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Senate Republicans deployed the so-called “nuclear option” Thursday afternoon in a bid to confirm Judge Neil Gorsuch to the Supreme Court, moving to overcome a Democratic filibuster just minutes earlier. The Senate initially voted 55-45 on a motion to end debate on Gorsuch, with four Democrats breaking ranks; it needed 60 to succeed. Known as a filibuster, this vote triggered Senate Majority Leader Mitch McConnell to go “nuclear.” This means he is trying to change Senate precedent so that the Senate can move to a final roll call with just a simple majority of 51 votes, as opposed to 60....

Monday on MSNBC while discussing Senate Democrats opposition to President Donald Trump Supreme Court nominee Judge Neil Gorsuch, Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said Republicans have “no other choice” than the nuclear option of lowering the 60-vote filibuster threshold for a Supreme Court nominee to a simple majority.

SAINT-PAUL-LEZ-DURANCE, France — At a dusty construction site here amid the limestone ridges of Provence, workers scurry around immense slabs of concrete arranged in a ring like a modern-day Stonehenge. It looks like the beginnings of a large commercial power plant, but it is not. The project, called ITER, is an enormous, and enormously complex and costly, physics experiment. But if it succeeds, it could determine the power plants of the future and make an invaluable contribution to reducing planet-warming emissions. ITER, short for International Thermonuclear Experimental Reactor (and pronounced EAT-er), is being built to test a long-held dream: that...

Westinghouse bankruptcy filing just the start for Toshiba Fulfilling loan guarantees could further strain fragile finances March 28, 2017 6:00 am JST TOKYO -- Toshiba's plan to have Westinghouse Electric file for bankruptcy protection this week is a risky first step in a long and potentially complicated recovery, exposing the parent to a stiff financial blow if loan payments by the American nuclear unit falter.

Sen. Chris Coons of Delaware predicted Monday that Republicans will “almost certainly” have to resort to the “nuclear” option to approve the nomination of Judge Neil Gorsuch to the U.S. Supreme Court. Mr. Coons, a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, which held four days of hearings on the Gorsuch nomination, doesn’t envision Democrats crossing party lines to vote in favor of President Trump’s nominee. “He will get an up or down vote. Sen. Schumer, our minority leader, has said it is going to be a 60-vote margin, and I doubt he is going to get 60 votes. The question...

At least six entities in the United States or Canada (TerraPower, ARC, GE Prism, LeadCold, Oklo and Westinghouse) are investing significant sums of corporate or venture capital to pursue an elusive technical achievement; commercially viable nuclear power systems that achieve substantially greater fuel economy than conventional reactors. Though nuclear fuel is “cheap,” substantially better fuel use provides improved longevity and produces less waste material. Efforts to achieve fuel economy objectives have reopened a discussion whose historical roots extend back more than 50 years into the middle of the 1960s. Given that there are United States entities that believe there is...

Weapon physicist declassifies rescued nuclear test films - Video On Tuesday, the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, a federally funded facility outside San Francisco that focuses on nuclear research, released 63 rare, restored and declassified nuclear-test films. The films, uploaded to the lab’s YouTube account, are part of a trove of some 10,000 that have been in storage since they were originally shot between 1945 and 1962, and had been held in secure vaults since then. The initial release is just a fraction of about 750 that Greg Spriggs, a physicist at the lab who has worked on the project for five years, declassified...

Thursday, March 16, 2017 The Leahy Rules for Supreme Court Confirmation Mean Gorsuch Must Be Confirmed In preparation for the Gorsuch hearing next week, we thought we would mention some of the Democrat Rules for confirmation of a Supreme Court Justice from their most senior member. The Leahy Rule (Part 1) on the President’s power to pick a Supreme Court Justice. And I think as members of the [Judiciary] Committee, we should respect the mandate the president has earned. The president had told us in 1980 and 1984 he would appoint judges of his philosophy. He was given a mandate...

Between 1945 and 1962, the United States conducted 210 atmospheric nuclear tests over remote sites in New Mexico, Nevada, and both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. With several cameras to capture each detonation, the tests yielded roughly 10,000 recordings which have since been left to be slowly decay in high-security vaults. Now, researchers are working to scan the decomposing films so the footage can be reanalysed and declassified before it’s too late. So far, they’ve scanned about 4,200 recordings – and the effort has revealed that much of the original published data on the tests are wrong.

AMERICAN military chiefs are sending nuclear bombers to the Korean peninsula as tensions in the region reach breaking point. North Korea and the US have been teetering on the brink of war for months after Kim Jong-un carried out a series of controversial missile launches. Earlier this week, trigger-happy Kim pushed his luck once more when he fired off four ballistic missiles into the seas near Japan. Now President Donald Trump is reportedly flying in B-1 and B-52 bombers – built to carry nuclear bombs – to show he’s had enough. South Korea and the US have also started their...

President Donald Trump said on Thursday he wants to build up the U.S. nuclear arsenal to ensure it is at the "top of the pack," saying the United States has fallen behind in its atomic weapons capacity. In a Reuters interview, Trump also complained about Russian deployment of a cruise missile in violation of an arms control treaty and said he would raise the issue with Russian President Vladimir Putin when and if they meet. On another front, Trump said China could solve the national security challenge posed by North Korea "very easily if they want to," ratcheting up pressure...

TOKYO — Toshiba Corp.'s chairman resigned Tuesday after the company logged such massive losses in its nuclear business that it must sell its lucrative computer-chip business to avoid going belly-up. The company projected a 712.5 billion yen ($6.3 billion) loss for its nuclear business related to the acquisition of CB&I Stone & Webster by its U.S. nuclear unit Westinghouse. The company also said it will not take on new projects to construct nuclear plants. President Satoshi Tsunakawa said the company also was looking for potential partners to acquire a stake in Westinghouse. He bowed deeply at a news conference to...

Thomas Countryman, former assistant secretary of state raised the possibility of New Start’s extension last month …Steven Pifer, former senior state department official, argued that if the US walked out of New Start now, it would give Russia a strategic advantage… James Jay Carafano, under the existing “New Start” Russia now has functioning production lines producing new nuclear weapons to replace the old...New Start really got the US nothing while it allowed Russia free space to upgrade”

The planet moved significantly closer to a catastrophic event this week as Donald Trump assumed the U.S. presidency, according to a new report. The planet's Doomsday Clock is now two-and-a-half minutes to midnight, which represents a global catastrophe. It's the closest the measure has been to midnight since the successful testing of hydrogen bombs in 1953. The new position represents a 30-second lurch forward from the previous position. A group of nuclear scientists affiliated with the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists determine when to move the clock in response to a number of threats from nuclear security to climate change.

Russia’s deadliest new nuclear weapon currently under development, the new super-heavy thermonuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) RS-28 Sarmat may be in trouble, the Russian Nuclear Forces Project (RNFP) reports. One sign: repeated delays in the missile’s first ejection test, which tests the mechanism of a missile leaving its launch container, according to a January 19 blog post on the RNFP website.“The first sign was the delay with be first ejection tests–they were moved from 2015 to the end of 2016 and now to 2017 (for all we know, this may be the end of 2017). The delay was sort of...

In his Jan. 11 remarks on nuclear weapons policy, the outgoing Vice President Joe Biden praised former President Barack Obama’s nuclear weapons policy. In reality, there are very few grounds for congratulations when it comes to Obama’s legacy. Take, for example, the Iran deal. Biden argued that the administration got the deal through a combination of international sanctions and hard-nosed diplomacy. In reality, the deal was sold to the American public by concealing the full extent of concessions the administration had to make to get the Iranians to agree to it. The deal does not prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear...

January 15, 2017. 70 Nations are gathering in France to discuss a "Final Solution" for the Israel-Palestinian conflict. And we can promise you, it is not favorable to the Israeli people. Remember, Hitler also proposed a "Final Solution." 'Nuff said. John looks at this issue, along with an analysis of an Iranian-Israeli nuclear conflict, plus another tortorous glimpse into the continuing absurdity of our nation's leaders who are dead set on inflicting as much damage as possible on God's chosen nation. January 20th cannot come soon enough for those who love Israel and her people.

While there had been rumors swirling for a while, I was still highly disappointed when I saw a tweet coming from the office of New York’s Governor this morning proclaiming his “victory” in moving to close the Indian Point nuclear power plant.

Pakistan on Monday successfully test-fired its first Submarine-Launched Cruise Missile capable of carrying a nuclear warhead up to 450km from an undisclosed location in the Indian Ocean, giving the country a "credible" second-strike capability, the military said. The missile, Babur-3, was fired from an underwater, mobile platform and hit its target with precise accuracy, the Inter Services Public Relations, the media wing of the Pakistani military said in a statement. Babur-3, which has a range of 450km, is a sea-based variant of Ground Launched Cruise Missile (GLCM) Babur-2+ , which was successfully tested earlier in December, last year. The Babur-3...

There are some things that should stop everyone in their tracks. At the top of that list should be an apparent lack of risk awareness concerning nuclear weapons. This line from Patrick Tucker’s article in last month’s The Atlantic stopped me cold; Future nuclear missiles may be siloed but, unlike their predecessors, they’ll exhibit “some level of connectivity to the rest of the warfighting system,” according to Werner J.A. Dahm, the chair of the Air Force Scientific Advisory Board. That opens up new potential for nuclear mishaps that, until now, have never been a part of Pentagon planning. In 2017,...