Green Blog

Making YOU pay for the next Chernobyls...in advance!!

2008-04-27T22:54:00.000-07:00

Making YOU pay for the next Chernobyls ... in advance!!
April 26, 2008

Are you ready to pay for the next Chernobyls---in advance? Are you willing to have nuclear power PREVENT a solution to the climate crisis?

Twenty-two years ago today, an apocalyptic cloud rose up from Unit Four, in the heart of the Ukraine. For the next few hundred generations, you and your progeny will breathe its radioactive fallout, which was thousands of times worse than that released at Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Conservative estimates of Chernobyl's financial costs are in the $500 billion range. In downwind regions festering with cancer and birth-defected children, the ultimate death toll is impossible to estimate.

Another Chernobyl could be happening as you read this. And you are already on line to pay for it.

The so-called "reactor renaissance" is built on high-priced lies and public liability.

Not one of the 104 US reactors now licensed to operate, and not one of the new ones being hyped, can get insurance from private sources against another Chernobyl.

For a half-century---since passage of the 1957 Price-Anderson Act---your tax dollars have protected the reactor owners. Now they want you on the hook for another century or so.

Check out your homeowners' insurance policy for its specific exclusions against liability for reactor-related radiation.

With an old reactor or new, a Chernobyl here will bankrupt the government…and YOU.

The first 9/11/2001 jet that flew into the World Trade Center passed, a minute prior, directly over the Indian Point nuke site. Had the terrorists targeted those one dormant and two active reactors, plus the three pools full of spent high-level fuel rods, the loss of life and property would have been beyond comprehension.

Billions of dollars in private money now pour into renewable technologies like wind and solar, which are the real solution to the climate crisis. Every dollar invested in increased efficiency saves seven times the energy a dollar invested in nukes can produce.

Last fall a grassroots movement stopped an attempt to grab $50 billion in federal loan guarantees (see nukefree.org).

Now nuke pushers want to load the Lieberman-Warner "Global Warming" Bill with still more taxpayer subsidies.

But from the start of the fuel cycle to plant decommissioning and waste management, reactor technology is a serious greenhouse gas emitter. The final "bootprint" is unclear because there's no actual solution to the waste problem, and no firm price for final reactor decommissioning.

A French "new generation" project in Finland is already two years and $2 billion over budget. French nukes are gargantuan tax pits, Europe's most notorious radioactive polluter, and an ecological and public health nightmare.

In Florida, ratepayers may be gouged for up to $24 billion for two new reactors that would destroy the Everglades, and still more billions for two more north of Tampa. The utilities involved don't know what kind of reactors they want to build, can't guarantee when they would come on line, or what they'll ultimately cost.

All that money should be going to renewables, which can solve global warming NOW, rather than at some alleged, inscrutable, incalculable distance in the future. Wind, solar, tidal, wave, geothermal and a host of green "Solartopian" technologies are attracting huge quantities of private capital. Based on the natural bounty of our Mother Earth, they promise tangible, immediate economic and employment opportunity, not radioactive catastrophe.

Chernobyl proved that atomic energy's most significant ability---by terror or error---is to spread radiation over large chunks of the Earth. While blocking the real solutions to climate chaos, nukes can bankrupt entire nations in a single moment. They can inflict birth defects and cancer on millions of humans with a single cloud.

Twenty-two years after, it's time to ask the ultimate question about the last reactor catastrophe: In money, body and soul, do you really want to pay for the next ones?

Will Al Gore help shut the nuke power loophole?

2008-04-27T22:52:00.000-07:00

Will Al Gore help shut the nuke power loophole?
April 2, 2008

Today Al Gore is unveiling a massive campaign to fight climate chaos.

But the hugely funded atomic power industry has jumped on global warming with the Big Lie that its failed reactors can somehow help. It's a sorry replay of the 1950s promise that atomic power would be "too cheap to meter."

Just before the 2000 election, as senior advisor to the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, I wrote then-Vice President Gore asking that he help delete from the Kyoto Accords any reference to nukes as a possible solution to global warming. On November 3, 2000 (the letter is posted at the www.nirs.org web site) Gore wrote back:

"Thank you for your recent inquiry regarding nuclear energy and the Kyoto Protocol. Let me restate for you my long held policy with regard to nuclear energy. I do not support any increased reliance on nuclear energy. Moreover, I have disagreed with those who would classify nuclear energy as clean or renewable. In fact, you will note that the electricity restructuring legislation proposed by the [Clinton] Administration specifically excluded both nuclear and large scale hydro-energy, and instead promoted increased investment in energy efficiency and renewable energy. It is my view that climate change policies should do the same."

Nukes were soon deleted from the Kyoto Accords as a "solution" to global warming.

The reactor industry claims, probably correctly, that it releases fewer greenhouse gases/kwh than fossil fuels. But it also says nukes compare with renewables in avoiding CO2 emissions. Here Gore's words ring especially true.

It's well-known that mining, milling, ore transport, enrichment and deployment of radioactive fuel for atomic reactors comprise a major source of CO2 emissions. Radon gas emissions also have significant environmental and public health impacts.

When it's "spent," used reactor fuel must cool in energy-intensive cooling ponds, then sit in dubious "dry casks," which are essentially large boxes with ventilating holes. If the rods are eventually moved to a central repository, tens of thousands of shipments on trucks and trains will be required.

Meanwhile, the mere construction of a nuclear plant consumes huge quantities of fossil fuels. Manufactured materials used to build reactors demand years of efficient operation just to break even in terms of net energy. The reactors also emit heated---often chemically treated---steam into the atmosphere, and hot water into lakes, streams and the oceans. Reactors in France, Alabama and elsewhere have been forced shut because global-warmed streams have become to hot to cool the reactors, and emissions would raise waters downstream beyond acceptable levels (in some cases, over 90 degrees Farenheit).

Meanwhile, nukes are enormously expensive. Some first-generation US reactors came in as much as 25 times over their original budget. Small wonder Wall Street "won't be burned again."

There has been much hype about a "standardized design," but the US industry has not settled on one, and continues to fiddle with essential structural changes even as the licensing process draws near.

As for France, its atomic industry is a form of national socialism. The reactors are primarily state-funded and immune to the kinds of cost-accounting that would force a normal industry to actually pay for itself. France's 60-odd reactors are loss-leaders for a nation hoping to export large numbers of them. But a "new generation" French-designed reactor under construction in Finland is already two years behind schedule and $2 billion over budget.

Even if reactors could help solve the climate crisis, the mere act of licensing and building them requires a decade or more. The two reactors projected for Turkey Point, Florida, are dubiously targeted to open in 2018 and 2020.

They are slated to cost a total of $24 billion. But that price tag is likely to soar, and that money invested NOW in efficiency and renewables could meanwhile be solving the climate crisis. The Rocky Mountain Institute estimates that every dollar invested in increased efficiency can save some 7 times as much energy as can be produced by a dollar invested in nuke power.

Throw in "ancillary" problems like apocalyptic catastrophe by terror and error, or atomic weapons proliferation, or human health and environmental impacts from "normal" emissions, and much more, and it's easy to see why not a single major national environmental organization now advocates building new nukes to solve the climate crisis.

The reactor pushers admit that they can't proceed without massive taxpayer handouts. Last fall, led by US Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) the industry slipped a $50 billion loan guarantee package into the Energy Bill. Thanks to a national and grassroots campaign (see www.nukefree.org) and strong leadership from Congressional Democrats, those guarantees were defeated.

But $18.5 billion did sleaze into descriptive language for last year's Appropriations Bill. The upcoming Lieberman-Warner Global Warming Bill will be laden with radioactive pork. And the industry is now working on state utility commissions to grant Construction Work in Progress, a boondoggle forcing ratepayers to fund new reactors as they are being built. They've already succeeded in Florida.

Without stopping all that, Gore's much-welcomed initiative cannot succeed. Nuke power is the Achilles Heel that can doom all attempts to save this planet.

Thirty years ago, as thousands of demonstrators marched onto reactor construction sites at Seabrook (NH), Diablo Canyon (CA), and elsewhere, we shared the Solartopian vision of a green-powered earth, a planet entirely free of nuke and fossil fuels.

That vision has now become a tangible possibility, technologically and economically. If this new push to stop global warming supports grassroots citizen action, and helps stop taxpayer funding for new reactors, we just might succeed.

Did Turkey Point again take Florida to the radioactive brink?

2008-04-27T22:50:00.000-07:00

Did Turkey Point again take Florida to the radioactive brink?
February 27, 2008

As many as two million Floridians were blacked out yesterday by a series of grid malfunctions that forced shut two old atomic reactors south of Miami and renewed nightmares of a radioactive catastrophe. The chain of events should serve as yet another serious warning to those who would build still more atomic reactors in Florida and elsewhere.

The wide-ranging blackout apparently started with an accidental trip at a substation. That sabotage has been ruled out may not be all that reassuring. Countless homes and businesses were affected from the Florida Keys to as far away as Tampa, Gainesville and Daytona Beach. Frightened Floridians were trapped in elevators or abandoned offices by making their way down dark, sweltering stairwells. In Miami-Dade alone, at least forty traffic accidents piled up as signals went dark.

This blackout’s reach was limited by steps taken since a 2003 reactor-related grid failure in Ohio led to a massive blackout that left 50 million people without power.

But the two large reactors at Turkey Point did trip from the loss of off-site power. (For safety reasons, vital cooling systems and other critical components rely on electricity coming from sources other than the reactors.)

A far more tense shut-down came when off-site power was lost during 1992’s Hurricane Andrew, whose eye passed directly over Turkey Point. At the height of the storm, communication from the control room was also dangerously lost. Tools and equipment valued at around $100 million were destroyed or simply blown away.

Andrew’s epic devastation made it clear that south Florida could never be evacuated in the wake of a melt-down amidst a hurricane. After the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island, the NRC adopted specifications for evacuation procedures that were simply shredded by Andrew.

But Turkey Point re-opened three weeks later. To this day, no procedures are in place that could reliably evacuate south Florida’s burgeoning human population if radiation releases occurred even under optimum weather conditions, let alone amidst a major weather event.

Nonetheless, Florida Power & Light now wants to build two more reactors at Turkey Point, at a cost of some $20 billion. The generators could not come on line until sometime between 2020 and 2025.

A request for “Construction Work in Progress” (CWIP) is now before the Public Utilities Commission. CWIP would force state ratepayers to cover the cost of the reactors as they are being built. The PUC could make a decision within a month.

FPL may also seek federal loan guarantees, $18.5 billion of which were noticed in the federal Appropriations Bill passed in December, 2007. The Lieberman-Warner Global Warming bill, soon to be debated in the US Senate, may also come with hefty subsidies for projects like this one. Two more reactors have been proposed by Progress Energy for a site near one reactor already operating at Crystal River, near Tampa.

Little if any private financing is likely forthcoming for the proposed Florida reactors. But if CWIP or federal loans come through, they may be hard to stop.

New reactor construction at Turkey Point would have substantial environmental impacts on the nearby Everglades National Park. Serious questions remain about pressure put on water supplies, damage to nearby wildlife habitat, and much more. A wide range of local and national environmental groups have begun to intervene against the project.

This blackout and reactor shut-down happened on a clear, calm Florida day. It may be only a matter of time these reactors finally do take the sunshine state into the radioactive abyss.

None of this could have happened had Florida's power come from decentralized solar panels installed on buildings. Those billions slated for more nukes would be far better spent doing just that.

How swing state Ohio got nuked

2008-04-27T22:49:00.001-07:00

How swing state Ohio got nuked
February 25, 2008

Ohio is poised to do its thing as the ultimate swing state. On March 4 it may, along with Texas, choose the Democratic presidential nominee.

Tragically, the candidates will campaign in a state whose economic future has been nuked.

Once a great industrial heartland, Ohio’s rust belt status has been solidified by billions in excess electric rates driven by four nuclear reactors, and by the state government's inability to make way for a green-powered future.

On Friday, February 22, a powerful group of international steel investors announced they were pulling Ohio out of the running for a new high-tech production plant. Some 500 jobs will now go elsewhere. The investors blamed unstable power prices. "If you had to rank from clarity on the utility situation, Ohio would not rank very high," said one.

The state suffers some of the nation's highest and most unpredictable electric costs for four simple reasons: the Davis-Besse, Perry, Zimmer and Beaver Valley 2 nuclear plants.

Davis-Besse, near Toledo, is world-famous for a leak of boric acid that ate through a six-inch stainless steel reactor pressure vessel, bringing northern Ohio to the brink of a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe. Perry, east of Cleveland, suffered billions in construction cost over-runs, and is the only US nuke to have been damaged by an earthquake. Zimmer, on the Ohio River, was allegedly more than 95% complete when massive design and construction flaws forced its hugely expensive 1980s conversion to coal. Beaver Valley 2, near Pittsburgh, has run up even more in overages.

To recoup their radioactive losses, Ohio utilities rammed a 1999 "deregulation" bill through the legislature that has thus far cost ratepayers at least $10 billion, and counting. The vast bulk of the money has gone to repay "stranded costs," corporate code for sunk debt reactor owners don't want to eat. Had that money gone to increased efficiency and renewable technologies, Ohio’s economy would be on a very different footing.

The bill was largely guided by the Akron-based FirstEnergy, whose Anthony Alexander has been a major Bush-Cheney donor. FirstEnergy makes very large campaign donations, mostly to Republican legislators in Ohio and nationwide. Forbes Magazine estimated Alexander's 2005 salary at more than $6 million.

As part of the dereg scam, the utilities promised an "open market" for electricity once the nukes were paid off. But instead of competition, Ohio is getting unregulated monopolies that are neither clean nor reliable. It was FirstEnergy's shaky grid that helped black out 50 million people in the northeastern US and Canada in 2003. Small wonder investors are skittish.

A much-touted energy bill passed by the state Senate in October mandates that Ohio utilities generate 25% of their electricity with "advanced energy" by 2020.

About two dozen other states have similar provisions. But Ohio's has become a national joke by including "clean coal" and nuke power in the mix. The Senate bill says half of that quota---12.5%--- must come from renewables such as wind, solar and bio-fuels. But the other 12.5% can come from still more nuke and fossil fuels.

Because of this and disputes over regulation, the bill has languished in the Ohio House. Republican Speaker Jon Husted is reportedly considering removing the coal/nuke concession. But Democratic Governor Ted Strickland has long-standing ties to the coal and uranium enrichment industries, which are deeply rooted in his native southern Ohio.

In the meantime, electric prices and green energy are in deep in limbo, and have dragged down any hope of an economic revival. Except for municipal utilities like Cleveland and Bowling Green, northern Ohio endures some of the nation's highest electric rates.

The region does not lack green visionaries---or resources. Bowling Green owns four extremely successful wind turbines, and may build more. The Cleveland Foundation and others are pushing hard for a renewable energy infrastructure along the lakefront to manufacture wind turbines, solar panels and fuel cells. The Museum of Science hosts the only utility-scale windmill in a US downtown.

The Great Lakes region boasts some of the world's most powerful wind resources. But a sustainable green harvest must somehow blow by Ohio's continued corporate commitment to nuke power.

The Senators campaigning here for the presidency had best look closely at the $18.5 billion in federal loan guarantees for new reactor construction that were written into the Congressional Appropriations Bill passed in 2007. They might also do something about the Lieberman-Warner Global Warming Bill, soon to be debated on the Senate floor, which may contain significant handouts to build still more atomic reactors.

Above all, as the campaign rolls through swing state Ohio, those who would be president should make note of what a mess nuke power has made of this state's economy.

Will Ohio be left behind by the green energy revolution?

2008-04-27T22:48:00.001-07:00

Will Ohio be left behind by the green energy revolution?
January 31, 2008

Testimony to the Public Utilities Commission of the Ohio House, January 30, 2008

Thank you for allowing me to testify today.

I am a resident of central Ohio and author, or co-author, of a dozen books, including four on energy. My most recent is SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, which is graced by an introduction by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and has been captured in song by Pete Seeger.

My message today is simple: any state that allows the construction of new nuclear power plants in the face of today’s global industrial competition and financial turmoil will be committing economic suicide.

Any energy legislation that allows any kind of incentive to build such reactors dooms itself to the failures of the last century, not the successes of the new one. Thus the 12.5% of future electric production that is left open to nuclear power and coal in this new energy bill should be transformed and devoted entirely to renewables and efficiency.

There is nothing “advanced” about atomic energy.

Aside from all its other problems, nuclear power is 50 years of proven financial failure. The industry at birth promised electricity “too cheap to meter.” What it delivers is too expensive to afford. Any attempt to revive atomic energy is akin to refloating the Titanic and re-selling the Edsel.

The first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957. It has since been dismantled, at huge expense.

Ohio’s poster children for atomic energy’s failure are Perry and Davis-Besse. Perry is the only US reactor to have suffered actual physical damage from an earthquake. In 1987, then-Governor Richard Celeste’s Blue Ribbon report showed that the area could not be evacuated in the face of a major accident. It thus failed a primary test for federal licensing. With massive increases in nearby population, that’s even more true today. Indeed, it’s hard to imagine any site in Ohio where a new nuke could meet basic evacuation requirements.

Davis-Besse is infamous throughout the world for the boric acid leak that ate through all but a fraction of an inch of its inner containment system. It took us within millimeters of a Chernobyl-scale catastrophe that would have killed countless Ohioans, irradiated the world’s largest body of fresh water and wrecked economic havoc beyond calculation. Whether we escape next time may once again be a matter of sheer luck.

Hidden in the mix is the sorry fiasco of the Zimmer Reactor, which at one point was considered more than 90% complete. Then its massive construction, design and bookkeeping irregularities forced the state to pull the plug, at huge public cost.

Less than a decade ago, in this room, legislation was debated that allowed the state’s utilities to recoup---at ratepayer expense---upwards of $9 billion in costs “stranded” by these failed reactors.

Calculate, for a minute, what Ohio could have done with $9 billion invested in industrial and high-tech infrastructure. Instead, private utility companies were bailed out of bad nuclear decisions that had been fiercely opposed from start to finish.

Today we face another such crossroads. We have before us what amounts to a 12.5% renewable portfolio standard. It is focused on wind, solar, biofuels, efficiency, conservation. These true green technologies work. They are profitable, create jobs and fight global warming. Wall Street loves them.

Each of these technologies has its special challenges. But few if any unbiased observers who study the realities of green energy believe that it has anything but a hugely profitable future ahead of it.

Economics, employment and the environment are all in synch here. Renewables and efficiency are at the cutting edge of what may be the most profound and profitable technological revolution yet, almost certain to transcend even the dot.com boom of the late 20th Century. That one had its inevitable stock market burst. But does anybody believe the internet or personal computer will soon disappear?

Unfortunately, as an industrial center, Ohio missed much of that revolution. But if we make the right decisions, we are poised to cash in on the revolution in green power. We already have substantial facilities here in solar photovoltaic cells, and in fuel cells.

But Northern Ohio is also poised for a massive boom in wind power. On-shore, our wind resource may not be comparable to Great Plains states like the Dakotas, Minnesota and Kansas. But we have a readily available transmission network, easily accessible urban centers with very large demand, and (unfortunately) high electric rates, largely due to the financial residues of those nuclear plants.

The city of Bowling Green has already erected four windmills worth $1.8 million each. It’s seriously contemplating more. They work, they’re profitable, well liked, don’t kill birds, and will never bring northern Ohio to the brink of a Chernobyl. If the wind resource in the north coast region is properly harvested, and if we take the lead in building the industrial infrastructure to make that happen, Ohio could reap billions in long-term profits and untold good, safe, high-paying jobs.

Beyond the north coast is one of the world’s greatest untapped energy resources, the winds in the middle of Lake Erie. Cleveland now hosts the first utility-scale windmill in an American downtown. It’s a gateway to a lake that is relatively shallow. Its powerful, steady winds could light the region. Brilliant plans are now in motion to make sure the manufacturing base to do that is in Ohio, not overseas or in other states.

But such a vision demands state policies that make sense. This is not futuristic, pie-in-the sky utopianism. Germany, Spain, Denmark, Holland, India, Japan, Israel…all are booming into a green-powered future they see as inevitable, and as a proven pathway to present prosperity.

In 2002 I attended my first national convention of the American Wind Energy Association. There were 1700 people there. In the summer of 2007, in the Los Angeles Convention Center, there were 7,000. This industry is growing at up to 25% per year, and represents well over $10 billion in annual revenues.

This past summer, Cleveland hosted its first gathering of the American Solar Energy Society. It was a rousing success, accompanied by the installation of a solar array which now helps power the Great Lakes Science Center. You could make this Ohio’s future.

But we will miss this revolution without a renewable portfolio standard that makes sense. And this bill contains a poisoned pill. It is the 12.5% of our energy future that would allow new nuclear and coal construction. Time does not allow me to address the issue of coal, except to say that ultimately, global warming and basic economics rule it out as a long-term player in our clean energy supply.

But the verdict on nuke power is clear: it is a welfare basket case. After 50 years, there is no solution to the radioactive waste problem---that hinges on a highly dubious government program centered on a dump in Nevada that may never open.

There is no private liability insurance against a catastrophe by terror or error--- that depends on a federal limit on how much the owners of a reactor will have to pay.

There is no private investment pool waiting to finance a new generation of reactors---that will only come with federal loan guarantees at the taxpayers expense.

There is no market viability for a radioactive product that cannot compete now with renewables and efficiency, and which continually loses margin against these booming green technologies.

Amidst all the hype, there is a “new generation” reactor under construction in Finland. It is two years and $2 billion over budget. As at Perry, Davis-Besse and Zimmer, the entire history of atomic power is one of cost-overruns, bailouts and high electric rates.

No nuke plant in Ohio is now proposed. Just obtaining a construction license could require five years. Then will come the endless litigation and clearing the protestors off the proposed site. Assuming construction went even reasonably on time, no new reactor could conceivably come on line here in less than fifteen years.

By then, renewables and efficiency will have priced this old technology so far out of the market as to make it laughable. Even today, a dollar invested in efficiency saves seven times as much energy as a dollar invested in nukes can produce.

In short, that 12.5% allowed for nukes and coal needs to go green. There is nothing advanced about atomic power. That loophole will cripple our role in the renewable revolution as surely as we missed the dot-com.

A final reality: In 1994, amidst a huge state-wide political battle, the Minnesota Legislature required Northern States Power to build 400 megawatts of windmills. The state’s PUC has since ruled that windpower is that state’s least cost alternative. Hundreds more windmills are being built there, and component manufacturing is booming. Much of this “cash crop” is owned by individuals, coops and communities. It is saving family farms throughout the state. It is massively profitable and hugely popular.

Provisions for community ownership, added to this bill, are essential to our energy future. Already, rights to our wind resource are being grabbed away by foreign firms like Spain’s Gamesa, and by out-of-state speculators. Grassroots, in-state ownership of our native green power is essential to local job creation and our future prosperity. It is issues like these, rather than the folly of nuclear power, that should be the focus of our attention.

Just this week, Warren Buffett’s Iowa-based utility backed out of a nuke project proposed for Idaho because it was too expensive. And another earthquake has rumbled near Perry.

It’s time for Ohio to choose technology for this century, not the last one. And it’s time we make sure our renewable energy resources are owned by Ohioans.

There is no room in any meaningful portfolio standard for anything but technologies that are profitable, that can compete, that can get financing independent of the government, that can be controlled by the people of Ohio, and that will not threaten the planet with radioactive catastrophe.

This world will be green-powered. The decision is now yours: will Ohio help lead the parade, or be left behind?

Anti-nuclear renaissance: A powerful but partial and tentative victory over atomic energy

2008-04-27T22:46:00.000-07:00

Anti-nuclear renaissance: a powerful but partial and tentative victory over atomic energy
January 5, 2008

As the presidential primary season heats up, an “anti-nuclear renaissance” against loan guarantees for new nuclear power plants will escalate, with the future of American energy policy and global warming hanging in the balance.

In the last days of 2007, grassroots activism ran up a stunning and improbably victory. But the triumph is both partial and tentative, and will be fiercely contested throughout 2008, with the basic direction of US energy policy hanging in the balance.

This latest chapter in the half-century saga of atomic energy began last summer, with an industry attempt to grab a blank taxpayer check for underwriting new reactor construction. The charge was been led by six-term Senator Pete Domenici (D-NM), atomic power's prime Congressional pusher.

Domenici inserted into the Senate version of the national Energy Bill a complex provision meant to allow the Department of Energy to underwrite up to 80% of new reactor construction costs. The nuclear industry envisioned $25 billion in loan guarantees for 2008, $25 billion more in 2009, and what would amount to a blank check into the future. The guarantees would be granted at the DOE's discretion, with no on-going Congressional oversight.

Domenici slipped in the provision without open debate in Congress or the public. It took the form of a single obscure sentence referencing the Energy Bill of 2005. The move only became widely noticed thanks to a front page New York Times article on July 31.

The loan guarantees generated intense grassroots and Washington-based opposition. After the Times article appeared, musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash established the www.nukefree.org website, and joined with the on-going grassroots movement against a “nuclear renaissance” meant to revive an industry whose last successful reactor order was placed in 1973. Raitt, Browne and Nash were joined by Keb Mo and Ben Harper in a music video that spread through the internet, underscoring the costs and dangers of such construction.

The video played into an on-going No Nukes movement. The industry has gone to great lengths to assert that it has widespread “green” support. But no major national ecological organization has endorsed nuclear power, and the core of the movement---including scores of national, grassroots and Internet-based groups---rallied to fight the subsidies.

On October 23, nine national groups joined with nukefree.org at a Washington press conference to submit 120,000 signatures against the guarantees. Representatives Ed Markey (D-MA), Shelley Berkeley (D-NV) and John Hall (D-NY) spoke along with representatives from the Sierra Club, League of Conservation Voters, Greenpeace USA, Environmental Working Group, Natural Resources Defense Council, Public Citizen, USPIRG/Association of State PIRGs, the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and Beyond Nuclear. (Speeches from the press conference can be found at www.nukefree.org, and accessed directly at www.nukefree.freevolt.org).

The petitions were also circulated by MoveOn.org, True Majority and other internet groups, and signed by, among others, Robert Redford, Ozamatli, Patti Smith, System of a Down, Sheryl Crowe, Herbie Hancock, Susan Sarandon, Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., and the council of the Hip-Hop Summit Action Network. The Nuclear Information & Resource Service (NIRS) submitted endorsements from several hundred local and regional grassroots organizations.

The Union of Concerned Scientists circulated a parallel petition opposing the guarantees. Free market advocates joined in from Forbes Magazine and the Cato Institute, which objects to billions in taxpayer funds going to support what Forbes has called “the largest managerial disaster in business history.”

Amidst intense public and private pressure, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid pulled the loan guarantees out of the Energy Bill. It was an historic victory for grassroots activism.

In the midst of the campaign, Domenici admitted to suffering from frontotemporal lobar degeneration, a form of dementia. First elected to the Senate in 1972, he announced he would retire at the end of his sixth term, in January, 2008.

Domenici then tried to stick the loan guarantees into the Farm Bill, prompting critics to term them “Domenici's radioactive retirement package.” That move failed.

The nuclear industry then attempted to add to a global warming bill, co-authored by Senators Lieberman (D-CT) and McCain (R-AZ), a laundry list of reactor subsidies and regulatory easements. These were removed by Sen. Barbara Boxer (D-CA), chair of the Energy and Public Works Committee.

Domenici then moved to attach the guarantees to the Appropriations Bill used to fund the government's operations. By late December, bickering over this $500 billion bill deteriorated into intense partisan warfare. Domenici's back-door move angered House Appropriations Chair David Obey (D-WI) and the battle intensified, with opposition signatures continuing to pour in.

The Appropriations Bill finally passed both houses of Congress in late December. But the legislative standing and ultimate outcome for the loan guarantees is murky at best, with legal and procedural experts still debating over what exactly has been done.

Ostensibly, the DOE has been authorized to grant $18.5 billion in reactor loan guarantees over the next two years, plus another $2 billion for uranium enrichment. There is also some $10 billion for renewable energy projects (though the definition of exactly what “renewable” means in the eyes of the Bush DOE remains to be seen). And there is apparently money for coal liquification and gasification. The DOE is also required to submit the specific guarantees to Congress for review 45 days before they can be authorized.

But there agreement ends. Based on the 2005 Energy Act, the $18.5 billion can be seen as just a benchmark number, with the DOE technically capable of issuing all the guarantees it wants. Long-standing Congressional procedures may also be used to interpret the submission requirement as merely informational, granting Congress no power to stop the DOE from issuing the guarantees once they're reviewed.

But Robert Alvarez, a former long-time employee of the Energy Department, now Senior Scholar at the Institute for Policy Studies, says the nature of the provision leaves the legal standing of the guarantees in limbo and could “paralyze (some say strangle) the loan program.”

Among the problems Alvarez cites are unresolved disputes over the previous Energy Policy Act of 2005, “scoring” procedures required by the 1990 Federal Credit Reform Act to determine the true cost of a spending package, the authorization of a two-year guarantee program in a one-year Appropriations Bill, disputes surrounding Congressional approval processes, and more. “Instead of clearing up the growing mess” over the loan guarantees, says Alvarez, this legislation “has magnified the major hurdles.”

Further muddying the waters is the fact that no proposed American reactor project is likely to obtain an actual construction license within at least the next two years. Michael Mariotte of NIRS questions whether loans can “really be obtained for projects with no official approval to proceed.”

Critics also point out that while the industry claims new reactors can be built for $4-5 billion each, independent observers put the likely real costs far higher. A “new generation” reactor in Finland is some $2 billion over budget and two years behind schedule after just two years of construction. The US industry continues to submit a steady stream of significant modifications to its so-call “standard” construction blueprints. Thus what actually constitutes 80% of what it would cost to build a new reactor is very much a moving target.

But nobody doubts that as Congress reconvenes, Pete Domenici will be resuming his efforts to get as much more money as possible for new reactors. His time in office will be limited. And the political, legal, procedural, technical and financial disputes surrounding the actual nature of the guarantee program are certain to stretch through Congress and the courts for years to come.

Meanwhile, Wall Street has made it clear that it will not fund new reactors without these guarantees. This sharp vote of financial no confidence means that fifty years after the 1957 opening of the first commercial reactor at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, atomic energy still cannot pay for itself. Nor can it compete with the booming revolution in renewable technologies.

Thus what's at stake could not be more critical. With the guarantees, reactor builders will be insulated from all that, and could simply build as many plants as the Congress is willing to underwrite. That the Congressional Budget Office has predicted a 50% default rate on these proposed loans, may be of no consequence to them. They could simply suck as much available capital into new reactors as the DOE will underwrite.

But without those guarantees, the pro-nuclear renaissance will die in a puff of radioactive hype. As fossil fuels diminish in supply, and are curtailed due to global warming, no new reactors will be built here. All available capital for new energy supply must flow instead to renewables and efficiency.

According to the National Renewable Energy Laboratory, some $6 billion in new wind farms are currently under construction in this country. Billions more are pouring in solar, bio-fuels, ocean thermal, wave, tidal and other forms of green power.

Indeed, if this tuneful victory over Pete Domenici's single-sentence insertion into the Energy Bill of 2007 holds through the end of 2008, it may someday be remembered as a landmark step toward a green-powered Earth.

Will Congress plunge us (again) into the nuke power abyss?

2008-04-27T22:45:00.001-07:00

Will Congress plunge us (again) into the nuke power abyss?
December 14, 2007

Congress stands at the brink of the global-warmed nuclear powered abyss. Again.

In a victory for green power, a massive grassroots/internet campaign forced removal from the national Energy Bill of blank check loan guarantees to build atomic reactors.

But as you read this, House and Senate Democrats and Republicans are negotiating the 2008 Omnibus Appropriations Bill.

Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) has slipped in $25 billion in taxpayer-guaranteed loans for new nukes. The nuke reactor guarantees are bundled with $10 billion for renewable energy, $10 billion to turn coal into liquid vehicle fuel, $2 billion to turn coal into natural gas and another $2 billion to build a uranium enrichment plant.

Safe energy supporters are demanding (see www.nirs.org) that American taxpayers not be forced to pay for another fifty years of radioactive failure.

At an October press conference (http://nukefree.freevolt.org/), a coalition of virtually all the nation's major environmental organizations, along with musicians Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne and Graham Nash, submitted more than 120,000 signatures to Congress.

Now that effort must be renewed to prevent a replay of radioactive history.

In 1952, President Harry Truman's Blue Ribbon “Paley Commission” Report showed that the future of American energy was with the sun and wind. Predicting 15 million solar-heated American homes by 1975, the administration pointed the way to a green, energy efficient economy. One that would have avoided the current climate crisis, and rendered the nation energy self-sufficient.

But in December, 1953, at the behest of the nuclear weapons industry, President Dwight Eisenhower told the world its energy would come from atomic reactors. The “Peaceful Atom” would provide electricity “too cheap to meter.” When no utilities would invest in it, the Republican administration offered massive subsidies, and federal insurance against liability for accidents and terror attacks. When it became clear the industry had no answer for its radioactive waste problem, the government promised to take care of it. Federal agencies promoted the technology while allegedly regulating it.

In the late 1960s, Dr John Gofman, the Atomic Energy Commission's top medical researcher, showed “normal” emissions from nuclear power plants were killing thousands of Americans yearly. He was fired.

More than a trillion dollars have been poured into a technology that now produces a very expensive 20% of our nation's electricity. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. Chernobyl and Three Mile Island have underscored the dangers of those that have been built. On September 11, 2001, the first jet that hit the World Trade Center flew directly over the Indian Point reactor complex a minute earlier.

Meanwhile a global renewable energy industry has boomed far past the Peaceful Atom. Major advances in wind, solar, bio-fuels, ocean thermal, wave, tidal and other green technologies have helped create a multi-billion-dollar business already taking off.

But for the Peaceful Atom, all this could have happened fifty years ago.

Now a much-hyped “revival” of this failed reactor technology again stands in the way. Wall Street will not finance it. Free market advocates like the Cato Institute and Forbes Magazine oppose it.

Domenici's loan guarantees would again divert our resources into the nuclear abyss, and again postpone the green-powered revolution that can save our economy and environment.

Bitter criticism is mounting against a divided Democratic Congressional leadership unwilling or unable to stand up to the Republican minority. Only a great green wave of public outcry---and calls to Congress---can now save us, within the next few days, from yet another lethal, expensive, global-warmed bout with atomic failure.

Will you help?

--

Two critical (but tentative) green victories hang in the balance

2008-04-27T22:42:00.000-07:00

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.

Will Congress make taxpayers fund terror-target nuke reactors?

2008-04-27T22:41:00.001-07:00

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!!

People were killed by Three Mile Island & other nuclear disasters

2008-04-27T22:39:00.001-07:00

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.

Nukes are back & so are e

2008-04-27T22:36:00.000-07:00

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.

2008-04-27T22:31:00.001-07:00

The Genius Doctor who Diagnosed Nuke Power's Deadly Disease

2007-09-08T22:19:00.001-07:00

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.

Astonishing Tower Collapse Screams "No New Nukes!!"

2007-08-26T23:44:00.000-07:00

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.

"Nuke Nuggets" glow for the Senate's Radioactive Rip-Off

2007-08-20T23:22:00.000-07:00

By Harvey Wasserman

Gargantuan loan guarantees for a "new generation" of nuke reactors define the Senate's version of the Energy Bill that Congress will consider right after Labor Day.

Its backers say the $50 billion-plus in radioactive pork will give us "inherently safe" reactors…

...which is what they said about the last crop, including Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and hundreds of billions in cost overruns and abysmal failure.

Nuke reactors are no safer than those coal mines just littered with fresh corpses, than that collapsed Minnesota bridge, or than the levees that let Katrina swamp New Orleans, and are poised to do it again.

The first "new generation" nuke is already swamped with cost overruns and absurd miscalculations. Finnish regulators are screaming at Areva, the French-based nuke pushers, about corner-cutting and costly delays.

But these are merely the latest in the endless flow of "nuke nuggets" that have made the world's 430-plus reactors history's most lethal and expensive technological failure:

Faulty plumbing forced one US nuke operator to shut on-site toilet facilities while the cooling system was in use;

At another US reactor, a basketball wrapped in tape was used to stop up a critical reactor tube;

Consecutive global-warmed "hundred-year floods" threatened to swamp the two Prairie Island reactors (south of that collapsed Minnesota bridge) nearly irradiating the entire downstream Mississippi River;

Like coal miners, uranium miners die en masse from lung cancer and tunnel collapses;

Steam releases killed and maimed at least four workers at Virginia's North Anna complex;

"Too cheap to meter" was atomic energy's mantra until it delivered gargantuan cost overruns and ramshackle reactors in what Forbes Magazine has called "the largest managerial disaster in business history";

In the 2000-1 deregulation scam, the nuke industry portrayed its own reactors as being "uncompetitive," thus demanding $100 billion in "stranded cost" subsidies for their bad reactor investments;

The Yucca Mountain nuke waste repository, which may never open, has already absorbed $10 billion, but its minimum official cost is now estimated at around $60 billion, which is likely to soar to at least $100 billion;

In 1957 the industry promised independent insurance companies would insure reactors against catastrophic accidents, but that has never happened, either for old nukes or for the proposed new ones;

Before March 28, 1979, nuke owners said the melt-down that destroyed Three Mile Island Two was "impossible";

Before April 26, 1986, nuke owners said the explosion that destroyed Chernobyl Four was "impossible";
For nine years, TMI's owners said there was no significant fuel melt, until a robotic camera showed that nearly ALL the fuel had melted;

TMI's owners say "no one died" there, but stack monitors failed during the accident and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission does not know exactly how much radiation escaped, where it went or who it affected;

No official systematic monitoring of the health of the people around TMI was initiated when the plant opened, or when it melted, and none has been maintained;

Some 2400 central Pennsylvania families have tried to sue for damages since TMI's fall-out hit them, but have been denied a federal trial for nearly three decades;

Some 800,000 drafted clean-up "liquidators" were forced into Chernobyl, thousands of whom are dying of cancer;

Seven atomic reactors in Japan were significantly damaged by an earthquake despite decades of official assurances that they were safe;

Japanese authorities now admit that the recent earthquake exceeded---by a factor of three---the design specifications of the seven reactors it damaged;

Far stronger earthquakes are expected soon at all or most of Japan's 55 reactors, where experts say at least some could be reduced to radioactive rubble;

Four reactors in California, one in Ohio and two in New York are among the many American nukes built very close to active earthquake faults;

The Perry nuke, east of Cleveland, whose owners denied it was in any danger from a nearby "geological anomaly," was significantly damaged by a January 31, 1986 earthquake;

Despite a lawsuit by Ohio's governor, Perry was allowed to open amidst damage to area roads and bridges that would have made evacuation impossible, and that could have meant disaster had it been operating at the time;

Near Toledo, dripping boric acid ate through the Davis-Besse pressure vessel, bringing it within a fraction of an inch of a catastrophe capable of irradiating Cleveland and all of Lake Erie;

Davis-Besse's owner blacked out the entire northeast, including much of Canada, partly due to uneven power surges from its nukes and the deterioration of its electric power grid;

On September 11, 2001, the terrorists who crashed into the World Trade Center flew directly over the two active reactors at Indian Point, but did not hit them, apparently believing that they were protected by surface-to-air missiles;

Not one of the 100-plus US reactors is protected by surface-to-air missiles;

Virtually every US reactor has failed simple tests of security systems meant to protect them from terror attacks;

Early official government studies warned that a single meltdown could make permanently uninhabitable "an area the size of Pennsylvania";

An attack on the Indian Point reactors on 9/11/2001 could have rendered the entire New York region---including the World Trade Centers---permanently uninhabitable, causing millions of long-term human casualties and trillions of dollars in damage, from which the US economy likely would never have recovered;

Huge heat emissions make atomic reactors major contributors to global warming, as do CO2 emissions from construction, decommissioning, the mining, milling and enrichment of uranium fuel, waste disposal, and more;

Despite being billed as a "solution to global warming," French reactors were recently shut because they overheated local rivers with their waste cooling water;

Despite being billed as a "solution to global warming," one reactor at Alabama's Browns Ferry was forced shut, and two cut back 25%, as summer river temperatures hit 90 degrees, the federal limit;

These shut-downs come precisely when power is most needed for air conditioning, and when the REAL solution to global warming, solar energy, is most abundant;

In 1975, a Browns Ferry reactor suffered a $100 million fire when a worker ignited its insulation with a candle;

Reactor regulators report a constant flow of "incidents" that endanger reactor operations and the public safety;

The former head of the Atomic Energy Commission's health research efforts has calculated that "normal" reactor emissions could kill some 32,000 Americans every year;

A dollar spent on energy conservation saves ten times the energy produced by a dollar spent on a nuke; This tragic, terrifying "nugget" list could extend on for another few hundred pages, as per THE NUGGET FILE, by a former industry insider, and FISSION STORIES by David Lochbaum of the Union of Concerned Scientists.

With a crippled infrastructure and corner-cutting mentality, the corporate operatives building these reactors are no more competent or trustworthy than the ones in charge of coal mines, bridges, levees.

Homer Simpson will run the new nukes, just like the old nukes.

Wall Street knows it. Does Congress? Better tell them.

Radioactive "Bailout-in-Advance" Opens Fierce New War Over Nuke Reactors

2007-08-09T22:38:00.000-07:00

by Harvey Wasserman

After fifty years of what Forbes Magazine long ago called “the largest managerial disaster in business history,” the nuke power industry is demanding untold billions in a federal “Bailout-in-Advance.” Congress will decide on these proposed loan guarantees for new nukes in its September conferences over the new Energy Bill.Both sides are gearing up for the new war over the irradiation of our energy future.

As usual, it’s vital to “follow the money.”

The industry once promised that atomic energy would be “too cheap to meter.” But after a half-century of proven failure, Wall Street won’t invest in new nukes without federal support. So buried in the Senate version of the new Energy Bill is a single sentence authorizing the Department of Energy to underwrite virtually unlimited loans for still more nukes. The sentence was slipped into the bill by industry backers without open debate.

Overall this staggeringly complex bill contains a hodge-podge of benefits for renewable energy and efficiency, along with a pile of contradictions and steps backward. The House version, for example, lacks strict fuel efficiency standards for automobiles. It also drew a veto threat from George W. Bush, who wants the restoration of huge tax breaks for his friends in the fossil fuel business.

But the single sentence that could ultimately have the biggest impact on human survival is the one that offers the prospect of an essentially unlimited amount of taxpayer money to guarantee investments in new atomic reactors.

The funding would come through the Department of Energy, which Congress has authorized to guarantee “new” technological advances that are considered “green.” Congress says that includes new reactors.

The Senate version of the bill would allow the DOE to sign off on loan guarantees for up to 80% of the cost of each new nuke it wants, with no yearly review from Congress. The industry has targeted $25 billion for next year alone, followed by another $25 billion in 2009, and admits to wanting at least 28 new reactors as soon as possible. The industry says the plants will cost $4-6 billion each, but history indicates the ultimate price tags will be far higher.

This does not include the federal insurance, under the Price-Anderson Act, that since 1957 has shielded nuke owners from liability in case of a major catastrophe.

Though it says they are “inherently safe,” the industry demands the same insurance for its new reactors. The policy would leave countless citizens uncompensated for the destruction of their health and property after a radioactive disaster.

Atomic power is also a major source of global warming. Reactors pump huge quantities of waste heat directly into the air and water. The mining, milling and enrichment of nuclear fuel also result in substantial CO2 emissions, as do the construction and decommissioning of the plants.

As for the long-term management of radioactive waste, the solution promised fifty years ago is nowhere in sight. Regulatory officials say the proposed Yucca Mountain waste repository, under construction at a cost so far of some $10 billion, cannot open until 2020, if ever. The projected cost if Yucca does open is now about $60 billion, but it’s likely to climb even higher.

In 2000-2001, as much as $100 billion in bad “stranded cost” nuke investments were foisted on the public by a technology that can no longer compete with wind, solar, increased efficiency or a wide array of truly green energy sources that offer real answers to the global warming crisis.

None of this bothers the reactor pushers and their well-funded supporters on Capitol Hill. Citizen groups such as Greenpeace, the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, Public Citizen, Beyond Nuclear, PIRG, Musicians United for Safe Energy, Nukewatch, Nuclear Energy Information Service, the Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility, and green industry supporters have banded together to wage an uphill battle aimed at striking that critical sentence from the Senate bill.

Come September, much of the public attention may be on the pro-green features of the bill, which requires more energy efficiency in buildings, appliances and the power grid, along with a demand that 15% of the nation’s electricity come from solar, wind and other renewables by 2020. The House passed its version—which also calls for a carbon neutral federal government—by a vote of 241 to 172 (the fossil fuel tax breaks demanded by Bush were rejected, 221 to 189).

But the real long-term impact on our energy future will turn on the tens of billions in taxpayer guarantees that may or may not pour into reactor construction that no private investors would otherwise fund.

As Forbes put it in 1985, atomic energy has been “a defeat for the U.S. consumer and for the competitiveness of U.S. industry, for the utilities that undertook the program and for the private enterprise system that made it possible.”

The losses, said Forbes, exceeded the cost of the space program and the Vietnam War combined and left the US with “a power source that is not only high in cost and unreliable, but perhaps not even safe.”

To stop this tragedy from being repeated, the safe energy movement will desperately try to stop yet another “bail-out in advance” for the world’s most dangerous and expensive failed technology.

They need your help—in the short term for the Congressional conference on the Energy Bill, in the long term for turning back this latest nuclear assault on our energy future.

Our survival depends on their green-powered success.

Nuke PR Flacks do the Kashiwazaki Quake Dance

2007-07-24T09:35:00.000-07:00

As you read this, swarms of extremely well-paid PR flacks are spinning the Kashiwazaki nuke quake into an argument for building more reactors. They will deploy utter absurdities and personal attacks, followed by the sound of media-complicit silence.

But the news coming from Japan---and not being covered here---makes it clear the realities of this latest reactor disaster are beyond catastrophic. Seven reactors were put at direct risk, with four forced into emergency shut-downs while suffering numerous fires and emitting unknown quantities of radiation. Most importantly, the quake exceeded the design capabilities of all Japan's 55 reactors, and worse seismic shocks are expected.

To counter these inconvenient realities, expect to soon see more of Patrick Moore, the alleged ex-Greenpeace founder. Moore has called the disaster at Three Mile Island a "success story."

Moore claims to be a scientist. He's obviously not an accountant. His face stays straight while calling the transformation of a $900 million asset into a $2 billion liability a "success story." It testifies to a mentality that never saw a polluter's check that couldn't be cashed.

On January 28, 1986, I debated a spokeswoman from Cleveland Electric Illuminating who termed the earthquake fault near the Perry Nuclear Plant a "geologic anomaly." As we spoke, the Challenger space shuttle blew up because NASA "scientists" said warnings from their own staff about O-rings in cold weather were not "compelling."

The shuttle was shot off to coincide with a planned presidential performance by Ronald Reagan. Seven astronauts died while the whole world watched in horror. Three days later, a non-anomalous earthquake cracked pipes and pumps at Perry, knocking out roads and bridges. Apparently, neither the O-rings nor the fault line had read the industry's spin.

Today the nuke flacks say Kashiwazaki was a "success story" because four reactors SCRAMmed into emergency shutdown and three more were damaged, but no apocalypse resulted (yet).

Since this is only the world's largest nuke complex, with only seven reactors on site, and only several hundred barrels of nuke waste tipped over, and far fewer had their lids fly off, and the gas emissions the utility lied about were only tritium, which is less deadly than plutonium, the fact that all of Japan was not engulfed in a catastrophic radiation release (yet) will be used to sell more reactors.

Expect phrases like these:

"The reactors withstood the worst nature could throw at them."

"The SCRAMs went off perfectly."

"The shut-downs will be temporary."

"American reactors are far stronger than Japanese ones."

"This was a once-in-a-century fluke, and no one was hurt."

"Even so, we must have nuke power to fight global warming."

"The media has distorted the utility's good-faith attempts to inform the public."

"Those rad-waste barrels were tipped over by eco-terrorists."

"Tritium is good for you."

"Nuke power is a 'zero emissions' technology, therefore the reported leaks could not have occurred."

"Those anti-nuke so-called scientists have been discredited."

But most importantly, expect a tightly enforced media blackout. It starts when all who question the industry are automatically "discredited."

Dr. John Gofman, universally acknowledged as one of the world's leading nuclear and medical researchers, was once in charge of health research for the old Atomic Energy Commission. When asked to determine how many people would be killed by radioactive emissions from "normal" reactor operations, he found it would be about 32,000 Americans per year.

The AEC demanded he revise his findings. Gofman refused. So he was forced out of the AEC and "discredited" despite credentials that continue to dwarf those who replaced him.

The list of physicists, engineers, medical researchers and others similarly purged for fact-based reporting is too tragic to reconstruct here. But it even includes a park ranger at the Pt. Reyes National Seashore who noticed in the spring of 1986 that the number of live bird births had plummeted compared with the previous ten springs. The only logical link was to radioactive fallout from Chernobyl, brought down by a California rainstorm ten days after the explosion.

The ranger soon found himself out of a job.

On the other hand, the industry still falsely asserts that no one died at Three Mile Island. It even produced a "doctor" who traveled through Europe asserting that the enormous radiation releases spewed by the explosion at Chernobyl would ultimately save lives.

Predictably, the Kashiwazaki catastrophe has disappeared from the American media. But in Japan, the news has transcended the truly horrifying. According to Leo Lewis in The Times, talk is rampant of a "Genpatsu-shinsai," defined by Japan's leading seismologist, Katsuhiko Shibashi, as "the combination of an earthquake and nuclear meltdown capable of destroying millions of lives and bringing a nation to its knees." Shibashi warns that the recent 6.8 magnitude shock exceeded the design capabilities of the Kashiwazaki nuke by a factor of three.

A Kobe University research team is reported as saying that if the quake had been 10km further to the southwest, a "terrible, terrible disaster" would have resulted. Prof. Mitsuhei Murata of Tokai Gakuen University is quoted as warning that a quake at the Hamaoka nuke could bring "24 million victims and the end for Japan."

Japan's earthquake experts assume the probability of an 8.0 quake within the next 30 years to be 87 percent.

As in the US, Tokyo Electric has long denied that its seven Kashiwazaki reactors were sited atop a fault line, only to have it turn out to be true. As at Three Mile Island, vital data has already disappeared from the Kashiwazaki disaster, and the exact quantities of radiation released are unknown. Radiation at both sites escaped well after the reactors were shut down.

As in the United States, Japanese earthquake experts have warned since the 1960s about the dangers of reactor construction, only to be ignored and "discredited." Undoubtedly the Japanese PR nuke spinsters will continue to attack and ignore them.

Here, 2400 central Pennsylvania families will still be denied a federal trial on the death, disease and mayhem spewed upon them by Three Mile Island nearly thirty years ago. And the seven dead Challenger astronauts are not available for comment on the "perfectly safe" O-rings that killed them just prior to the "non-credible" earthquake that struck the Perry nuke.

Any possible problems with a new generation of reactors are equally non-credible. Just ask a flack.

Harvey Wasserman is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this article first appeared.

The earthquake that screamed "NO NUKES!!!"

2007-07-24T09:33:00.000-07:00

The Massive earthquake that shook Japan this week nearly killed millions in a nuclear apocalypse. It also produced one of the most terrifying sentences ever buried in a newspaper. As reported deep in the New York Times, the Tokyo Electric Company has admitted that "the force of the shaking caused by the earthquake had exceeded the design limits of the reactors, suggesting that the plant's builders had underestimated the strength of possible earthquakes in the region." There are 55 reactors in Japan. Virtually all of them are on or near major earthquake faults. Kashiwazaki alone hosts seven, four of which were forced into the dangerous SCRAM mode to narrowly avoid meltdowns. At least 50 separate serious problems have been so far identified, including fire and the spillage of barrels filled with radioactive wastes. There are four active reactors in California on or near major earthquake faults, as are the two at Indian Point north of New York City. On January 31, 1986, an earthquake struck the Perry reactor east of Cleveland, knocking out roads and bridges, as well as pipes within the plant, which (thankfully) was not operating at the time. The governor of Ohio, then Richard Celeste, sued to keep Perry shut, but lost in federal court. The fault that hit Perry is an off-shoot of the powerful New Madrid line that runs through the Mississippi River Valley, threatening numerous reactors. The Beyond Nuclear Project reports that in August, 2004, a quake hit the Dresden reactor in Illinois, resulting in a leak of radioactive tritium. Nevada's Yucca Mountain, slated as the nation's high-level radioactive waste dump, has a visible fault line running through it. More than 400 atomic reactors are on-line worldwide. How many are vulnerable to seismic shocks we can only shudder to guess. But one-eighth of them sit in one of the world's richest, most technologically advanced, most densely populated industrial nations, which has now admitted its reactor designs cannot match the power of an earthquake that has just happened. In whatever language it's said, that translates into the unmistakable warning that the world's atomic reactors constitute a multiple, ticking seismic time bomb. Talk of building more can only be classified as suicidal irresponsibility. Tokyo Electric's behavior since the quake defines the industry's credibility. For three consecutive days (with more undoubtedly to come) the utility has been forced to issue public apologies for erroneous statements about the severity of the damage done to the reactors, the size and lethality of radioactive spills into the air and water, the on-going danger to the public, and much more. Once again, the only thing reactor owners can be trusted to do is to lie. Prior to the March 28, 1979 disaster at Three Mile Island, the industry for years assured the public that the kind of accident that did happen was "impossible." Then the utility repeatedly assured the public there had been no melt-down of fuel and no danger of further catastrophe. Nine years later a robotic camera showed that nearly all the fuel had melted, and that avoiding a full-blown catastrophe was little short of a miracle. The industry continues to say no one was killed at TMI. But it does not know how much radiation was released, where it went or who it might have harmed. Since 1979 its allies in the courts have denied 2400 central Pennsylvania families the right to test their belief that they and their loved ones have been killed and maimed en masse. Prior to its April 26, 1986, explosion, Soviet Life Magazine ran a major feature extolling the virtually "accident-proof design" of Chernobyl Unit Four. Then the former Soviet Union of Mikhail Gorbachev kept secret the gargantuan radiation releases that have killed thousands and yielded a horrific plague of cancers, leukemia, birth defects and more throughout the region, and among the more than 800,000 drafted "jumpers" who were forced to run through the plant to clean it up. Since the terror attacks of September 11, 2001, the industry has claimed its reactors can withstand the effects of a jet crash, and are immune to sabotage. The claims are as patently absurd as the lies about TMI and Chernobyl. So, too, the endless, dogged assurances from Japan that no earthquake could do to Kashiwazaki what has just happened. Yet today and into the future, expensive ads will flood the US and global airwaves, full of nonsense about the "need" for new nukes. There is only one thing we know for certain about this advertising: it is a lie. Atomic reactors contribute to global warming rather than abating it. In construction, in the mining, milling and enriching of the fuel, in on-going "normal" releases of heat and radioactivity, in dismantling and decommissioning, in managing radioactive wastes, in future terror attacks, in proliferation of nuke weapons, and much much more, atomic energy is an unmitigated eco-disaster. To this list we must now add additional tangible evidence that reactors allegedly built to withstand "worst case" earthquakes in fact cannot. And when they go down, the investment is lost, and power shortages arise (as is now happening in Japan) that are filled by the burning of fossil fuels. It costs up to ten times as much to produce energy from a nuke as to save it with efficiency. Advances in wind, solar and other green "Solartopian" technologies mean atomic energy simply cannot compete without massive subsidies, loan guarantees and government insurance to protect it from catastrophes to come. This latest "impossible" earthquake has not merely shattered the alleged safeguards of Japan's reactor fleet. It has blown apart---yet again---any possible argument for building more reactors anywhere on this beleaguered Earth. --Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at http://www.solartopia.org/. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this piece originally appeared. In 1975 he spoke near the Kashiwazaki complex, urging its shut down.

King CONG in California declares total "New Nukes" war against Solartopia

2007-07-24T09:31:00.000-07:00

A major pro-nuke "surge" against the renewable solution to global warming is about to erupt in California. State assemblyman Chuck DeVore (R-Irvine) has moved for a statewide vote to allow new nuclear power plants to be built in the Golden State. He wants to repeal the 1976 law requiring a solution to the nuke waste problem before new reactors are built. A business cartel says it wants to build a new reactor near downtown near downtown Fresno. (For more information on the California situation, visit http://www.a4nr.org/) So the nation's biggest state may soon be at war over new nukes. In essence, it's King CONG (Coal, Oil, Nukes and Gas) versus Solartopia. The core issue is who will control our energy: corporations, or the public. The irony is that we stand at the brink of the greatest technological revolution in human history. But we're being dragged away from it by Big Money's push for a technology with fifty years of proven ecological disaster and financial failure. Green energy is poised to remake our world. Wind power is the cheapest form of new generation now available. There are sufficient wind resources between the Mississippi and the Rockies to generate, with available technology, 300% of the electricity we use. There's enough in North Dakota, Kansas and Texas alone to do 100%. Solar technologies ranging from green architectural design to desert power towers to photovoltaic cells that go on every rooftop are booming toward a multi-billion-dollar mainstay of our electric supply. Bio-fuels based on sustainable, organic practices can transform our transportation sector. Tidal, wave, geothermal, ocean thermal and a wide range of other green production processes stand at the brink of epic profitability. Meanwhile, increased efficiency and revived mass transit are the cheapest, cleanest ways to salvage the energy we waste. In concert, these revolutionary green technologies are poised to bring us to Solartopia, a post-pollution planet powered totally by energy harvested in harmony with our Mother Earth. They promise an abundance of efficient supply with the power to boom our economies and save our ability to survive on this planet. But here's the hitch: renewable energy has the "flaw" of tending toward community control. In the long run, a true Solartopian revolution must involve re-shaping our corporate culture into one based on sustainability, accountability and grassroots democracy. Though some astute corporations are cashing in, in the long run green technologies are the door to decentralization…and economic democracy. A green-powered Solartopia will own its energy supply at the grassroots. Wind, solar, bio-fuels---they hold the keys to community control. Against all that, new nukes are the ultimate weapon of mass distraction. There have been numerous rationales put forth for building more reactors. Except to an entrenched corporate power elite, none of them make any sense. Some advocates claim new reactors can fight global warming. In fact, through their own "normal" emissions, in the construction process, in mining, milling and enriching fuel, in decommissioning, in managing radioactive waste, in accounting for inevitable catastrophic accidents and terror attacks, in weapons proliferation, and much much more, atomic reactors are a global warming nightmare. Some also claim nukes will generate cheap electricity. But fifty years of proven failure (the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania in 1957) says exactly the opposite. Overall, the nuke power experiment has been a trillion dollar disaster, with explosions, melt-downs, cost overruns, expensive failures, massive subsidies, undoable insurance, deregulatory bailouts and much more on the debit sheet. Overall, at its ultimate corporate root, the new nuke push is a coup d'etat, a rightist putsch to prevent the community ownership of our Solartopian energy supply. The irony in California could not be more obvious. The only way the industry can build new nukes is for the community to NOT require a solution to the radioactive waste problem. The world was told fifty years ago that such a solution was "just around the corner." It was also told atomic energy would be "too cheap to meter." These two biggest of all 20th Century industrial lies are about to be rationalized and atomized by a corporate King CONG desperate to hold power. But the vision of Solartopia burns bright and real. Humankind now possesses all the technology we need to solve global warming and bring us a world of post-pollution prosperity. The new nuke surge just declared in California is an early test in the larger war for a sustainable future. The question about to be asked in California, and worldwide, is: Do we have the will to win Solartopia for ourselves and our children? --Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

Mother Earth can't live without a Solartopian vision

2007-07-24T09:26:00.000-07:00

At last our dying Mother Earth has taken center stage. Thanks to Al Gore's global concert, the major media are finally filling with coverage of the climate crisis. It all comes with a dire dual realization: our economy will collapse, and we could all die, if something drastic is not done. But what? There are many piecemeal formulas out there. But there's also a holistic vision of a post-pollution civilization that is clear, absolute and all-encompassing. It's a "Solartopia" built around a democratic, green-powered millennium. It is as simple as it is necessary: Technologically, the vision rests on four pillars: 1. Total renunciation of all fossil and nuclear fuels. In a sustainable, survivable future, they are a 20th Century pox, neither green nor clean. 2. All-out conversion to renewable energy, led by the "Solartopian Trinity" of wind, solar and bio-fuels. Mother Earth gives us the natural power we need. 3. Complete commitment to maximum efficiency, including revived and solarized mass transit and passenger rail systems. We may "remake" the automobile, but can't survive without transcending it. 4. Zero tolerance for production of anything that cannot be re-used or recycled, including chemical-based food. Solartopia is an organic, post-pollution world. Along with wind, solar and bio-fuels, Solartopian energy comes from the waves, currents, rivers and tides; from the geothermal heat beneath the earth's crust; from the interplay of solar-heated water at the oceans' surface and the frigid deep. Hydrogen and electricity are the chief power carriers, but they are always produced by clean Solartopian means. The conservation/efficiency revolution drives Solartopian energy consumption levels ever downward. Compact fluorescent bulbs are transcended by Light Emitting Diodes and more. An evolving armada of efficiency devices, many invented in backyards and garages, spreads at warp-speed through a hyper-linked global community. Advanced methods of organic food production get us past the "silent spring" of chemical pesticides, herbicides, fertilizers and genetically modified crops. The ever-evolving internet fuels a geek-driven torrent of Solartopian innovation---and the raging e-network of green grassroots democracy ( http://solartopia.org/Links.php ). In our 21st Century global economy, renewable technologies are already on the whole more profitable than the obsolete "alternatives" of coal, oil, nukes and gas. But from bio-fuels to wind, from hyper-efficiency to organic farming, no green technology is without costs and limitations. All demand vigilance, limitation, regulation and innovation to stay clean, current and useful. When done right, the Solartopian revolution spawns the decentralized wealth, full employment, and community-based economic power of a prosperous, socially democratized society. Homes, buildings, communities and farms control their own energy. Power and prosperity are widespread, not concentrated in the hands of King CONG---the coal, oil, nukes and gas cartel---and its corporate minions. Indeed, Solartopia can't happen without transcending some primary barriers: 5. Corporations can no longer enjoy human rights without human responsibilities. Revised corporate charters must break the grip these giant economic organizations have held on our political, economic and ecological systems. 6. Population is the province of women, who in Solartopia are empowered, educated and equally paid. In synch with Mother Earth, they bring us the number of children She wishes to accommodate. 7. Where everyone has a right to the basic necessities of life, including free education, nobody starves. The Solartopian rich may be plentiful, but no civilization thrives unless all are guaranteed the necessities of life and dignity. 8. Big Money is barred from the campaign process. Free and fair elections and referenda power non-violent community-based evolution. The universal right to ballots on recycled paper mean accurate vote counts and recounts for all. Solartopia demands that business serve society and the planet, rather than vice versa. Capitalism may be one thing, but Enron cannibalism is quite another. Indeed, from the "isms" of the last century---capitalism, communism, socialism, environmentalism---must emerge an alchemical mix that actually works. Balancing competition and the profit motive with human and ecological need, the Solartopian vision demands accountability, efficiency, service and justice. The switch to renewables defunds global terrorism. Atomic reactors are pre-deployed weapons of radioactive mass destruction. Shutting them ends the fear of apocalyptic disaster by both terror and error. Transcending coal and cars cures much of global warming. But everywhere we turn, the King CONG corporations build barriers. They use government subsidies and media disinformation to prolong their failed investments in obsolete technologies and the fossil/nuclear fuels that run them. Inseparable from those fuels are authoritarian power structures that produce wars for oil, financial imbalance and social chaos, leading to biological extinction. By contrast, Solartopia is the diverse, democratic, organic vision that gives us a framework from which we can survive and thrive. Now we see the spectacular take-off of a worldwide concern with what's happening to our atmosphere. Yet simultaneously, the King CONG corporations push to revive nuke power, the very worst technological and financial boondoggle of the past century. With it has come a raft of nonsense about "clean coal" and other obsolete technologies. To survive, we cannot be diverted, we must keep our eye on the prize. There is much to debate in myriad aspects of the Solartopian vision. But there is no doubting that if we could sweep the world clean of all its polluting facilities, energy and otherwise, we could replace everything with available technology that would easily supply all our needs while allowing a sustainable planet to survive and thrive. Solartopia's ultimate importance is as a holistic vision, a mind-organizing framework toward which we can carry humankind's greatest technological revolution, the birth of a clean, green, sustainable post-pollution engine of peace and prosperity In humble synch with Mother Earth and all her children, Solartopia is the 21st Century vision of our necessary future. Pete Seeger has written a song for this vision ( http://solartopia.org/Song.php ) . Next time we gather to sing for our green-powered future, let's open with his "Song for Solartopia." --Harvey Wasserman's SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared.

The patriotic service of Leonard Peltier versus the treason of Scooter Libby

2007-07-24T09:21:00.000-07:00

In all the hand-wringing about George Bush's ghastly commutation for Scooter Libby, the name that should resonate most is that of Leonard Peltier. While the junta's henchmen walk free, this great Native American activist still sits in a federal penitentiary after thirty-one years. In 1977, Leonard was wrongly convicted in the killing of two FBI agents. The case is so laden with fraud and illegalities as to tear at the fabric of our entire criminal justice system. Any president since Jimmy Carter---including Bill Clinton---could at least have granted him a fair trial. Evidence weighed by Amnesty International and a very wide range of other powerful and prestigious global observers confirms that the FBI intimidated witnesses, withheld evidence, falsified affidavits and did every other dirty trick in the book to get Peltier convicted. Thirty-one years later, the FBI is still withholding over 140,000 pages of critical documents about this case, in violation of a wide range of federal laws. Peltier's sentence has been wrongfully extended. And his repeated requests for a retrial have been routinely denied. Peltier's persecution clearly stems from his effectiveness as a powerful activist for a series of just causes. From prison he's worked to bring critical resources to the desperately poor native society from which he came. Among other things, his efforts through the Native American Energy Group have helped bring 4,000 energy efficient homes to the Pine Ridge Reservation. For all this essential patriotism, he's been nominated for a Nobel Prize. In response, the prison system has denied Peltier his religious freedoms. He's been thrown into solitary confinement for no sane or just reason. His Constitutional right to communicate fully and fairly with the outside world has been restricted. His medical needs have been ignored. Yet he has survived thirty-one years in jail with determination and clarity. For all that, Leonard Peltier has become a critical pillar of what remains of our national conscience. By contrast, the Bush-Cheney-Libby axis has given new definition to the word treason. First and foremost, to protect the interests of their oil industry sponsors, they have committed the worst form of betrayal: lying to the American public to sell a war that has brought death, defeat, corruption, shame and bankruptcy to us all. It's no small accident that Libby did legal work for Mark Rich, who was pardoned by Bill Clinton in his final days. Clinton was briefed thoroughly, throughout his presidency, about the Peltier case. Rich had nothing to recommend him except his money. Clinton's choice of who to pardon remains unforgivable. Bush now says Libby's sentence for the lies he told in service of the Iraqi slaughter was "excessive." But as governor of Texas, Bush executed some 150 prisoners. Despite numerous cases involving incompetent counsel and other grounds for clemency, he issued not a single commutation. Bush did meet with Karla Faye Tucker, a death row prisoner who converted to fundamentalist Christianity. He responded by mocking her in public (http://www.ccadp.org/bushkills.htm) and having her killed, a punishment he deemed less "excessive" than Libby's jail time. So the aptly named Rich and his treasonous lawyer now walk free while Leonard Peltier remains behind bars, still having never received a fair trial, or access to the FBI's evidence, kept secret in the interest of "national security." Peltier now has great-grandchildren he's never met. We can only be grateful for his astonishing personal strength. If this obscene gift to Scooter Libby serves any function at all, it should remind us that we cannot save our national soul without winning justice for Leonard Peltier. --To learn more about Leonard Peltier, see http://www.leonardpeltier.net/. Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of http://www.freepress.org/, where this article first appeared. His HISTORY OF THE UNITED STATES is at http://www.solartopia.org/.

TOTALLY Boom/Doom Solartopian Green by 2030 or Else

2007-06-27T12:10:00.000-07:00

WE are all now desperate runners in the epic race between doom and boom. It's a global- warmed dead heat between apocalyptic ecological collapse, versus a Solartopian green-powered prosperity. Defeat is defined by a death spiral that decimates our planet. Victory means the wealth, jobs and organic well-being that can come with renewables, efficiency and a post-pollution planet. A middle ground is likely along the way, but would almost certainly happen by dividing humankind even further between rich and poor. That polarization is ultimately unsustainable, and will demand correction, one way or the other. The "tipping point" where climate chaos becomes self-accelerating and irreversible may be as close as ten years away. Some believe we're already over the edge. The global economy runs parallel. Any system addicted to huge inputs of irreplaceable, monopolized resources whose prices are soaring must soon collapse. The cure is clear---a technological, economic and social revolution built around the transition to green power. Despite the nay-sayers, such a Solartopian transformation is physically and financially do-able. But can we do it by 2030? The answer: Ecologically, and economically, we have no choice. A new report from the United Nations points to huge increases in renewable investing in the past 18 months---in excess of $100 billion. It predicts almost a quarter of the world's electricity could be green by 2030. But Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., has pointed out that the National Renewable Energy Laboratory in Golden, Colorado, has published on the internet (and then withdrawn) findings that say ALL electricity consumed in the United States---the world's largest consumer---could be produced by renewable means by the year 2020. Like Russia, China and India, the US has enough harvestable wind to do the total job. NREL says there is enough wind capacity in North Dakota, Kansas and Texas alone to electrify the entire US, using currently available technology. There's enough wind resource in the states between the Mississippi and the Rockies---what we might now call Windiana---to do the US three times over. There are transmission constraints and occasional permitting issues. But there's no reason to build any generator west of the Mississippi that's not fueled by the wind or solar energy. There is also plenty of wind east of the Mississippi, especially in the Great Lakes and Atlantic. Worldwide wind power is proven, profitable and booming at rates in excess of 25% per year. Solar, bio-fuels, wave, ocean thermal, geothermal, tidal, current and other forms of renewables are all close behind. Anyone doubting the explosion in Solartopian energy might check out the financial pages and investment reports popping up throughout the global media. The trade association web sites (awea.org, ases.org, nrel.gov, etc.) over-brim with numbers that scream of a classic techno-economic takeoff. The situation parallels the rise of the personal computer and dot.com industries. Imagine yourself describing 25 years ago---in 1982---what was about to happen in the information age. Technologically, the Solartopian revolution is much further along. But it has one problem the information revolution did not---an institutional enemy. There is a barrier separating a future defined by climate chaos and economic collapse from a boom to Solartopia. It is the coal, oil, nukes and gas industries---King CONG. Few stood to lose from the spread of the PC and internet. But green power threatens the fossil/nuke multinationals with ultimate (and well-deserved) oblivion. A likely scenario: for the next five to ten years, led by wind, renewables will grow at 25-35% per year. Despite King CONG, investment capital is fast becoming a green tsunami. Production facilities for wind turbines, photovoltaic roofing shingles, wave-generating "sea-worms" and the like, are booming. As capacity expands, production costs and prices drop. Demand will accelerate even further. Solartopian industry will accumulate serious wealth and employee mass. The host communities will add their social and political commitment. Today's green lobby has tremendous popular support. But too many solar companies are owned by major corporations with fossil/nuke investments. Above all, they fear the decentralized nature of green power. But sooner or later, the public demand for an independent green industry will combine with accelerating wealth to create aggressive institutional power. When finally it attacks its competition---coal, oil, nukes and gas---in open political warfare, King CONG will head toward the compost heap. The green power industry is certain to expand rapidly for the next decade. Economically and politically mature by 2015, its technological breakthroughs will multiply on themselves. Self-sustaining profitability and growth should match the PC/internet saturation of the global economy within another quarter century---by 2030---maybe earlier. The take-off will bring a revolution in efficiency. Bloviating "experts" continually refer to an "inevitable" exponential growth in energy demand. But soaring energy prices will force exponential breakthroughs on the demand side. The biggest barrier to Solartopia may be reviving a mass transit system that was systematically murdered by General Motors, Standard Oil and the glass and rubber companies. Without good inter-city rail travel and advanced public transit within the cities, the US has no economic future. The hybrid car-especially the plug-in model---marks a step forward. But the automobile still kills in the range of 40,000 Americans per year, many on a freeway system that is overburdened and obsolete. The auto must be transcended. The rhythm of this techno-financial revolution will push us toward Solartopia by 2030. But so will our eco-systems. Time is short to solve our climate crisis. We must stop emitting carbon dioxide and reverse the damage done. The eco-imperative extends to habitat destruction, air and water pollution, decimation of the forests, the spread of toxics, and much more. Mother Earth is telling us we can't coast for another quarter-century. The clock to "Thermageddon," as Greenpeace founder Robert Hunter called it, ticks as fast as the one on economic collapse. Extinction peers over our shoulder just as green power approaches critical mass. So set the date for 2030, bid King CONG goodbye, and let's win this race to Solartopia.

The honor of being called a "jerk" by pro-nuker Patrick Moore

2007-06-12T18:49:00.000-07:00

June 12, 2007

Patrick Moore has called me a "jerk." He may not be Queen Elizabeth, but it feels like being made Knight of the Realm.

Moore is a supporter of nuclear power. He is also an advocate for clear-cutting forests, genetically modified foods and a wide range of other corporate eco-assaults. The companies behind them fund Moore's "consulting" agency, which appears to specialize in greenwashing.

Moore's mission also seems to include tagging the Greenpeace name onto things Greenpeace opposes. As a voting member of Greenpeace USA, my e-mail box is often filled with contemptuous messages about Moore's latest outrage, and anger about his claim to be a Greenpeace founder. Many advocate ignoring him.

I'm not of that faith. Based on his appearances, too many people ask me why Greenpeace now "supports nuclear power." It doesn't. Its opposition to atomic reactors is as strong and clear as it was when Moore made his brief appearance on the organization's staff list, decades ago.

Moore is quoted calling me a "jerk" in a long piece on the greenwashing of nukes that has graced the cover of the San Francisco Bay Guardian, for which I've written occasionally over the years.

The piece correctly quotes me as advocating "Solartopia," a world gone totally to renewables and efficiency by the year 2030. It is a world in which King CONG---the coal, oil, nukes and gas industry---has been vanquished, and the way cleared for green technologies that are cleaner, cheaper, safer, more reliable and more job-creating. Those would include wind, solar, bio-fuels, geothermal, ocean thermal, wave, current, tidal, trash gas and other forms of renewable generation, along with massively increased efficiency and a revival of mass transit.

My choice of the year 2030 for Solartopia works in tandem with a theory of "Thermageddon" put forth by the late Bob Hunter, who really was a founder of Greenpeace. Hunter called Moore an "eco-Judas." Moore says Bob recanted.

But King CONG is now Patrick Moore's employer. He advocates a "renaissance" for atomic power, a technology inseparable from the murderous melt-downs at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, with fifty years of proven economic failure.

In the half-century since the first commercial reactor opened at Shippingport, Pennsylvania, in 1957, there has been no solution to the storage of high level radioactive waste. Since the terror attacks of 9/11/2001, it is more obvious than ever that commercial reactors are pre-deployed weapons of nuclear mass destruction. The private insurance industry appears to agree, as none will independently underwrite the risk of a major reactor catastrophe, either by terror or error.

Overall, the nuke power industry simply would not exist without gargantuan federal subsidies. The latest now involve huge proposed loan subsidies to drag Wall Street into a technology it would not otherwise touch.

None of this seems to bother Mr. Moore, whom I've never met. But I'd like to. Patrick, when you read this (and I'm sure you will), please accept my invitation to debate anywhere, anytime, with any format you choose, on any medium willing to host us.

Think of it as a form of renewable energy generation. Or as a "renaissance" of democracy.

But above all, think of it as a trip to Solartopia, where nukes are banned along with fossil fuels and all other forms of waste, and there is a green-powered confluence of pollution-free prosperity.

The only greenwashing in such a world, Mr. Moore, will be with mint and aloe vera. I'll bring you some of both.

--
Harvey Wasserman has been senior advisor to Greenpeace USA since 1990, and is senior editor of www.freepress.org, where this article first appeared. His SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 is at www.solartopia.org.

How Solartopian Non-Violence Beat a King CONG Nuke and Birthed the Global Green Power Movement

2007-05-12T08:06:00.000-07:00

By Harvey Wasserman

Thirty years ago this fortnight, in the small seacoast town of Seabrook, New Hampshire, a force of mass non-violent green advocacy collided with the nuclear establishment.

What emerged after two astonishing weeks was a definitive victory over corporate power, and the birth of one of the most powerful and effective social movements in world history---one that still writes the bottom line on atomic energy and global warming.

All today's battles over whether more nuke reactors will be built can be dated to May, 13, 1977, when 550 Clamshell Alliance protestors walked victoriously free after thirteen days of media-saturated imprisonment. Not a single US reactor ordered since that day has been completed.

It all started when---in the classic tradition of New England democracy---the tiny town of Seabrook voted four times against the construction of a mammoth twin reactor complex in the salt marshes along its seashore. The site is at the very southeast corner of New Hampshire, where the Granite State meets Massachusetts and the Atlantic. All other towns within a ten-mile radius of the proposed plant joined the opposition, including those in Massachusetts. .

The absurdly mis-named Public Service Company of New Hampshire offered the cash-strapped communities major economic bribes. But local stalwarts feared disruption of their lives, destruction of the local fishing industry, ecological desolation of the marshes and the dangers of radiation.

So a de facto coalition rose up that joined extremely conservative locals with the very peace activists they had bitterly denounced for marching against the Vietnam War, which was just ending. Many were new to the environmental cause, having moved to communal farms in rural areas where they became acquainted for the first time with trees, grass and gardens.

The coalition was joined by Quaker stalwarts from Boston who helped introduce many of the youthful demonstrators to the art and politics of creative non-violence. Forming the Clamshell Alliance, they began small-scale civil disobedience at the Seabrook site, which was just then being bulldozed.

On August 1, 1976, 18 New Hampshirites were arrested there. On August 22, 180 from around New England were dragged away.

In October, at a nearby seaside park, the Alliance staged an Alternative Energy Fair. They drew on the experiences of the Toward Tomorrow Fair, recently held at the University of Massachusetts in Amherst. The conference's godfather was William Heronemus, who pioneered a vision of huge windmill arrays off-shore and in the Great Plains, which he dubbed "the Saudi Arabia of Wind." Also speaking was a young Oxford don named Amory Lovins, who helped conceive an ultra-efficient world powered by renewable energy.

From these gatherings came a "Solartopian" vision of fossil/nuke-free economy, powered by green energy, that the Clamshell demonstrators carried with them onto the Seabrook site. They were battling not just nuclear power, but an obsolete "King CONG" paradigm centered on coal, oil, nukes and gas. Once the immense resources being wasted on nukes and unclean fossil fuels were shifted to renewables and efficiency, they said, a green-powered Earth would come.

On April 30, 1977, about 2,000 Clams poured onto the Seabrook site from numerous directions. Key to the months of prior planning was the requirement that all who came to occupy the site be trained in small "affinity groups." The sessions included discussions of the theory of non-violence, and active role playing in which demonstrators would take turns practicing the rituals of both arresting and being arrested. (These sessions are documented in the Green Mountain Post film "Training for Non-Violence" available via http://www.gmpfilms.com/).

Technically, the Clams' commitment was to shut construction altogether. The theoretical model came from Wyhl, West Germany, where a mass grassroots occupation stopped a proposed nuclear facility. The Wyhl campaign helped birth a social movement that's led to Germany's renunciation of nuke power, a multi-billion-dollar boom in green power and what may be the world's most efficient industrial economy.

New Hampshire's extreme right-wing Gov. Meldrim Thomson wanted none of it. He demanded that the state police bar the demonstrators from the site altogether.

But the patrol was worried about chaos on local highways, especially the nearby Interstate 95. They preferred to let the Clams march onto the bulldozed construction site, where they could be easily herded onto buses and hauled to local courts for arraignment.

The 1414 arrests proceeded deep into the night. No instances of violence were reported, and no one was seriously injured.

The Clams' expectation was to be booked and freed on personal recognizance, as in the previous actions. They had volunteered to be arrested. They had come to state their case that stopping nuke power served a higher good.

But early in the evening, a livid Gov. Thomson helicoptered into the seacoast. He demanded that the detainees from out of state pay bail.

Most refused. In solidarity, so did most of the New Hampshirites.

Next morning, the nation awoke to read that more than a thousand non-violent protestors were being held in five National Guard armories spread around the state of New Hampshire.

At the crucial moment, Thomson's attorney general (none other than David Souter, now a "liberal" associate of the U.S. Supreme Court) swooped into the seacoast and browbeat a local judge into requiring bail. The Clams stiffened. The epic confrontation was on.

The global media had a field day. The Guard in Manchester, the biggest of the armories, was forced to visit a local McDonalds to buy hundreds of hamburgers for their unexpected "guests" (many of whom were vegetarians and would eat only the buns). Gov. Thomson, who constantly railed at neighboring Massachusetts, advocated arming the New Hampshire National Guard with nuclear weapons.

But for the first time ever, world's print and electronic journalists gave serious focus to nuke power's fatal flaws. The question of whether to build more nukes got the kind of thoughtful, responsive coverage that left the American mainstream with the coming of Ronald Reagan.

Thomson refused to yield on bail. Beckoned by jobs and families, a steady flow did exit the armories.

But a hard core stayed. Charles Matthei refused to eat or drink at all. Edgy officers finally put him (gently, and unindicted) out on the street.

Staunch New Hampshire conservatives cringed in global embarrassment. The mass imprisonment cost the state's notoriously thrifty taxpayers tens of thousands of dollars per day.

Finally, on Friday, May 13, Thomson caved. Some 550 Clams walked free, pledging to return for their trials (which they did) with no bail posted.

The standoff sparked a global movement against atomic power and for green energy. Dozens of alliances sprouted up at US reactor sites. California's Abalone Alliance led thousands of arrests at Diablo Canyon, perched perilously close to a major earthquake fault. The Trojan Decommissioning Alliance eventually shut Oregon's only nuke. At Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island, protestors demanded---unsuccessfully---that Unit Two not open.

TMI helped undo Jimmy Carter. Carter campaigned in New Hampshire in August, 1976, as the Clamshell staged its first protests. For a documentary crew from Green Mountain Post Films he outlined a series of requirements he pledged to enforce before any new reactor could open. Neither Seabrook nor TMI could meet them. But construction continued at Seabrook anyway. TMI went critical in December, 1978, then melted three months later.

Carter did fund pioneer green energy work at the Solar Energy Research Institute (now the National Renewable Energy Lab) in Golden, Colorado. But the battles at the reactor sites proved politically disastrous.

The ultimate blow came when TMI-2 melted in the wee hours of March 28, 1979. Had it not been for the demonstrations at Seabrook and elsewhere, the accident might have garnered a few paragraphs in the local papers.

But inspired in part by the protests, Jane Fonda and Michael Douglas's China Syndrome, happened to open in theaters just as TMI went to the brink. The industry took the double body blow of a terrifying disaster and a Hollywood blockbuster.

Ironically, Carter's greatest triumph, the signing of the Camp David accords, was consummated at the White House on March 26, 1979. For thirty-six hours the president basked in an afterglow that might have helped him coast to re-election.

But then, suddenly, he was in the TMI control room, dressed in protective booties, desperately doing damage control. Had the public and Jimmy Carter's career been spared the openings of Seabrook and TMI, the world might be a very different place.

The grassroots alliances helped drive the nuke industry into dormancy. Seabrook Unit I was eventually finished. But Unit 2 is a rotting hulk, every bit as useless (but not quite as radioactive) as TMI-2.

Richard Nixon had pledged to build 1000 nukes in the US by the year 2000. But the industry peaked at less than 120. Today, just over a hundred are operating. No US reactor ordered since 1974 has been completed. The Seabrook demonstrations---which extended to civil disobedience actions on Wall Street---were key to avoiding the nearly 880 US reactors that might otherwise have been built.

In the 1970s, nuke backers thought they could solve the Arab oil embargo. But rising oil prices helped doom reactor construction. In construction and in fuel enrichment, nukes depend on fossil fuels that emit greenhouse gases and are in increasingly short supply. Another round of rising oil prices could easily doom another round of proposed reactors, as could impending shortages of raw uranium.

As in the 1970s, today's nuke backers have cost calculations for new reactors that are fictional wish lists. Despite millions in PR hype, there is no core Wall Street funding or reliable private insurance for liability in case of a major accident. Whatever economic case there might have been for atomic energy thirty years ago has long since disappeared.

The global grassroots movement that emerged from those New Hampshire armories was savvy, well-organized and passionate. It defined the Solartopian paradigm of an energy-efficient, fossil/nuke-free world powered by renewables.

Tens of thousands of arrests have followed at hundreds of No Nukes demonstrations. But no non-violent reactor opponent or arresting officer has been seriously injured. It is an epic monument to the evolution of peaceful civil disobedience as an effective agent of social change.

It is also a given that any new reactor construction will be accompanied by mass arrests.

It will also require gargantuan taxpayer subsidies. Thirty years since construction began at Seabrook, the real cost of building new reactors has soared off the charts.

By contrast, the prices for renewables and efficiency have plummeted. While reactor construction has gone nowhere, wind, solar and bio-fuels have become multi-billion-dollar industries enjoying double-digit growth rates. The revolution in green power is poised to do for the economies of the Solartopian world of the next quarter-century what the computer revolution did for the last.

Those 550 Clamshell activists who held fast in Mel Thomson's armories thirty years ago opened the door for a brave renewable world. The astonishing victory they claimed on May 13, 1977, testified to the amazing power of mass non-violence---and to the coming reality of a green-powered planet.

--------------------------------------- Harvey Wasserman helped co-ordinate media for the Clamshell Alliance, 1976-8. He was arrested at Diablo Canyon in 1984 and at Seabrook in 1989, and is author of SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030 (http://www.solartopia.org/).

Chernobyl Reminds Us that Nukes are NOT Green

2007-05-04T09:55:00.000-07:00

by Harvey Wasserman

Twenty-one years ago this week, lethal radiation poured into the breezes over Europe and into the jet stream above, carrying death and disease around the planet.
It could be happening again as you read this: either by error, as at Chernobyl and Three Mile Island, or by terror, as could have happened on September 11, 2001.
Those who now advocate a “rebirth” of this failed technology forget what happened during these “impossible” catastrophes, or refuse to face their apocalyptic reality, both ecological and financial.
Radiation monitors in Sweden, hundreds of miles away, first detected the fallout from the blast at Chernobyl Unit 4. The reactor complex had just been extolled in the Soviet press as the ultimate triumph of a “new generation” in atomic technology.
The Gorbachev government hushed up the accident, then reaped a whirlwind of public fury that helped bring down the Soviet Union. The initial silence in fact killed people who might otherwise have taken protective measures. In downtown Kiev, just 80 kilometers away, a parade of uninformed citizens—many of them very young—celebrated May Day amidst a hard rain of lethal fallout. It should never have happened.
Ten days after the explosion, radiation monitors at Point Reyes Station, on the California coast, detected that fallout. A sixty percent drop in bird births soon followed. (The researcher who made that public was fired).
Before they happened, reactor pushers said accidents like those at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl were “impossible.” But….
To this day, no one knows how much radiation escaped from TMI, where it went or who it harmed. But 2400 central Pennsylvanians who have sued to find out have been denied their day in court for nearly thirty years. The epithet “no one died at Three Mile Island” is baseless wishful thinking.
To this day also, no one knows how much radiation escaped from Chernobyl, where it went and who was harmed. Dr. Alexey Yablokov, former environmental advisor to the late President Boris Yeltsin, and president of the Center for Russian Environmental Policy, estimates the death toll at 300,000. The infant death and childhood cancer rates in the downwind areas have been horrific. Visual images of the innumerable deformed offspring make the most ghastly science fiction movies seem tame.
Industry apologists have stretched the limits of common decency to explain away these disasters. Patrick Moore, who falsely claims to be a founder of Greenpeace, has called TMI a “success story.” An industry doctor long ago argued that Chernobyl would somehow “lower the cancer rate.”
In human terms, such claims are beneath contempt. As one of the few reporters to venture into central Pennsylvania to study the health impacts of TMI, I can recall no worse experience in my lifetime than interviewing the scores of casualties.
The farmers made clear, with appalling documentation, that the animal death toll alone was horrendous. But the common human symptoms, ranging from a metallic taste the day of the accident to immediate hair loss, bleeding sores, asthma and so much more, came straight out of easily available literature from Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
There is no mystery about what happened downwind from TMI, only a conscious, well-funded corporate, media and judicial blackout.
At Chernobyl, the experience was repeated a thousand-fold. More than 800,000 (that’s NOT a typo) Soviet draftees were run through the radioactive ruins as “jumpers,” being exposed for 90 seconds or so to do menial clean-up work before hustling out. The ensuing cancer rate has been catastrophic (this huge cohort of very angry young men subsequently played a key role in bringing down the Soviet Union).
In both cases, “official” literature negating (at TMI) or minimizing (at Chernobyl) the death toll are utter nonsense. The multiple killing powers of radiation remain as much a medical mystery as how much fallout escaped in each case and where it went.
The economic impacts are not so murky. Moore’s assertion that TMI was a success story is literally insane. A $900 million asset became a $2 billion clean-up job in a matter of minutes. At Chernobyl, the cost of the accident in lost power, damaged earth, abandoned communities and medical nightmares has been conservatively estimated at a half-trillion dollars, and still climbing.
The price of a melt-down or terror attack at an American nuke is beyond calculation. In most cases, reactors built in areas once far from population centers have now been surrounded by development, some of it bumping right up to the plant perimeters. Had the jets that hit the World Trade Center on 9/11/2001 instead hit Indian Point Units Two and Three, 45 miles north, the human and financial costs would have been unimaginable. Imagine the entire metropolitan New York area being made permanently uninhabitable, and then calculate out what happens to the US economy.
There remains no way to protect any of the roughly 450 commercial reactors on this planet from either terror attack or an error on the part of plant operators.
Those advocating more nukes ignore the myriad good reasons why no private insurance company has stepped forward to insure them against catastrophe. Those who say future accidents are impossible forget that exactly the same was said of TMI and Chernobyl.
The commercial fuel cycle DOES emit global warming in the uranium enrichment process. Uranium mining kills miners. Milling leaves billions of tons of tailings that emit immeasurable quantities of radioactive radon. Regular reactor operations spew direct heat in to the air and water. They also pump fallout into the increasingly populated surroundings, with impacts on the infant death rate that have already been measured and proven. And, of course, there is no solution for the management of high-level waste, a problem the industry promised would be solved a half-century ago.
Economically, early forays into a “new generation” of reactors have already been plagued by huge cost overruns and construction delays. At best they would take ten to fifteen years to build, by which time renewable sources and efficiency—which are already cheaper than new nukes—will have totally outstripped this failed technology. Small wonder Wall Street wants no part of this radioactive hype, which is essentially just another corporate campaign for taxpayer handouts.
This past Earth Day an orgy of corporate greenwashing, aided by the always-compliant major media, tried to portray nukes as “green” energy. Nothing could be further from the truth.
We will never get to Solartopia, a sustainable economy based on renewables and efficiency, as long as atomic power sucks up our resources and threatens us with extinction.
Twenty-one years ago this week, Chernobyl became something far worse than a mere warning beacon. The radiation it spewed still travels our jet stream, still lodges in our bodies, still harms our children.
Only by burying this failed, murderous beast can we get to a truly green future.
Harvey Wasserman’s SOLARTOPIA! OUR GREEN-POWERED EARTH, A.D. 2030, is at http://www.solartopia.org/. He is senior advisor to Greenpeace USA and the Nuclear Information & Resource Service, and writes regularly for http://www.freepress.org/, where this article first appeared.