In 1976 U.S. president Gerald Ford announced that the U.S. would stop reprocessing used civilian nuclear fuel. The trigger for this decision was of course political: the announcement was on October 28, and in five days there would be a general election in which Ford was the Republican presidential candidate. But why would such...
Nuclear diplomacy
Why is Iran stepping up uranium enrichment?
The Iran nuclear program continues unabated. Readers of this blog may recall my assessment of Iran’s nuclear motives. The original reason Iran decided to go nuclear was Saddam Hussein. Iran and Iraq, after their bloody, costly, and inconclusive hot war in the 1980s, had their own cold war—complete with a nuclear arms race—during the...
Waste to power: beautiful concept, and demonstrably viable
I recently visited a waste-to-power project in my home town, Ottawa Ontario. This is the Carp Road landfill gas project. The Carp Road landfill is a private facility, run by Waste Management Inc., a Houston-based multinational whose name aptly describes its business. The Carp Road facility consists of a mountain of municipal garbage into...
Nuclear exceptionalism: why is a nuclear fatality more noteworthy than a non-nuclear one?
Twenty-six days after the ferocious Japanese earthquake and tsunami, the Fukushima nuclear emergency has still not produced a single fatality. You would never know that from the headlines. Though the quake/tsunami killed tens of thousands of people and left half a million homeless, by far most of the news from Japan has centred on...
Nuclear threats in a changing world: revisiting Pakistan
A couple of weeks ago, I spoke about nuclear proliferation at the World Affairs Conference in Toronto. The WAC is an annual student-run conference hosted by Upper Canada College. I co-presented along with a Carleton University professor, Trevor Findlay, a veteran of the Australian diplomatic service who now heads the Canadian Centre for Treaty...
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