proliferation

Can David Miliband find a cure for nuclear weapons addiction?

Foreign Secretary David Miliband gave a speech today in London outlining a new '6 step programme' for creating a world free of nuclear weapons. His speech was largely a response to pressure created by recent high-profile campaigns emerging from the US, which have been calling for step by step progress towards the ultimate abolition of the world's nuclear arsenals.

Getting rid of the bomb? Sounds like radical stuff, but what's particularly radical is who is behind these campaigns. Not your 'usual suspect' peaceniks, but rather some of the biggest names in international diplomacy, who have come together to demand action on global security because they see the spread of nuclear weapons as the biggest threat to our immediate future.

There's a truly frightening story – and a sharp reminder that its failure to tackle climate change isn’t the only problem with nuclear power - in The Guardian today.

A mafia clan in Italy is accused of trafficking nuclear waste and trying to make plutonium (ie nuclear weapons). It's alleged, says The Guardian, "to have made illegal shipments of radioactive waste to Somalia, as well as seeking the 'clandestine production' of other nuclear material".

Eight former employees of the state energy research agency Enea, suspected of paying the mafia to take the nuclear waste off their hands, are also being investigated.

"An Enea manager is said to have paid the clan to get rid of 600 drums of toxic and radioactive waste from Italy, Switzerland, France, Germany, and the US… with Somalia as the destination lined up by the traffickers… But with only room for 500 drums on a ship waiting at the northern port of Livorno, 100 drums were secretly buried somewhere in the southern Italian region of Basilicata."

The full story's here.

We've been arguing for a long time that nuclear power can't stop climate change - because replacing our whole fleet of nuclear power stations would only reduce our carbon emissions by four per cent, some time after 2024 (far too little, far too late).

The Oxford Research Group has just published an interesting study on the subject. It says that, for nuclear power to make any significant contribution to a reduction in global carbon emissions in the next two generations, the industry would have to construct nearly 3,000 new reactors globally - about one a week for 60 years.