Monday, July 23, 2018

Trump’s Space Force: Military Profiteering’s Final Frontier - Progressive.org




“The heavens are going to be littered with radioactive debris.”

by Harvey Wasserman

The Commander-in-Chief, President Donald Trump, has announced a new mission into the realm of martial excess. It is one is that will surely enrich the aerospace industry while spreading the global battlefield to a new dimension.

Trump is calling for the creation of a new Space Force as a sixth branch of the U.S. military, to militarize the heavens.

“It is not enough to merely have an American presence in space,” Trump told a meeting of the National Space Council in mid-June. “We must have American dominance in space.”

To this end, the President has taken a page from Ronald Reagan’s Star Wars playbook. Reagan’s scheme, according to a recent article by Karl Grossman, was built around “nuclear reactors and plutonium systems on orbiting battle platforms providing the power for hypervelocity guns, particle beams and laser weapons.”

read: Trump’s Space Force: Military Profiteering’s Final Frontier - Progressive.org




Saturday, July 14, 2018

August 6 March for Nuclear Abolition & Global Survival • Livermore Lab • Livermore, CA


Mark your calendar today for this major Rally, March and Nonviolent Direct Action on Monday, August 6th. Join us to commemorate the U.S. atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan at the site where new nuclear weapons are being developed for use today.


We will gather at Livermore Lab to stop the creation of novel, “more usable” nuclear warheads that the Trump Administration proposed in its Nuclear Posture Review and fiscal 2019 budget, both released earlier this year. We will join millions of peace advocates around the country and the world on this memorable day to say “never again” to the use of nuclear weapons – and to call for their global abolition. Our keynote speaker will be Daniel Ellsberg, perhaps best known as the whistleblower who released “The Pentagon Papers” to hasten an end to the war in Vietnam. He has been an analyst at RAND Corp. and a consultant to the Defense Dept., specializing in problems of command and control of nuclear weapons, war plans and crisis decision-making. Ellsberg recently released his critically acclaimed memoirs, The Doomsday Machine: Confessions of a Nuclear War Planner

more info: March for Nuclear Abolition & Global Survival Livermore Lab, 8 AM on August 6, 2018 | Tri-Valley CAREs

March for Nuclear Abolition & Global Survival Facebook Event Page




Report of 7/11 NNA rally・7/11 抗議集会事後報告 | No Nukes Action Committee


About a dozen people got together on 7/11.
Speak out included Japan’s Energy Basic Plan was approved for 20-22% of nuclear dependence by 2030,
https://www.nippon.com/en/currents/d00419/
http://www.asahi.com/ajw/articles/AJ201807030061.html
and another reactor, Gennkai plant #4, was restarted on 6/16,
https://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180616/p2g/00m/0dm/050000c
and TEPCO resumed Higashidori nuclear plant construction.
http://mainichi.jp/english/articles/20180630/p2g/00m/0dm/004000c
Steve Zeltzer wrote the letter to PM Abe for this rally.
Attached please read.
Genta Yoshikawa made a video.
https://youtu.be/T_D0ml8VOBo
And please do not forget to attend the Livermore protest on Monday 8/6.
All information is on the attached poster.
See at the Livermore protest and 8/11 rally at SF!
*
ここサンフランシスコは、エアコンディショナー効いているように涼しく、その中10人余りがデモに参集しました。
スピークアウトでは7月3日に「エネルギー基本計画」の議決が採決され、原発での電気供給が2030年までに20−22%になること、
https://www.excite.co.jp/News/politics_g/20180705/Economic_81014.html
そして玄海原発4号機が6月16日に再稼働したこと、
https://www.asahi.com/articles/ASL6D55SJL6DTIPE029.html
そして東電は柏崎刈羽原発を再稼働させたいだけでなく、東通原発の建設再開準備を始めたこと、
http://www.tokyo-np.co.jp/article/economics/list/201806/CK2018063002000156.html
などが指摘されました。
今回は、スティーブ ゼルツアーが安倍首相への手紙を書き、朗読しました。
添付の手紙を読んでください。
ヴィディオが収録され、Genta Yoshikawa-Ch1で見られます。
https://youtu.be/T_D0ml8VOBo
なお来月、8月6日のリバモア核兵器研究所前での核兵器抗議集会、添付ポスターを参照の上、ぜひ参加してください。
それでは、8・6リバモアで、そして8・11SF日本領事館前で会いましょう!
written by NNA member Chizu Hamada
nonukesaction.wordpress.com

— letter to Japanese P.M. Abe —

To Prime Minister Abe,
We are here today again to call for the immediate halt of the restarting of the many nuclear plants in Japan. Despite your government’s proclamations that the Fukushima meltdowns have been overcome and you have “decontaminated” the Fukushima area, this is patently untrue, as most people know. You and your government have still not removed the melted cores that continue to reside in the reactors and you continue to contaminate millions of gallons of water to keep the temperature down in these reactors.
You and your government, which not control TEPCO, have allowed subcontractors including yakuza to bring in day laborers, and even foreign trainees to work in the plants without proper safety training and protection and health safeguards if they are contaminated. You and your government are again allowing the Fukushima contract cleanup workers in great danger, and likely victims of cancer and other diseases from their work at the Fukushima nuclear plants.
Thousands of tanks surrounding the plants that contain millions of gallons of contaminated water are also at serious risk of rupture in another likely major earthquake. You and your government are also still seeking to release thousands of tons of radioactive water into the Pacific Ocean despite the opposition of the local fisherman’s co-operatives and the people of Japan and the United States.
Despite the continuing higher levels of radiation in the Fukushima area, you and your government continue to demand that the children and families that evacuated be forced back to the area by the cutoff of subsidies on their housing outside the Fukushima area.
If you think it is safe, maybe you Prime Minister Abe and your family should move closer to Fukushima, so you as well can suffer the dangers of increased radioactive contamination instead of forcing the children and families who do not want to be forced back to suffer this contamination.
You, Prime Minister Abe, and your government also continue to push for the militarization of Asia with the construction of more US bases in Okinawa and for the removal of article 9 of the Japanese constitution to allow the further militarization of Japan. You and your government have also increased the repression of anti-nuclear activists and journalists by illegal harassment and even false arrests. These repressive tactics to silence opposition show the real face of you and your government, which itself is involved in a massive education corruption scandal over illegal transfer of public property for rightwing reactionary militaristic schools that you and your wife support.
We again, call for an end to the restarting of the nuclear plants that threaten not only the survival of Japan and the people of Japan but also the whole Pacific rim and the people of the United States.
Our voices will not be silenced.
Steve Zeltzer
No Nukes Action Committee
7/11/18

Report of 7/11 NNA rally・7/11 抗議集会事後報告 | No Nukes Action Committee

August 6 March for Nuclear Abolition & Global Survival

Livermore Lab • Livermore, CA

Thursday, July 12, 2018

We Need Renewable Energy, Not Nuclear Power! | NIRS


The nuclear industry is back at it again: promoting dirty, dangerous, expensive reactors at the public’s expense. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) is reviewing an “Early Site Permit” application for up to a dozen reactors in Tennessee – with potentially no evacuation plans. This would be a dangerous precedent.

This time, the industry wants us to believe the “solution” is small, modular reactors – or SMRs. Their idea is to design each reactor smaller, and combine a bunch of them into one big power plant. However, these reactors aren’t really “small” and putting a bunch of them in one place only means more potential for disaster. The Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear plant only had three reactors operating when disaster occurred in 2011. They all melted down.
You’d think that would have taught NRC a lesson. But no – NRC is considering exempting SMRs from longstanding emergency planning requirements, even eliminating the need to have evacuation plans for nearby communities in the case of a meltdown.
Even worse, NRC is flatly ignoring the reality that there is no justification for nuclear power. NRC is supposed to consider both the need for electricity and the alternatives to a nuclear power plant, but its review of the Tennessee Valley Authority’s application ignores both. TVA’s demand for electricity is declining, not growing, and solar, wind, and energy efficiency are far cleaner, safer, and more affordable than the theoretical, untested SMRs.
Send a public comment to NRC, demanding that the agency withdraw its Draft Environmental Impact Statement, and conduct a new, objective study.

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Thursday, July 5, 2018

Don't Let Congress Waste America! • #DontWasteAmerica



Congress is attempting to push one of the worst nuclear waste bills we have seen in years. The Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act of 2017 is a nuclear waste bill that threatens nearly every state with decades of nuclear waste shipments. 
If the passed, the bill would:
  • revive the failed Yucca Mountain (NV) site as a nuclear dump, despite volcanoes, earthquakes, its inability to isolate waste, and violations of environmental justice against Western Shoshone sovereignty and state authority.
  • direct the Department of Energy (DOE) to contract for a private corporate centralized “interim” parking-lot dump, which allows DOE to set up additional "temporary" storage sites, which are illegal under current law.
  • trigger thousands of intensely radioactive shipments on our roads, rails and waterways over decades.
  • weaken environmental and safety requirements for this deadly waste. 
This dangerous bill must be stopped! 
It would launch thousands of shipments of the deadliest radioactive nuclear waste ever made via truck, train, and/or barge shipments through 45 states, including the hearts of many major cities and farmlands, headed for Yucca Mountain, Nevada and “interim” parking lot dumps. 

This is a major fight you can help win--Don't Let Congress Waste America!


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