The sixth Young Professional Nuclear Forum (YPNF6), sponsored by the Center for International Security and Cooperation at Stanford University and the Moscow Engineering and Physics Institute (MEPhI), was held at MEPhI, Moscow, on November 4-7, 2019.

The mission of the forums is to foster collaboration between young professionals from Russia and the United States in the nuclear power and nonproliferation fields. The forum allows them to discuss and evaluate pressing global nuclear issues during times that the two governments are not cooperating and are not in serious dialogue. In recent years, the two governments have severely restricted opportunities and venues that previously used to be open to experienced nuclear professionals on both sides to cooperate with each other.  The benefits of nuclear cooperation were clearly demonstrated in hundreds of mutually beneficial collaborative projects by Russian and American nuclear professionals during the breakup of the Soviet Union and in the 20-plus years that followed.

These forums allow Stanford University and MEPhI to prepare the next generation to help rejuvenate cooperation once the governments realize that cooperation in the nuclear arena is essential. The young professionals participating in these meetings are upper level undergraduates, graduate students, postdocs, young faculty and junior specialists. They are the new generation who will be stepping in to solve the mounting challenges including nuclear security, nonproliferation, nuclear disarmament and how to mitigate the effects of climate change and toxic pollution of the planet.

The November 2019 meeting included two and a half days of lectures and group work on two exercises – one on a “World free of nuclear weapons” and the second on “The impact of nuclear accidents on the future of nuclear power.”

Most young professionals acknowledged – or came to realize – the enormity and complexity of Nuclear Zero as both a study area and a goal. At the same time, many noted that this very complexity provoked deeper thinking and the discussion opened new perspectives, especially for those on the engineering side. The young professionals also realized that they share more common ground on the issue of Global Zero than one might have thought.

The feedback on the nuclear accidents exercise also showed several notable takeaways. The aspects that appealed to the young professionals were: the comparative approach that pushed them to look beyond the known facts into similarities and specifics across the three accident cases; a perspective that integrated the technical, social, and cultural angles; and such examination being directly relevant to improved safety of nuclear energy, the objective close to heart to many of them who see their future as nuclear professionals.

It is also interesting that in this exercise the young professionals noted differences of perspective and opinion rather than similarities. As has been the case in all previous forums, these differences were valued and accepted as leading to a richer, more productive, discussions.

Their reports were sufficiently impressive that we have decided to follow the model of YPNF4 and have the young professionals turn the six short articles to be published in the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists. We have the go-ahead from the editor of the Bulletin.

In addition to the working sessions, the forum provided the opportunity for personal interaction and connections. The young professionals rated their overall satisfaction of the meeting as 8.6 out of 10 expressed a strong preference to stay engaged between the forums working on collaborative projects.

On the whole, the response to the 6^th YPNF seems to show a growing engagement and sense of ownership by the young professionals on both sides. The forum presented various opportunities for the young professionals to learn about issues, each other, and each other’s countries. Young professionals approached many of the senior experts individually with questions both within and beyond the Forum discussion areas and exchanged contacts for future interaction.

The forum was supported by MEPhI, the Carnegie Corporation of New York and the MacArthur Foundation.

This article examines a set of public controversies surrounding the role of nuclear power and the threat of radioactive contamination in a post-Fukushima Japan. The empirical case study focuses on the Ministry of Economy, Trade and Industry (METI), Japan most influential ministry and, more importantly, the former regulator of nuclear energy before the 2011 Fukushima nuclear disaster. Through participant observation of METI’s public conferences, as well as interviews with state and non-state actors, I examine how particular visions of nuclear power continue to affect the basis of expert authority through which state actors handle post-Fukushima controversies and their subsequent uncertainties. In its post-Fukushima representations, METI frames nuclear power as an apolitical necessity for the well-being of the Japanese nation-state and the common humanity. It does so by mobilizing categories of uncertainty around specific political scenes, such as global warming. For METI, the potential uncertainties linked with the abandonment of nuclear power have the power to trigger political turmoil of a higher scale than those linked with Fukushima’s radioactive contamination. A form of double depoliticization takes place, in which the issue of Fukushima’s radioactive contamination gets depoliticized through perceived priorities that are paradoxically depicted as ‘post-political’ – that is, in an urgent need for immediate action and not open to in-depth deliberation. I refer to this process as establishing ‘post-political uncertainties’. This kind of depoliticization raises ethical questions surrounding meaningful public participation in decisions that happen at the intersection of politics and science and technology study.

Read the rest at Social Studies of Science

Authorities don’t seem to understand the real threat from cyber-operations.

The Nuclear Power Corporation of India Limited (NPCIL) has now confirmed that there was a cyberattack on the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant (KKNPP) in Tamil Nadu, India, in September. The nuclear power plant’s administrative network was breached in the attack, but did not cause any critical damage. KKNPP plant officials had initially denied suffering an attack and officially stated that KKNPP “and other Indian nuclear power plants are stand alone and not connected to outside cyber network and Internet. Any cyberattack on the Nuclear Power Plant Control System is not possible.”

So what really happened at Kudankulam? Here’s what you need to know.

1. The nuclear power plant and the cyberattack

The KKNPP is the biggest nuclear power plant in India, equipped with two Russian-designed and supplied VVER pressurized water reactors with a capacity of 1,000 megawatts each. Both reactor units feed India’s southern power grid. The plant is adding four more reactor units of the same capacity, making the Kudankulam Nuclear Power Plant one of the largest collaborations between India and Russia.

Read the Rest at The Washington Post

U.S.-Turkish relations have plunged to a new nadir. In the past month, a senior Republican senator has suggested suspending Turkey’s membership in the NATO alliance, while the secretary of state implied a readiness to use military force against America’s wayward ally.

In these circumstances, U.S. nuclear weapons have no business in Turkey. It is time to bring them home.

The signs of a strained and deteriorating relationship are hard to miss. President Recep Tayyip Erdogan, Turkey’s increasingly autocratic leader, has turned away from both Europe and the United States. He instead is actively cultivating a close relationship with fellow authoritarian Vladimir Putin, as evidenced by their eight meetings just this year.

Erdogan rejected buying U.S. Patriot air defense missiles in favor of Russian S-400s—missiles that are incompatible with NATO’s integrated air defense system. As a result, the United States excluded Turkey from taking part in the F-35 Joint Strike Fighter program, leaving the question of Turkey’s next-generation fighter literally up in the air.

Following President Donald Trump’s rash decision to withdraw the small U.S. military contingent from eastern Syria, Erdogan launched the Turkish army on a major offensive. In doing so, he showed no regard for the Kurdish forces that did so much in collaboration with the U.S. military to destroy ISIS at great cost—some ten thousand Kurdish fighters killed. At one point, Turkish artillery bracketed a position still occupied by U.S. troops. Trump has threatened various sanctions and repeatedly expressed his readiness to “devastate” the Turkish economy.

One other worrying matter. Erdogan says he wants nuclear weapons. In September, he told his political party: “Some countries have missiles with nuclear warheads. But the West insists ‘we can’t have them.’ This, I cannot accept.”

Turkey is not the place to host U.S. nuclear arms.

According to the Federation of American Scientists, the U.S. military maintains 150 B61 nuclear gravity bombs in Europe for use in conflict by the U.S. and certain allied air forces. Reportedly, fifty of those are located at an American facility at the Turkish airbase at Incirlik (bases in Germany, the Netherlands, Belgium and Italy host the other one hundred). The 39th Weapons Systems Security Group, numbering about five hundred U.S. Air Force personnel, secures and maintains the bombs at Incirlik.

The United States has deployed nuclear weapons in Europe going back to the 1950s, though the number today is drastically lower than the peak of more than seven thousand in the 1970s. The long-stated purpose of these deployments has been to help deter an attack against NATO member states in Europe while reassuring European allies of America’s commitment to their defense.

Ten years ago, many in Europe questioned the need for such forward-basing of U.S. nuclear arms. That talk has become muted as Moscow adopted a belligerent attitude toward the West, and the Russian military seized Crimea and provoked an armed conflict in eastern Ukraine.

Washington and NATO still see a need for American nuclear bombs in Europe. While any use of a nuclear weapon would have a military effect, the Alliance has come to regard these bombs as having primarily a political purpose: deterrence and, should deterrence fail and a conflict break out, to signal (by their use) that matters are about to escalate to potentially horrific levels and thus bring the conflict to an end.

The one hundred B61 bombs deployed at bases in NATO countries other than Turkey can fulfill those requirements. There is no requirement to have U.S. nuclear weapons on the territory of five NATO members in order to deter attack and provide assurance to the twenty-seven European members of the Alliance; that can readily be done with B61 bombs based in four countries.

Moreover, while the U.S., German, Dutch, Belgian and Italian air forces each have dual-capable aircraft certified to carry nuclear weapons and crews trained in nuclear delivery, questions arose some time ago as to whether that is so with the Turkish Air Force. In that case, the most likely scenario in which a Turkish-based nuclear bomb would be used would envisage a U.S. fighter flying into Incirlik, loading a B61 bomb, and then taking off to fly to and strike its target. It would seem much simpler to launch a nuclear-armed U.S. F-16 from its base at Aviano, Italy.

The rationale for maintaining nuclear weapons at Incirlik becomes more dubious by the day. It is time for the U.S. Air Force to bring them home.

Steven Pifer is a William Perry research fellow at Stanford University’s Center for International Security and Cooperation, and a retired U.S. Foreign Service officer.

Originally for The National Interest at  https://nationalinterest.org/blog/middle-east-watch/its-time-get-us-nuk…

CISAC Co-Director Rodney Ewing was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Award from the Mineralogical Society of America (MSA), to honor his “important contributions to furthering the vitality of the geological sciences.”

“I don’t know anyone more deserving of this award than Rod,” wrote Kevin Crowley, National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine (retired), in the citation for the award. “Rod is first and foremost an extraordinarily creative and productive scientist, having authored or coauthored over 750 research publications and established fruitful research collaborations with scientists in several countries. He is also a founding editor of Elements Magazine, co-published by 18 national and international scientific organizations, which focuses on current themes in the mineralogical and geochemical sciences.”

“He has been a major force in the application of science and technology to national and international public policy making on nuclear waste management and disposal... and appointed by President Barack Obama to serve on the U.S. Nuclear Waste Technical Review Board,” Crowley continued.

Among Ewing’s honors, he also is the past recipient of the MSA’s Dana Medal and Roebling Medal, the Russian Academy of Sciences’ Lomonosov Gold Medal, and was elected to the U.S. National Academy of Engineering.

North Korea currently has only one publicly known uranium mine—the Pyongsăn uranium mining and milling complex—that serves as a first step in the country’s pathway towards nuclear weapons.

Using a combination of multispectral imagery sourced from the European Space Agency’s Copernicus Sentinel-2 satellite and a review of geological analyses dating back to 1955, a new study from Stanford’s Center for International Security and Cooperation (CISAC) in Jane’s Intelligence Review by geological sciences postdoctoral fellow Sulgiye Park (PhD ’17) and CISAC honors student Federico Derby (BS ’19) looks for evidence of uranium mining in North Korea, going beyond what is currently available in open sources in order to estimate the uranium resources and their locations in North Korea.

The peer-reviewed CISAC study has identified around 18 additional sites in North Korea where the hyperspectral signatures and geological profile combine to suggest the possibility of uranium mining. Nevertheless, CISAC and Jane’s stress that the presence of these ‘hotspots’ does not imply the presence of an active uranium mine or related facility, but rather a site that warrants further analysis.

In this Q&A with Katy Gabel Chui, researchers Sulgiye Park and Federico Derby discuss their work on the project:

How did you land on this project? What made you think to look for more mining sites?

Sulgiye Park (SP) and Federico Derby (FD): Very little is known about the front-end of North Korea’s nuclear fuel cycle, particularly when it comes to the mining and milling processes of uranium production pathway. To date, assessments of this portion of North Korea’s nuclear fuel cycle have been mostly conducted through traditional (electro-optical) satellite imagery observations---the type of imagery that you can access through Google Earth, for instance.

We wanted to get a more complete grasp of North Korea's uranium mining and processing capacity by conducting a multi-disciplinary approach that combines both the visible signatures from multi-spectral satellite imagery and a geological dataset that contains information such as mineralogy and geochemistry. The two individual methods come together at the end to provide information that encapsulates the potential regions likely to host uranium deposits and mines.

What is multispectral imaging? How would it ordinarily be used, and how did you use it for this project?

SP and FD: Traditional electro-optical satellite imagery exploits only three portions of the electromagnetic spectrum; namely, the blue, green and red bands. In general, when using the term “multispectral” within the satellite imagery community, we are usually referring to a satellite system that covers a few to tens of different bands in the electromagnetic spectrum.

Multispectral imagery is used in a wide variety of industries, to measure things like water turbidity, crop healthiness, vegetation quality, etc. For this project, we focused on using spectral fingerprints. Basically, every object – whether it be a mineral, a living thing, water, etc. – has a(n in theory unique) spectral fingerprint. Spectral fingerprints are measured as the intensity of the object’s reflectance of light at a specific wavelength. Varying across wavelengths – hence the importance of having a multispectral system that can give you access to different ranges of the electromagnetic spectrum – you ultimately get a spectral curve that is unique to the item you are studying.

The spectral fingerprints you collect on a specific image can be compared to previously collected fingerprints stored in what is usually termed a spectral library, for classification purposes. Basically, if my spectral curve of a given pixel (or set of pixels) looks super similar to that of gold (for which I obtained a reference spectral curve from a spectral library), then it is probably gold. Obviously, this matching is performed in a more rigorous manner, but you get the idea of how the process works.

In this project, we used the Pyongsan uranium mine in North Korea (arguably the only well-identified uranium mine in the country) as my reference spectral curve. Essentially, using various imaging techniques, we traversed North Korea looking for pixels whose spectral curves are similar to that of the Pyongsan uranium mine. Those are the ‘hotspots’ we identified.

What most surprised you in both your work and your findings?

SP and FD: The fascinating match between the 'hotspots' identified through satellite imagery analysis and the geologic information available in maps and reports. The majority of the 'hotspots' appeared adjacent to the limestone formation from the Ordovician period (circa 445-485 Ma) that are in contact with a specific sedimentary rocks of upper Proterozoic group. Part of the geologic characteristics of the 'hotspots' regions were similar to what had been observed in the Pyongsan (the most well-known) uranium mine of North Korea.

What was most surprising in the work itself? What was difficult in doing the work?

SP and FD: It was surprising to see how much we still don't know about North Korea despite the amount of effort that had been invested. There is no consensus reached regarding the location and the total number of uranium mines in North Korea.

One of the bigger difficulties we had was finding credible geological data and information.

What is the one thing you think someone should take away from your study?

SP and FD: That there are still many unknowns. While our study identified multiple regions with spectral signatures similar to the uranium tailing piles at Pyongsan, verification of uranium presence is still needed.

What are you working on next?

SP: I am still working on using a geologic approach to glean information on the uranium mines of North Korea. The further evaluation aims to identify a qualitative upper limit of uranium ore grade (quality) and quantity pertaining to all the suspected uranium mines in North Korea.

FD: I co-founded a startup focused on developing deep learning models for credit risk analytics (in Latin America). However, I will still keep in touch with my CISAC peers!