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s-asians-against-Nukes.org/2009/custers[Posted
below is an essay that appeared in three parts in the Bangladesh daily
New Age on 24, 25 and 26th May 2009. It is reproduced here in public
interest and for non commercial use]A different perspective on US-India nuclear dealThe
US-India nuclear deal is bound to result in huge quantities of
extremely dangerous waste that cannot be sold on the market, but needs
to be put aside, at great risks to humans and to our natural environmentby Dr Peter CustersTHE
US-India nuclear deal was initiated through a framework agreement
signed by Indian prime minister Manmohan Singh and US president George
W Bush in July 2005. Under this initial statement, India agreed to
separate its civilian and military nuclear production facilities, and
place all civilian production facilities under the inspection regime of
the International Atomic Energy Agency. The nuclear deal, which took
three years to complete, officially aims at promoting India’s access to
uranium and to civilian nuclear technology, through enlarged
importation of both. Whereas nuclear energy contributed a reported 2.5
percent of India’s energy requirements in 2007, the deal is expected to
boost the contribution of the nuclear sector to India’s electricity
supply – without reducing India’s primary dependence on coal. From its
very start, the US-India nuclear deal has generated huge controversies,
both in India and internationally.
This essay
discusses the hazardous and wasteful implications of the US-India
nuclear deal beyond its implications for the nuclear arms race in the
subcontinent. Most of the key objections against the deal that have
been put forward by progressive opponents of the deal in India and
internationally have addressed the fact that it legitimises India’s
status as a nuclear weapons state, and that it will enable India to
expand its production of weapons’ grade plutonium. Already, India is
estimated to possess a sufficient amount of plutonium for the
manufacturing of at least a hundred atomic bombs. Since India
reportedly has agreed to place only 14 out of its 22 civilian reactors
under the IAEA’s inspection regime, it is free to produce in the
remaining 8 reactors another 200 kilograms of weapons’ grade plutonium
per year (see Praful Bidwai, ‘Manmohan’s False Nuclear Move’, July 19,
2008, www.cndp.org; also Zia Mian and MV Ramana, ‘Going MAD: Ten Years
of the Bomb in South Asia, July 29, 2008, www.cndp.org). Thus, fears
that the controversial deal will enhance the danger of a nuclear
conflagration in South Asia appear to be well-grounded, even if we
leave aside all other interrelated objections that have been raised.
In this essay, the spotlights will not be put on India’s past and
future plans for production of weapons grade plutonium and nuclear
bombs, but on two other major questions. For the US-India nuclear deal
needs to be also and fiercely questioned with regard to its ostensible
aims, i.e. the vast expansion in the production of nuclear energy.
Whereas a more then 10-fold increase in generation of nuclear energy,
as foreseen, may help to overcome India’s rapidly growing energy needs,
the side-effects in terms of generation of nuclear waste are so
ponderous, that from this perspective too, implementation of the deal
needs to be pre-empted. Moreover, as reported briefly in India’s
national press in September last, when the signing of the deal was
being debated, there is a little discussed ‘reverse side’ to the
nuclear deal, being the US’s additional commercial objectives relating
to its arms exports. For the US is poised to lobby aggressively so as
to capture a larger share of India’s arms imports than it has held up
until now.
The conceptual approach proposed so as
to address these combined issued is a holistic view on waste. In this
view, processes of manufacturing that result in military commodities,
i.e. in weaponry, basically need to be analysed as processes that
result in wastage of economic resources. This, for instance, is the
case where economic policymakers deciding to purchase armament systems
do not primarily have in mind security considerations, but
macroeconomic stimulation of domestic demand for goods.
However, this, the production of ‘social waste’, generally does not
stand alone, but needs to be juxtaposed with the generation of
‘non-commodity waste’ during the same industrial processes. Whereas
conventional economics discusses these side-effects of industrial
manufacturing under the heading of ‘externalities’, in this essay the
term non-commodity waste will be used, whenever reference will be made
to the ecologically harmful by-products of industrial manufacturing (a
precursor of the concept of non-commodity waste is the term
‘discommodities’ coined by the Marginalist Jevons but largely ignored
by other economists of his time and subsequently; see W Stanley Jevons,
The Theory of Political Economy, Macmillan and Co, London, United
Kingdom, 1879, p 62).
Whereas ‘social’ waste and
‘non-commodity’ waste are rarely juxtaposed in public debate, the US
nuclear deal and its reverse side offer an occasion to do precisely
this. As the below cited data on the generation of waste in the nuclear
production chain show, the US-India nuclear deal is bound to result in
huge quantities of extremely dangerous waste that cannot be sold on the
market, but needs to be put aside, at great risks to humans and to our
natural environment. Again, the importation of expensive armament
systems entails the waste of vast economic resources that could be used
towards relieving India’s persistent mass poverty, hence should be
considered importation of social waste. Moreover, the issues of
‘social’ and ‘non-commodity’ waste can also be posed in relation to the
manufacturing of weapons’ grade plutonium and atomic weapons, where
generation of the two given forms of waste occurs simultaneously (for a
full discussion, see Peter Custers, Questioning Globalised Militarism,
Nuclear and Military Production and Critical Economic Theory, Tulika
Publishers, New Delhi, India, 2007).
The nuclear deal: importation of nuclear technology and importation of US armament systems
AS STARTING point for my discussion I will take two newspaper articles
published in the Times of India on September 11 last. One of these
highlighted the business prospects of the US-India nuclear deal via the
sale of nuclear production technology, and via the importation and the
construction of nuclear reactors in India. The second article discussed
the aspiration of the US in terms of expanded exports of armament
systems to India. To take the article on plans for expansion of nuclear
energy production first, it spoke very glowingly about the size of
business that will be generated, mentioning a figure of $40 billion
worth of orders Indian and foreign enterprises stand to receive, and
hailing the deal as a ‘project’ having a financial size of Rs 2.4 lakh
crore (lakh and crore are numerical figures commonly used in accounting
in South Asia; one lakh refers to a hundred thousand and one crore
signifies ten million). Under the deal, a reported 24 light-water
reactors will be imported from abroad and installed along India’s
coasts. India plans to build a further 12 indigenous nuclear plants,
consisting of pressurised heavy water reactors. At no point in the
article are the implications of the nuclear deal in terms of generation
of additional nuclear waste discussed (Srinivas Laxman, ‘N-Trade: It’s
a $40 Billion Opportunity’, Times of India, New Delhi, September 11,
2008, p 15; for other estimates regarding the business prospects of the
deal, see J Sri Raman, ‘How India’s “Waiver” Has Won’, (September 9,
2008, www.cndp.org)!
In another article published
in the Times of India on the very same day, the secondary objectives of
the US, which traditionally is not a major seller of military hardware
to India, are described. The article delineates the huge size of
India’s overall arms’ imports. It states that since the Kargil
conflict, India has spent a ‘whopping’ $25 billion on imports of
weaponry. The country is ‘poised’ to spend another $30 billion on such
purchases over the next 5-6 years. Thus, the US is vying to capture a
whole series of arms orders which India intends to place on the world
market for arms. Indian import plans reportedly include a $170 million
plan for the buying of anti-ship Harpoon missiles, a Rs 42,000-crore
project for the purchase of multi-role combat aircraft, and purchases
of 197 light utility and observation helicopters worth another Rs 3,000
crore. A deal mentioned that has already been clinched, and has been
sent for approval to US Congress, is the arms deal – described as
India’s ‘biggest ever’ with the US – for the purchase of 8 Boeing
reconnaissance aircraft, estimated to cost no less than Rs 8,500 Crore.
At no point in the article is it explained that such lavish spending on
arms imports represents a form of social waste, and that the same
financial resources could well be spent on alleviating the massive
poverty that still exists in India (Rajat Pandit, ‘In Defence, US Wants
to be India’s Partner No 1’, Times of India, New Delhi, September 11,
2008, p 13).
OFFICIALLY, of course, the US-India nuclear deal
and the listed plans to import armaments are no interconnected issues.
The arms purchases do not directly form part of the agreement
surrounding importation of nuclear technology. And yet it is probably
correct to see the US’s hopes to overtake other foreign suppliers of
arms to India as a reverse side of the nuclear deal, as was indeed
hinted at in the article of the Times of India. In any case,
juxtaposition of the two issues enables us to look more holistically at
the wasteful implications of the Indian government’s behaviour, than a
focus on the US-India nuclear deal alone would allow us to do. Hence,
below I am going to address both the generation of nuclear waste that
will occur in consequence of the nuclear deal, and India’s arms
imports, in order to show the full extent of waste creation that is
involved.
The generation of hazardous waste in the nuclear production chain
LET’S take the issue of nuclear waste generation first. I do not
possess comprehensive data on the nuclear waste that has been generated
by nuclear production in India so far. Nor am I in a position to give a
precise assessment regarding the waste that importation and
construction of new reactors will result in. However, the experience of
nuclear production worldwide is unequivocal: nuclear waste emerges at
each and every link in the nuclear production chain, starting from the
very first stage, i.e. that of uranium mining and milling, and lasting
up to the stage where nuclear fuel elements are treated in reprocessing
facilities. An important source for my own understanding of these
issues is the book ‘Nuclear Wastelands’, written by a group of
scientists led by the US-based Indian academician Arjun Makhijani,
which book primarily reviews waste generation by nuclear-military
production facilities (Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu and Katherine Yih
(eds.), Nuclear Wastelands: A Global Guide to Nuclear Weapons
Production and its Health and Environmental Effects, MIT Press,
Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA, 1995). From this and other sources, I
have selected three cases of waste generation, namely: the waste
tailings that emerge when uranium is mined and milled; depreciated fuel
elements which themselves are a form of nuclear waste; and the
high-level waste that needs to be put aside when former nuclear fuel
elements are reprocessed.
Uranium mining is, of
course, the very first stage in the whole nuclear production chain. As
known, such mining is also undertaken in India, and would likely be
intensified in consequence of the US-India nuclear deal. When uranium
ore is mined and uranium is prepared and enriched, towards employment
as raw material for making nuclear fuel elements, a truly huge amount
of hazardous material in the form of mill tailings is left behind,
tailings which do contain radioactive substances and are therefore
hazardous for humans and for nature. Speaking in volume terms, these
tailings reportedly constitute 95 per cent of all the nuclear waste
that is generated in the nuclear production chain. Among the
radioactive substances found in mill tailings are for instance
radium-226 and thorium-230, the latter radioactive element has a
half-life of 76,000 years, meaning that it will take that many years
before half of the radioactivity contained in the thorium will have
decayed. In mining uranium and in creating the tailings, capitalist
entrepreneurs are not just burdening our children and grandchildren
with the consequences of uranium extraction, but entire future
generations, and such for an almost indefinite period of time. The
damaging consequences of uranium mining have been recorded well in the
US, where nuclear production was historically started. Here, tailing
dams have turned into slurry after downpours of rain. Between 1955 and
1977 a total of fifteen tailing dams have broken. In one such case, the
river Rio Puerco was flooded with 94 million gallons of tailing
liquids, resulting in contamination of a long stretch of the river
(Katherine Yih, Albert Donnay, Annalee Yassi, A.James Ruttenber and
Scott Saleska, ‘Uranium Mining and Milling for Military Purposes´, in
Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu and Katherine Yih, 1995, op-cit, p 121).
Another stage in the nuclear production chain known to generate
dangerous waste is the stage where nuclear energy is generated in
reactors. Surely, the production of nuclear energy can be seen as a
contribution to human welfare, if purely looked at from the perspective
of energy generation. Yet the hazardous implications from employment of
the nuclear fuel rods in the reactors are multifarious. A section of
the rods needs to be taken out regularly, as the nuclear fuel elements
can be utilised for only three years. Now in the parlance of economic
theory the fuel elements once taken out are considered ‘depreciated
means of production’. They are presumed to have lost all the value that
has been transferred to the new commodity, the nuclear energy. Yet, the
fuel elements undoubtedly are a form of hazardous waste. Speaking in
quantitative terms, the size of this waste seems small. Yet the
radioactivity contained in the spent fuel elements is truly intense.
The radioactive elements present in this nuclear waste include uranium,
strontium-90, caesium-137 and plutonium. Of these, plutonium is
entirely the outcome of human production; as such, it does not exist in
nature. It is known to be the very most toxic substance on earth, its
half-life being exceedingly long. The half-life of plutonium-239 is
24,400 years, that of plutonium-242 as much as 380,000 years. Even
microgram quantities of plutonium, when inhaled by humans, are known to
result in fatal cancers (for details on the health and environmental
hazards of plutonium production and use, see notably Frank Barnaby,
‘Nuclear Legacy: Democracy in a Plutonium Economy’, Cornerhouse
Briefing Paper No 2, Sturminster, Newton, United Kingdom, November
1997)). Hence, the expansion in construction and utilisation of nuclear
reactors worldwide is a reason for grave concerns. Each additional
nuclear reactor generates spent nuclear fuel rods containing different
forms of high-level waste.
The third distinct stage
in the chain of nuclear production I wish to refer to, is the stage of
reprocessing. For decades, policymakers in the west have tried to make
the public believe that they had solved the above-sketched issue of
dangerous waste, i.e. the issue of spent fuel elements. They did so by
arguing that these fuel rods can well be reprocessed, i.e. they may be
treated chemically in reprocessing facilities so as to allow for re-use
of the uranium and to pave the way for use of the fresh plutonium for
‘productive’ ends, towards the manufacturing of new fuel elements. Yet
it is at the stage of reprocessing that problems really pile up. First,
it is at this stage that high-level waste comes into being as a
distinct category of waste, since the chemical treatment of the fuel
rods does not only help to separate out uranium and plutonium, but also
results in high-level waste that needs to be put aside. This counts for
uranium-236, to be distinguished from uranium-235, incorporated in the
fuel elements. Uranium-236, mind you, has a half-life of 24.2 million
years. Again, there is the radioactive element jodium-129 which has a
half-life of 15.7 million years. These are time-scales which as humans
we are hardly able to imagine, but which make the consequences of
nuclear production that much graver. The high-level waste in liquid
form put aside after chemical treatment of the fuel rods is commonly
stored in tanks.
Now, the risks involved in such
storage can be visualised through the accidents that have taken place
in nuclear-military production facilities in both the US and the former
Soviet Union. The Hanford nuclear complex in the US is the complex
where the US used to manufacture its military plutonium. Here,
high-level waste in liquid form was stored in 117 stainless steel
tanks, each containing half a million gallons of waste. In 1973, a leak
was discovered which had caused massive dissipation of radioactivity
into Hanford’s subsoil (see on the leakages of nuclear waste at the
Hanford complex, Arjun Makhijani and Scott Saleska, ‘The Production of
Nuclear Weapons and Environmental Hazards’, in Arjun Makhijani, Howard
Hu and Katherine Yih, 1995, op-cit, p 44). But the most dramatic
example of an accident with high-level radioactive waste has been
reported from the former Soviet Union. In the Cheliabinsk complex, a
military-nuclear complex located in the Ural Mountains, a tank
explosion occurred in 1957. The government of the then USSR suppressed
the news of the accident in name of guarding ‘state secrets’, but
Soviet scientists unravelled the accident long before the Gorbachev
government instituted an enquiry. Just as in Hanford, the high-level
waste from the reprocessing in Cheliabinsk was stored in stainless
steel tanks, located in a canyon-shaped area eight metres under the
soil surface. Yet the explosion in Cheliabinsk‘s tanks resulted in a
massive leakage of radioactivity. A reported 22 million curies of
radioactivity were released, 2 million curies in the form of a plume
that reached a height of one kilometre above the Cheliabinsk complex.
The explosion and the releases of radioactivity destroyed entire
ecosystems in the surrounding region. Villages had to be evacuated,
rivers and lakes were polluted, and the government had to take
draconian measures to contain the danger of the accident for the
region’s ecology (on the Cheliabinsk catastrophe, see Zhores Medvedev,
Nuclear Disaster in the Urals, Vintage Books, London, United Kingdom,
1980; also Arjun Makhijani, Howard Hu and Katherine Yih, 1995, op-cit,
p 335).
Above I have simply summarised data on
selected aspects of nuclear waste generation, focusing on waste
tailings from uranium mining and milling, on the waste represented by
spent nuclear fuel elements, and on the high-level waste that is put
aside whenever nuclear fuel rods are reprocessed. Surely, given the
risks they represent for humans and for nature surrounding us, there is
no way one can belittle the occurrence of multiple wastes in the
nuclear production chain. Nor can one deny the validity of posing the
consequences of the US-India nuclear deal in these terms.
India as importer of weapons systems: question of disparate exchange
I WILL now turn to the second form of waste I have spoken of in the
introduction to this essay, namely waste in the social sense of the
term. As said, here I will focus on the reverse side of the US-India
nuclear deal which is the US’s eagerness to expand its arms’ sales to
India. In this context it is worth recalling the fact that India today
heads the list of Southern importers of armament systems. Whereas in
the past this position was held by the Middle Eastern oil giant Saudi
Arabia, India has meanwhile displaced the latter country as leading
Southern importer, along with China. This may be illustrated with
concrete figures.
ACCORDING to a report brought out by the
US-based Congressional Research Service, in 2005 India ranked first
among developing nations weapons purchasers, in terms of the market
value of agreements signed to import weaponry. Further, whereas the
total value of southern arms imports in this year was $30 billion, the
value of the agreements concluded by India alone was $5.4 billion,
meaning that India was set to swallow fully one sixth of the total
(Richard Grimmett, ‘Conventional Arms Transfers to Developing Nations,
1998-2005, Congressional Research Service, The Library of Congress,
Washington, USA, October 23, 2006). While these data could be biased,
they are in fact corroborated by data which have been compiled by the
respectable Stockholm-based peace research institute SIPRI. In its 2007
annual report, SIPRI offers comprehensive figures for the value of arms
imports by individual southern states over a period of 30 years. Again,
India heads the list of these totals. This of course does not imply
that India has been the leading southern importer in each and every
year. But it does signify that the accumulated arms imports of India
have been so big over the last decade as to make up for the
comparatively ‘smaller’ size of arms imports in earlier decades (for
SIPRI´s most recent data, see Paul Holtom, Mark Bromley and Pieter
D.Wezeman, ‘International Arms Transfers’, Chapter 7 of the SIPRI
Yearbook 2008: Armaments, Disarmament and International Security,
Stockholm, Sweden, 2008, p 293).
Now, the role
which arms transfers between north and south hold in the world economy
can be assessed from either a southern or a northern perspective. If
looked at from a southern perspective, one has to reflect on India’s
arms imports in terms of disparate exchange. The term disparate
exchange expresses the fact that southern economies, when importing
armament systems from the north, are losers. Whereas they import
military commodities which from a social point of view should be
considered waste, the northern states which export the armaments are
benefactors, for they directly or indirectly transfer the arms in
exchange for raw materials, semi-finished goods and labour-intensive
commodities representing wealth. This is indeed a form of international
exchange which may be characterised as disparate (as opposed to
unequal) exchange, since there is a qualitative difference between the
commodities flowing in parallel between northern and southern trade
‘partners’. Although in certain cases the inter-linkages between
exported and imported goods are explicit (notably in case of barter
agreements where crude oil is exchanged against weaponry), more
generally processes of disparate exchange are less easy to pinpoint,
i.e. they are indirectly interlinked (an exposition regarding the
trading mechanism of disparate exchange between north and south is
stated in Peter Custers (2007), op-cit, Part Three, Chapter Nineteen:
´Unequal Exchange versus Disparate Exchange. A Theoretical Comparison.
Succession and Coexistence of Two Imperialist Trading Mechanisms’, p
309).
To highlight the imperialist nature of this
trading mechanism, it needs to be stated that the given trading
mechanism was historically instituted by the United States. For when
OPEC’s oil-exporting countries in the 1970s decided to take their fate
in their own hands, by insisting on the right to fix the international
price of crude oil, the US immediately tried to take advantage of the
changing situation. It knew of course that increased prices of oil
would inter alia result in additional dollar incomes for members of
OPEC (for the views of US State Department officials regarding the
implications of the historical price increases decided upon by OPEC in
1973, see Pierre Terzian, OPEC: The Inside Story, Zed Books, London,
1985). Hence it feverishly worked to channel such southern income
towards additional southern imports of weapon systems from the US and
other northern arms exporters, and with success (see e.g. Anthony
Sampson, The Arms Bazaar, Hodder & Stoughton, London, 1977; and
Russell Warren Howe, Weapons. The Shattering Truth About the
International Game of Power, Money and Arms, Abacus, London, 1980).
Leading oil exporters, such as Saudi Arabia and Iran, in the seventies
were easily deluded into buying fighter planes and other expensive
weaponry. These Middle Eastern countries right then headed the list of
southern importers of weapons systems. Today, when India has emerged as
a leading southern arms importer, the US is eager to expand its arms
sales to India, at the expense of the country’s traditional suppliers
of arms (for India’s primary dependence on arms supplies from Russia,
see e.g. Paul Holtom, Mark Bromley and Pieter D Wezeman, 2008, op-cit,
p 300). And whereas it needs to be assessed whether the exports of
social waste from the US towards India will be undertaken at the
expense of wealth belonging to India’s own population, or rather at the
expense of wealth belonging to the people of India and other southern
states combined, the arms transfers are bound to represent further
cases of disparate exchange.
India’s massive
imports of armament systems can, however, also be analysed from a
northern perspective. Here we need to highlight the fact that the
hegemonic power in the world system, ever since the days of British
imperialism, has used its leverage as dominant power to export weaponry
as a part of macroeconomic policymaking. This is true in particular for
the presently tottering hegemonic power, the US. Ever since the sixties
of the previous century, the US has used its exports of armament
systems as replacement mechanism, as supplement to ensure that American
armament corporations at all times are supplied with orders sufficient
in amount to protect their production capacity and guarantee
accumulation. For instance, when the US government at the end of the
1980s needed to partly scale down the size of its orders towards
monopoly corporations based in the US military sector, it heavily
pushed military corporations into expanding their exports. It even
employed the second Gulf war staged in 1991 towards this end. Moreover,
the US Department of Defence, the Pentagon, itself embraces the
economic logic behind armament exports. This is evident, for instance,
from statements contained in its 2006 report to the US Congress, the
Annual Industrial Capability Report. As the report states, ‘Defence
exports play an important economic role in strengthening the US defence
industrial base’; ‘about 20 per cent (sic) of US weapons systems items
are exported…’; and ’sales to foreign customers have frequently been
critical to keeping entire production lines open…’ (Office of the
Undersecretary of Defence, Annual Industrial Capability Report,
Pentagon, Washington DC, USA, February, 2006). Hence, it is difficult
to interpret these sales as necessitated by the US’s ‘security’, when
the Pentagon itself admits to the US Congress that the exports of
armament systems represent a leverage for macroeconomic policymaking.
The combined historical evidence for the past several decades indicates
that exports play an active role towards solving dilemmas in connection
with the US’s business cycle, driven as it largely is by military
allocations.
Conclusions: juxtaposing social waste and non-commodity waste
As suggested, the US-India nuclear deal should be analysed in terms of
wasteful implications which the deal is set to have in two ways. If
strictly looked at from a perspective of expanded production of nuclear
energy in India, as is the official line of the Indian government, the
deal already needs to be severely criticised. For it will undoubtedly
result in vastly increased generation of nuclear waste, which from the
standpoint of critical economic theory is to be considered
non-commodity waste. Above I have not presented specific data on the
waste which India’s own production of nuclear energy has generated in
the past, but have concentrated on international data regarding the
generation of waste at three stages in the nuclear production chain,
i.e. the stage of uranium mining and milling, the stage of production
in nuclear reactors, and the stage of reprocessing of nuclear fuel
elements. These data unequivocally bring out that in assessing the
implications of the US-India nuclear deal, the issue of nuclear waste
needs to be taken on board.
Yet if we are to assess
the full extent of waste generation implied by the US-India nuclear
deal, we also need to reflect on the reverse side of the deal. There
needs to be, it seems, greater awareness of the fact that the US does
not just intend to use the deal to promote the export of nuclear
production technology towards India. The US also is keenly interested
in greatly expanding its sales of armaments to India, in view of the
fact that India is one of the global south’s leading arms importers,
along with China. Here again, my data regarding the loss of wealth
implied by these deals for India and the south are incomplete. Thus,
further research on Indian armament imports should bring out how they
express disparate exchange. They may lead to loss of wealth for the
people of India alone – or ultimately lead to replication of disparate
exchange via parallel exports of conventional arms by India to other
countries of the global South. In any case, such research would have to
focus on the precise way in which foreign currency towards payment of
these imports is generated. In order to make a holistic assessment of
the US-India nuclear deal and the mentioned arms deals, we need to
juxtapose ‘non-commodity’ waste and ‘social’ waste.
Dr Peter Custers is a campaigner-theoretician based in Leiden, Netherlands