Sylvie Corbet | AP News
Poland and Baltic nations welcomed Thursday a proposal by French President Emmanuel Macron to launch talks about using France’s nuclear deterrent to protect the continent from Russian threats, a move Moscow quickly dismissed as “extremely confrontational.” The comments came as Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelenskyy joined European Union leaders in Brussels for an emergency summit on defense and security.
Melissa Quinn | CBS News
The Supreme Court on Wednesday jumped into the decades-long dispute over what to do with thousands of metric tons of nuclear waste, as it considered a plan to store it above one of the world's most productive oil fields, the Permian Basin in Texas. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and the company Interim Storage Partners are facing off against the state of Texas and Fasken Land and Minerals Ltd., which owns land in the Permian Basin… The waste can remain radioactive and pose health risks for thousands of years, according to the U.S. Energy Information Administration.
Matt Honeycombe-Foster and Emilio Casalicchio | Politico
The British government stressed that the United States remains a “reliable ally,” amid questions in London about the future of the country’s jointly-maintained nuclear deterrent under Donald Trump… The comments come after defense analysts told the Times of London that Trump’s sharp pivot away from Europe, as he tries to end the Ukraine war, called into question the future of the U.K.’s £3 billion-a-year Trident program, which relies heavily on U.S. cooperation to keep running.
Courtney Albon | Defense News
The Pentagon is weighing options to establish new flight corridors to test hypersonic weapons over the U.S. and Australia — and it’s eyeing the Trump administration’s urgent call for a homeland missile shield as a mechanism to speed up the approval process. The Defense Department already leverages several over-sea test ranges to validate that the hypersonic vehicles it’s developing… But as programs transition to later test phases, overland ranges are better suited to evaluate how a system performs under more stressing conditions, like a faulty navigation system or an enemy decoy, which an adversary may use to distract from a real target.
Deutsche Presse Agentur
Germany has decided not to take part in a UN conference in New York to review a landmark treaty on nuclear weapons prohibition. "The Treaty on the Prohibition of Nuclear Weapons dates back to a time before the Russian war of aggression against Ukraine," the Foreign Office told dpa in Berlin on Tuesday. "The intention and ambition of the treaty no longer reflect the current reality in security policy."
World Nuclear News
EDF says it has "recently become aware of a new type of acoustic fish deterrent system that could be installed and operated in a way likely to be safe and effective in the waters of the Severn"… It involves using ceramic transducers to make targeted very high-frequency sound and "we are working with experts to provide the scientific data to underpin the case for its use at the new power station". It says it is a fairly new technology deployed in the fishing industry to reduce by-catch and had not been considered for use for a power station before.