Fukushima at 8: Accusations of scientific misconduct concern city in Japan    Eight years after the Fukushima nuclear reactors exploded on Japan’s Northern coast, spewing radioactive particles into the air, across the land, and into the Pacific Ocean, the country continues to struggle with decontamination and relocation efforts. Determining the health impacts resulting from the nuclear disaster has been particularly fraught. For Date City, about 60 km from the ruined Fukushima reactors, and still blanketed by radioactive contamination from the ongoing catastrophe, the struggle for protection of health continues amid accusations of scientific misconduct and betrayal. More.

Nuclear-related scandals unfold at highest levels of U.S. and Canadian politics      An opinion column in the New York Times by Pulitzer Prize winner Nicholas Kristof is but the latest in a growing collection of news stories questioning the Trump administration’s eagerness to transfer weapons-usable nuclear power technology to the reckless Saudi Arabia regime. Kristof has pointed to a “gargantuan conflict of interest involving [Jared] Kushner,” Trump’s son in law, and highly controversial senior advisor. It turns out that Brookfield Asset Management, headquartered in Toronto, Canada, which bailed out the infamous, billion-dollar Kushner real estate boondoggle at 666 5th Avenue in Manhattan, also took over the bankrupt Westinghouse corporation, which is trying to sell its high-risk nuclear wares in Saudi Arabia. Kristof also quoted U.S. Rep. Brad Sherman (D-CA), who stated “A country that can’t be trusted with a bone saw shouldn’t be trusted with nuclear weapons,” referring to the murder and dismemberment of Washington Post columnist Jamal Khashoggi at the Saudi consulate in Turkey, a crime that even the Trump CIA, and the Republican-controlled U.S. Senate unanimously, have concluded implicates the highest levels of the Crown Prince Mohammed bin Salman (MBS) regime. (See MBS, pictured, with President Trump, in the Oval Office a year ago, celebrating $12.5 billion in finalized U.S. conventional arms sales to Saudi Arabia.) For his part, MBS has come right out and said Saudi Arabia could develop a nuclear weapons arsenal, to counter its arch enemy, Iran — something Nobel Peace Prize winner, Mohamed ElBaradei, former director of the UN International Atomic Energy Agency, warned about more than a decade ago.

But Brookfield Asset Management isn’t the only the nuclear-related Canadian firm embroiled in high-level political scandal. Montreal, Quebec-based SNC-Lavalin, which recently partnered with Holtec International of New Jersey, to undertake nuclear power plant decommissioning and highly radioactive waste management in the U.S. (as at Oyster Creek, NJ), is at the center of an unprecedented Canadian political scandal that could take down Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, as federal elections approach this autumn. Holtec and SNC-Lavalin have proposed taking over the soon-to-close Pilgrim nuclear power plant site near Boston, something the Massachusetts State Attorney General, as well as the watchdog group Pilgrim Watch, are challenging. The writing on the wall is that Holtec and SNC-Lavalin could raid the billion-dollar Oyster Creek and Pilgrim decommissioning trust funds, do as little actual radioactive contamination clean up as the complicit U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission will allow, and use the money to expedite transfer of irradiated nuclear fuel to Holtec’s proposed centralized interim storage facility (CISF) in New Mexico. Beyond Nuclear has legally intervened against the Holtec CISF, as has a broad coalition of environmental groups from NM and across the country. Learn more about the CISF fight at Beyond Nuclear’s Centralized Storage website section. 
Resistance to Yucca Mountain, NV high-level radioactive waste dump remains strong       Peace, Over the past 32 years, since the raw politics of the “Screw Nevada” bill of 1987 (the Nuclear Waste Policy Amendments Act, that singled out Yucca Mountain as the only site in the country to be further studied as a potential repository), a thousand environmental groups have stepped up to oppose the high-level radioactive waste dump. The State of Nevada itself has fended off the dump at every turn, for more than a generation. This week, the state’s Democratic U.S. congressional delegation has re-introduced its legislation, requiring high-level radioactive waste dumps to be consent-based — something Yucca is not. Recently, Nevada — led by its new Democratic governor, Steve Sisolak — has fought back against secret U.S. Department of Energy shipments of ultra-toxic, weapons-grade plutonium, from South Carolina, for “temporary” storage at the Nevada National Security Site (formerly called the Nevada Test Site), near Yucca. But no one has fought radioactive waste dumping, nuclear weapons testing, and other abuses upon their people and lands — and violations of the “peace and friendship” Treaty of Ruby Valley of 1863 — longer than the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians, who have inhabited Nevada since time immemorial. Just the latest examples include a Jan.15 submission to the UN Human Rights Committee, and a Feb.15 submission to the UN Special Rapporteur on the Consequences of Exposure of Indigenous People to Toxic and Otherwise Hazardous Substances, made by Principal Man Ian Zabarte, on behalf of the Western Bands of the Shoshone Nation of Indians. (Ian is pictured, right, holding his “Nevada is Not a Wasteland” banner, alongside Beyond Nuclear’s Kevin Kamps, left, at a youth climate rally on the National Mall in Washington, D.C. last year.) What can you do? Please contact both your U.S. Senators, and your U.S. Representative, and urge they oppose any efforts in Congress or by the Trump administration, to revive the cancelled Yucca dump. You can be patched through to your Members of Congress’s Washington, D.C. offices via the U.S. Capitol Switchboard at (202) 224-3121. To learn more about resistance to the Yucca dump, see Beyond Nuclear’s website section. 

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