By Denis Lehane, Chief European Correspondent, on April 13th, 2011
Shannon Airport | U.S. Navy Admiral Mike Mullen, Chairman of the Joint Chief of Staff, greets U.S. Army Soldiers at the Shannon Airport, Ireland Feb. 12, 2011 . Photo: Wikimedia / Wolf32at | U.S. Army photo by Staff Sgt. Teddy Wade
Shannon International Airport, set amid lush agrarian fields in the sparsely populated west of Ireland, is better known for its duty free shops than as a major transit hub for American troops on their way to war zones since shortly after Al Qaeda brought down the Twin Towers.
The private Dublin Airport Authority, which owns and runs the airport, will not discuss America’s use of the airport and refers all press queries to the Irish government. The Irish government refuses to comment or answer any questions in writing. The U.S. government will not respond to written questions about American involvement in Shannon submitted to it.
So what do we have at Shannon? Well, we have an airport which is today the fifth busiest airport on the island of Ireland, where once it was number one in the country. In the past, it relied on a law that made all transatlantic flights to anywhere in Ireland stop there and the passengers disembark to go shopping in the Duty Free shops, a wheeze Shannon itself invented more than half a century ago. This law, brought in by the local Member of Parliament for Clare, Eamon de Valera, is like him and his world, long gone, as is the Soviet Union that helped keep Shannon afloat in the 1960s, 70s, and 80s.
Not many people live in the natural hinterland of Shannon Airport. Certainly not enough to support a major international airport. Shannon’s glory days were due to the fact that the aircraft of the time could not fly directly from the United States to continental Europe and had to refuel. Today’s aircraft don’t need to refuel, and there goes the main selling-pointthat Shannon once had. Continue reading The Shannon Connection: Do U.S. Military Flights Threaten Irish Neutrality?
By Celia Sampol, on March 10th, 2011
Photo: Areva
For three decades the United States has been a key strategic market for the French atomic energy giant AREVA. The firm strongly supported the Bush administration’s efforts to revive the nuclear industry in 2005 and is now taking advantage of the Obama administration’s investments in nuclear energy.
AREVA, owned by the French government, is a world leader in the nuclear sector with a commercial presence in 100 countries, almost 50,000 employees around the world, and $12.57 billion in revenues in 2010.
Better positioned than any of its competitors, AREVA is one of the main beneficiaries of the “nuclear renaissance” in the United States. Created in 2001 from the merger of two companies, Cogema and Framatome, it deals with the whole “nuclear fuel cycle” from uranium mining to fuel enrichment, reactor design and used fuel recycling. It is chaired by the powerful CEO Anne Lauvergeon – called “Atomic Anne” by the French press – and its main shareholder is the French public-sector company CEA (“Commissariat à l’Energie Atomique”) which owns 78 percent. (The CEA’s mission is similar to that of the U.S. Department of Energy.) The French State owns in total 87 percent, including the shares owned by the CEA. The rest is divided among essentially the “Caisse des Dépôts et Consignations,” EDF group, Total group. Last December, shareholders approved a capital increase of the company, mainly a $794 million investment by the Kuwait Investment Authority, a Kuwait sovereign fund. It acquired a 4.8% stake in AREVA and became the third largest shareholder after the CEA and the French State. Continue reading French Nuclear Giant AREVA’s Multi-Billion-Dollar Strategic Partner: American Taxpayers
By Robert Alvarez, on March 10th, 2011
Robert Alvarez
“While we are investing in areas that are critical to our future, we are also rooting out programs that aren’t needed and making hard choices to tighten our belt,” declared Energy Secretary Steven Chu.
Hold on. Less than 20 percent of the Energy Department’s budget covers actual energy activities. More than half of that small slice gets spent on nuclear energy and fossil fuels. More than 60 percent of our supposed energy funding ends up covering the cost of safeguarding our large and antiquated nuclear infrastructure, which features enough weapons to blow up the planet many times over.
Much of this money covers the maintenance of nuclear weapon stockpiles and cleaning up the agency’s enormous environmental mess at its weapons sites in Idaho, Tennessee, and elsewhere. Continue reading The Government’s Nuclear Millstone
By Joseph Trento, on March 3rd, 2011
Bob Alvarez is one of the world’s foremost experts on the United States nuclear weapons program. He is widely credited with opening up the secret history of the Department of Energy as an aide to former Energy Secretary Hazel O’Leary and former Senator John Glenn. Alvarez is known for his unvarnished candor and his . . . → Read More: An Expert’s Look At The Proposed 2012 DOE Budget
By Celia Sampol, on January 26th, 2011
Nuclear Waste Container coming out of Nevada Test Site. Photo: Bill Ebbesen
Too slow, too expensive, too risky: the multi-billion dollar Mixed Oxide Fuel (MOX) program, under construction at the Savannah River Site, continues to be controversial. A technology chosen by the United States in the mid-1990s to contribute to the nonproliferation of nuclear weapons, today it is being held out as a solution for America’s energy future.
In 1996, the U.S.-Russian Independent Scientific Commission on Disposition of Excess Weapons Plutonium was put in place to propose options to decrease risks of nuclear proliferation. In the framework of the 1991 Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START I) signed by the United States and Russia, the two countries had indeed committed to dispose of 34 metric tons of their surplus weapons plutonium to reduce the threat that this material could be stolen or diverted.
Professor Nikolai N. Ponomarev-Stepnoi was a member of this commission. During a conference organized by the National Academies and the U.S. Institute of Peace on January 19 in Washington, he explained that the final report presented by the commission in 1997 contained a two-approach proposal: “Using the plutonium in MOX fuel for burning once-through in currently operating nuclear power reactors, and vitrifying the plutonium together with fission products in glass logs for burial.” These two approaches were supposed to be used in both countries. At the end of the 1990s, the United States eventually chose to give up the vitrification process and to concentrate on MOX. Russia decided, for its part, to stock the plutonium for disposition over future decades. The only condition of the deal was that the disposition in the two countries would proceed in parallel. Continue reading Little Progress Disposing of 34 Metric Tons of Surplus Weapons Grade Plutonium
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