Secretary of State Marco Rubio and foreign ministers from France, Germany and the United Kingdom have agreed that Iran will face greater sanctions if it does not reach a nuclear deal with the United States by August, Axios reported.
If a deal is not reached, the European powers would reimpose all of the United Nations Security Council sanctions that were lifted under the original 2015 deal in a process called “the snapback process” under the 2015 deal. Iran, however, has threatened to expand its nuclear program to deter these “snapback sanctions.” Though Iran has maintained its position on enriching uranium, Russia has notably encouraged Iran this week to only accept a zero uranium enrichment deal while offering to provide Iran with the 3.67% uranium it would need for civilian purposes, Axios reported.
Meanwhile, at the nuclear sites in Iran, the Institute for Science and International Security said Iranian personnel have not tried accessing the underground areas of the Esfahan and Natanz sites as of July 9. According to an assessment by the Donald Trump administration, two of the sites were not as badly damaged as the third one, NBC News said.
This past Wednesday, July 16, marked the 80th anniversary of the Trinity test, the first detonation of a nuclear weapon, a plutonium implosion device, around 200 miles south of Los Alamos, N.M. as part of the Manhattan Project in 1945.
The final test catapulted a series of events that ended World War II, namely the U.S. dropping a nuclear atomic bomb on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, Japan three weeks later on Aug. 6 and Aug. 9, 1945, respectively. This remains the sole use of nuclear weapons in an armed conflict, as the bombings killed between 150,000 and 246,000 people. Julius Robert Oppenheimer, the director of Los Alamos National Laboratory during the Manhattan Project, reportedly said “we knew the world would never be the same.”
The American Nuclear Society, in a statement this week, said it “honors the World War II achievements of the Manhattan Project generation of nuclear pioneers and their postwar legacy,” and “also remembers those affected by the test and those who lost their lives in the subsequent bombings of Japan.” Local paper the Santa Fe New Mexican reported on activities at the site of the test, the White Sands Missile Range, to remember those in New Mexico that were exposed to and negatively affected by the subsequent radiation from the test.
Sandia National Laboratories is collaborating with California-based Aeva Technologies to develop technology to strengthen security at nuclear reactor sites in the United States, according to a release by Aeva.
Aeva, a next-generation sensing and perception systems developer, said the sensors it is developing for Sandia can deliver “round-the-clock operational capabilities” that operate in suboptimal conditions such as darkness, fog, rain and dust.
Sandia recently completed the evaluation phase of Aeva’s technology, called 4D LiDAR technology, and chief engineer at Aeva James Reuther said the team is entering the next phase by testing the technology for security at nuclear sites.
Recent satellite imagery shows Russia is upgrading and expanding nuclear sites near NATO and European Union borders, according to Business Insider this week.
The images, taken in May and June, show new structures, roadworks, modifications and “rapid expansion,” analysts told the publication. The images also apparently show extensive construction at “secret” facilities and fences surrounding sites associated with Russia’s nuclear facilities.
“There are two primary interests here,” Hans Kristensen, director of the Nuclear Information Project at the Federation of American Scientists, said in the article about the imagery. “One is an internal one that has to do with something you do every once in a while, to upgrade a facility. The other one is certainly the interactions with other nuclear states or big military powers.”
A documentary about the old Rocky Flats Plant, which made plutonium triggers for the Department of Energy, will be screened Saturday July 19 at the Boulder Film Festival in Colorado.
“Half-Life of Memory: America’s Forgotten Atomic Bomb Factory,” will be screened at 4:30 p.m. Mountain Time at the Dairy Arts Center in Boulder. A website about the documentary can be found here.
Rocky Flats operated from the 1950s through the 1980s. In 1989, the Federal Bureau of Investigation and the Environmental Protection Agency raided the facility, following a government probe. DOE declared the site cleaned up in 2005.
Obituary
Robert (Bob) Alvarez, a former Senate staffer, 1990s Department of Energy official and nuclear watchdog who helped found the Environmental Policy Institute, died July 1 at age 78 following a years-long battle with Parkinson’s disease, according to published reports.
The Institute for Policy Studies and the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists published remembrances of Alvarez in recent days.
“Bob won a Lifetime Achievement Award in 2022 from the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability and the Nuclear Information and Resource Service,” the Institute for Policy Studies said in its piece. “They called him “one of the bedrock founders of the national movement to unmask the human and environmental carnage that resulted directly from the U.S. production of a massive nuclear arsenal,’” the IPS said.
