Two critical (but tentative) green victories hang in the balance
December 11, 2007
The eyes of the world are now on the US Senate. Our oil-endangered species anxiously awaits even a tiny American step toward fighting global warming and saving the planetary environment.
But the battered and embattled Energy Bill now being held hostage by the Republican neo-con minority hides two huge victories tentatively won by the No Nukes/safe energy movement. If those victories hold, the odds on human survival could take a quiet but huge leap forward.
The key issues now in the Energy Bill's limelight are big tax break/subsidies for the fossil fuel industry, and a Renewable Electricity Standard that would require a certain percentage of our electric power to come from green sources such as wind, solar, bio-fuels and more.
The centerpiece of the bill has become new standards for motor vehicle fuel efficiency. This could still go down. But the auto industry, and its labor unions, seem to have signaled through Congressman John Dingell (D-MI) that they're willing to accept what's currently in the package, or something similar. (That such standards have already been largely achieved or even exceeded in China, Japan and Europe may have something to do with this accession.)
As for the fossil subsidies, George W. Bush and his minions in the media and Congress are screeching that the grotesque profits being rolled up by their coal, oil and gas cohorts are simply not enough. The only hybrid the neo-cons will now buy is the one mixing that with the notion that truly green power will somehow raise electric rates. Nothing strikes greater terror amongst of the Barons of Old Energy than the vision of an electric grid powered by community-owned wind farms and rooftop solar panels, stretching from sea to shining sea.
But the multi-trillion-dollar transformation from the King CONG madness of Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas is already underway. The brave renewable world will be powered entirely by natural fuels. Google's deep-pocket leap into that great green sunrise marries the computer revolution that transformed the world of information in the 1990s with the clean power revolution that will remake the energy business of the new millennium.
The entrenched Barons of Oil are a formidable barrier to that transformation. But peak oil has come, peak gas is past, and the ghastly costs of coal are too obvious to ignore. It has become all too clear that very soon we will say goodbye either to fossil fuels or to our ability to live on this planet.
As for nuke power, after 50 years of proven failure, a hugely funded counterattack has been launched to somehow revive this Titanic technology. It's a desperate last gasp for an uncompetitive technology staring at extinction.
In the half-century since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, the industry has found no solution for its radioactive waste problem. It can't get liability insurance. It can't protect its reactors from terror attacks, or from errors by its own operators.
Nor can it get its own financing. And here's where the Energy Bill hides our most crucial green victories.
This past summer, US Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) slipped an obscure sentence into the Senate version. It would allow the Department of Energy to issue unlimited guarantees for building new atomic reactors. By its own admission, the industry wants $25 billion for 2008 and $25 billion for 2009, with untold billions to follow, free of Congressional oversight.
The ploy underscores what's long been known on Wall Street: the Peaceful Atom is the most expensive technological failure in human history. Even under optimal circumstances, no new reactor could come on line in this country in less than ten years. A "new generation" plant under construction in Finland is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
The American nuke pushers continually invoke France's 59 reactors, but never mention that they are all owned by a government with a very big export agenda. The French industry is in fact a loss-leader, untroubled by such details as cost, independent regulation, waste disposal or media scrutiny.
The US industry has already punctured its own myth of "efficient standardized designs" by submitting scores of major changes to blueprints it has already run by regulators. Its cost estimates and construction schedules have already been deemed absurdly optimistic by such independent observers as Moody's.
Most importantly, every passing moment renders nuke power significantly less competitive with advancing green technologies that have long since passed it by. In an intense two months, anti-nuke/safe energy forces rallied through the www.nukefree.org web site and a wide range of environmental and internet allies. Mixed in came support from free market groups like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, which dislike a technology that can't compete after five decades on the federal dole.
Spurred on by a music video featuring Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, Graham Nash, Keb Mo and Ben Harper, more than 120,000 signatures poured in against the nuke loan guarantees. On October 23, the petitions were submitted with Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), Shelly Berkeley (D-NV) and John Hall (D-NY), and the core of the environmental movement on hand.
Under the leadership of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, the subsidies were dropped from the Energy Bill. At the same time, Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), as Chair of the Senate Committee on the Environment and Public Works, deleted a laundry list of nuke handouts from the Global Warming Bill being championed by Senators Joe Lieberman (D-CT) and John Warner (R-VA).
The victories are not etched in stone. Nuke backers could inject the guarantees into the hectic negotiations now roiling the Energy Bill. Those handouts could resurface in the Lieberman-Warner Bill, which will be voted on next year.
Domenici says he'll continue to push for nukes until he retires from the Senate next year. Rumors are now flying that he is already pushing for the guarantees to be included in the upcoming omnibus appropriations bill, where the complexities of the legislative process will make the battle even fiercer and more delicate than in the Energy Bill. Key votes on that could be coming within days. As always, stopping nuke power will require our full and immediate attention.
For the stakes couldn't be higher. New reactors are indeed on order and under construction in Russia, China, India and elsewhere. But except for France, the major economic powers of Europe---most importantly Germany, Spain, Sweden, Denmark and Italy---have turned their collective back on nuke power. The global take-off toward renewable energy would gain serious----perhaps definitive---altitude from an American decision to not build more nukes.
Which is the hidden big picture behind these radioactive loan guarantees. Despite all the "nuclear renaissance" hype, no new reactors will be built in the United States without taxpayers footing the bill, a la France.
If that underwriting is stopped here, the flight toward a green-powered planet might rise to unstoppability. And our species just might find a way to solve the climate crisis and survive on this planet.
Sunday, April 27, 2008
Will Congress make taxpayers fund terror-target nuke reactors?
Will Congress make taxpayers fund terror-target nuke reactors?
November 29, 2007
Within a matter of days Congressional back-room deals may rubber stamp huge taxpayer loan guarantees to build dozens of what amount to pre-deployed "dirty bombs" for terrorists.
The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that atomic power plants are supremely vulnerable. The first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over Indian Point, whose two active reactors---plus one more that's retired---sit next to some very fragile high-level waste storage pools.
Had that first jet hit Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, with tens of millions of Americans closely downwind, the devastation would have been unimaginable. In fact, the 9/11 Commission found that Al Quaeda at one point considered crashing two planes into two nuclear facilities as part of its original plan.
Yet Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) is trying desperately to force taxpayers to underwrite $50 billion and more in loans to build still more of these radioactive bulls-eyes. A decision to include these provisions in the Energy Bill may be made as you read this, which is why safe energy advocates are asking citizens to flood Congress with calls, demanding the provisions be removed.
There is effectively nothing that can protect an atomic power plant from a terror attack. After 9/11, a global internet debate erupted over whether a jet could penetrate a reactor containment dome. Fortunately, there is no experimental data…yet.
But at very least more than two dozen early reactor domes, including Indian Point's, were never required to withstand a jet crash. They were designed in the 1960s with no anticipation of the much bigger planes now filling our skies. There is nothing to indicate they could withstand the kind of impact or fire that hit the WTC towers.
It would not be necessary for terrorists to hijack another jet, since Osama bin Laden among others has more than enough money to buy his own.
Nor would they need to penetrate a containment. The impact and fire alone on or near a reactor could devastate pipes, pumps, cooling systems, electronic controls, human operators, off-site power and communications, and any number of additional vital pressure points capable of causing a melt-down.
Chernobyl did explode in 1986, and Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder almost did so in 1966. In 1979, Three Mile Island faced the possibility of a hydrogen explosion. But its lethal radiation, which killed people and animals nearby, vented through stacks that remained intact throughout the disaster.
Arizona's entire three-reactor Palo Verde complex was recently shut because a single worker had what may have been a pipe bomb in his car.
All these events highlight the vulnerability of any society dependent on nuke power for its energy. A recent earthquake in Japan forced shut seven reactors in a single moment. The US now has 104 such plants generating some 20% of our electricity. Many are also near earthquake faults. All are vulnerable individually and as a fleet to a terror shut-down without a moment's notice.
Domenici's loan plan has been denounced by nearly every major environmental group in the United States, along with taxpayer groups and free marketeers such as the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, plus Congressional conservatives concerned about the budget process.
Domenici and his neo-con cohorts have been clear in their willingness to shred the Constitution in the name of national security.
But they would simultaneously force us to underwrite easily ignitable engines of radioactive mass destruction pre-deployed on our own soil.
The decision on whether these radioactive loan guarantees will be in the Energy Bill is being made as you read this. Call the Congressional leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and tell them these bailouts for terror-target nukes must be stopped. NOW!!
November 29, 2007
Within a matter of days Congressional back-room deals may rubber stamp huge taxpayer loan guarantees to build dozens of what amount to pre-deployed "dirty bombs" for terrorists.
The terror attacks of September 11, 2001, showed that atomic power plants are supremely vulnerable. The first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over Indian Point, whose two active reactors---plus one more that's retired---sit next to some very fragile high-level waste storage pools.
Had that first jet hit Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan, with tens of millions of Americans closely downwind, the devastation would have been unimaginable. In fact, the 9/11 Commission found that Al Quaeda at one point considered crashing two planes into two nuclear facilities as part of its original plan.
Yet Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) is trying desperately to force taxpayers to underwrite $50 billion and more in loans to build still more of these radioactive bulls-eyes. A decision to include these provisions in the Energy Bill may be made as you read this, which is why safe energy advocates are asking citizens to flood Congress with calls, demanding the provisions be removed.
There is effectively nothing that can protect an atomic power plant from a terror attack. After 9/11, a global internet debate erupted over whether a jet could penetrate a reactor containment dome. Fortunately, there is no experimental data…yet.
But at very least more than two dozen early reactor domes, including Indian Point's, were never required to withstand a jet crash. They were designed in the 1960s with no anticipation of the much bigger planes now filling our skies. There is nothing to indicate they could withstand the kind of impact or fire that hit the WTC towers.
It would not be necessary for terrorists to hijack another jet, since Osama bin Laden among others has more than enough money to buy his own.
Nor would they need to penetrate a containment. The impact and fire alone on or near a reactor could devastate pipes, pumps, cooling systems, electronic controls, human operators, off-site power and communications, and any number of additional vital pressure points capable of causing a melt-down.
Chernobyl did explode in 1986, and Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder almost did so in 1966. In 1979, Three Mile Island faced the possibility of a hydrogen explosion. But its lethal radiation, which killed people and animals nearby, vented through stacks that remained intact throughout the disaster.
Arizona's entire three-reactor Palo Verde complex was recently shut because a single worker had what may have been a pipe bomb in his car.
All these events highlight the vulnerability of any society dependent on nuke power for its energy. A recent earthquake in Japan forced shut seven reactors in a single moment. The US now has 104 such plants generating some 20% of our electricity. Many are also near earthquake faults. All are vulnerable individually and as a fleet to a terror shut-down without a moment's notice.
Domenici's loan plan has been denounced by nearly every major environmental group in the United States, along with taxpayer groups and free marketeers such as the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine, plus Congressional conservatives concerned about the budget process.
Domenici and his neo-con cohorts have been clear in their willingness to shred the Constitution in the name of national security.
But they would simultaneously force us to underwrite easily ignitable engines of radioactive mass destruction pre-deployed on our own soil.
The decision on whether these radioactive loan guarantees will be in the Energy Bill is being made as you read this. Call the Congressional leadership, including House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, and tell them these bailouts for terror-target nukes must be stopped. NOW!!
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
Harvey Wasserman
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
November 18, 2007
One of the biggest lies ever told in American industrial history is that “no one died at Three Mile Island.”
In the frenzy to get public funding for still more nuclear reactors, some industry backers now say no one has ever been killed by the nuclear industry AT ALL.
These absurd statements reflect atomic energy's desperate need for federal loan guarantees, which have been slipped into the Energy Bill now before Congress. After fifty years of proven failure, no private sources will invest in this lethal, expensive technology.
Meanwhile billions are pouring into the booming business of green power, including wind, solar power and increased efficiency. These technologies are not only profitable and clean, they don't kill people.
And the reality is that people have, in fact, been killed by the fallout from atomic power, and not just at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
At the very birth of fission technology, Lewis Slotin, a top researcher on the Manhattan Project, was fatally irradiated in an early experiment. Patriotic workers were exposed to high radiation doses while building the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1950s, a critical accident struck a reactor at Chalk River, Canada. Scores of American “jumpers” were run into the plant to do clean-up work and then run out. One was the future president Jimmy Carter, who joked about the incident in his autobiography “Why Not the Best.”
In 1961, three workers were killed at the SL-1 plant in Idaho. One was pinned to the ceiling of the containment dome by a fuel rod that shot out of the reactor core. The men's bodies were classified as high level radioactive waste, and were buried in lead casks.
On October 5, 1966, a critical blockage brought Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder reactor to the brink of disaster. Fermi's owners said the $100 million accident released no radiation. But for a month state authorities prepared to evacuate Detroit.
The entire history of atomic energy is defined by radiation releases that the industry has covered up. Today, nothing reactor owners say can be believed. At both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, elaborate official studies done before the accidents “proved” that it was “impossible” for what then did happen to occur. The term "inherently safe" had been applied to reactors that proved very much otherwise. Today that same term is being used to describe the "new generation" of plants to be underwitten by these proposed guarantees.
In the late 1960s, Dr. John Gofman was asked to evaluate the killing power of so-called "normal" releases from America's fleet of atomic reactors.
Gofman was a towering figure. He was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb. As a medical doctor, his breakthrough discoveries in heart disease and LDL cholesterol are still in use.
Dr. Gofman was chief of health research at the Atomic Energy Commission. But he discovered that regular radiation emissions from America's nukes would kill 32,000 citizens per year, even without an accident or terror attack.
The industry demanded Gofman change his findings. When he refused, he was fired. He spent the rest of his life warning that Americans were being killed every day by the ever-growing fleet of US reactors.
In 1979, human error caused the melt-down at Three Mile Island Unit Two. The reactor's owners immediately denied there was any melting of fuel. This was a lie. Robotic cameras later showed that at least a third of the fuel had melted.
The owners said there was never a danger of a major catastrophe. That was a lie. The plant was very much at the brink of an apocalyptic radiation release.
The owners ridiculed those---among them Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health---who desperately warned that local citizens should be evacuated, especially to protect pregnant women and small children. The governor finally ordered just such an evacuation, but later fired his long-time friend at the Department of Health, who had advocated the evacuation, and who warned of damage from TMI's stealth radioactive fallout.
TMI's owners denied that its releases harmed anyone. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted to Congress that nobody knows how much radiation escaped or where it went.
Official statistics showed a huge jump in infant death rates in Harrisburg in the three months after the accident compared to the numbers for the previous two years. State statistics showing heightened cancer rates were quickly altered. The state's tumor registry was abolished. Evidence showing downwind health effects was suppressed.
But an investigative team from the Baltimore News-Herald uncovered a massive epidemic of death and disease among the area's farm and wild animals.
In early 1980, I reported from ground zero on a ghastly epidemic of human death and disease. Based on a horrifying series of house-to-house interviews, I found cancer, heart attacks, respiratory problems, skin lesions, cataracts, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, birth defects and everything else you'd expect from a major radiation release was everywhere to be found.
With three other researchers, I spent two years investigating these and other parallel epidemics at nuclear facilities throughout the United States. Our findings were published in 1982 by Dell/Delta in a book called KILLING OUR OWN (www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO.pdf) that showed a similar death toll throughout the nuclear fuel cycle---especially at uranium mines, mills and enrichment facilities---and at weapons production plants, waste storage pools and much more.
At TMI, 2400 central Pennsylvania families filed a class action lawsuit seeking justice. But the federal courts have never allowed their case to be heard.
Studies by Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina have confirmed the TMI death toll. Researcher Joe Mangano and others have used the government's own statistics to show a heightened cancer rate in the region. Parallel studies have correlated radioactive emissions with infant death rates, cancer rates and other health epidemics around other operating reactors.
But the industry's response is always the same. Anyone who shows that reactors kill people is automatically "discredited," even if their credentials, like those of Dr. Gofman, dwarf those of their attackers.
Even at an obvious catastrophe like Chernobyl, the deniers are out in force. The radiation releases at this unprecedented explosion far exceeded what was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By all accounts, the plague that darkened central Pennsylvania after TMI was exponentially exceeded for thousands of downwind square miles in the Ukraine and other nearby nations of the former Soviet Union. The cancers, birth defects and other radioactive plagues have duplicated on a far larger scale what had already happened in the US in 1979.
Today, with billions in bailout dollars on the line, there is big money to be made in saying that atomic reactors have harmed no one.
But the truth is less convenient. Nuclear power kills people. From the Manhattan Project to TMI, from Chalk River to Chernobyl, even "normal" operations can be lethal.
Solar power, wind energy, bio-fuels, increased conservation---these sources are safe and clean. They don't create radioactive emissions or wastes, and will not be potential terror targets.
Nor do they need federal loan guarantees. Unlike atomic energy, green power is profitable for the entire community.
And unlike Three Mile Island, we will never have to evacuate wind farms or solar panels while their owners lie about what's really going down.
People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters
November 18, 2007
One of the biggest lies ever told in American industrial history is that “no one died at Three Mile Island.”
In the frenzy to get public funding for still more nuclear reactors, some industry backers now say no one has ever been killed by the nuclear industry AT ALL.
These absurd statements reflect atomic energy's desperate need for federal loan guarantees, which have been slipped into the Energy Bill now before Congress. After fifty years of proven failure, no private sources will invest in this lethal, expensive technology.
Meanwhile billions are pouring into the booming business of green power, including wind, solar power and increased efficiency. These technologies are not only profitable and clean, they don't kill people.
And the reality is that people have, in fact, been killed by the fallout from atomic power, and not just at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl.
At the very birth of fission technology, Lewis Slotin, a top researcher on the Manhattan Project, was fatally irradiated in an early experiment. Patriotic workers were exposed to high radiation doses while building the bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
In the 1950s, a critical accident struck a reactor at Chalk River, Canada. Scores of American “jumpers” were run into the plant to do clean-up work and then run out. One was the future president Jimmy Carter, who joked about the incident in his autobiography “Why Not the Best.”
In 1961, three workers were killed at the SL-1 plant in Idaho. One was pinned to the ceiling of the containment dome by a fuel rod that shot out of the reactor core. The men's bodies were classified as high level radioactive waste, and were buried in lead casks.
On October 5, 1966, a critical blockage brought Michigan's Fermi I fast breeder reactor to the brink of disaster. Fermi's owners said the $100 million accident released no radiation. But for a month state authorities prepared to evacuate Detroit.
The entire history of atomic energy is defined by radiation releases that the industry has covered up. Today, nothing reactor owners say can be believed. At both Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, elaborate official studies done before the accidents “proved” that it was “impossible” for what then did happen to occur. The term "inherently safe" had been applied to reactors that proved very much otherwise. Today that same term is being used to describe the "new generation" of plants to be underwitten by these proposed guarantees.
In the late 1960s, Dr. John Gofman was asked to evaluate the killing power of so-called "normal" releases from America's fleet of atomic reactors.
Gofman was a towering figure. He was instrumental in developing the atomic bomb. As a medical doctor, his breakthrough discoveries in heart disease and LDL cholesterol are still in use.
Dr. Gofman was chief of health research at the Atomic Energy Commission. But he discovered that regular radiation emissions from America's nukes would kill 32,000 citizens per year, even without an accident or terror attack.
The industry demanded Gofman change his findings. When he refused, he was fired. He spent the rest of his life warning that Americans were being killed every day by the ever-growing fleet of US reactors.
In 1979, human error caused the melt-down at Three Mile Island Unit Two. The reactor's owners immediately denied there was any melting of fuel. This was a lie. Robotic cameras later showed that at least a third of the fuel had melted.
The owners said there was never a danger of a major catastrophe. That was a lie. The plant was very much at the brink of an apocalyptic radiation release.
The owners ridiculed those---among them Pennsylvania's Secretary of Health---who desperately warned that local citizens should be evacuated, especially to protect pregnant women and small children. The governor finally ordered just such an evacuation, but later fired his long-time friend at the Department of Health, who had advocated the evacuation, and who warned of damage from TMI's stealth radioactive fallout.
TMI's owners denied that its releases harmed anyone. But the Nuclear Regulatory Commission has admitted to Congress that nobody knows how much radiation escaped or where it went.
Official statistics showed a huge jump in infant death rates in Harrisburg in the three months after the accident compared to the numbers for the previous two years. State statistics showing heightened cancer rates were quickly altered. The state's tumor registry was abolished. Evidence showing downwind health effects was suppressed.
But an investigative team from the Baltimore News-Herald uncovered a massive epidemic of death and disease among the area's farm and wild animals.
In early 1980, I reported from ground zero on a ghastly epidemic of human death and disease. Based on a horrifying series of house-to-house interviews, I found cancer, heart attacks, respiratory problems, skin lesions, cataracts, a metallic taste in the mouth, hair loss, birth defects and everything else you'd expect from a major radiation release was everywhere to be found.
With three other researchers, I spent two years investigating these and other parallel epidemics at nuclear facilities throughout the United States. Our findings were published in 1982 by Dell/Delta in a book called KILLING OUR OWN (www.ratical.org/radiation/KillingOurOwn/KOO.pdf) that showed a similar death toll throughout the nuclear fuel cycle---especially at uranium mines, mills and enrichment facilities---and at weapons production plants, waste storage pools and much more.
At TMI, 2400 central Pennsylvania families filed a class action lawsuit seeking justice. But the federal courts have never allowed their case to be heard.
Studies by Steven Wing of the University of North Carolina have confirmed the TMI death toll. Researcher Joe Mangano and others have used the government's own statistics to show a heightened cancer rate in the region. Parallel studies have correlated radioactive emissions with infant death rates, cancer rates and other health epidemics around other operating reactors.
But the industry's response is always the same. Anyone who shows that reactors kill people is automatically "discredited," even if their credentials, like those of Dr. Gofman, dwarf those of their attackers.
Even at an obvious catastrophe like Chernobyl, the deniers are out in force. The radiation releases at this unprecedented explosion far exceeded what was released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
By all accounts, the plague that darkened central Pennsylvania after TMI was exponentially exceeded for thousands of downwind square miles in the Ukraine and other nearby nations of the former Soviet Union. The cancers, birth defects and other radioactive plagues have duplicated on a far larger scale what had already happened in the US in 1979.
Today, with billions in bailout dollars on the line, there is big money to be made in saying that atomic reactors have harmed no one.
But the truth is less convenient. Nuclear power kills people. From the Manhattan Project to TMI, from Chalk River to Chernobyl, even "normal" operations can be lethal.
Solar power, wind energy, bio-fuels, increased conservation---these sources are safe and clean. They don't create radioactive emissions or wastes, and will not be potential terror targets.
Nor do they need federal loan guarantees. Unlike atomic energy, green power is profitable for the entire community.
And unlike Three Mile Island, we will never have to evacuate wind farms or solar panels while their owners lie about what's really going down.
Nukes are back & so are e
Harvey Wasserman
Nukes are back and so are we
October 18, 2007
The nuclear power industry is back to where it always goes when it wants to build new reactors---the taxpayer trough.
And those of us who've been fighting them for decades are doing it again, now with help from the musicians' community, and a petition drive (at nukefree.org) aimed at stripping the radioactive subsidies from the national Energy Bill now before Congress.
Time after time over the past half-century, the atomic energy industry has gone to the government to demand massive amounts of money. The most recent public gouging came during the Great Deregulation Scam of 1999-2001. As Enron and its cronies contrived phony energy shortages and nearly bankrupted California, the atomic pushers went before America's state legislatures and asked for a massive bailout. They complained that with the coming age of deregulation (about two dozen states deregulated their electricity businesses) nuclear power plants were too expensive, inefficient and obsolete to compete in the coming green age.
So they demanded---and got---more than $100 billion in “stranded cost” payouts. These were the ultimate admission that atomic power simply could not make it in the marketplace. As deregulation failed throughout the US, what Forbes Magazine labeled “the largest managerial disaster in business history” stayed alive as America's ultimate welfare cheat.
Now the industry is back for more. After complaining about its old reactors' lousy economic performance, it now argues that the new ones will be magically transformed, and that billions more should be spent building them.
The first of those is already under construction in Finland. Ground was broken just two years ago, but the project is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
So a whole new cover story has been invented: nuke power will “solve global warming.”
The assertion is absurd. All reactors emit radioactive carbon, along with numerous other “hot” isotopes. Massive quantities of greenhouse gasses are spewed into the atmosphere during the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel. The reactors themselves emit huge plumes of heat directly into the air and water.
Nukes perform poorly in hot weather, which is precisely when they're supposed to help with global warming. Reactors in both France and the US have been forced to shut because the rivers into which they dump their waste heat have exceeded 90 degrees Farenheit.
Still more greenhouse gasses have been created with the partial construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada, which has already cost the public $11 billion. If it ever opens---it's not yet licensed, and many say it will never be---Yucca could cost $60 to $100 billion. Even then it couldn't handle the waste from the new reactors the industry wants to build---or even all the spent fuel from the old ones now in existence.
Yet the industry wants Congress to give the industry essentially a blank check for loan guarantees to the tune of $25 billion in 2008 and $25 billion more in 2009, with countless billions more still to come down the road.
Why? Because Wall Street just isn't buying. After fifty years, nuke power is the most expensive technological failure in US history. It can't get investors, liability insurance or a solution to its waste problem. It can't compete with new conservation, efficiency or renewables like wind power.
Since 9/11/2001, it's also become obvious that atomic reactors cannot be defended from terror attack. They are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.
It's thus no accident that the push for new nukes with federal loan guarantees also comes with a demand for extended federal liability insurance. Who would invest in a reactor that might irradiate thousands of square miles and kill hundreds of thousands of human beings? The answer is simple: after fifty years, without federal guarantees---nobody!
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were tragic warnings, as was the fact that the first jet to hit the World Trade Center flew directily over the Indian Point reactor complex, 45 miles north. Had those reactors been hit, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands by now. The property damage from irradiating southern New York, Long Island, and all of downwind New Jersey and New England would be beyond calculation.
Despite all that, Pete Domenici, the Senator from Nuke Power, slipped these loan guarantees into the 2007 Energy Bill that could become one of the most expensive and lethal rip-offs in US history.
Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry is soaring to new heights of power and profitability. Wind farming has boomed to a $10-15 billion per year industry, with worldwide growth rates surpassing 25%. Breakthroughs in silicon solar cells are taking rooftop photovoltaics (PV) to vastly increased levels of efficiency and profitability. Bio-fuels, tidal, geo- and ocean thermal, wave energy and many more rapidly developing forms of green power are also booming ahead.
In 1979, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, through Musicians United for Safe Energy, helped organize five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The accompanying rally at Battery Park City drew 200,000 people.
All of it was part of a successful grassroots campaign to stop the nuke industry. In 1974 Richard Nixon predicted there would be 1000 reactors in the US by the year 2000. But in the year 2000, there were just 103.
That's still 103 too many. Browne, Nash and Raitt are now working to help stop this latest bailout. In singing Stephen Stills's classic “For What It's Worth,” they joined Ben Harper and Keb Mo for a video that's linked through the www.nukefree.org web site, where a petition is being circulated and signed.
On October 23 they'll present the first round of petitions to Congress. In demanding the nuke subsidies be removed from an Energy Bill that contains many positive green features, they'll be joined by their fellow musician John Hall (D-NY), now a US Representative committed to shutting Indian Point.
They'll also be working with one of the most successful non-violent grassroots campaigns in US history. Should they stop this latest atomic assault on the public treasury, the door could finally open for a truly green-powered future.
Nukes are back and so are we
October 18, 2007
The nuclear power industry is back to where it always goes when it wants to build new reactors---the taxpayer trough.
And those of us who've been fighting them for decades are doing it again, now with help from the musicians' community, and a petition drive (at nukefree.org) aimed at stripping the radioactive subsidies from the national Energy Bill now before Congress.
Time after time over the past half-century, the atomic energy industry has gone to the government to demand massive amounts of money. The most recent public gouging came during the Great Deregulation Scam of 1999-2001. As Enron and its cronies contrived phony energy shortages and nearly bankrupted California, the atomic pushers went before America's state legislatures and asked for a massive bailout. They complained that with the coming age of deregulation (about two dozen states deregulated their electricity businesses) nuclear power plants were too expensive, inefficient and obsolete to compete in the coming green age.
So they demanded---and got---more than $100 billion in “stranded cost” payouts. These were the ultimate admission that atomic power simply could not make it in the marketplace. As deregulation failed throughout the US, what Forbes Magazine labeled “the largest managerial disaster in business history” stayed alive as America's ultimate welfare cheat.
Now the industry is back for more. After complaining about its old reactors' lousy economic performance, it now argues that the new ones will be magically transformed, and that billions more should be spent building them.
The first of those is already under construction in Finland. Ground was broken just two years ago, but the project is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.
So a whole new cover story has been invented: nuke power will “solve global warming.”
The assertion is absurd. All reactors emit radioactive carbon, along with numerous other “hot” isotopes. Massive quantities of greenhouse gasses are spewed into the atmosphere during the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel. The reactors themselves emit huge plumes of heat directly into the air and water.
Nukes perform poorly in hot weather, which is precisely when they're supposed to help with global warming. Reactors in both France and the US have been forced to shut because the rivers into which they dump their waste heat have exceeded 90 degrees Farenheit.
Still more greenhouse gasses have been created with the partial construction of the proposed Yucca Mountain waste dump in Nevada, which has already cost the public $11 billion. If it ever opens---it's not yet licensed, and many say it will never be---Yucca could cost $60 to $100 billion. Even then it couldn't handle the waste from the new reactors the industry wants to build---or even all the spent fuel from the old ones now in existence.
Yet the industry wants Congress to give the industry essentially a blank check for loan guarantees to the tune of $25 billion in 2008 and $25 billion more in 2009, with countless billions more still to come down the road.
Why? Because Wall Street just isn't buying. After fifty years, nuke power is the most expensive technological failure in US history. It can't get investors, liability insurance or a solution to its waste problem. It can't compete with new conservation, efficiency or renewables like wind power.
Since 9/11/2001, it's also become obvious that atomic reactors cannot be defended from terror attack. They are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction.
It's thus no accident that the push for new nukes with federal loan guarantees also comes with a demand for extended federal liability insurance. Who would invest in a reactor that might irradiate thousands of square miles and kill hundreds of thousands of human beings? The answer is simple: after fifty years, without federal guarantees---nobody!
Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were tragic warnings, as was the fact that the first jet to hit the World Trade Center flew directily over the Indian Point reactor complex, 45 miles north. Had those reactors been hit, the death toll could have been in the tens of thousands by now. The property damage from irradiating southern New York, Long Island, and all of downwind New Jersey and New England would be beyond calculation.
Despite all that, Pete Domenici, the Senator from Nuke Power, slipped these loan guarantees into the 2007 Energy Bill that could become one of the most expensive and lethal rip-offs in US history.
Meanwhile, the renewable energy industry is soaring to new heights of power and profitability. Wind farming has boomed to a $10-15 billion per year industry, with worldwide growth rates surpassing 25%. Breakthroughs in silicon solar cells are taking rooftop photovoltaics (PV) to vastly increased levels of efficiency and profitability. Bio-fuels, tidal, geo- and ocean thermal, wave energy and many more rapidly developing forms of green power are also booming ahead.
In 1979, Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, through Musicians United for Safe Energy, helped organize five nights of No Nukes concerts at Madison Square Garden. The accompanying rally at Battery Park City drew 200,000 people.
All of it was part of a successful grassroots campaign to stop the nuke industry. In 1974 Richard Nixon predicted there would be 1000 reactors in the US by the year 2000. But in the year 2000, there were just 103.
That's still 103 too many. Browne, Nash and Raitt are now working to help stop this latest bailout. In singing Stephen Stills's classic “For What It's Worth,” they joined Ben Harper and Keb Mo for a video that's linked through the www.nukefree.org web site, where a petition is being circulated and signed.
On October 23 they'll present the first round of petitions to Congress. In demanding the nuke subsidies be removed from an Energy Bill that contains many positive green features, they'll be joined by their fellow musician John Hall (D-NY), now a US Representative committed to shutting Indian Point.
They'll also be working with one of the most successful non-violent grassroots campaigns in US history. Should they stop this latest atomic assault on the public treasury, the door could finally open for a truly green-powered future.
Saturday, September 8, 2007
The Genius Doctor who Diagnosed Nuke Power's Deadly Disease
By Harvey Wasserman
The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom ever larger.
One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year. At the time, Gofman was the chief medical researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission. He told the AEC that reactor emissions must be radically reduced.
The AEC demanded he change his findings, then forced him out when he refused. Since then, reactor backers have ceaselessly and erroneously attacked Gofman and his findings. But they could hardly have picked a more brilliant, committed opponent. Gofman was both relentless and uncorrupted. His findings should have doomed from the start an industry he called "insane."
In addition to being a world-class nuclear chemist, Dr. John William Gofman was one of history's most important heart specialists. His pioneer research helped define our modern understanding about cholesterol, distinguishing "good" fatty acids from bad. Gofman's astonishing medical discoveries remain at the core of today's common wisdom about diet and heart disease. For that work alone, Gofman was a towering figure.
Throughout his life, he was friend and peer to Nobel Laureates such as Linus Pauling and George Wald. But Gofman was also a nuclear chemist. As part of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs, his pioneer work helped lead to the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium.
Yet his career suffered from an inconvenient truth: when he discovered that atomic power plants kill people in large numbers, he refused to shut up about it. As a full professor at the University of California, Gofman's combined medical and nuclear credentials made him an obvious choice to manage health research for the Atomic Energy Commission, which both regulated and promoted the young nuclear power industry. When public questions were raised about the health impacts of radioactive reactor emissions, Gofman was dispatched to prove the industry safe.
But his findings showed that reactors are serious killers. So even Gofman's towering resume could not protect him from the wrath of an industry determined to build all the power plants it could. He and co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs. When their POISONED POWER detailed the killing potential of atomic energy, Gofman and Tamplin were attacked mercilessly by an industry with immense investments to protect.
The experience showed that no matter how impeccable their credentials, and no matter how thorough their research, any scientists whose findings might indicate problems with atomic power would be automatically "discredited" by industry flacks to who did no comparable research. Even at his passing, the tired attacks on Gofman's findings have resurfaced. But his research remains the gold standard on the health impacts of radiation.
And as a gentle but firm advocate, mentor and friend, his integrity was matched only by his willingness to step outside traditional boundaries for what he believed. One of Gofman's most powerful and influential moments came in 1974, when he agreed to defend a civil disobedient named Sam Lovejoy in the small town of Montague, Massachusetts.
A member of a communal organic farm, Lovejoy had manually knocked over a 500-foot weather tower erected as a precursor to the building of a large twin reactor complex. Gofman agreed to testify in Lovejoy's defense, arguing that building two nuke reactors constituted a lethal threat to the health and safety of the community. In a monumental moment for the rise of the anti-nuclear movement, Lovejoy was acquitted.
Gofman's pivotal pronouncements appear in the award-winning LOVEJOY'S NUCLEAR WAR (gmpfilms.com), which has been shown all over the world. As a pivotal struggle over a "bailout in advance" for new reactor construction rages in Congress, Gofman's words resonate with a renewed critical importance:
"The decision to build nuclear power plants," he said, "may very well be, for the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth with respect for life for all future generations. "Why do we want to put every city and hamlet of the United States at risk by building a thousand of these plants? We can get the power from sunshine, very easily and economically.
"When we're talking about a mass of a hundred tons or so of material, melting 5,000 degrees Farenheit, with water around, with hydrogen being generated and burning explosively, melting through concrete into soil, when someone tells me that we're sure it isn't going to go far away, I say that I've heard various forms of insanity, but hardly this form.
"Even if this hazard of a meltdown were securely answered, it doesn't alter for one second my opposition to nuclear power, because I'm concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down, you 've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerilla activity, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…do you believe that there's anything you'd like to guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand years?"
After fifty years of proven failure, the nuke power industry is demanding still more taxpayer handouts to create still more of this waste. The great and good Dr. John W. Gofman warned us all against this insanity. His words and spirit remain at the core of what must be done to save this planet.
The nuke power industry now wants $50 billion and more in loan guarantees to build new atomic reactors. As it strong-arms Congress, the warnings of the great Dr. John Gofman, who passed away last week at 88, loom ever larger.
One of history's most respected and revered medical and nuclear pioneers, Gofman's research showed as early as 1969 that "normal" radioactive reactor emissions could kill 32,000 Americans per year. At the time, Gofman was the chief medical researcher for the Atomic Energy Commission. He told the AEC that reactor emissions must be radically reduced.
The AEC demanded he change his findings, then forced him out when he refused. Since then, reactor backers have ceaselessly and erroneously attacked Gofman and his findings. But they could hardly have picked a more brilliant, committed opponent. Gofman was both relentless and uncorrupted. His findings should have doomed from the start an industry he called "insane."
In addition to being a world-class nuclear chemist, Dr. John William Gofman was one of history's most important heart specialists. His pioneer research helped define our modern understanding about cholesterol, distinguishing "good" fatty acids from bad. Gofman's astonishing medical discoveries remain at the core of today's common wisdom about diet and heart disease. For that work alone, Gofman was a towering figure.
Throughout his life, he was friend and peer to Nobel Laureates such as Linus Pauling and George Wald. But Gofman was also a nuclear chemist. As part of the Manhattan Project that built the first atomic bombs, his pioneer work helped lead to the discoveries of plutonium and certain isotopes of uranium.
Yet his career suffered from an inconvenient truth: when he discovered that atomic power plants kill people in large numbers, he refused to shut up about it. As a full professor at the University of California, Gofman's combined medical and nuclear credentials made him an obvious choice to manage health research for the Atomic Energy Commission, which both regulated and promoted the young nuclear power industry. When public questions were raised about the health impacts of radioactive reactor emissions, Gofman was dispatched to prove the industry safe.
But his findings showed that reactors are serious killers. So even Gofman's towering resume could not protect him from the wrath of an industry determined to build all the power plants it could. He and co-researcher Arthur Tamplin were driven from their jobs. When their POISONED POWER detailed the killing potential of atomic energy, Gofman and Tamplin were attacked mercilessly by an industry with immense investments to protect.
The experience showed that no matter how impeccable their credentials, and no matter how thorough their research, any scientists whose findings might indicate problems with atomic power would be automatically "discredited" by industry flacks to who did no comparable research. Even at his passing, the tired attacks on Gofman's findings have resurfaced. But his research remains the gold standard on the health impacts of radiation.
And as a gentle but firm advocate, mentor and friend, his integrity was matched only by his willingness to step outside traditional boundaries for what he believed. One of Gofman's most powerful and influential moments came in 1974, when he agreed to defend a civil disobedient named Sam Lovejoy in the small town of Montague, Massachusetts.
A member of a communal organic farm, Lovejoy had manually knocked over a 500-foot weather tower erected as a precursor to the building of a large twin reactor complex. Gofman agreed to testify in Lovejoy's defense, arguing that building two nuke reactors constituted a lethal threat to the health and safety of the community. In a monumental moment for the rise of the anti-nuclear movement, Lovejoy was acquitted.
Gofman's pivotal pronouncements appear in the award-winning LOVEJOY'S NUCLEAR WAR (gmpfilms.com), which has been shown all over the world. As a pivotal struggle over a "bailout in advance" for new reactor construction rages in Congress, Gofman's words resonate with a renewed critical importance:
"The decision to build nuclear power plants," he said, "may very well be, for the first time, a decision that can result in the desecration of the Earth with respect for life for all future generations. "Why do we want to put every city and hamlet of the United States at risk by building a thousand of these plants? We can get the power from sunshine, very easily and economically.
"When we're talking about a mass of a hundred tons or so of material, melting 5,000 degrees Farenheit, with water around, with hydrogen being generated and burning explosively, melting through concrete into soil, when someone tells me that we're sure it isn't going to go far away, I say that I've heard various forms of insanity, but hardly this form.
"Even if this hazard of a meltdown were securely answered, it doesn't alter for one second my opposition to nuclear power, because I'm concerned about the fact that whether it melts down or doesn't melt down, you 've created an astronomical amount of radioactive garbage which you must contain and isolate better than 99.99 percent perfectly, in peace and war, with human error and human malice, guerilla activity, psychotics, malfunction of equipment…do you believe that there's anything you'd like to guarantee will be done 99.99 percent perfectly for a hundred thousand years?"
After fifty years of proven failure, the nuke power industry is demanding still more taxpayer handouts to create still more of this waste. The great and good Dr. John W. Gofman warned us all against this insanity. His words and spirit remain at the core of what must be done to save this planet.
Sunday, August 26, 2007
Astonishing Tower Collapse Screams "No New Nukes!!"
By Harvey Wasserman
A cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant has collapsed.
A broken 54" pipe there has spewed 350,000 gallons per minute of contaminated, overheated water into the Earth. "The river water piping and the series of screens and supports failed," said a company spokesman. They "fell to the ground."
The public and media were barred from viewing the wreckage for three days.
But when a Congressional Energy Bill conference committee takes up Senate-approved loan guarantees for building new nukes this fall, what will reactor backers say about this latest pile of radioactive rubble? This kind of event can make even hardened nuke opponents pinch themselves and read the descriptions twice.
Who could make this up?
Vermont Yankee has been in operation---more or less---since the early 1970s. Its owner is Entergy, a multi-reactor "McNuke" operator that last year got approval to up VY's output by 20%.
Required inspections revealed worrisome cracks and other structural problems. Entergy dismissed all that, but was forced to issue a "ratepayer protection policy" against incidents caused by the power increase. The guarantee expired earlier this month, not long before the collapse.
The tower came down amidst angry negotiations between Entergy and plant workers. A strike was barely averted, but VY's labor troubles are by no means over.
The reactor's output has now been slashed 50%. A public battle is raging over whether it can dump water even hotter than usual into the Connecticut River. Reactors in Alabama, France and elsewhere have been forced shut because the rivers that cool them have exceeded 90 degrees.
Yankee's cooling system, vintage 1972, centers on 22 (now 21) wood, fiberglass and metal towers that stretch for 300 feet, and are 50 feet high and 40 feet wide. The company calls this giant rig a "rain forest." Operators admit to hearing "strange sounds" coming from its fans last week, but say Tuesday's collapse was unexpected.
Nuclear opponents who warned about such an event have been scorned by Entergy and its supporters. That something as apparently absurd as the spontaneous collapse of an entire cooling tower could actually occur underlines America's Keystone Kops reality of atomic operation and regulation. "We need to understand what happened," explains the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Diane Screnci.
So does Congress.
A definitive Conference Committee battle will be fought after Labor Day over an Energy Bill that includes taxpayer guarantees for $50 billion and more to build new nukes.
Meanwhile Vermonters will pay for this latest pile of radioactive reactor rubble. Maybe a "fall foliage" field trip to the Green Mountain State would do the Congress some good.
A cooling tower at the Vermont Yankee Nuclear Power plant has collapsed.
A broken 54" pipe there has spewed 350,000 gallons per minute of contaminated, overheated water into the Earth. "The river water piping and the series of screens and supports failed," said a company spokesman. They "fell to the ground."
The public and media were barred from viewing the wreckage for three days.
But when a Congressional Energy Bill conference committee takes up Senate-approved loan guarantees for building new nukes this fall, what will reactor backers say about this latest pile of radioactive rubble? This kind of event can make even hardened nuke opponents pinch themselves and read the descriptions twice.
Who could make this up?
Vermont Yankee has been in operation---more or less---since the early 1970s. Its owner is Entergy, a multi-reactor "McNuke" operator that last year got approval to up VY's output by 20%.
Required inspections revealed worrisome cracks and other structural problems. Entergy dismissed all that, but was forced to issue a "ratepayer protection policy" against incidents caused by the power increase. The guarantee expired earlier this month, not long before the collapse.
The tower came down amidst angry negotiations between Entergy and plant workers. A strike was barely averted, but VY's labor troubles are by no means over.
The reactor's output has now been slashed 50%. A public battle is raging over whether it can dump water even hotter than usual into the Connecticut River. Reactors in Alabama, France and elsewhere have been forced shut because the rivers that cool them have exceeded 90 degrees.
Yankee's cooling system, vintage 1972, centers on 22 (now 21) wood, fiberglass and metal towers that stretch for 300 feet, and are 50 feet high and 40 feet wide. The company calls this giant rig a "rain forest." Operators admit to hearing "strange sounds" coming from its fans last week, but say Tuesday's collapse was unexpected.
Nuclear opponents who warned about such an event have been scorned by Entergy and its supporters. That something as apparently absurd as the spontaneous collapse of an entire cooling tower could actually occur underlines America's Keystone Kops reality of atomic operation and regulation. "We need to understand what happened," explains the Nuclear Regulatory Commission's Diane Screnci.
So does Congress.
A definitive Conference Committee battle will be fought after Labor Day over an Energy Bill that includes taxpayer guarantees for $50 billion and more to build new nukes.
Meanwhile Vermonters will pay for this latest pile of radioactive reactor rubble. Maybe a "fall foliage" field trip to the Green Mountain State would do the Congress some good.
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