AfriqueCAN
US President Donald Trump will sign executive orders as soon as Friday that aim to jumpstart the nuclear energy industry by easing the regulatory process on approvals for new reactors and strengthening fuel supply chains, four sources familiar said.
Facing the first rise in power demand in two decades from the boom in artificial intelligence, Trump declared an energy emergency on his first day in office.
Chris Wright, the energy secretary, has said the race to develop power sources and data centers needed for AI is “Manhattan Project 2,” referring to the massive US program during World War II to develop atomic bombs.
A draft summary of the orders said Trump will invoke the Cold War-era Defense Production Act to declare a national emergency over US dependence on Russia and China for enriched uranium, nuclear fuel processing and advanced reactor inputs.
The summary also directs agencies to permit and site new nuclear facilities and directs the Departments of Energy and Defense to identify federal lands and facilities for nuclear deployment and to streamline processes to get them built.
It also encourages the Energy Department to use loan guarantees and direct loans to increase the build out of reactors. Trump only used the Loan Programs Office in his first administration to support a large nuclear plant in Georgia.
The British government will roll out the use of medication to suppress the sex drive of sex offenders, as part of a package of measures to reduce the risk of reoffending and alleviate the pressures on the prison system, which is running out of space.
Justice Secretary Shabana Mahmood said Thursday that so-called chemical castration would be used in 20 prisons in two regions and that she was considering making it mandatory.
“Of course, it is vital that this approach is taken alongside psychological interventions that target other causes of offending, like asserting power and control,” she said in a statement to Parliament following the release of an independent sentencing review,
Though the review highlighted the treatment wouldn’t be relevant for some sex offenders such as rapists driven by power and control, rather than sexual preoccupation, Mahmood said that studies show that chemical castration can lead to a 60 percent reduction in reoffending.
It’s been used in Germany and Denmark on a voluntary basis, and in Poland as mandatory for some offenders.
The recommendation was part of a wide-ranging review led by former Justice Secretary David Gauke. As well as looking at ways to cut reoffending, Gauke recommended reforms to overhaul the prisons system, which is running at near capacity.
One of the first things Mahmood did as justice minister after Labour returned to power after 14 years last July was sanction an early-release program for prisoners to free up space. She says she inherited a judicial system that had been neglected for years by the previous Conservative government and set up the review as a means to stabilize it.
“If our prisons collapse, courts are forced to suspend trials,” she said. “The police must halt their arrests, crime goes unpunished, criminals run amok and chaos reigns. We face the breakdown of law and order in this country.”
The review recommended that criminals could be released from prison earlier than they are now for good behavior, while judges could be given more flexibility to impose punishments such as driving bans. It also recommended that sentences of less than 12 months would also be scrapped for tougher community sentences. It also called for the immediate deportation for foreign nationals handed a three-year sentence or less.
The review called for higher investment in the probation service to allow officers to spend more time with offenders for their rehabilitation and extra funding for the many more who are monitored with electronic tags in the community.
Mahmood responded by giving a 700 million-pound a year for probation within years.
“If the government doesn’t put the resources into probation that is necessary, then the risk here is that we won’t make progress on rehabilitation that we need, and there will be a public backlash against it,” Gauke said.
The prison population in England and Wales has doubled over the past three decades or so to nearly 90,000. That’s despite a fall in crime rates and is driven in part by the fact that longer sentences are being handed out amid pressure to be tough on crime.
Robert Jenrick, the justice spokesman for the Conservatives, warned that scrapping short sentences would be effectively “decriminalizing” offenses like burglary, theft and assault. And monitoring tags, he said, are as useful as “smoke alarms putting out bonfires” in stopping reoffending.
In response, Mahmood said that she was clearing up the mess left by the Conservatives and that the government has also embarked on the largest expansion of prisons since Victorian times in the 19th century.