Wednesday, May 2, 2012
Murdoch's Mission In Media -- Politics
With the finding this week by a committee of the British Parliament that Rupert Murdoch is “not a fit person to exercise the stewardship of a major international company,” the Federal Communications Commission should move to prohibit Murdoch from owning television stations in the United States.
The licensing system for TV and radio stations in the U.S. requires that their owners be of good character. It also mandates that only U.S. citizens hold a major interest in a station —the reason why Murdoch became a U.S. citizen in 1985 as he moved to create a U.S.-based media empire.
His Australian citizenship went, but as for his questionable character, that remained. In its extensive and scathing report on the hacking and bribery scandal in the U.K. involving Murdoch’s News Corporation, the Parliamentary committee declared that Murdoch “turned a blind eye and exhibited willful blindness to what was going on in his companies and publications. This culture, we consider, permeated from the top.”
The “claim that phone-hacking could be dismissed as the work of a single ‘rogue reporter’…was a false one,” said the committee about the assertion of Murdoch and his son James in earlier testimony before it. “As a result of our own investigation, but also of civil cases currently before the courts, Lord Justice Leveson’s inquiry and investigative journalism, there has been a steady flow of evidence which, taken together, comprehensively discredits that assertion. This is beyond dispute.”
“Rupert Murdoch is certainly not, as part of his evidence would have us believe, a ‘hands-off proprietor,’” the panel stated. Indeed, last week, Murdoch finally acknowledged to the committee that there was a “cover-up” of the scandal in which he took part.
The report, said the BBC, “directly questioned the integrity and honesty of Rupert Murdoch” and could lead to a determination in the U.K. that Murdoch’s company “is not fit and proper to hold a broadcasting license.”
When the Federal Communications Act—the regulatory structure for radio and later also TV in the U.S.—was initially enacted in 1934, a similar standard requiring station owners to be “stewards” of the public airwaves became law in America.
Broadcast media, it was reasoned, were using a limited resource—the airwaves—and thus standards were needed to be set for who could own a station. Unlike newspapers, there could not be a virtually unlimited number of stations—frequencies were finite and use of them should only be granted to those of good character committed to serving the public interest. That also applies when a station undergoes a periodic process of relicensing.
If the owners are found guilty of a felony, an anti-trust violation, a fraudulent statement to a governmental entity, discrimination, among other things, they can lose their license to operate the station.
This is what should now happen to Murdoch in the U.S.
A problem is that the Federal Communications Commission, which enforces the Federal Communications Act, has—like so many U.S. regulatory agencies—been a lapdog to rather than a watchdog of industry.
Dark Genius by Kerwin Swint, a book about Roger Ailes who with Murdoch put together the hard right-wing Fox News Channel, notes that Murdoch “has always gotten what he wanted out of the FCC.” This included, in 1993, the FCC waiving “its cross-ownership rule—barring a company from owning a newspaper and/or a radio or TV station in the same market.”
Murdoch’s mission in media is politics. “At Murdoch’s media companies,” writes Swint, “his operations are often used for expressly political purposes.” For example, the “New York Post is not profitable in a financial sense for Murdoch, but it has been invaluable to him as a battering ram for political causes and vendettas….He has skillfully used his media properties to advance political agendas , and conversely, has used those political assets to advance his media properties.”
There have been outrageous media barons through the years. Citizen Kane, often considered America’s finest movie, is about the meglomania of William Randolph Hearst.
But Murdoch has operated—in the U.K., in the U.S., indeed all over the world—as what William Shawcross in Murdoch, his biography of Murdoch, describes as "an international Citizen Kane, with influence beyond imagining."
His cynicism—such as the Fox News Channel proclaiming to be exactly what it’s not, “fair and balanced”—is profound. The quantity of his media holdings is vast. And some are extremely important. He now owns 150 newspapers in Australia including The Australian, the nation's biggest paper. In the U.K., he bought what had been the most distinguished newspaper in the English-speaking world, The Times of London, the quality of which has been downgraded under Murdoch. His other U.K. holdings include Sky Television.
In the U.S. his holdings, in addition to the New York Post, include The Wall Street Journal which he has been using to take on The New York Times to become the leading American newspaper. His News Corporation also owns the giant book-publishing company, HarperCollins; 20th Century Fox movie studio; 20th Century Fox Television and Fox Broadcasting Company. His U.S. cable TV assets in addition to Fox News Channel include Fox Movie Channel and Fox Business Network.
Murdoch’s holdings also extend to Asia, Europe, Africa, the Middle East, and Latin America. All in all, his News Corporation owns more than 800 media companies in more than 50 countries.
According to Forbes magazine, Murdoch’s net worth is now $8.3 billion making him, says Forbes, the 106th richest person in the world, the 38th richest in the U.S.
“With News Corp undoubtedly facing increased regulatory scrutiny in the U.S. as the phone-hacking scandal expands in the U.K., the company is acting to correct a breach of FCC laws regarding foreign ownership,” the website Studio Briefing reported last month. “The media conglomerate will likely suspend half the voting rights of foreign shareholders to bring it into compliance with FCC rules limiting foreign ownership of broadcasting stations to 25 percent.” The largest foreign shareholder, it said, is Saudi Prince Al-Waleed bin Talal bin Abdulaziz Al Saud who “owns 7 percent of News Corp’s voting stock.”
Now what about the man at the top—Rupert Murdoch—and the requirement of integrity?
Monday, April 16, 2012
Atomic Titanics
On the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Titanic, The Japan Times yesterday ran an editorial titled “The Titanic and the Nuclear Fiasco” which stated: “Presenting technology as completely safe, trustworthy or miraculous may seem to be a thing of the past, but the parallels between the Titanic and Japan's nuclear power industry could not be clearer.”
“Japan's nuclear power plants were, like the Titanic, advertised as marvels of modern science that were completely safe. Certain technologies, whether they promise to float a luxury liner or provide clean energy, can never be made entirely safe,” it said.
It quoted from a piece by Joseph Conrad written after the Titanic sank in which he noted the "chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind." The Japan Times urged: “That lesson should be applied to all ‘unsinkable’ undertakings that might profit a few by imperiling the majority of others.” http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ed20120415a1.html
Yes, the same kind of baloney behind the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable is behind the puffery that nuclear power plants are safe. The nuclear power promoters are still saying that despite the sinking of atomic Titanics: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants.
In fact, underneath the PR offensive are government documents admitting that nuclear power plants are deadly dangerous.
The first analysis of the consequences of a nuclear plant accident was done in 1957 by Brookhaven National Laboratory, established a decade before by the since disbanded U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop civilian uses of nuclear technology. Its “WASH-740” report said a major nuclear plant accident could result in “3,400 killed and about 43,000 injured” and property damage “could be about 7 billion dollars.” However, this analysis was based on nuclear power plants a fifth to a tenth of the size of those being constructed in the 1960s.
So Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a second study in the mid-60s, “WASH-740-update.” It stated repeatedly that for a major nuclear plant accident, “the possible size of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.” It increased the number of deaths to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage up to $280 billion.
Then, in 1982, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories did a study they titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” that analyzed the accident consequences for every nuclear plant in the U.S. It projected, for example, for a meltdown with a breach of containment at the Indian Point 2 plant just north of New York City: 50,000 “peak early fatalities; 167,000 “peak early injuries;” 14,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $314 billion in “scaled costs” of property damage in, it noted, “1980 dollars.”
As to likelihood, in 1985 there was a formal written exchange between U.S. Congressman Edward Markey’s House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations and the NRC in which the panel asked: “What does the commission and NRC staff believe the likelihood of a severe core melt accident to be in the next twenty years for those reactors now operating and those expected to operate during that time?”
The NRC response: “In a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of such an accident would be 45%.” But then it went on that this might be off by “a factor of about 10 above and below.” Thus, the chances of a meltdown during a 20-year period among 100 U.S. nuclear plant plants (there are 104 today) would be about 50-50.
These are not good odds for disaster.
Steven Starr, a board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, speaks further of the “fatal and deadly flaw” of nuclear power “that cannot be remedied by any technological fix or redesign. Nuclear power plants manufacture poisons thousands and millions of times more deadly to life than any other industrial process, and some of these poisons last for hundreds of millennia, and thus have great potential to become ubiquitous in the global environment.” And the “clear evidence” is that it is “beyond the means of the nuclear industry to keep these poisons contained during even the average lifespan of a nuclear reactor. It is beyond belief that anyone can promise that we can contain them for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”
The current issue of Popular Mechanics features an article “Why Titanic Still Matters” by Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor and chief, which states: “In one respect, little has changed. As the recent loss of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia demonstrates, bad decision making can overcome even robust engineering. Virtually all man-made disasters—including the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and the BP oil spill—can be traced to the same human failings that doomed Titanic. After 100 years, we must still remember—and, too often, relearn—the grim lessons of that night.”
Indeed, human error is a big part of what can go wrong at a nuclear power plant. However, even without human error, nuclear power is fraught with the potential for immense catastrophe. A mechanical malfunction simple or complex, an earthquake, a tornado, a tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a terrorist attack, these and other threats can result in catastrophe. Nuclear power plants and the process of atomic fission in them are inherently dangerous—at a scale of technological disaster that is unparalleled.
Some 1,500 souls were lost with the Titanic. For a nuclear plant accident, it is anticipated that tens of thousands could die—and the most recent estimates by independent scientists is that a million have died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It is expected that even more will perish as a result of the six-nuclear plant Fukushima catastrophe.
And it’s not a ship sinking to the bottom of the sea but a part of the Earth rendered uninhabitable for millennia—as a huge area around Chernobyl has been, and now a large area around Fukushima will be. They become “sacrifice zones.”
And what for? In 1912 there was no other way to cross an ocean than on a ship—there were no airplanes flying passengers from continent to continent. But now there are numerous and truly safe, clean energy technologies available that render nuclear power totally unnecessary. Thus, we can avoid sinking with the atomic Titanics which the nuclear power promoters insist we board.
-3
“Japan's nuclear power plants were, like the Titanic, advertised as marvels of modern science that were completely safe. Certain technologies, whether they promise to float a luxury liner or provide clean energy, can never be made entirely safe,” it said.
It quoted from a piece by Joseph Conrad written after the Titanic sank in which he noted the "chastening influence it should have on the self-confidence of mankind." The Japan Times urged: “That lesson should be applied to all ‘unsinkable’ undertakings that might profit a few by imperiling the majority of others.” http://www.japantimes.co.jp/text/ed20120415a1.html
Yes, the same kind of baloney behind the claim that the Titanic was unsinkable is behind the puffery that nuclear power plants are safe. The nuclear power promoters are still saying that despite the sinking of atomic Titanics: Three Mile Island, Chernobyl and now the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plants.
In fact, underneath the PR offensive are government documents admitting that nuclear power plants are deadly dangerous.
The first analysis of the consequences of a nuclear plant accident was done in 1957 by Brookhaven National Laboratory, established a decade before by the since disbanded U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to develop civilian uses of nuclear technology. Its “WASH-740” report said a major nuclear plant accident could result in “3,400 killed and about 43,000 injured” and property damage “could be about 7 billion dollars.” However, this analysis was based on nuclear power plants a fifth to a tenth of the size of those being constructed in the 1960s.
So Brookhaven National Laboratory conducted a second study in the mid-60s, “WASH-740-update.” It stated repeatedly that for a major nuclear plant accident, “the possible size of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.” It increased the number of deaths to 45,000, injuries to 100,000 and property damage up to $280 billion.
Then, in 1982, the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories did a study they titled “Calculation of Reactor Accident Consequences” that analyzed the accident consequences for every nuclear plant in the U.S. It projected, for example, for a meltdown with a breach of containment at the Indian Point 2 plant just north of New York City: 50,000 “peak early fatalities; 167,000 “peak early injuries;” 14,000 “peak cancer deaths;” and $314 billion in “scaled costs” of property damage in, it noted, “1980 dollars.”
As to likelihood, in 1985 there was a formal written exchange between U.S. Congressman Edward Markey’s House Subcommittee on Oversight & Investigations and the NRC in which the panel asked: “What does the commission and NRC staff believe the likelihood of a severe core melt accident to be in the next twenty years for those reactors now operating and those expected to operate during that time?”
The NRC response: “In a population of 100 reactors operating over a period of 20 years, the crude cumulative probability of such an accident would be 45%.” But then it went on that this might be off by “a factor of about 10 above and below.” Thus, the chances of a meltdown during a 20-year period among 100 U.S. nuclear plant plants (there are 104 today) would be about 50-50.
These are not good odds for disaster.
Steven Starr, a board member of Physicians for Social Responsibility, speaks further of the “fatal and deadly flaw” of nuclear power “that cannot be remedied by any technological fix or redesign. Nuclear power plants manufacture poisons thousands and millions of times more deadly to life than any other industrial process, and some of these poisons last for hundreds of millennia, and thus have great potential to become ubiquitous in the global environment.” And the “clear evidence” is that it is “beyond the means of the nuclear industry to keep these poisons contained during even the average lifespan of a nuclear reactor. It is beyond belief that anyone can promise that we can contain them for tens or hundreds of thousands of years.”
The current issue of Popular Mechanics features an article “Why Titanic Still Matters” by Jim Meigs, the magazine’s editor and chief, which states: “In one respect, little has changed. As the recent loss of the Italian cruise ship Costa Concordia demonstrates, bad decision making can overcome even robust engineering. Virtually all man-made disasters—including the Three Mile Island nuclear accident, the space shuttle Challenger explosion, and the BP oil spill—can be traced to the same human failings that doomed Titanic. After 100 years, we must still remember—and, too often, relearn—the grim lessons of that night.”
Indeed, human error is a big part of what can go wrong at a nuclear power plant. However, even without human error, nuclear power is fraught with the potential for immense catastrophe. A mechanical malfunction simple or complex, an earthquake, a tornado, a tsunami, a hurricane, a flood, a terrorist attack, these and other threats can result in catastrophe. Nuclear power plants and the process of atomic fission in them are inherently dangerous—at a scale of technological disaster that is unparalleled.
Some 1,500 souls were lost with the Titanic. For a nuclear plant accident, it is anticipated that tens of thousands could die—and the most recent estimates by independent scientists is that a million have died as a result of the 1986 Chernobyl disaster. It is expected that even more will perish as a result of the six-nuclear plant Fukushima catastrophe.
And it’s not a ship sinking to the bottom of the sea but a part of the Earth rendered uninhabitable for millennia—as a huge area around Chernobyl has been, and now a large area around Fukushima will be. They become “sacrifice zones.”
And what for? In 1912 there was no other way to cross an ocean than on a ship—there were no airplanes flying passengers from continent to continent. But now there are numerous and truly safe, clean energy technologies available that render nuclear power totally unnecessary. Thus, we can avoid sinking with the atomic Titanics which the nuclear power promoters insist we board.
-3
Wednesday, April 11, 2012
The Deadly Folly of Nuclear Power Overhead
The crash last week of a U.S. drone on the Seychelles Islands—the second crash of a U.S. drone on Seychelles in four months—underlines the deadly folly of a plan of U.S. national laboratory scientists and the Northrop Grumman Corp. for nuclear-powered drones.
The drone that “bounced a few times on the runway” at Seychelles International Airport on April 4 “before ending” up in the sea, according to a statement from the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority, was conventionally powered. So was the drone which had a similar accident on Seychelles in December. From the Indian Ocean island nation the U.S. flies drones over Somalia and over waters off East Africa looking for pirates.
But the use of nuclear power on U.S. drones was “favorably assessed by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Northrop Grumman Corp.,” revealed Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists last month. http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=14770.0
Their report said that “technology and systems designs evaluated…have previously never been applied to unmanned air vehicles” and “use of these technologies” could provide “system performance unparalleled by existing technologies.” http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2012/121676p.pdf It acknowledged, however, that “current political conditions will not allow use of the results.” Thus “it is doubtful that they will be used in the near-term or mid-term future.”
Just consider if the two drones which crashed on the Seychelles used nuclear power—and the impacts if the radioactive fuel they contained was released. Or consider if the drones had crashed elsewhere, in Somalia, for instance, providing nuclear material to those who might want to make a “dirty bomb.” Drones, not too incidentally, have a record of frequently crashing.
The nuclear-powered drone scheme is ostensibly not going anywhere now—because of “current political considerations.” But other schemes to use nuclear power overhead—which also threaten nuclear disaster—are on the planning table and some are moving ahead.
These include:
* A new U.S. Air Force plan which supports “nuclear powered flight.” Titled Energy Horizons, issued in January, it states that “nuclear energy has been demonstrated on several satellite systems” and “this source provides consistent power…at a much higher energy and power density than current technologies.” It does admit that “the implementation of such a technology should be weighed heavily against potential catastrophic outcomes.” Indeed, the worst accident involving a U.S. space nuclear system occurred with the fall to Earth in 1964 of a satellite powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator on RTG, the SNAP-9A. It failed to achieve orbit and fell to Earth, disintegrating upon hitting the atmosphere causing its Plutonium-238 fuel to be dispersed as dust widely over the Earth. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, long linked the SNAP-9A accident to a global rise in lung cancer. The Air Force report sees nuclear power as an energy source that would assist it in taking the “ultimate high ground” which would provide it with “access to every part of the globe including denied areas.” http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-120209-060.pdf
* “A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space travel propulsion system will be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025,” the Russian state news agency, Ria Novosti, reported last week. http://rt.com/news/space-nuclear-engine-propulsion-120/ The April 3 article, headlined “Plutonium to Pluto: Russian nuclear space travel breakthrough,” said, “The megawatt-class nuclear drive will function for up to three years and produce 100-150 kilowatts of energy at normal capacity.” It is “under development at Skolkovo, Russia’s technology innovation hub, where nuclear cluster head Dennis Kovalevich confirmed the breakthrough.” It said, “Scientists expect to start putting the new engine through its paces in operational tests as early as 2014.” Earlier, Ria Novosti reported that the director of Roscosmos , the Russian space agency, believes the “development of megawatt-class nuclear power systems for manned spacecraft was crucial if Russia wanted to maintain a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the moon and Mars.” http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101123/161461317.html It also said the Russian rocket company, Energia, is “ready to design a space-based nuclear power station with a service life of 10-to-15 years, to be initially placed on the moon or Mars.” The worst accident involving a Soviet or Russian nuclear space system was the fall from orbit in 1978 of the Cosmos 954 satellite powered by a nuclear reactor. It also broke up in the atmosphere spreading radioactive debris which scattered over 77,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
* The U.S. is moving again to produce Plutonium-238 for space use. In recent years, the U.S. stopped making Plutonium-238. It is 270 times more radioactive than the more commonly known Plutonium-239, used as fuel in atomic bombs, and thus its manufacture has resulted in significant radioactive pollution. Instead, it obtained Plutonium-238 from Russia. RTGs powered by Plutonium-238 had been used by the U.S. as a source of electricity on satellites—as the Energy Horizons noted. But that was until the SNAP-9A accident which caused a turn to generating electricity with solar photovoltaic panels. Now all satellites are powered by solar panels, as is the International Space Station. But RTGs using Plutonium-238 have remained a source of on board electricity for space probes such as Cassini which NASA launched to Saturn in 1999. The Department of Energy plans to produce Plutonium-238 at both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory. “Over the next two years, Oak Ridge National Laboratory will carry out a $20 million pilot project to demonstrate the lab’s ability to produce and process Plutonium-238 for use in the space program,” reported the Knoxville News Sentinel last month. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/mar/30/20m-plutonium-project-at-ornl-to-support-space/
* The U.S. is also developing nuclear-powered rockets. NASA Director Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, is a booster of a design of a Houston-based company, Ad Astra, of which another former astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, is president and chief executive officer. “He launched Ad Astra after he retired from NASA in 2005, but the company continues a close association with the U.S. space agency,” the U.S. government’s Voice of America noted in its article on the project last year. http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Former-Astronaut-Develops-Powerful-Rocket-123960664.html The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASMIR could he energized by solar power but, the article relates, “Chang-Diaz says replacing solar panels with a nuclear reactor would provide the necessary power to VASMIR for a much faster trip.” It quotes him as saying “we could do a mission to Mars that would take about 39 days, one way.” And, although “such a mission is still many years away, Chang-Diaz says his rocket could be used much sooner for missions to the International Space Station or to retrieve or position satellites in Earth orbit.”
Challenging what is going on is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power
in Space. www.space4peace.org Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the group, comments:
“Who can deny that the nuclear power industry isn't working overtime to spread its deadly product onto every possible military application? The recent disclosure that the Pentagon has been strongly considering sticking nuclear engines on-board drones is dangerously 'more of the same.’”
“Nuclear-powered devices flying around on drones or on-board rockets that frequently blow up on launch is pure insanity,” says Gagnon. “The people need to push back hard.”
What is happening has deep roots. A key rationale by Sandia and Northrop Grumman for nuclear-powered drones was, as the British newspaper, The Guardian, reported last week, long—very long—flight times. “American scientists have drawn up plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered drones capable of flying over remote regions of the world for months on end without refueling,” it reported. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/02/us-plans-nuclear-drones The same rationale, noted Gagnon, was behind the U.S. development in the 1940s and 50s of nuclear-propelled bombers.
The strategy was for these nuclear-powered bombers to stay up in the air for extensive periods of time. There would thus be no need to scramble crews and have bombers take off to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union—they’d already be airborne waiting for the command. The Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft or NEPA project was begun in 1946 and involved the conversion of two B-36 bombers for nuclear propulsion. The first operation of an aircraft engine using nuclear power occurred in 1956. The U.S. national laboratories—a string of facilities that got their start in the crash program to build atomic weapons, the Manhattan Project—were integral to the scheme. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then run by the since disbanded U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, did much of the research work. Much of the testing was done at what is now Idaho National Laboratory where today two nuclear aircraft engines are on public display and there is also still remaining a gargantuan hangar built for nuclear aircraft. http://idptv.state.id.us/buildingbig/buildings/ineel.html General Electric was a major contractor.
The plan for nuclear-powered bombers was finally scuttled because of the problem of providing heavy lead shielding to protect the crew from radiation and, as then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress in 1961, an atomic airplane would “expel some fraction of radioactive fission products into the atmosphere, creating an important public relations problem if not an actual physical hazard.”
A subsequent program linking nuclear power and weapons was the Star Wars program under President Ronald Reagan. It was “predicated,” as Gagnon notes, “on nuclear power in space.” Reactors and also a “Super RTG” to be built by General Electric were to provide the energy on orbiting battle platforms for lasers, hypervelocity guns and particle beam weapons.
In my book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet,” and TV documentary, Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens, I noted the 1988 declaration of Lt. General James Abramson, first head of the Strategic Defense Initiative, that “without reactors in orbit [there is] going to be a long, long light cord that goes down to the surface of Earth” bringing up power. He stated: “Failure to develop nuclear power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti-missile sensors and weapons in orbit.”
As to nuclear-propelled rockets, the U.S. has a long history of seeking to build them from the 1950s onward. There was a program called Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application or NERVA followed by Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. And in the 1980s, the Timberwind nuclear-powered rocket was developed to loft heavy Star Wars equipment into space and also for trips to Mars. Most recently, the Project Prometheus program to build nuclear-powered rockets was begun by NASA in 2003. Through the years there have been major concerns over a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth.
The Soviet Union, Russia, conducted a parallel space nuclear program—including nuclear-powered satellites, development of a nuclear bomber and nuclear-powered rockets.
Now, meanwhile, nuclear power above our heads has been shown as unnecessary.
NASA has persisted in using Plutonium-238-powered RTGs on space probes claiming there was no choice. But last year it launched the Juno space probe which is now on its way to Jupiter—getting all its on-board electricity only from solar photovoltaic panels. It’s to arrive in 2016 and make 32 orbits around Jupiter and perform a variety of scientific missions. As NASA stated last week on its website for Juno: “As of April 4, Juno was approximately209 million miles from Earth…The Juno spacecraft is in excellent health.” http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html This is despite NASA claiming for decades that only nuclear power could provide on-board power in deep space.
Likewise, the European Space Agency in 2004 launched a space probe it calls Rosetta, also using solar energy rather than nuclear power for on-board electricity. It is to rendezvous in 2014 with a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and send out a lander which will investigate the comet’s surface. At that point it will be 500 million miles from the Sun, a small ball in the sky at that distance, yet Rosetta will still be harvesting solar energy. http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Rosetta/SEMHBK2PGQD_0.html
As to propulsion in space, a highly promising energy source are the ionized particles in space that can be utilized in the frictionless environment with what are being called solar sails.
In May 2010, the Japan Exploration Agency launched an experimental spacecraft, Ikaros, that seven months later reached Venus—propelled only by its solar sail. http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f17/overview/ikaros_e.html The Planetary Society is readying a similar mission using a spacecraft named LightSail-1 powered by solar sails and planning for two more ambitious solar sail flights of LightSail-2 and LightSail-3. http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/solar_sailing/lightsail1.html
These missions do not present threats to life on Earth—as does the use of nuclear power overhead. And the threats of nuclear power overhead can be enormous. For example, consider the projection in NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission about the impacts if there were an “inadvertent reentry” of Cassini into Earth’s atmosphere during one of its two “flybys”—whips around the Earth but a few hundred miles high to increase its velocity so it could get to Saturn. If it fell to Earth, broke up in the atmosphere and its 72.3 pounds of Plutonium-238 were released, “5 billion…of the world population…could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure,” projected NASA.
Moreover, the production of nuclear fuel on Earth for use in space—or in the atmosphere for drones—constitutes danger, too. Facilities that had been used earlier by the U.S. to produce Plutonium-238, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Mound Laboratory, ended up as hotspots for worker contamination and radioactive pollution.
James Powell, executive director of the organization Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, which has been opposing the restart of Plutonium-238 production at nearby Idaho National Laboratory, comments: “Aside from the looming danger of nuclear powered crafts above Earth, we should also realize that the nuclear material is to be produced in our backyards with 1960's era nuclear reactors and then transported back and forth from [Oak Ridge National Laboratory in]Tennessee to Idaho. Every single part of this process deeply concerns us.”
The drone that “bounced a few times on the runway” at Seychelles International Airport on April 4 “before ending” up in the sea, according to a statement from the Seychelles Civil Aviation Authority, was conventionally powered. So was the drone which had a similar accident on Seychelles in December. From the Indian Ocean island nation the U.S. flies drones over Somalia and over waters off East Africa looking for pirates.
But the use of nuclear power on U.S. drones was “favorably assessed by scientists at Sandia National Laboratories and the Northrop Grumman Corp.,” revealed Steven Aftergood of the Project on Government Secrecy of the Federation of American Scientists last month. http://www.secretprojects.co.uk/forum/index.php?topic=14770.0
Their report said that “technology and systems designs evaluated…have previously never been applied to unmanned air vehicles” and “use of these technologies” could provide “system performance unparalleled by existing technologies.” http://prod.sandia.gov/techlib/access-control.cgi/2012/121676p.pdf It acknowledged, however, that “current political conditions will not allow use of the results.” Thus “it is doubtful that they will be used in the near-term or mid-term future.”
Just consider if the two drones which crashed on the Seychelles used nuclear power—and the impacts if the radioactive fuel they contained was released. Or consider if the drones had crashed elsewhere, in Somalia, for instance, providing nuclear material to those who might want to make a “dirty bomb.” Drones, not too incidentally, have a record of frequently crashing.
The nuclear-powered drone scheme is ostensibly not going anywhere now—because of “current political considerations.” But other schemes to use nuclear power overhead—which also threaten nuclear disaster—are on the planning table and some are moving ahead.
These include:
* A new U.S. Air Force plan which supports “nuclear powered flight.” Titled Energy Horizons, issued in January, it states that “nuclear energy has been demonstrated on several satellite systems” and “this source provides consistent power…at a much higher energy and power density than current technologies.” It does admit that “the implementation of such a technology should be weighed heavily against potential catastrophic outcomes.” Indeed, the worst accident involving a U.S. space nuclear system occurred with the fall to Earth in 1964 of a satellite powered by a radioisotope thermoelectric generator on RTG, the SNAP-9A. It failed to achieve orbit and fell to Earth, disintegrating upon hitting the atmosphere causing its Plutonium-238 fuel to be dispersed as dust widely over the Earth. Dr. John Gofman, professor of medical physics at the University of California, Berkeley, long linked the SNAP-9A accident to a global rise in lung cancer. The Air Force report sees nuclear power as an energy source that would assist it in taking the “ultimate high ground” which would provide it with “access to every part of the globe including denied areas.” http://www.af.mil/shared/media/document/AFD-120209-060.pdf
* “A ground-breaking Russian nuclear space travel propulsion system will be ready by 2017 and will power a ship capable of long-haul interplanetary missions by 2025,” the Russian state news agency, Ria Novosti, reported last week. http://rt.com/news/space-nuclear-engine-propulsion-120/ The April 3 article, headlined “Plutonium to Pluto: Russian nuclear space travel breakthrough,” said, “The megawatt-class nuclear drive will function for up to three years and produce 100-150 kilowatts of energy at normal capacity.” It is “under development at Skolkovo, Russia’s technology innovation hub, where nuclear cluster head Dennis Kovalevich confirmed the breakthrough.” It said, “Scientists expect to start putting the new engine through its paces in operational tests as early as 2014.” Earlier, Ria Novosti reported that the director of Roscosmos , the Russian space agency, believes the “development of megawatt-class nuclear power systems for manned spacecraft was crucial if Russia wanted to maintain a competitive edge in the space race, including the exploration of the moon and Mars.” http://en.rian.ru/russia/20101123/161461317.html It also said the Russian rocket company, Energia, is “ready to design a space-based nuclear power station with a service life of 10-to-15 years, to be initially placed on the moon or Mars.” The worst accident involving a Soviet or Russian nuclear space system was the fall from orbit in 1978 of the Cosmos 954 satellite powered by a nuclear reactor. It also broke up in the atmosphere spreading radioactive debris which scattered over 77,000 square miles of the Northwest Territories of Canada.
* The U.S. is moving again to produce Plutonium-238 for space use. In recent years, the U.S. stopped making Plutonium-238. It is 270 times more radioactive than the more commonly known Plutonium-239, used as fuel in atomic bombs, and thus its manufacture has resulted in significant radioactive pollution. Instead, it obtained Plutonium-238 from Russia. RTGs powered by Plutonium-238 had been used by the U.S. as a source of electricity on satellites—as the Energy Horizons noted. But that was until the SNAP-9A accident which caused a turn to generating electricity with solar photovoltaic panels. Now all satellites are powered by solar panels, as is the International Space Station. But RTGs using Plutonium-238 have remained a source of on board electricity for space probes such as Cassini which NASA launched to Saturn in 1999. The Department of Energy plans to produce Plutonium-238 at both Oak Ridge National Laboratory and Idaho National Laboratory. “Over the next two years, Oak Ridge National Laboratory will carry out a $20 million pilot project to demonstrate the lab’s ability to produce and process Plutonium-238 for use in the space program,” reported the Knoxville News Sentinel last month. http://www.knoxnews.com/news/2012/mar/30/20m-plutonium-project-at-ornl-to-support-space/
* The U.S. is also developing nuclear-powered rockets. NASA Director Charles Bolden, a former astronaut and U.S. Marine Corps major general, is a booster of a design of a Houston-based company, Ad Astra, of which another former astronaut, Franklin Chang-Diaz, is president and chief executive officer. “He launched Ad Astra after he retired from NASA in 2005, but the company continues a close association with the U.S. space agency,” the U.S. government’s Voice of America noted in its article on the project last year. http://www.voanews.com/english/news/science-technology/Former-Astronaut-Develops-Powerful-Rocket-123960664.html The Variable Specific Impulse Magnetoplasma Rocket or VASMIR could he energized by solar power but, the article relates, “Chang-Diaz says replacing solar panels with a nuclear reactor would provide the necessary power to VASMIR for a much faster trip.” It quotes him as saying “we could do a mission to Mars that would take about 39 days, one way.” And, although “such a mission is still many years away, Chang-Diaz says his rocket could be used much sooner for missions to the International Space Station or to retrieve or position satellites in Earth orbit.”
Challenging what is going on is the Global Network Against Weapons & Nuclear Power
in Space. www.space4peace.org Bruce Gagnon, coordinator of the group, comments:
“Who can deny that the nuclear power industry isn't working overtime to spread its deadly product onto every possible military application? The recent disclosure that the Pentagon has been strongly considering sticking nuclear engines on-board drones is dangerously 'more of the same.’”
“Nuclear-powered devices flying around on drones or on-board rockets that frequently blow up on launch is pure insanity,” says Gagnon. “The people need to push back hard.”
What is happening has deep roots. A key rationale by Sandia and Northrop Grumman for nuclear-powered drones was, as the British newspaper, The Guardian, reported last week, long—very long—flight times. “American scientists have drawn up plans for a new generation of nuclear-powered drones capable of flying over remote regions of the world for months on end without refueling,” it reported. http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/2012/apr/02/us-plans-nuclear-drones The same rationale, noted Gagnon, was behind the U.S. development in the 1940s and 50s of nuclear-propelled bombers.
The strategy was for these nuclear-powered bombers to stay up in the air for extensive periods of time. There would thus be no need to scramble crews and have bombers take off to drop nuclear weapons on the Soviet Union—they’d already be airborne waiting for the command. The Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft or NEPA project was begun in 1946 and involved the conversion of two B-36 bombers for nuclear propulsion. The first operation of an aircraft engine using nuclear power occurred in 1956. The U.S. national laboratories—a string of facilities that got their start in the crash program to build atomic weapons, the Manhattan Project—were integral to the scheme. Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then run by the since disbanded U.S. Atomic Energy Commission, did much of the research work. Much of the testing was done at what is now Idaho National Laboratory where today two nuclear aircraft engines are on public display and there is also still remaining a gargantuan hangar built for nuclear aircraft. http://idptv.state.id.us/buildingbig/buildings/ineel.html General Electric was a major contractor.
The plan for nuclear-powered bombers was finally scuttled because of the problem of providing heavy lead shielding to protect the crew from radiation and, as then U.S. Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara told Congress in 1961, an atomic airplane would “expel some fraction of radioactive fission products into the atmosphere, creating an important public relations problem if not an actual physical hazard.”
A subsequent program linking nuclear power and weapons was the Star Wars program under President Ronald Reagan. It was “predicated,” as Gagnon notes, “on nuclear power in space.” Reactors and also a “Super RTG” to be built by General Electric were to provide the energy on orbiting battle platforms for lasers, hypervelocity guns and particle beam weapons.
In my book, The Wrong Stuff: The Space Program’s Nuclear Threat to Our Planet,” and TV documentary, Nukes in Space: The Nuclearization and Weaponization of the Heavens, I noted the 1988 declaration of Lt. General James Abramson, first head of the Strategic Defense Initiative, that “without reactors in orbit [there is] going to be a long, long light cord that goes down to the surface of Earth” bringing up power. He stated: “Failure to develop nuclear power in space could cripple efforts to deploy anti-missile sensors and weapons in orbit.”
As to nuclear-propelled rockets, the U.S. has a long history of seeking to build them from the 1950s onward. There was a program called Nuclear Engine for Rocket Vehicle Application or NERVA followed by Projects Pluto, Rover and Poodle. And in the 1980s, the Timberwind nuclear-powered rocket was developed to loft heavy Star Wars equipment into space and also for trips to Mars. Most recently, the Project Prometheus program to build nuclear-powered rockets was begun by NASA in 2003. Through the years there have been major concerns over a nuclear rocket blowing up on launch or crashing back to Earth.
The Soviet Union, Russia, conducted a parallel space nuclear program—including nuclear-powered satellites, development of a nuclear bomber and nuclear-powered rockets.
Now, meanwhile, nuclear power above our heads has been shown as unnecessary.
NASA has persisted in using Plutonium-238-powered RTGs on space probes claiming there was no choice. But last year it launched the Juno space probe which is now on its way to Jupiter—getting all its on-board electricity only from solar photovoltaic panels. It’s to arrive in 2016 and make 32 orbits around Jupiter and perform a variety of scientific missions. As NASA stated last week on its website for Juno: “As of April 4, Juno was approximately209 million miles from Earth…The Juno spacecraft is in excellent health.” http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/juno/main/index.html This is despite NASA claiming for decades that only nuclear power could provide on-board power in deep space.
Likewise, the European Space Agency in 2004 launched a space probe it calls Rosetta, also using solar energy rather than nuclear power for on-board electricity. It is to rendezvous in 2014 with a comet named 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko and send out a lander which will investigate the comet’s surface. At that point it will be 500 million miles from the Sun, a small ball in the sky at that distance, yet Rosetta will still be harvesting solar energy. http://www.esa.int/esaMI/Rosetta/SEMHBK2PGQD_0.html
As to propulsion in space, a highly promising energy source are the ionized particles in space that can be utilized in the frictionless environment with what are being called solar sails.
In May 2010, the Japan Exploration Agency launched an experimental spacecraft, Ikaros, that seven months later reached Venus—propelled only by its solar sail. http://www.jaxa.jp/countdown/f17/overview/ikaros_e.html The Planetary Society is readying a similar mission using a spacecraft named LightSail-1 powered by solar sails and planning for two more ambitious solar sail flights of LightSail-2 and LightSail-3. http://www.planetary.org/programs/projects/solar_sailing/lightsail1.html
These missions do not present threats to life on Earth—as does the use of nuclear power overhead. And the threats of nuclear power overhead can be enormous. For example, consider the projection in NASA’s Final Environmental Impact Statement for the Cassini Mission about the impacts if there were an “inadvertent reentry” of Cassini into Earth’s atmosphere during one of its two “flybys”—whips around the Earth but a few hundred miles high to increase its velocity so it could get to Saturn. If it fell to Earth, broke up in the atmosphere and its 72.3 pounds of Plutonium-238 were released, “5 billion…of the world population…could receive 99 percent or more of the radiation exposure,” projected NASA.
Moreover, the production of nuclear fuel on Earth for use in space—or in the atmosphere for drones—constitutes danger, too. Facilities that had been used earlier by the U.S. to produce Plutonium-238, Los Alamos National Laboratory and Mound Laboratory, ended up as hotspots for worker contamination and radioactive pollution.
James Powell, executive director of the organization Keep Yellowstone Nuclear Free, which has been opposing the restart of Plutonium-238 production at nearby Idaho National Laboratory, comments: “Aside from the looming danger of nuclear powered crafts above Earth, we should also realize that the nuclear material is to be produced in our backyards with 1960's era nuclear reactors and then transported back and forth from [Oak Ridge National Laboratory in]Tennessee to Idaho. Every single part of this process deeply concerns us.”
Monday, March 5, 2012
Nuclear Cover-Up More Extensive As First Anniversary of Fukushima Disaster Arrives
As the first anniversary of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster arrives, the cover-up involving nuclear power is more extensive than ever.
The Big Lie was integral to the nuclear push from its start.
Promoters of nuclear power discounted the seriousness of nuclear plant accidents, although government documents acknowledged the vast scale of catastrophe. As the Atomic Energy Commission’s “WASH-740 update,” done at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1960s, repeatedly states about a major nuclear plant accident: “The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
They pushed the “peaceful atom”—although knowing that any nation with a nuclear plant would have the materiel from it (the plutonium produced as a byproduct) and trained personnel to make atomic weapons.
They downplayed the effects of radioactivity claiming it needed to reach a “threshold” to cause harm—even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill.
And nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter,” they insisted.
And on and on…
The realities of nuclear power have become ever more evident—acutely so because of the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
But the Nuclear Big Lie continues bigger than ever.
In recent weeks, for example, there’s been the move to negate what has been the U.S. government’s benchmark analysis on the impacts of nuclear plant accidents. “Calculation Reactor Accident Consequences 2” (CRAC-2) was done for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in 1982. It catalogues the impacts from a meltdown with a breach of containment at every nuclear plant in the U.S.
It divides the consequences into “Peak Early Fatalities,” “Peak Early Injuries,” “Peak Cancer Deaths” and “Scaled Costs” for property damage—and the numbers are chilling.
For the Indian Point 3 nuclear plant north of New York City, for instance, it projects “Peak Early Fatalities” at 50,000, “Peak Early Injuries” at 167,000, “Peak Cancer Deaths” at 14,000 and “Scaled Costs” at $314 billion (in 1980 dollars).
The estimates turn out to be low considering the toll of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.
But in January, the NRC put out a report that it intends to replace CRAC-2 with that it titles the “State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequences Analyses” or SOARCA. SOARCA flatly dismisses the high casualty and damage figures of CRAC-2 (and the WASH-740 update before it). Using as models the Surry nuclear station in Virginia and the Peach Bottom facility in Pennsylvania, each with two nuclear plants, the NRC declared that the “risks of public health consequences from severe accidents” at a nuclear plant “are very small.”
The “long-term risk” of a person dying from cancer from a nuclear plant accident is less than one-in-a billion, says SOARCA. This is because “successful implementation of existing mitigation measures can prevent reactor core damage or delay or reduce offsite releases of radioactive material.”
Tell that to the people impacted by Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Cindy Folkers of the organization Beyond Nuclear declares that the “NRC should immediately withdraw its absurd SOARCA report and get about the business of protecting the public health, safety, and the environment—its mandate—rather than doing the nuclear power industry’s bidding.”
Then there’s the attempt to cover up Fuksushima impacts.
“Health impacts from the radioactive materials released in the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns will probably be too small to be easily measured,” began a New York Times piece by Matthew Wald last week. That was based on a Health Physics Society program at the National Press Club.
But the Health Physics Society is a booster of nuclear technology. It wasn’t supposed to be that. The health physics profession was founded in 1943 by Karl Z. Morgan, a physicist with an interest in the health effects of radioactivity. He was hired by the Manhattan Project, the World War II crash program to build atomic bombs, to deal with health issues caused by radioactivity at the project. Then, for more than two decades, he was director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was the first president of the Health Physics Society. And he saw and protested the profession selling out.
“It is with much reluctance and regret that I now must recognize that the U.S. profession of health physics has become essentially a labor union for the nuclear industry—not a profession of scientists dedicated to protect the worker and members of the public from radiation injury,” Dr. Morgan wrote in 1992.
The radioactivity that has fallen in Japan for many months from Fukushima will have enormous consequences to the people of Japan. The type of accident that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi was “something that never happened—a multiple reactor catastrophe…happening within 200 kilometers of 30 million people,” notes Dr. Alexey Yablokov, lead author of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Dr. Yablokov, a biologist, and two other scientists, in the 2009 book, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, find that 985,000 people died between 1986, the year of the Chernobyl accident, and 2004 from the radioactivity it released. He projects the Fukushima toll will be greater.
“The Fukushima disaster will be worse than Chernobyl,” agrees Dr. Janette Sherman, toxicologist and editor of the Chernobyl book. She also points to the Fukushima disaster involving several nuclear plants along with spent fuel pools affecting a part of Japan “far more populated” than the region around Chernobyl.
Fukushima fall-out has already caused death in the U.S., Dr. Sherman and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project have determined.
Dr. Sherman and Mangano cross-checked data on infant mortality from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with records of Fukushima fallout from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and found that infant mortality spiked by an average of 35 percent in eight cities west of the Rocky Mountains, including San Francisco and Seattle, and by 48 percent in Philadelphia during the ten weeks after the accident began on March 11, 2011.
Infant mortality—defined as death of children from birth to one year old—is considered an early measure of radiation effects because there is rapid growth and cell division at this stage, increasing the impacts of radioactivity. Cancer is a subsequent consequence.
“A global increase in cancer can be expected from the Fukushima discharges,” says Dr. Sherman, who has been an advisor to the National Cancer Institute and has studied the impacts of radiation since working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.
Besides blowing in the wind, the radioactive poisons from Fukushima have been spread in food, which is why several countries have restricted food imports from Japan.
Moreover, the sea along the Fukushima site provides a vast pathway for spreading radioactivity. When radioactive poison gets into the marine environment a “concentration factor” kicks in as the radiation moves up the food chain. Small fish eat radiation-contaminated seaweed, and medium-size fish eat the small fish. Then big fish eat the medium-size fish and radioactivity becomes increasingly concentrated. Some of the fish are migratory, so it’s not just sushi in Tokyo that’s imperiled.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, continues to insist: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” The American Nuclear Society proclaims on its website that “no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident.”
Mangano says that “the absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
Further, last May 3, after doing at least weekly monitoring of radioactivity providing the data that Dr. Sherman and Mangano linked to infant mortality, the EPA announced it would only gather readings every three months. Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, described it as “inexplicable that EPA would shut down its radiation monitoring effort” while Fukushima discharges continued to fall on the U.S.
Inexplicable, but in line, says Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, with the “cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity, since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology.”
Here and there, there’s been a break through the Fukushima cover-up—such the PBS television Frontline program, Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown, that aired last week with an interview with former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan in which he acknowledged that Japanese officials considered at one point an evacuation of the greater Tokyo area with its 30 million people. The New York Times, in a Page One story last week, also reported this based not on its own investigative work but on a six-month inquiry by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation that resulted in a 400-page report.
Yes, as WASH-740-update said decades ago, the scale of a major nuclear plant accident “might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
Another part of the cover-up since Fukushima has been the claim that there is no alternative to nuclear power. As Miranda Spencer wrote in last May’s issue of Extra! magazine, with the Fukushima disaster “U.S. government and nuclear industry spin control kicked in, asserting that a similar disaster couldn’t happen here, and that atomic power is here to stay…An option hardly mentioned: renewable energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal power.”
This is especially important for the nuclear establishment because, as Spencer pointed out, “wind is already cheaper per kilowatt-hour than nuclear” and “the National Research Council estimates that by 2020, the cost of geothermal will be comparable to or lower than that of nuclear (10 cents/kwh versus 6-13 cents/kwh). Solar power, which the Council said “could potentially produce many times the current and projected future U.S. electricity consumption,” is projected to cost anywhere from 8-30 cents/kwh. Also, “A Duke University study found that the cost of solar power has not only recently declined by half, but also is poised to become cheaper than nuclear, even in places that aren’t always sunny.” The claims, she accurately wrote, that safe, clean, renewable power is not here to substitute for atomic energy “simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
But “the story that emerged accordingly presented nuclear energy as a path with no real alternatives.” This is despite Germany, Italy, Switzerland and other nations deciding, because of Fukushima, to pursue safe, clean, renewable power instead of nuclear power. It can be done.
“Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study,” headlined the British newspaper, The Guardian, also in May. It went on: “UN’s climate change science body says renewable supply, particularly solar power, can meet global demand.” The article, about a 1,000-page report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added, however, that this is “only if governments pursue the policies needed to promote green power.”
An especially grisly angle was taken in last week’s The Economist magazine. In an article titled “Radiation and evolution, Surviving fallout,” it reported on a study on birds around Chernobyl and Fukushima. “When researchers looked at the 14 bird species that lived in both regions, they found that the same level of radiation was associated with twice as large a drop in bird numbers in Fukushima as in Chernobyl.”
The Economist said that Dr. Timothy Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, co-author of the study published in Environmental Pollution, believes a “likely explanation is that evolution has already been at work near Chernobyl, killing off individual birds that cannot cope with the background radiation and allowing the genes of those that have some tolerance to be passed on. The birds at Fukushima are only beginning to face the evolutionary challenge of living in a radioactive world.”
Does this point to the consequence of living in “a radioactive world” the elimination of huge numbers of people—with the more radiation-tolerant humans the survivors? Is this what we want? And is there no choice but to live in “a radioactive world.”
Nobel Award-winning biologist Dr. George Wald once said of nuclear power: “If you were to read in the newspapers tomorrow that astronomers had a shocking piece of information for us, they had just found another star is going to collide with the sun and that would be curtains, we’d have eight months more to go and, finished—why—heavens above! You would put on your best clothes and go dancing in the streets—that’s cosmic, that’s fate. You could go out with dignity.” But to die as a result of nuclear power, he said, “is so trivial, it’s so ghastly ignoble as to be, I think, intolerable, altogether unacceptable.” And he called for “the closing down of all nuclear power plants tomorrow.”
That’s more relevant—and urgent—than ever.
The Big Lie was integral to the nuclear push from its start.
Promoters of nuclear power discounted the seriousness of nuclear plant accidents, although government documents acknowledged the vast scale of catastrophe. As the Atomic Energy Commission’s “WASH-740 update,” done at Brookhaven National Laboratory in the 1960s, repeatedly states about a major nuclear plant accident: “The possible size of the area of such a disaster might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
They pushed the “peaceful atom”—although knowing that any nation with a nuclear plant would have the materiel from it (the plutonium produced as a byproduct) and trained personnel to make atomic weapons.
They downplayed the effects of radioactivity claiming it needed to reach a “threshold” to cause harm—even as it became clear that any amount of radioactivity can injure and kill.
And nuclear power would be “too cheap to meter,” they insisted.
And on and on…
The realities of nuclear power have become ever more evident—acutely so because of the disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima.
But the Nuclear Big Lie continues bigger than ever.
In recent weeks, for example, there’s been the move to negate what has been the U.S. government’s benchmark analysis on the impacts of nuclear plant accidents. “Calculation Reactor Accident Consequences 2” (CRAC-2) was done for the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission by the U.S. Department of Energy’s Sandia National Laboratories in 1982. It catalogues the impacts from a meltdown with a breach of containment at every nuclear plant in the U.S.
It divides the consequences into “Peak Early Fatalities,” “Peak Early Injuries,” “Peak Cancer Deaths” and “Scaled Costs” for property damage—and the numbers are chilling.
For the Indian Point 3 nuclear plant north of New York City, for instance, it projects “Peak Early Fatalities” at 50,000, “Peak Early Injuries” at 167,000, “Peak Cancer Deaths” at 14,000 and “Scaled Costs” at $314 billion (in 1980 dollars).
The estimates turn out to be low considering the toll of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant accident.
But in January, the NRC put out a report that it intends to replace CRAC-2 with that it titles the “State-of-the-Art Reactor Consequences Analyses” or SOARCA. SOARCA flatly dismisses the high casualty and damage figures of CRAC-2 (and the WASH-740 update before it). Using as models the Surry nuclear station in Virginia and the Peach Bottom facility in Pennsylvania, each with two nuclear plants, the NRC declared that the “risks of public health consequences from severe accidents” at a nuclear plant “are very small.”
The “long-term risk” of a person dying from cancer from a nuclear plant accident is less than one-in-a billion, says SOARCA. This is because “successful implementation of existing mitigation measures can prevent reactor core damage or delay or reduce offsite releases of radioactive material.”
Tell that to the people impacted by Chernobyl and Fukushima.
Cindy Folkers of the organization Beyond Nuclear declares that the “NRC should immediately withdraw its absurd SOARCA report and get about the business of protecting the public health, safety, and the environment—its mandate—rather than doing the nuclear power industry’s bidding.”
Then there’s the attempt to cover up Fuksushima impacts.
“Health impacts from the radioactive materials released in the Fukushima Daiichi meltdowns will probably be too small to be easily measured,” began a New York Times piece by Matthew Wald last week. That was based on a Health Physics Society program at the National Press Club.
But the Health Physics Society is a booster of nuclear technology. It wasn’t supposed to be that. The health physics profession was founded in 1943 by Karl Z. Morgan, a physicist with an interest in the health effects of radioactivity. He was hired by the Manhattan Project, the World War II crash program to build atomic bombs, to deal with health issues caused by radioactivity at the project. Then, for more than two decades, he was director of health physics at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He was the first president of the Health Physics Society. And he saw and protested the profession selling out.
“It is with much reluctance and regret that I now must recognize that the U.S. profession of health physics has become essentially a labor union for the nuclear industry—not a profession of scientists dedicated to protect the worker and members of the public from radiation injury,” Dr. Morgan wrote in 1992.
The radioactivity that has fallen in Japan for many months from Fukushima will have enormous consequences to the people of Japan. The type of accident that occurred at Fukushima Daiichi was “something that never happened—a multiple reactor catastrophe…happening within 200 kilometers of 30 million people,” notes Dr. Alexey Yablokov, lead author of Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. Dr. Yablokov, a biologist, and two other scientists, in the 2009 book, published by the New York Academy of Sciences, find that 985,000 people died between 1986, the year of the Chernobyl accident, and 2004 from the radioactivity it released. He projects the Fukushima toll will be greater.
“The Fukushima disaster will be worse than Chernobyl,” agrees Dr. Janette Sherman, toxicologist and editor of the Chernobyl book. She also points to the Fukushima disaster involving several nuclear plants along with spent fuel pools affecting a part of Japan “far more populated” than the region around Chernobyl.
Fukushima fall-out has already caused death in the U.S., Dr. Sherman and epidemiologist Joseph Mangano of the Radiation and Public Health Project have determined.
Dr. Sherman and Mangano cross-checked data on infant mortality from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention with records of Fukushima fallout from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency and found that infant mortality spiked by an average of 35 percent in eight cities west of the Rocky Mountains, including San Francisco and Seattle, and by 48 percent in Philadelphia during the ten weeks after the accident began on March 11, 2011.
Infant mortality—defined as death of children from birth to one year old—is considered an early measure of radiation effects because there is rapid growth and cell division at this stage, increasing the impacts of radioactivity. Cancer is a subsequent consequence.
“A global increase in cancer can be expected from the Fukushima discharges,” says Dr. Sherman, who has been an advisor to the National Cancer Institute and has studied the impacts of radiation since working for the Atomic Energy Commission in the 1950s.
Besides blowing in the wind, the radioactive poisons from Fukushima have been spread in food, which is why several countries have restricted food imports from Japan.
Moreover, the sea along the Fukushima site provides a vast pathway for spreading radioactivity. When radioactive poison gets into the marine environment a “concentration factor” kicks in as the radiation moves up the food chain. Small fish eat radiation-contaminated seaweed, and medium-size fish eat the small fish. Then big fish eat the medium-size fish and radioactivity becomes increasingly concentrated. Some of the fish are migratory, so it’s not just sushi in Tokyo that’s imperiled.
Meanwhile, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the nuclear industry trade group, continues to insist: “No health effects are expected among the Japanese people as a result of the events at Fukushima.” The American Nuclear Society proclaims on its website that “no public ill effects are expected from the Fukushima incident.”
Mangano says that “the absurd belief that no one will be harmed by Fukushima is perhaps the strongest evidence of the pattern of deception and denial by nuclear officials in industry and government.”
Further, last May 3, after doing at least weekly monitoring of radioactivity providing the data that Dr. Sherman and Mangano linked to infant mortality, the EPA announced it would only gather readings every three months. Jeff Ruch, executive director of Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, described it as “inexplicable that EPA would shut down its radiation monitoring effort” while Fukushima discharges continued to fall on the U.S.
Inexplicable, but in line, says Dr. Jeffrey Patterson, immediate past president of Physicians for Social Responsibility, with the “cover-up, a minimization of the effects of radioactivity, since the development of nuclear weapons and nuclear technology.”
Here and there, there’s been a break through the Fukushima cover-up—such the PBS television Frontline program, Inside Japan’s Nuclear Meltdown, that aired last week with an interview with former Japanese Prime Minister Naoto Kan in which he acknowledged that Japanese officials considered at one point an evacuation of the greater Tokyo area with its 30 million people. The New York Times, in a Page One story last week, also reported this based not on its own investigative work but on a six-month inquiry by the Rebuild Japan Initiative Foundation that resulted in a 400-page report.
Yes, as WASH-740-update said decades ago, the scale of a major nuclear plant accident “might be equal to that of the State of Pennsylvania.”
Another part of the cover-up since Fukushima has been the claim that there is no alternative to nuclear power. As Miranda Spencer wrote in last May’s issue of Extra! magazine, with the Fukushima disaster “U.S. government and nuclear industry spin control kicked in, asserting that a similar disaster couldn’t happen here, and that atomic power is here to stay…An option hardly mentioned: renewable energy, such as wind, solar and geothermal power.”
This is especially important for the nuclear establishment because, as Spencer pointed out, “wind is already cheaper per kilowatt-hour than nuclear” and “the National Research Council estimates that by 2020, the cost of geothermal will be comparable to or lower than that of nuclear (10 cents/kwh versus 6-13 cents/kwh). Solar power, which the Council said “could potentially produce many times the current and projected future U.S. electricity consumption,” is projected to cost anywhere from 8-30 cents/kwh. Also, “A Duke University study found that the cost of solar power has not only recently declined by half, but also is poised to become cheaper than nuclear, even in places that aren’t always sunny.” The claims, she accurately wrote, that safe, clean, renewable power is not here to substitute for atomic energy “simply don’t stand up to scrutiny.”
But “the story that emerged accordingly presented nuclear energy as a path with no real alternatives.” This is despite Germany, Italy, Switzerland and other nations deciding, because of Fukushima, to pursue safe, clean, renewable power instead of nuclear power. It can be done.
“Renewable Energy Can Power the World, Says Landmark IPCC Study,” headlined the British newspaper, The Guardian, also in May. It went on: “UN’s climate change science body says renewable supply, particularly solar power, can meet global demand.” The article, about a 1,000-page report of the United Nation’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, added, however, that this is “only if governments pursue the policies needed to promote green power.”
An especially grisly angle was taken in last week’s The Economist magazine. In an article titled “Radiation and evolution, Surviving fallout,” it reported on a study on birds around Chernobyl and Fukushima. “When researchers looked at the 14 bird species that lived in both regions, they found that the same level of radiation was associated with twice as large a drop in bird numbers in Fukushima as in Chernobyl.”
The Economist said that Dr. Timothy Mousseau, professor of biological sciences at the University of South Carolina, co-author of the study published in Environmental Pollution, believes a “likely explanation is that evolution has already been at work near Chernobyl, killing off individual birds that cannot cope with the background radiation and allowing the genes of those that have some tolerance to be passed on. The birds at Fukushima are only beginning to face the evolutionary challenge of living in a radioactive world.”
Does this point to the consequence of living in “a radioactive world” the elimination of huge numbers of people—with the more radiation-tolerant humans the survivors? Is this what we want? And is there no choice but to live in “a radioactive world.”
Nobel Award-winning biologist Dr. George Wald once said of nuclear power: “If you were to read in the newspapers tomorrow that astronomers had a shocking piece of information for us, they had just found another star is going to collide with the sun and that would be curtains, we’d have eight months more to go and, finished—why—heavens above! You would put on your best clothes and go dancing in the streets—that’s cosmic, that’s fate. You could go out with dignity.” But to die as a result of nuclear power, he said, “is so trivial, it’s so ghastly ignoble as to be, I think, intolerable, altogether unacceptable.” And he called for “the closing down of all nuclear power plants tomorrow.”
That’s more relevant—and urgent—than ever.
Monday, February 13, 2012
As if a Runaway Train, the Nuclear Juggernaut Roars On
Last week’s granting by the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission of combined construction and operating licenses for two nuclear plants to be built in Georgia—both Westinghouse AP1000s—is the culmination of a scheme developed by nuclear promoters 20 years ago.
There have been huge changes in energy since. The consequences in death and illness of of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster have become manifest. Wind energy has become cheaper than nuclear—thus is the fastest growing new energy source—and solar is well on its way. The two troubled giants of nuclear power, Westinghouse and General Electric, sold out to the Japanese in 2006: Toshiba took over
Westinghouse’s nuclear operations and GE partnered with Hitachi. And then there’s been the catastrophe at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant complex.
Still, as if a runaway train, the nuclear juggernaut has roared on.
The strategy for what happened last week was set with the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The vote in the House of Representatives was 381-to-37. “As the bill wound its way through the Senate and the House, the nuclear industry won nearly every vote that mattered, proving that Congress remains captive to industry lobbying and political contributions over public opinion,” reported the Nuclear Information & Resource Service then. (The same could be said about Congress now.) The New York Times said, “Nuclear lobbyists called the bill their biggest victory in Congress since the Three Mile Island accident.”
The measure, signed into law by the first President Bush, provided for “one-step” nuclear plant licensing. Previously, there were hearings held in the area where a nuclear plant would be built—one on granting a construction license and, later, a second on whether to issue an operating license.
This presented a big problem for the nuclear industry—not that the Atomic Energy Commission or its successor, the Nuclear Energy Commission, ever turned down an application for a construction or operating license. But at the hearings for a construction license major issues arose—such as, with the proposed Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, New York, the impossibility of evacuation off the crowded island in the event of a major accident, important in the eventual stoppage of Shoreham. And at operating license hearings, whistle-blowers would emerge, often engineers and others involved in the construction of the plant, going public with testimony about faults, defects and dangers.
Under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, instead of these hearings, the NRC, sitting in Washington far from the areas and people to be impacted, would be authorized to grant in one move a construction and operating license. That’s what the NRC did last week for the two AP1000 nuclear plants that the Southern Company plans to build at its Vogtle site near Augusta.
Westinghouse said in the 90s that with this “one-step” process, it would take but five years after NRC approval for an AP1000 to be completed. Indeed, that was what the nuclear industry was saying last week about the Georgia project.
Westinghouse also, before the Energy Policy Act of 1992, touted its AP1000 as an “advanced” nuclear power plant. The act specifically greased the skids for “advanced” nuclear power plants. It featured a section titled “Subtitle C-Advanced Nuclear Reactors” that stated: “The purposes of this subtitle are (1) to require the Secretary [of Energy] to carry out civilian nuclear programs in a way that will lead toward the commercial availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies; and (2) to authorize such activities to further the timely availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies.”
To push the new system along, NuStart, which calls itself “a consortium for new nuclear energy development,” was formed. NuStart, says further on its website
(www.nustartenergy.com), that it has been “formed to respond to a Department of Energy issued solicitation to demonstrate the NRC’s COL [Construction and Operating License] process.” NuStart has been working closely with utilities for them to utilize the one-step licensing process and build new “advanced” nuclear plants. As to its funding, its website says that “NuStart is participating in a 50-50 cost sharing program” with the Department of Energy.
Thus U.S. tax dollars have been and are being used for a system all but eliminating public input to get new “advanced” nuclear power plants up and running—and fast.
NuStart lists 10 corporate “members.” These include the Southern Company, Exelon, Entergy and other utilities committed to nuclear power as well as Westinghouse and GE. The president of NuStart “since its inception,” says the NuStart website, is Marilyn Krey. “Marilyn is also Vice President, Nuclear Project Development for Exelon,” it states. Exelon owns the most nuclear power plants of any U.S. utility. “Prior to joining Exelon, Marilyn was a reactor engineer and project manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” it goes on. Yes, the nuclear power-revolving door.
The chairman of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, voted against the licensing on February 9. He cited the need to “learn the lessons from Fukushima.” Jaczko stated: “I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima had never happened.”
But the other four NRS commissioners—nuclear power zealots all—voted for the licensing. “There is no amnesia individually or collectively regarding the events of March 11, 2011 and the ensuing accident at Fukushima,” wrote Commissioner Kristine Svinicki for the four. No, not amnesia—they all know of the Fukushima disaster, but with their staunch allegiance to nuclear power, they don’t give a damn.
There will be challenges to the licensing—which beyond being the first issuance of combined construction and operating licenses is the first time since the 1970s that the NRC has given approval for a new nuclear power plant. There were no applications to build new nuclear plants as atomic energy, rightfully, went into a deep eclipse for decades.
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy announced: “Our challenge maintains that the NRC is violating federal laws by issuing the license without fully considering the important lessons of the catastrophic Fukushima accident.” It will also raise various safety issues involving the AP1000.
And there are many. Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts—one of the few members of Congress not in the pockets of the nuclear industry or a national nuclear laboratory in their district—earlier in the year wrote Jaczko, “These concerns include those raised by one of the [Nuclear Regulatory] Commission’s most long-serving staff that there is a risk that an earthquake at, or aircraft impact on, the AP1000 could result in a catastrophic core meltdown.” In a statement last week, he re-emphasized the finding made in a report to the NRC by its staffer Dr. John Ma, a structural engineer, that the AP1000’s “containment structure could”—in Ma’s words, “ shatter like a glass cup”— because of “flaws in the design of the shield building if impacted by an earthquake or commercial aircraft.”
Of the NRC’s licensing move, Markey said: “Today, the NRC abdicated its duty to protect public health and safety, just to make construction faster and cheaper for the nuclear industry.”
As to finances, not only was—and is—taxpayer money being used to facilitate the new nuclear plant licensing scheme, it is the basis for their construction. Wall Street is wary of nuclear power. So the Department of Energy is providing the Southern Company with $8.3 billion in taxpayer-based loan guarantees for its new nuclear plants, part of a multi-billion dollar loan guarantee fund that has been established for new nuclear power plants.
In a sales brochure for the AP1000—online at www.AP1000.westinghousenuclear.com
—Westinghouse trumpets it as “Simple, Safe, Innovative.” Throughout the brochure is also the line: “The Nuclear Renaissance Starts Here.” But although the AP1000 might be of a different design, even the brochure acknowledges severe accidents can happen. “The AP1000 is designed to mitigate a postulated severe accident such as a core melt,” says the brochure. Mitigate, not eliminate.
It also includes a “Probabilistic Risk Assessment” by the NRC on the possibility of “Core Damage Frequency” and “Large Release Frequency” at an AP1000. For both, the odds are given as very low, reminiscent of the very low odds NASA once set for a catastrophic accident involving one of its space shuttles—until the Challenger blew up.
“It follows,” says Westinghouse, “that the AP1000 also improves upon the probability of large release goals for advanced reactor designs in the event of a severe accident scenario to retain the molten core within the reactor vessel.” Improves upon—not eliminates the release of catastrophic amounts of radioactivity.
If Americans are anxious about a disaster involving the AP1000—and want wind and solar and other safe, clean, renewable energy technologies which they can live with instead—well, under the new system, that’s too bad. With the new nuclear licensing system—devised 20 years ago and now moving ahead despite Chernobyl and Fukushima and the availability of energy alternatives that render nuclear power unnecessary—the citizenry and what they want are to be excluded.
The NRC, meanwhile, is expected to next month issue combined construction and operating licenses to South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to also build and run a pair of AP1000s.
As anti-nuclear crusader Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been saying: “People must rise up.” Indeed, they must.
There have been huge changes in energy since. The consequences in death and illness of of the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear plant disaster have become manifest. Wind energy has become cheaper than nuclear—thus is the fastest growing new energy source—and solar is well on its way. The two troubled giants of nuclear power, Westinghouse and General Electric, sold out to the Japanese in 2006: Toshiba took over
Westinghouse’s nuclear operations and GE partnered with Hitachi. And then there’s been the catastrophe at the Fukushima-Daiichi nuclear plant complex.
Still, as if a runaway train, the nuclear juggernaut has roared on.
The strategy for what happened last week was set with the passage of the Energy Policy Act of 1992. The vote in the House of Representatives was 381-to-37. “As the bill wound its way through the Senate and the House, the nuclear industry won nearly every vote that mattered, proving that Congress remains captive to industry lobbying and political contributions over public opinion,” reported the Nuclear Information & Resource Service then. (The same could be said about Congress now.) The New York Times said, “Nuclear lobbyists called the bill their biggest victory in Congress since the Three Mile Island accident.”
The measure, signed into law by the first President Bush, provided for “one-step” nuclear plant licensing. Previously, there were hearings held in the area where a nuclear plant would be built—one on granting a construction license and, later, a second on whether to issue an operating license.
This presented a big problem for the nuclear industry—not that the Atomic Energy Commission or its successor, the Nuclear Energy Commission, ever turned down an application for a construction or operating license. But at the hearings for a construction license major issues arose—such as, with the proposed Shoreham nuclear plant on Long Island, New York, the impossibility of evacuation off the crowded island in the event of a major accident, important in the eventual stoppage of Shoreham. And at operating license hearings, whistle-blowers would emerge, often engineers and others involved in the construction of the plant, going public with testimony about faults, defects and dangers.
Under the Energy Policy Act of 1992, instead of these hearings, the NRC, sitting in Washington far from the areas and people to be impacted, would be authorized to grant in one move a construction and operating license. That’s what the NRC did last week for the two AP1000 nuclear plants that the Southern Company plans to build at its Vogtle site near Augusta.
Westinghouse said in the 90s that with this “one-step” process, it would take but five years after NRC approval for an AP1000 to be completed. Indeed, that was what the nuclear industry was saying last week about the Georgia project.
Westinghouse also, before the Energy Policy Act of 1992, touted its AP1000 as an “advanced” nuclear power plant. The act specifically greased the skids for “advanced” nuclear power plants. It featured a section titled “Subtitle C-Advanced Nuclear Reactors” that stated: “The purposes of this subtitle are (1) to require the Secretary [of Energy] to carry out civilian nuclear programs in a way that will lead toward the commercial availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies; and (2) to authorize such activities to further the timely availability of advanced nuclear reactor technologies.”
To push the new system along, NuStart, which calls itself “a consortium for new nuclear energy development,” was formed. NuStart, says further on its website
(www.nustartenergy.com), that it has been “formed to respond to a Department of Energy issued solicitation to demonstrate the NRC’s COL [Construction and Operating License] process.” NuStart has been working closely with utilities for them to utilize the one-step licensing process and build new “advanced” nuclear plants. As to its funding, its website says that “NuStart is participating in a 50-50 cost sharing program” with the Department of Energy.
Thus U.S. tax dollars have been and are being used for a system all but eliminating public input to get new “advanced” nuclear power plants up and running—and fast.
NuStart lists 10 corporate “members.” These include the Southern Company, Exelon, Entergy and other utilities committed to nuclear power as well as Westinghouse and GE. The president of NuStart “since its inception,” says the NuStart website, is Marilyn Krey. “Marilyn is also Vice President, Nuclear Project Development for Exelon,” it states. Exelon owns the most nuclear power plants of any U.S. utility. “Prior to joining Exelon, Marilyn was a reactor engineer and project manager for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission,” it goes on. Yes, the nuclear power-revolving door.
The chairman of the NRC, Gregory Jaczko, voted against the licensing on February 9. He cited the need to “learn the lessons from Fukushima.” Jaczko stated: “I cannot support issuing this license as if Fukushima had never happened.”
But the other four NRS commissioners—nuclear power zealots all—voted for the licensing. “There is no amnesia individually or collectively regarding the events of March 11, 2011 and the ensuing accident at Fukushima,” wrote Commissioner Kristine Svinicki for the four. No, not amnesia—they all know of the Fukushima disaster, but with their staunch allegiance to nuclear power, they don’t give a damn.
There will be challenges to the licensing—which beyond being the first issuance of combined construction and operating licenses is the first time since the 1970s that the NRC has given approval for a new nuclear power plant. There were no applications to build new nuclear plants as atomic energy, rightfully, went into a deep eclipse for decades.
The Southern Alliance for Clean Energy announced: “Our challenge maintains that the NRC is violating federal laws by issuing the license without fully considering the important lessons of the catastrophic Fukushima accident.” It will also raise various safety issues involving the AP1000.
And there are many. Representative Edward Markey of Massachusetts—one of the few members of Congress not in the pockets of the nuclear industry or a national nuclear laboratory in their district—earlier in the year wrote Jaczko, “These concerns include those raised by one of the [Nuclear Regulatory] Commission’s most long-serving staff that there is a risk that an earthquake at, or aircraft impact on, the AP1000 could result in a catastrophic core meltdown.” In a statement last week, he re-emphasized the finding made in a report to the NRC by its staffer Dr. John Ma, a structural engineer, that the AP1000’s “containment structure could”—in Ma’s words, “ shatter like a glass cup”— because of “flaws in the design of the shield building if impacted by an earthquake or commercial aircraft.”
Of the NRC’s licensing move, Markey said: “Today, the NRC abdicated its duty to protect public health and safety, just to make construction faster and cheaper for the nuclear industry.”
As to finances, not only was—and is—taxpayer money being used to facilitate the new nuclear plant licensing scheme, it is the basis for their construction. Wall Street is wary of nuclear power. So the Department of Energy is providing the Southern Company with $8.3 billion in taxpayer-based loan guarantees for its new nuclear plants, part of a multi-billion dollar loan guarantee fund that has been established for new nuclear power plants.
In a sales brochure for the AP1000—online at www.AP1000.westinghousenuclear.com
—Westinghouse trumpets it as “Simple, Safe, Innovative.” Throughout the brochure is also the line: “The Nuclear Renaissance Starts Here.” But although the AP1000 might be of a different design, even the brochure acknowledges severe accidents can happen. “The AP1000 is designed to mitigate a postulated severe accident such as a core melt,” says the brochure. Mitigate, not eliminate.
It also includes a “Probabilistic Risk Assessment” by the NRC on the possibility of “Core Damage Frequency” and “Large Release Frequency” at an AP1000. For both, the odds are given as very low, reminiscent of the very low odds NASA once set for a catastrophic accident involving one of its space shuttles—until the Challenger blew up.
“It follows,” says Westinghouse, “that the AP1000 also improves upon the probability of large release goals for advanced reactor designs in the event of a severe accident scenario to retain the molten core within the reactor vessel.” Improves upon—not eliminates the release of catastrophic amounts of radioactivity.
If Americans are anxious about a disaster involving the AP1000—and want wind and solar and other safe, clean, renewable energy technologies which they can live with instead—well, under the new system, that’s too bad. With the new nuclear licensing system—devised 20 years ago and now moving ahead despite Chernobyl and Fukushima and the availability of energy alternatives that render nuclear power unnecessary—the citizenry and what they want are to be excluded.
The NRC, meanwhile, is expected to next month issue combined construction and operating licenses to South Carolina Electric & Gas Company to also build and run a pair of AP1000s.
As anti-nuclear crusader Dr. Helen Caldicott, president emeritus of Physicians for Social Responsibility, has been saying: “People must rise up.” Indeed, they must.
Sunday, January 22, 2012
A Way Around the Federal Nuclear Power Fix
The nuclear power program in the United States was set up rigged—to allow the federal government to push atomic energy with state and local governments “pre-empted” on most issues.
That’s what the State of Vermont was confronted with last week as a federal judge blocked the state’s attempts to shut down the accident-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.
But there’s a way around this federal nuclear fix—the use by states of their power of “eminent domain.” That’s a legal principle going back centuries and is how, commonly, states condemn property for a highway right-of-way if the owners refuse to sell.
The application of the state’s power of “eminent domain” to nuclear power was pioneered in New York State in the 1980s—and was how the completed Shoreham nuclear plant was stopped from opening. That ended the scheme of nuclear promoters to turn Long Island into a “nuclear park” with seven to 11 nuclear plants.
The Long Island Power Act was passed by New York State in 1985 creating a Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) with the power to seize the assets and stock of the utility behind this nuclear scheme, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO).
The federal government was gung-ho for Shoreham. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had approved the start-up of operations at Shoreham, the first of three nuclear plants to be built on that site, and the construction of two more nuclear plants at Jamesport, to be joined by two more there. More plants would go up between the two with all fronting on the Long Island Sound.
But by enacting the Long Island Power Act that utilized the state’s power of “eminent domain,” New York State made clear that if LILCO persisted with nuclear power, the state would eliminate it.
This strategy can be used by the State of Vermont—and other states—faced by the nuclear juggernaut of the federal government and nuclear industry. Indeed, it’s a strategy that needs to be pursued because it is highly unlikely that federal nuclear officials will be sensible or fair—or uphold democracy.
The NRC like its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), has never, for example, denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anyplace, anywhere in the United States. These days, with no new nuclear plants having both been ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973, the NRC has been busy rubber-stamping “license renewal” applications of utilities to run their existing plants—including Vermont Yankee—20 more years. It has also begun to give the go-ahead to utilities to build new plants.
The Long Island Power Act “set forth a mechanism for getting rid of the utility by giving the public authority which it created the power to condemn the utility’s assets and stock,” explains Irving Like, a co-author of the act.
“With this we had the ability to tell LILCO: either you shut down the Shoreham plant or we will condemn you,” he said. Like, of Babylon, Long Island, had previously written the Environmental Bill of Rights of the New York State Constitution.
With Vermont now “looking for a path forward,” Like suggested last week that it—and other states faced by the federal government and nuclear industry’s drive—should “see if you can model a statute along those lines.” He would be glad to share his knowledge and can be contacted at ilike@rlt-law.com
Also co-author of the Long Island Power Act was Steve Liss, counsel to the Environmental Conservation Committee of the New York State Assembly, who last week spoke of how “eminent domain” gives a state the power to act “in the public interest for a lawful purpose.” The state must pay “fair market value” for what it condemns, Liss added.
Although Vermont Yankee’s owner is Entergy, a utility based in Louisiana which has been buying nuclear plants around the U.S.—including Vermont Yankee from its original owner—the State of Vermont’s power of “eminent domain” can be applied to it, Liss said. The state, after enacting a legal foundation similar to the Long Island Power Act, could move against the assets of Entergy in Vermont, he said.
Another strategy, said Liss, would be for Vermont to acquire the utilities in Vermont that distribute the electricity from Vermont Yankee and which own the transmission lines through which it runs—and refuse the electricity and bar its transmission over the lines.
In his January 19th ruling, U.S. District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha declared that the State of Vermont’s demand that Vermont Yankee be shut down was “grounded in radiological concerns,” and this is an issue on which the federal government has “pre-empted” state and local governments.
Indeed, that is central to the scheme concocted in the late 1940s and 1950s by those seeking to promote atomic energy. They came out of the Manhattan Project, the World War II program to build nuclear weapons. They sought after the war to continue and expand their nuclear work. They would keep building weapons but atomic bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial spin-off—they can’t be sold. So there would be a limit in constructing atomic and hydrogen bombs. Thus this “nuclear establishment”—officials and scientists of the multi-billion dollar Manhattan Project and the project’s corporate contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse—sought to perpetuate the endeavor with other uses of atomic energy, especially nuclear power plants.
The Manhattan Project in 1946 became the Atomic Energy Commission, to be given extraordinary powers, particularly with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, by a U.S. Congress that the “nuclear establishment” found (then and now) easy for it to manipulate. This included federal jurisdiction over the issue of radioactivity, as noted by Judge Murtha.
A licensing system for nuclear power plants was devised to give an illusion of democratic process. Hearing officers, many of whom would come from the national nuclear laboratories which sprang up with the Manhattan Project, would be called “judges.” In fact, the hearings have been kangaroo courts—consistently approving atomic projects. The NRC, like the AEC before it, has been an unabashed booster of nuclear power. The system is a sham.
Like, in the 1960s, learned well about the impossibility of making change when a government is dominated by a special interest. He was deeply involved in efforts to stop New York State public works czar Robert Moses from building a four-lane highway on Fire Island, a slender barrier beach south of Long Island. The road would have devastated the famed nature and communities on Fire Island. Moses—the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Power Broker—had such huge power in New York State that stopping his plan through the state couldn’t happen, concluded Like and other highway opponents.
So, instead, a campaign to create a Fire Island National Seashore was launched—to use the power of the federal government to stop Moses.
A Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore was formed with Like as its counsel. It was chaired by Maurice Barbash, also a lover of Fire Island and Like’s brother-in-law. By 1964, it had led in getting a Fire Island National Seashore established and the Moses road stopped.
Two decades later, Like and Barbash flipped the strategy when it came to Shoreham –and LILCO’s other proposed Long Island nuclear plants. A Citizens Committee to Replace LILCO—with a state public power entity—was created with Like its counsel, Barbash its chairman.
State power would be used to stop the nuclear assault on Long Island.
The Long Island Power Act created a foundation for preventing this plan from moving ahead and also committed the state agency it created, the Long Island Power Authority, to developing clean, safe, renewable energy for Long Island.
In 1989, LILCO abandoned Shoreham because of the Long Island Power Act. It sold Shoreham to LIPA for $1. It was then decommissioned as a nuclear facility. Also helping greatly with this outcome were continuing anti-nuclear demonstrations on Long Island, legal action by Suffolk County against LILCO under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the refusal of Suffolk and New York State to adopt or implement a federally-required evacuation plan for the plant (after both governments concluded evacuation of heavily-populated Long Island would be impossible in the event of a major nuclear accident), and other legal, political and activist challenges.
Federal nuclear promoters were extremely upset. U.S. Energy Secretary John S. Herrington declared at a Nuclear Power Assembly in Washington that “the Shoreham plant must open!” He asserted: “If it doesn’t, the signals will be the low point in this [nuclear] industry’s history. If it does, we are going to begin a brand new era.”
Well, it didn’t open.
In recent times, trying to use global warming as an excuse (although the nuclear “cycle” of mining, milling, fuel enrichment and the rest of it contributes significantly to global warming), the federal government and the nuclear industry has tried for what it calls a “revival” of nuclear power.
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster has threatened that effort. And, not incidentally, the reactor at Vermont Yankee—and the one which had been at Shoreham—were both General Electric Mark I reactors, the same as those that exploded and released many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons at Fukushima.
For the federal government and nuclear industry to allow Vermont Yankee and other U.S. nuclear plants to operate for 60 years is inviting disaster. The NRC has now given 20-year “license renewals” to more than half of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants—turning a deaf ear to strong state and local opposition. Nuclear plants have been long seen as having an operating life of no more than 40 years, after which their metal components would become embrittled by radioactivity and they’d be far more prone to accidents. The NRC is also considering extending the 60 year extension period to 80 years. Meanwhile, the claim of nuclear promoters that the new nuclear plants they seek to build (and the NRC has started to approve) are “inherently safe” is completely false. They, like the Fukushima plants, like Chernobyl, like Vermont Yankee, like all nuclear power plants, are inherently unsafe.
Importantly, nuclear power is not necessary. From solar to wind to wave power to tidal power to bio-fuels to geothermal to hydropower and on and on, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies can provide all the power we need.
But how to stop the decades-old “nuclear establishment” and its confederates?
A challenge to the Atomic Energy Act and other such laws giving federal nuclear officials the powers to run roughshod over state and local governments—and the people—is vital. There must be an end to the rigged U.S. nuclear power program Taking on the federal nuclear officials must happen. Vermont should appeal Judge Murtha’s ruling. And, as in the case of Shoreham and the scheme to load Long Island with nuclear power plants, other legal, political and activist initiatives need be launched.
Meanwhile, Vermont and other states can replicate New York State’s use of the state power of “eminent domain” to fight nuclear power. It’s a strategy that can work. Through it an end-run can be made around the would-be mandate of federal nuclear officials and the nuclear industry that we must accept deadly nuclear power.
That’s what the State of Vermont was confronted with last week as a federal judge blocked the state’s attempts to shut down the accident-plagued Vermont Yankee nuclear plant.
But there’s a way around this federal nuclear fix—the use by states of their power of “eminent domain.” That’s a legal principle going back centuries and is how, commonly, states condemn property for a highway right-of-way if the owners refuse to sell.
The application of the state’s power of “eminent domain” to nuclear power was pioneered in New York State in the 1980s—and was how the completed Shoreham nuclear plant was stopped from opening. That ended the scheme of nuclear promoters to turn Long Island into a “nuclear park” with seven to 11 nuclear plants.
The Long Island Power Act was passed by New York State in 1985 creating a Long Island Power Authority (LIPA) with the power to seize the assets and stock of the utility behind this nuclear scheme, the Long Island Lighting Company (LILCO).
The federal government was gung-ho for Shoreham. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC) had approved the start-up of operations at Shoreham, the first of three nuclear plants to be built on that site, and the construction of two more nuclear plants at Jamesport, to be joined by two more there. More plants would go up between the two with all fronting on the Long Island Sound.
But by enacting the Long Island Power Act that utilized the state’s power of “eminent domain,” New York State made clear that if LILCO persisted with nuclear power, the state would eliminate it.
This strategy can be used by the State of Vermont—and other states—faced by the nuclear juggernaut of the federal government and nuclear industry. Indeed, it’s a strategy that needs to be pursued because it is highly unlikely that federal nuclear officials will be sensible or fair—or uphold democracy.
The NRC like its predecessor agency, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), has never, for example, denied a construction or operating license for a nuclear plant anyplace, anywhere in the United States. These days, with no new nuclear plants having both been ordered and built in the U.S. since 1973, the NRC has been busy rubber-stamping “license renewal” applications of utilities to run their existing plants—including Vermont Yankee—20 more years. It has also begun to give the go-ahead to utilities to build new plants.
The Long Island Power Act “set forth a mechanism for getting rid of the utility by giving the public authority which it created the power to condemn the utility’s assets and stock,” explains Irving Like, a co-author of the act.
“With this we had the ability to tell LILCO: either you shut down the Shoreham plant or we will condemn you,” he said. Like, of Babylon, Long Island, had previously written the Environmental Bill of Rights of the New York State Constitution.
With Vermont now “looking for a path forward,” Like suggested last week that it—and other states faced by the federal government and nuclear industry’s drive—should “see if you can model a statute along those lines.” He would be glad to share his knowledge and can be contacted at ilike@rlt-law.com
Also co-author of the Long Island Power Act was Steve Liss, counsel to the Environmental Conservation Committee of the New York State Assembly, who last week spoke of how “eminent domain” gives a state the power to act “in the public interest for a lawful purpose.” The state must pay “fair market value” for what it condemns, Liss added.
Although Vermont Yankee’s owner is Entergy, a utility based in Louisiana which has been buying nuclear plants around the U.S.—including Vermont Yankee from its original owner—the State of Vermont’s power of “eminent domain” can be applied to it, Liss said. The state, after enacting a legal foundation similar to the Long Island Power Act, could move against the assets of Entergy in Vermont, he said.
Another strategy, said Liss, would be for Vermont to acquire the utilities in Vermont that distribute the electricity from Vermont Yankee and which own the transmission lines through which it runs—and refuse the electricity and bar its transmission over the lines.
In his January 19th ruling, U.S. District Court Judge J. Garvan Murtha declared that the State of Vermont’s demand that Vermont Yankee be shut down was “grounded in radiological concerns,” and this is an issue on which the federal government has “pre-empted” state and local governments.
Indeed, that is central to the scheme concocted in the late 1940s and 1950s by those seeking to promote atomic energy. They came out of the Manhattan Project, the World War II program to build nuclear weapons. They sought after the war to continue and expand their nuclear work. They would keep building weapons but atomic bombs don’t lend themselves to commercial spin-off—they can’t be sold. So there would be a limit in constructing atomic and hydrogen bombs. Thus this “nuclear establishment”—officials and scientists of the multi-billion dollar Manhattan Project and the project’s corporate contractors, notably General Electric and Westinghouse—sought to perpetuate the endeavor with other uses of atomic energy, especially nuclear power plants.
The Manhattan Project in 1946 became the Atomic Energy Commission, to be given extraordinary powers, particularly with the Atomic Energy Act of 1954, by a U.S. Congress that the “nuclear establishment” found (then and now) easy for it to manipulate. This included federal jurisdiction over the issue of radioactivity, as noted by Judge Murtha.
A licensing system for nuclear power plants was devised to give an illusion of democratic process. Hearing officers, many of whom would come from the national nuclear laboratories which sprang up with the Manhattan Project, would be called “judges.” In fact, the hearings have been kangaroo courts—consistently approving atomic projects. The NRC, like the AEC before it, has been an unabashed booster of nuclear power. The system is a sham.
Like, in the 1960s, learned well about the impossibility of making change when a government is dominated by a special interest. He was deeply involved in efforts to stop New York State public works czar Robert Moses from building a four-lane highway on Fire Island, a slender barrier beach south of Long Island. The road would have devastated the famed nature and communities on Fire Island. Moses—the subject of the Pulitzer Prize-winning book The Power Broker—had such huge power in New York State that stopping his plan through the state couldn’t happen, concluded Like and other highway opponents.
So, instead, a campaign to create a Fire Island National Seashore was launched—to use the power of the federal government to stop Moses.
A Citizens Committee for a Fire Island National Seashore was formed with Like as its counsel. It was chaired by Maurice Barbash, also a lover of Fire Island and Like’s brother-in-law. By 1964, it had led in getting a Fire Island National Seashore established and the Moses road stopped.
Two decades later, Like and Barbash flipped the strategy when it came to Shoreham –and LILCO’s other proposed Long Island nuclear plants. A Citizens Committee to Replace LILCO—with a state public power entity—was created with Like its counsel, Barbash its chairman.
State power would be used to stop the nuclear assault on Long Island.
The Long Island Power Act created a foundation for preventing this plan from moving ahead and also committed the state agency it created, the Long Island Power Authority, to developing clean, safe, renewable energy for Long Island.
In 1989, LILCO abandoned Shoreham because of the Long Island Power Act. It sold Shoreham to LIPA for $1. It was then decommissioned as a nuclear facility. Also helping greatly with this outcome were continuing anti-nuclear demonstrations on Long Island, legal action by Suffolk County against LILCO under the Racketeer Influenced and Corrupt Organizations (RICO) Act, the refusal of Suffolk and New York State to adopt or implement a federally-required evacuation plan for the plant (after both governments concluded evacuation of heavily-populated Long Island would be impossible in the event of a major nuclear accident), and other legal, political and activist challenges.
Federal nuclear promoters were extremely upset. U.S. Energy Secretary John S. Herrington declared at a Nuclear Power Assembly in Washington that “the Shoreham plant must open!” He asserted: “If it doesn’t, the signals will be the low point in this [nuclear] industry’s history. If it does, we are going to begin a brand new era.”
Well, it didn’t open.
In recent times, trying to use global warming as an excuse (although the nuclear “cycle” of mining, milling, fuel enrichment and the rest of it contributes significantly to global warming), the federal government and the nuclear industry has tried for what it calls a “revival” of nuclear power.
The Fukushima Daiichi disaster has threatened that effort. And, not incidentally, the reactor at Vermont Yankee—and the one which had been at Shoreham—were both General Electric Mark I reactors, the same as those that exploded and released many thousands of tons of radioactive poisons at Fukushima.
For the federal government and nuclear industry to allow Vermont Yankee and other U.S. nuclear plants to operate for 60 years is inviting disaster. The NRC has now given 20-year “license renewals” to more than half of the 104 U.S. nuclear plants—turning a deaf ear to strong state and local opposition. Nuclear plants have been long seen as having an operating life of no more than 40 years, after which their metal components would become embrittled by radioactivity and they’d be far more prone to accidents. The NRC is also considering extending the 60 year extension period to 80 years. Meanwhile, the claim of nuclear promoters that the new nuclear plants they seek to build (and the NRC has started to approve) are “inherently safe” is completely false. They, like the Fukushima plants, like Chernobyl, like Vermont Yankee, like all nuclear power plants, are inherently unsafe.
Importantly, nuclear power is not necessary. From solar to wind to wave power to tidal power to bio-fuels to geothermal to hydropower and on and on, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies can provide all the power we need.
But how to stop the decades-old “nuclear establishment” and its confederates?
A challenge to the Atomic Energy Act and other such laws giving federal nuclear officials the powers to run roughshod over state and local governments—and the people—is vital. There must be an end to the rigged U.S. nuclear power program Taking on the federal nuclear officials must happen. Vermont should appeal Judge Murtha’s ruling. And, as in the case of Shoreham and the scheme to load Long Island with nuclear power plants, other legal, political and activist initiatives need be launched.
Meanwhile, Vermont and other states can replicate New York State’s use of the state power of “eminent domain” to fight nuclear power. It’s a strategy that can work. Through it an end-run can be made around the would-be mandate of federal nuclear officials and the nuclear industry that we must accept deadly nuclear power.
Thursday, January 19, 2012
After Fukushima and Chernobyl, Here's The Best Energy Alternative
(Published today on lipolitics.com)
In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl nuclear plant disasters, it is clear that nuclear power is far too dangerous an energy technology. And considering the global warming impact of burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—they also need to be eliminated.
So how are we to power society?
In fact, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready to do it.
Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a 2009 cover story unveiled its “A Plan for a Sustainable Future.” It declared in its “Plan to Power 100Percent of the Planet with Renewables” that, “wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.”
The New Scientist, the highly-respected British magazine, also in a 2009 cover story titled “Our Brighter Future”–presented presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is at hand.
A while back, I visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. In one division, solar power was being used to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen — with the hydrogen available for use as fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”
In another division, which pioneered thin-film photovoltaic technology (sheets of material embedded with solar collectors that can coat a large building, even a skyscraper, and have the building become a huge power generator), the scientists spoke of solar photovoltaics generating all the energy the world needs. Thin-film photovoltaic is now being widely used in Europe.
In the wind division at NREL, scientists were speaking about the advanced wind turbines they have developed—especially for off-shore siting—and the abundant wind resources all over the world that could provide, they, too, stressed, all the energy the world would need.
All the NREL scientists from the various divisions speaking of how the renewable energy technology they are working on could provide all the energy the world needs might not all be right regarding a specific technology—but together a mix of these and other safe, clean energy technologies can indeed provide all the energy the world needs.
There’s also the NREL division in which technologies to use biomass to produce fuel, not out of food crops but from non-edible vegetation and various waste products. And so on.
Or consider “hot dry rock” (HDR) geothermal. It turns out that below half of the planet, just one to six miles down, it’s extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, geysers are formed. But now a technology has been developed that sends water down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise to the surface in a second production well — which can turn a turbine and generate electricity. Dave Duchane, the HDR manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told me: “Hot dry rock has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and, indeed, all the world.”
Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, they render as unnecessary nuclear power, as well as fossil fuels.
Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, last year published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, which concludes that solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs and he sets forth his Plan B that would implement this. Brown, formerly president of Worldwatch, dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.
It’s already happening, he emphasizes. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with wind, solar, and geothermal energy,” writes Brown. “Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined two years ago.”
In a chapter titled “Harnessing Wind, Solar, and Geothermal Energy,” Brown details the potential and the technologies for fully utilizing these safe, clean, renewable energy sources.
“This transition is now building on its own momentum,” says Brown, “driven by an intense excitement from the realization that we are tapping energy sources that can last as long as the earth itself. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we are investing in energy sources that can last forever.” To view my “Enviro Close-Up” TV interview with Brown, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVm33cprlzI
What’s needed now is rapid and full implementation of the safe, clean, renewable enrgy technologies now available.
Instead of a Manhattan Project, the wartime crash program out of which came nuclear weapons (followed by nuclear power plants), let’s have, as Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says might be called a “Bronx Project”—a crash program to fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy. What a job-creator it would be. And what a new world of safe, clean, non-polluting energy technologies we would then have—energy we and Planet Earth can live with.
In the wake of the Fukushima Daiichi and Chernobyl nuclear plant disasters, it is clear that nuclear power is far too dangerous an energy technology. And considering the global warming impact of burning fossil fuels—coal, oil and gas—they also need to be eliminated.
So how are we to power society?
In fact, safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready to do it.
Scientific American, a most conservative scientific publication, in a 2009 cover story unveiled its “A Plan for a Sustainable Future.” It declared in its “Plan to Power 100Percent of the Planet with Renewables” that, “wind, water and solar technologies can provide 100 percent of the world’s energy, eliminating all fossil fuels.”
The New Scientist, the highly-respected British magazine, also in a 2009 cover story titled “Our Brighter Future”–presented presented a United Nations report declaring that “renewable energy that can already be harnessed economically would supply the world’s electricity needs.”
From solar to wind (now the fastest-growing and cheapest new energy technology) to wave-power to tidal-power to bio-fuels to small hydropower to co-generation (combining the generation of heat and electricity) and on and on, a renewable energy windfall is at hand.
A while back, I visited the National Renewable Energy Laboratory (NREL) in Golden, Colorado. In one division, solar power was being used to break down water into oxygen and hydrogen — with the hydrogen available for use as fuel. “It’s the forever fuel,” Dr. John Turner, senior scientist at NREL told me. “This uses our two most abundant natural resources—sunlight and water—to give us an energy supply that is inexhaustible.”
In another division, which pioneered thin-film photovoltaic technology (sheets of material embedded with solar collectors that can coat a large building, even a skyscraper, and have the building become a huge power generator), the scientists spoke of solar photovoltaics generating all the energy the world needs. Thin-film photovoltaic is now being widely used in Europe.
In the wind division at NREL, scientists were speaking about the advanced wind turbines they have developed—especially for off-shore siting—and the abundant wind resources all over the world that could provide, they, too, stressed, all the energy the world would need.
All the NREL scientists from the various divisions speaking of how the renewable energy technology they are working on could provide all the energy the world needs might not all be right regarding a specific technology—but together a mix of these and other safe, clean energy technologies can indeed provide all the energy the world needs.
There’s also the NREL division in which technologies to use biomass to produce fuel, not out of food crops but from non-edible vegetation and various waste products. And so on.
Or consider “hot dry rock” (HDR) geothermal. It turns out that below half of the planet, just one to six miles down, it’s extremely hot. When naturally flowing water hits those hot rocks and has a place to come up, geysers are formed. But now a technology has been developed that sends water down an injection pipe to hit the hot dry rock below and rise to the surface in a second production well — which can turn a turbine and generate electricity. Dave Duchane, the HDR manager at Los Alamos National Laboratory, told me: “Hot dry rock has an almost unlimited potential to supply all the energy needs of the United States and, indeed, all the world.”
Renewables Are Ready is the title of a book written by two Union of Concerned Scientists staffers in 1999. Today a host of safe, clean, renewable energy technologies are more than ready. Combined, importantly, with energy efficiency, they render as unnecessary nuclear power, as well as fossil fuels.
Lester Brown, president of Earth Policy Institute, last year published World on the Edge: How to Prevent Environmental and Economic Collapse, which concludes that solar, wind and geothermal energy can provide all the energy the world’s needs and he sets forth his Plan B that would implement this. Brown, formerly president of Worldwatch, dismisses nuclear power as too expensive and dangerous.
It’s already happening, he emphasizes. “The old energy economy, fueled by oil, coal, and natural gas, is being replaced with wind, solar, and geothermal energy,” writes Brown. “Despite the global economic crisis, this energy transition is moving at a pace and on a scale that we could not have imagined two years ago.”
In a chapter titled “Harnessing Wind, Solar, and Geothermal Energy,” Brown details the potential and the technologies for fully utilizing these safe, clean, renewable energy sources.
“This transition is now building on its own momentum,” says Brown, “driven by an intense excitement from the realization that we are tapping energy sources that can last as long as the earth itself. Oil wells go dry and coal seams run out, but for the first time since the Industrial Revolution, we are investing in energy sources that can last forever.” To view my “Enviro Close-Up” TV interview with Brown, go to http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SVm33cprlzI
What’s needed now is rapid and full implementation of the safe, clean, renewable enrgy technologies now available.
Instead of a Manhattan Project, the wartime crash program out of which came nuclear weapons (followed by nuclear power plants), let’s have, as Alice Slater of the Nuclear Age Peace Foundation, says might be called a “Bronx Project”—a crash program to fully implement the use of safe, clean, renewable energy. What a job-creator it would be. And what a new world of safe, clean, non-polluting energy technologies we would then have—energy we and Planet Earth can live with.
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