Since the earthquake and tsunami struck over one hundred miles away electricity use has been rationed here. Here in Japan the mood has turned against nuclear power. ibid.
Heat remained in the reactors and they slowly started to cook ... There was a release of steam and radioactive particles. ibid.
This was an old nuclear plant. ibid.
Thousands of people still remain in temporary and makeshift accommodation. ibid.
Radioactive iodine and radioactive caesium. ibid.
Chernobyl ... They are lower than anyone expected ... Thyroid cancer: the numbers are very low. ibid.
They live in constant fear of what the radiation might have done to them. ibid.
Thorium. Some scientists have made great claims for its potential. It’s more efficient. It burns more completely. And it’s more abundant than uranium. ibid.
Costing around £2 billion a year it is the most controversial nuclear facility in Britain. Professor Jim Al-Khalili, Britain's Nuclear Secrets: Inside Sellafield, BBC 2015
There are over a thousand separate buildings. ibid.
The Windscale fire of 1957 ... The core itself was on fire ... A cloud of smoke began to fall over the area. ibid.
In the decades that followed there have been other more serious incidents at nuclear plants around the world. ibid.
Our modern world has a lust for energy. We are consuming more and more of it each year ... As a physicist I know there’s an alternative: Fusion. An almost limitless supply of clean energy. Almost no pollution. Too good to be true? Well I believe it’s not that far off. Jim Al-Khalili, interview Brave New World With Stephen Hawking
We are living on borrowed time. We are consuming more energy: our supplies are running out. Our whole way of life is under threat. Well nuclear fusion could change all that. ibid.
There were two historic events in America last year: the first was the removal of the crook Richard Nixon; the second was something you will have almost certainly heard nothing about: for the first time since the beginning of the atomic age almost thirty years ago the United States formally and quietly abandoned its policy of the ultimate nuclear deterrent. In other words the old game known in Washington as MAD – mutual assured destruction – is out, and a new more insidious and more dangerous game is in. It is called Counterforce. Counterforce means the United States is prepared not merely to deter its enemies by the threat of annihilation but to actually wage a flexible, acceptable nuclear war. John Pilger, Mr Nixon’s Secret Legacy, Youtube 26.51, ITV 1975
Looking Glass is the codename for another nuclear command post that is always flying, always waiting. A Looking Glass plane always has a general on board. ibid.
From 1950 to 1970 there were 33 major accidents involving United States’ nuclear weapons. ibid.
This film is about atomic power … 1) Anyone with an expert knowledge of physics can make an atomic bomb with that much of a substance called plutonium; 2) A speck of plutonium causes cancer; 3) There is no absolutely safe way of storing, protecting or transporting plutonium. And you may have read recently that enough plutonium to make fifteen atomic bombs has officially disappeared from nuclear research centres in Britain. John Pilger, An Unjustifiable Risk, 1977
The first commercial nuclear power station fuelled by plutonium; the first of many so-called fast-breeder reactors that will solve all our energy problems, according to the salesmen of our nuclear industry. ibid.
In July 1956 a United States B-52 crashed into an atomic bomb store at Lakenheath base in Suffolk. John Pilger, The Truth Game
For three times as many people died in the five-year period after the bomb fell on Hiroshima than on the day of the explosion, most of them from the effects of radiation ... Film of what really happened to the victims was suppressed. ibid.
More and more people are asking impatiently and rationally why over the years we have allowed this country to become a prime target. ibid.
Trident was built for the Cold War, so what’s it for now? Well, it’s said to have a new role about which the government says very little. This is known as sub-strategic capability. What does that mean? It means a new threat has been found. There is no political debate about any of this because the government and the Labour Party have effectively the same policy. This is the real cost: it has been estimated that the money spent over the years on nuclear submarines would restore a national housing programme, and virtually end homelessness. It would also restore the transport system and stop the haemorrhage of teachers from schools by raising salaries to a decent level. And it would pay every outstanding bill in the Health Service and ensure no-one died waiting for an operation. It would also allow non-military research and development to catch up with the best in Europe. And what was left over could be invested in converting industry to peaceful production. John Pilger, Flying the Flag (Arming the World)
Under Obama, nuclear warhead production is greater than under any post-Cold War president. John Pilger on the Threat of World War III, interview Going Underground, Youtube 18.43
Georgia’s sandy coastal shallows hide a deadly secret –a hydrogen bomb dumped by an American bomber half a century ago. Pentagon officials insist the missing H bomb poses no threat. But with the threat of nuclear terrorism after 9/11 some aren’t so sure. America’s Lost H Bomb, 2007
Richardson dumps the H-bomb. The 7,600 pound nuke plummets a mile and a half somewhere near the shore of Tybee Island, Georgia, but doesn’t explode. Its safeties hold. ibid.
Another US nuclear weapon mishap – this one over Palomares, Spain. A collision between a refuelling plane and a B-52 killed seven US airmen and dropped four 1.4 megaton H-bombs over Spanish tomato farms. Parachutes on two of the bombs opened. ibid.
Jack Howard, Defense Secretary ... testified under oath that four nuclear weapons had been lost and were still missing. ibid.
There are approximately 10,000 nuclear weapons in America’s arsenal today. ibid.
Nuclear is nothing more than a dangerous and unnecessary distraction. Greenpeace Australia December 2007
There is no environmentally acceptable and proven solution for the disposal of high level radioactive waste and spent fuel. Greenpeace UK February 2010
The sheer opportunism involved in this process has astonished even those who have pushed it on. The most hideous example is Labour’s attitude to British nuclear weapons. At two general elections – 1983 and 1987 – Labour argued that the British government should stop making and stockpiling these weapons. They were, Labour argued, useless, expensive and an encouragement to all other belligerent nations who wanted their own bombs. It was a clear policy, easily argued, at one time shared by a majority of the people, again and again passed at party conferences and enthusiastically endorsed by the enormous majority of Labour Party members.
A mighty campaign against this anti-nuclear policy was set in train by the Tories. Labour, they said, was leaving Britain ‘defenceless’ against the only enemy country which had nuclear weapons: Russia. The campaign, so the polls pronounced, damaged Labour in the elections. Accordingly, after 1987, the Labour leaders set their minds to changing it.
Their problem, however, was that Russia, the former ‘enemy’, was now rapidly becoming a ‘friend’. There were now no ‘enemy’ nations with nuclear weapons! The last half-argument for keeping them was gone. Yet doggedly the Labour leaders constructed a ‘defence policy’ which was based on keeping nuclear weapons for possible use against ... er ... no-one in particular. Paul Foot, The Case For Socialism ch6
No source in modern times proved this more dramatically than Mordechai Vanunu. He worked for some years at the Dimona plant in Israel, where nuclear weapons were being manufactured. He was shocked by the fact that no one in Israel or anywhere else seemed to know about it. At a time when weapons of mass destruction were very much in the news, and the conflicts in the Middle East constantly covered in the media, no one knew that the most powerful military force in the area was arming itself with nuclear weapons. He took pictures of the plant, and of the nuclear processes, and left his job. In 1986 he came to London and gave his information and his photographs to the Sunday Times ...
In all the excitement surrounding the publication of the scoop, the Sunday Times managed to lose its precious source. Mordechai was consigned to the loose charge of a couple of journalists who had no instructions as to how they were to keep him safe, and no means to do so. Wandering around disconsolate and lonely, he was approached in Leicester Square by an attractive young woman who befriended him and persuaded him to fly with her to Rome. The woman was an agent of Mossad, the Israeli intelligence service. In Rome the unsuspecting Mordechai was attacked, knocked unconscious, drugged, bound hand and foot, and taken by boat to Israel, where he was convicted of high treason and sentenced to prison for 18 years. That sentence has now been served in full, much of it in solitary confinement, and Mordechai is due to be released this month. The Israeli government, which never stops boasting about its commitment to the rule of law, is threatening either not to release him or to commit him to house arrest. Paul Foot, Mordechai Vanunu, Israel’s Whistle Test