at the Mol research facility was found to have been placed under ‘hostile surveillance‘ by individuals linked to the Islamic State-sanctioned attacks in Paris.

Reports suggested that the terrorist cell may have planned to blackmail or co-opt the worker to gain access to either the facility or radiological materials. Alongside the 2014 Doel sabotage incident, this raises the spectre of an ‘insider threat’. A worker could use their access, authority and knowledge to sabotage a nuclear plant or remove material for malicious purposes.

This concern is furthered by reports of a worker at the Doel plant, who was associated with the radical Salafist organisation Sharia4Belgium, joining Al-Qaeda-inspired militants in Syria in late 2012. Following his death in Syria, the Belgian nuclear regulator reported that “several people have … been refused access to a nuclear facility or removed from nuclear sites because they showed signs of extremism”.

There were fears that the Brussels cell of the Islamic State terror group may have been plotting a radioactive nuclear bomb attack. Although there was no official confirmation, media reports claim that two brothers were believed to have been involved in an Isis plan to create a bomb to scatter radioactive material over a populated area.

Since then, the authorities temporarily revoked the security clearances of 11 nuclear workers at Tihange nuclear plant over fears of inside help.

Tightening security worldwide

Meanwhile, the fourth and final meeting in a series of international nuclear security summits took place in Washington DC last Friday. This brought together high-level decision makers, including heads of state, to try to improve the international nuclear security regime (which has been described as “a rather messy and complicated affair.”)

While strict processes are in place to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there are far fewer shared rules on securing nuclear facilities and materials. This summit has aimed to address this imbalance. The first summit was held in 2010, after US president Barack Obama described nuclear terrorism as the “most immediate and extreme threat” to global security.

So far, the summits have seen significant successes. They have led to the removal of highly enriched uranium from 14 jurisdictions and upgrades to security at 32 material storage facilities. Equipment to detect nuclear materials has also been installed at 328 international borders.

But no further summits are planned after the 2016 meeting and no mechanism has been identified to replace the summit process. That means the future progress of nuclear security is uncertain. And as can be seen in Belgium, the threat remains as real as ever.

 

 

Robert J Downes is the MacArthur Fellow in Nuclear Security at King’s College London.The Conversation

Daniel Salisbury is a Research Associate at King’s College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.

 

‘Dirty bomb’ security risk at Belgian nuclear power plants

Leave a reply

Belgium’s counter-terrorism efforts are once again being called into question following the recent tragedies in Brussels.

The attacks were carried out against soft targets – the public check-in area of Brussels Airport and Maelbeek metro station – but a series of unusual and suspicious occurrences were also reported at nuclear facilities in the country.

Occurring a week before a major international summit on nuclear security, these events highlight the very real threat to nuclear facilities. For Belgium, this recent episode is one item on a long list of security concerns.

The US repeatedly has voiced concerns about Belgium’s nuclear security arrangements since 2003. That year, Nizar Trabelsi, a Tunisian national and former professional footballer, planned to bomb the Belgian Kleine-Brogel airbase under the aegis of Al-Qaeda.

The airbase, which holds US nuclear weapons, has seen multiple incursions by anti-nuclear activists who have gained access to the site’s ‘protected area’, which surrounds hardened weapons storage bunkers. Yet Belgium only started using armed guards at its nuclear facilities weeks before the March 2016 attacks.

Beyond incursions, so-called ‘insider threats’ have also cost Belgium dearly. The nation’s nuclear industry comprises two ageing power stations first commissioned in the 1970s (Doel and Tihange), and two research facilities, a research reactor facility in Mol, and a radioisotope production facility in Fleurus.

In 2014, an unidentified worker sabotaged a turbine at the Doel nuclear power station by draining its coolant. The plant had to be partially shut down, at a loss of €40 million per month. Based on this history, the Belgian authorities should be primed to take nuclear security especially seriously. But there are serious questions about whether they are.

Islamic State is watching you

Islamic State is believed to have taken possession of radiological materials, including 40kg of uranium compounds in Iraq. This suggests a possible interest in fabricating a radiological dispersal device – or ‘dirty bomb’ – that would spread dangerous radioactive materials over a wide area.

It had been assumed that IS was concentrating this activity in the Middle East. But that all changed in late 2015. A senior nuclear worker at the Mol research facility was found to have been placed under ‘hostile surveillance‘ by individuals linked to the Islamic State-sanctioned attacks in Paris.

Reports suggested that the terrorist cell may have planned to blackmail or co-opt the worker to gain access to either the facility or radiological materials. Alongside the 2014 Doel sabotage incident, this raises the spectre of an ‘insider threat’. A worker could use their access, authority and knowledge to sabotage a nuclear plant or remove material for malicious purposes.

This concern is furthered by reports of a worker at the Doel plant, who was associated with the radical Salafist organisation Sharia4Belgium, joining Al-Qaeda-inspired militants in Syria in late 2012. Following his death in Syria, the Belgian nuclear regulator reported that “several people have … been refused access to a nuclear facility or removed from nuclear sites because they showed signs of extremism”.

There were fears that the Brussels cell of the Islamic State terror group may have been plotting a radioactive nuclear bomb attack. Although there was no official confirmation, media reports claim that two brothers were believed to have been involved in an Isis plan to create a bomb to scatter radioactive material over a populated area.

Since then, the authorities temporarily revoked the security clearances of 11 nuclear workers at Tihange nuclear plant over fears of inside help.

Tightening security worldwide

Meanwhile, the fourth and final meeting in a series of international nuclear security summits took place in Washington DC last Friday. This brought together high-level decision makers, including heads of state, to try to improve the international nuclear security regime (which has been described as “a rather messy and complicated affair.”)

While strict processes are in place to prevent the proliferation of nuclear weapons, there are far fewer shared rules on securing nuclear facilities and materials. This summit has aimed to address this imbalance. The first summit was held in 2010, after US president Barack Obama described nuclear terrorism as the “most immediate and extreme threat” to global security.

So far, the summits have seen significant successes. They have led to the removal of highly enriched uranium from 14 jurisdictions and upgrades to security at 32 material storage facilities. Equipment to detect nuclear materials has also been installed at 328 international borders.

But no further summits are planned after the 2016 meeting and no mechanism has been identified to replace the summit process. That means the future progress of nuclear security is uncertain. And as can be seen in Belgium, the threat remains as real as ever.

 

 

Robert J Downes is the MacArthur Fellow in Nuclear Security at King’s College London.The Conversation

Daniel Salisbury is a Research Associate at King’s College London.

This article was originally published on The Conversation. Read the original article.