When Recycling Isn’t: Lessons from a Nuclear Industry Conference
I learned many things at the Nuclear Energy Institute’s (NEI’s) annual meeting, but perhaps none more surprising than this: When nuclear power executives discuss the state of their industry, they highlight many of the same issues as their environmentalist opponents.Of course, the emphasis and even the language are different. But presenters at the “Nuclear Energy Assembly,” held in Chicago from May 5 to 7, discussed financing for new nuclear plants, nuclear waste storage and nuclear weapons proliferation concerns.
Nuclear power opponents argue that the industry shouldn’t expect or need government support, some fifty years into its existence. In a hotel conference room populated mostly with gray-suited older white men, industry executives repeatedly called for an expansion of federal loan guarantees for new nuclear plants.
Early on in the conference, NEI president and CEO Frank L. “Skip” Bowman said, “We use loan guarantees in this country to support ship building, steel making, student loans, rural electrification, affordable housing, construction of critical transportation infrastructure, and for many other purposes. Please don’t tell me that America’s electric infrastructure is any less important.” He added, “I wish someone would tell me when the word ’subsidy’ became a slur, a four-letter word. … What is there of value in American life that is not subsidized, to some extent?”
Nuclear power opponents argue that the radioactive waste generated raises serious environmental, health and safety issues, and the United States still hasn’t figured out how to handle the waste from existing plants. At the NEI meeting, there was no “waste,” only “spent fuel.” And the answer to the storage issue is “recycling” — not reprocessing — spent fuel to obtain material that can again be used to fuel reactors.
“You still have a challenge of what to do with used fuel,” admitted Craig T. Smith, a principal at the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland. “Recycling is a message that resonates with people. … From a messaging perspective, it resonates with audiences that don’t necessarily support, or are somewhat agnostic, with nuclear power.”
Furthering the CASE
For me, Smith’s talk was easily the highlight of the conference. His firm (which was co-founded by Hillary Clinton’s campaign pollster, Mark Penn) has worked for nuclear industry for “several years,” to “shape the image of nuclear power in the public policy marketplace,” as Smith described it.
“Many of you may have heard of our firm because of the political work we do — Bill Clinton, Tony Blair, [Silvio] Berlusconi, Michael Bloomberg,” Smith explained at the beginning of his presentation. “But actually, 80 percent of the work we do is for corporations, and help position them … not their products, but their image, their ideas, and what they’re trying to do.”
For the nuclear industry, much of that positioning has been accomplished via the “Clean and Safe Energy Coalition,” or CASEnergy. That’s the NEI-funded front group chaired by Greenpeace activist turned industry consultant Patrick Moore and former U.S. Environmental Protection Agency chair turned industry consultant Christine Todd Whitman. As the Center for Media and Democracy has reported, journalists are all too willing to accept Moore’s and Whitman’s self-description as environmentalists who just happen to support nuclear power, without asking or disclosing to news audiences who signs their paychecks.
Craig Smith addresses the audienceWhile Hill & Knowlton handles the PR work for NEI / CASEnergy, the polling is done by Penn, Schoen & Berland. “Part of what I do is I work with an organization called CASEnergy,” Smith said. “What we have done at CASEnergy is we’ve gone out and recruited opinion leaders around the country, who are supportive of nuclear power and ready to talk to people about that, to write letters to the editor. … CASE goes to [nuclear plant] relicensing hearings, and … provides a presence there. We have materials that we get out. We’ve done a lot of work in Illinois and Michigan and Florida and Iowa and New Hampshire, and we’re going to be working in some additional states as we try to raise the public profile of nuclear power.”
Smith patted himself and NEI / CASEnergy on the back, for successfully “positioning” nuclear power as an energy source that doesn’t significantly contribute to greenhouse gas emissions. Future CASEnergy talking points will focus on the benefits of used fuel “recycling” and the jobs created by building new nuclear power plants, he said.
Another Patrick Moore?
Craig Smith identified various groups who “need some additional convincing” about the benefits of nuclear power. These include women, people of color, young people, health care providers, environmentalists, people who live in cities and those who live in the Midwest.
Not surprisingly, these are the groups that CASEnergy is now focusing on winning over. While he didn’t speak at the conference, Patrick Moore was in Chicago during the event, meeting with the editorial board of the respected African-American newspaper the Chicago Defender.
The speaker following Smith, Gwyneth Cravens, meets some of the nuclear industry’s desired outreach demographics. She identifies as an environmentalist and former opponent of nuclear power, a mother, an organic gardener and a yoga enthusiast. She credits an acquaintance who worked on nuclear risk assessment issues with her gradual conversion into a supporter of nuclear energy, a process detailed in her book “Power to Save the World: The Truth About Nuclear Energy.”
Is Cravens following in Patrick Moore’s and Christie Whitman’s footsteps? Only time will tell. If that’s the plan, Cravens needs a little more PR coaching. Her stated commitment to environmentalism and her exhortations to avoid an “us versus them” mentality rang a little hollow, when — during the same speech — she referred to environmentalists as “anti’s” and “tree huggers.”
Much of the rhetoric at the NEI conference was similar; it sounded good, until you listened more closely. To the industry executives gathered, issues like nuclear waste and the considerable price tag of and lack of private investment in new plants are challenges, not to be overcome so much as “repositioned” with poll-driven spin and managed via state and federal lobbying campaigns. This approach has been disturbingly successful to date. With not just our energy policy but also our environmental well-being on the line, hopefully legislators and journalists will start listening more closely and asking more questions.
Diane Farsetta is the Center for Media and Democracy’s senior researcher.
I think this author is a little unfair to Patrick Moore. Almost every time I have seen sound bites he identifies himself with CASE and that CASE is an industry funded organization.
As for subsidies; In most of the US, coal is the lowest cost means of generating power 24/7. If alternatives are not subsidized or otherwise encouraged, coal is the method of choice for baseload generation. Wind, solar and nuclear are all low CO2 emitting methods of generating electricity and should be encouraged.
Bill
Bill, you say “Wind, solar and nuclear are all low CO2 emitting methods of generating electricity and should be encouraged.” This is disingenuous, since wind and solar do not generate radioactive waste — the most difficult waste storage problem in the history of the human race!
Furthermore, additional nuclear plants can’t be built unless the Price-Anderson Act is extended; it continues to stick American taxpayers with most of the costs of a catastrophic accident, because private insurers will NOT take this on alone. And if you’re a property owner whose home and grounds is destroyed by a radioactive release, you’ll be stuck with the total loss, since no homeowner’s policy will cover a nuclear plant accident.
Then there’s the question of why we should build more nuclear plants when you consider that each one is a juicy terrorist target.
Adele,
I agree with you that used nuclear fuel is a difficult challenge. I would, however, characterize it as a difficult political problem; not a technical problem. There are several technical solutions that are (at least to me) acceptable. All of these practical solutions do cost money and our current government is loathe to spend money on anything other than military adventurism.
The solutions which I consider acceptable include incinerating (i.e. nuclear fissioning) of the troublesome transuranic elements (neptunium, plutonium, americium and cerium) and neutralizing through neutron bombardment the long lived fission fragments.
Yucca mountain (or a similar style repository elsewhere if Yucca mountain is not licensable) will be necessary to store fission fragments. These are a very dangerous byproduct of a nuclear reactor. Society needs to be protected from this hazard for 400 to 500 years.
The rest of the used nuclear fuel is uranium. While the radiation level is not particularly troublesome, if you are not going to reuse it, it is a heavy metal poison (similar to lead) and the water supply needs to be protected from contamination.
Bill
Actually Adele, CO2 is turning out to be the most difficult waste problem in human history. We barely realized it in 1980, there are many deniers even today, we are totally dependent on it for our modern lifestyle, and it may soon be too late.
Adele,
It is my understanding that the aircraft that struck the twin towers on 9/11 overflew the Indian Point Nuclear plant.
Of course we will never know exactly what would of happened had they targeted those reactors rather the towers. Certainly, there would have been casualties on the ground among the maintenance, security and operating personnel at the reactor site. Injuries probably would have been in the 100’s. Fataliities may have been as high at 25 or 30.
In all probability, both reactors would have been knocked offline. Depending on the exact location of the strike, at least one of the reactors may have been damaged beyond economic repair. It would probably take several years to repair the damage if the decision was made to return both reactors to service. The chance that there would have been a release of radiation at all, let alone beyond the site, is very low.
All premature loss of life is a tragedy. I won’t play God and swap lives between New York City and the Indian Point employees but, had the terrorists struck the reactors instead of the towers, there would have been probably 3000 fewer dead.
Bill
Bill
Perhaps we don’t need to drift off of the real issue by going to the terrorist attack probabilities, even though that possibility is a potential threat.
The ‘primary’ issue is just operating a nuclear facilty causes far to much radio-active hazards for those who live downwind of a nuclear power plant and we have 103 operating in the United States now. That does not include all of the small nuclear reactors such as the one at the University of Arizona. They are ALL deadly dangerous and susceptable to a maintenace or human error malfunction or even a serious melt down.
One can call the nuclear waste recylable material, spent fuel, muclear waste, or deadly shit. Whatever term is used to describe nuclear waste, it’s dangerous, deadly and some of it will be deadly dangerous for far longer than 500 years. Just the cost to store it is beyond reasonable discussion to even consider using nuclear power at all.
It has been well proven we cannot ’safely’ store nuclear waste for even 50 years, so to discuss storing it SAFELY for hundreds or thousands of years is ludicrous. Then the talk of burning nuclear waste until it is safe is bull also. That is possibe to a degree, but WHEN is the pertenant question?
There will always be some types of nuclear waste in any type of nuclear plant and or the possibity of a nuclear accident that could forever wipe out millions of acres of land and kill or seriously sicken millions of people. The types of nuclear plants now being proposed for development will not be using nuclear waste for fuel. Not any that I’ve heard about.
Another important issue is the world’s water tables keep falling and rivers like the Colorado are drying up and that poses a serious future problem for many nuclear plants currently operating, both here in the States and in other countries.
What it all boils down to is, the handful of powerful rich people who make obscene profits from nuclear power, haven’t figured out how to make as much money from Geo-thermal, wind, solar, tidal and wave powered electricity.
If we spent half as much tax money as we do for nuclear energy developing the truely clean alternatives, we could have them and shut down every coal fired plant and begin to phase out the nukers. We’d damn sure better do it too if we wish to insure humans are here arguing 100 years or so from now.
We in the U.S are very naive about nuclear power. To point to just one example of this naivete, discussions of nuclear power here almost never mention breeder technology, which deals with the problem of nuclear waste and is much more efficient than other types of reactors.
For the curious, wiki has a good introductory article, tho’ it does not present the viewpoint of critics of breeder technology: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor.
Ever wonder why breeder reactors are seldom mentioned ~KLORO~?
And that link you provided is not very informative. There is nothing there about breeder reactors. How come?
because the press — along with the majority of our citizens — is ill-informed. and there is nothing in the article that is >not about breeder technology. try again: : http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor.
profuse apologies for the two bad links. the ‘.’ after Breeder_reactor was the problem. try: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breeder_reactor .
Hey Kem:
Google Global Nuclear energy Partnership (GNEP) or Generation IV Forum (GIF). This stuff is in the works, and there is a lot of international cooperation. Its kind of an engineer’s Kyoto. There has to be more to all this than just peddling uranium.
BTW we need skeptics like you and Adele to keep things honest and transparent, keeping people like me from accepting the engineers’ word as gospel, and keeping the bean counters aware the purpose of power is to serve people in the safest possible way.
Big question: Why won’t the insurance industry insure nuclear plants? The Price-Anderson Act has insurance limit at $10 billion, a pittance given the potential of a meltdown to make an area the size of Pennsylvania uninhabitable (Anything beyond that amount has to be paid for by government, read tax-payers). Such a catastrophe is just one human error away. Moreover, the dangers posed by the years of Nevada tests, of 3-mile Island and the Rocky Flats “releases” have routinely been covered up by governmental officials.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Price-Anderson_Nuclear_Industries_Indemnity_Act
” In a hotel conference room populated mostly with gray-suited older white men, ”
What the hell is this crap!?!? Stick to the issue.
Nuclear waste must be monitored 24/7 for- you may as well just say FOREVER! A guarantee we cannot give even for the survival of our species for the next few decades.
If the cooling ponds of the spent fuel rods at nuclear power stations were to be unmonitored and unpowered for only about a day, they would all evaporate away due to the atomic heat, and the spent fuel would then CATCH NUCLEAR FIRE, destroy their buildings and create radioactive fallout disasters of enormous and vast magnitude in the coutrysides around them. In a matter of hours. With no recourse after the fires start.
If the 9/11 planes had instead been purposely crashed into the holding ponds of Indian Point, New York City would now be a ghost town, and probably millions would be radiation-sick, or dead. The entire TriState area would resemble the dead-zone of morgue cities aroound the decaying sarcophagus of Chernobyl. So much for nuclear power.
We must become independent from power companies, especially private ones, whose only motivation is how much profit they can squeeze out of people and the people’s government. Nuclear power does not help in this regard either.
No, we will not each have little ittybitty household nuke power plants. And even if we replaced all electric power stations with nuclear ones, it is said we would then only have enough uranium fuel for around ten or so years. It may last a few more years if there were some reprocessing into plutonium, possibly the deadliest substance ever, and the favored substance of nuclear bomb-makers. So much for nuclear as a permanent fix. And if not permanent, then why waste immense resources on it?
Best way forward is to stop the government paying the Enrons and Halliburtons of the world for nuclear plants, and start ’subsidizing’ solar power on rooftops, and wind power, and geothermal power and conservation, and new techniques…all of them.
After all, according to this article, even NEI president and CEO Frank L. “Skip” Bowman says, “We use loan guarantees in this country to support ship building, steel making, student loans, rural electrification, affordable housing, construction of critical transportation infrastructure, and for many other purposes. Please don’t tell me that America’s electric infrastructure is any less important.
He added, “I wish someone would tell me when the word ’subsidy’ became a slur, a four-letter word. … What is there of value in American life that is not subsidized, to some extent?”
So he too is a Socialist - just one that wants a fat profit for himself and his cronies in the Nuke business to be built-in to the government nanny-money for this industry.
So let’s instead go full-on Socialist, and relieve many of the problems caused by capitalist power concentration, and subsidize Green Industry instead of just subsidizing the nuclear power industry and Greed for the moneyGreen, as we are now.
Oh, and have I mentioned the spread of nuclear weapons via the PR-spin-friendly-monikered “Atoms for Peace” program? That name, as well as the nuclear industry’s PR-spin Orwell-speak campaign outlined in the above article, would make Karl Rove proud.
Present company excepted, this whole area of discussion often seems to generate more heat than light amongst commentators. And, in the current “politically correct” environment, those who need that kind of identifiable ethnic/gender target for their blame and/or ridicule and/or “humor” really don’t have many other safe choices. Watch much commercial TV lately?
KEM PATRICK & FV HORN: Great posts.
“And, in the current “politically correct” environment, those who need that kind of identifiable ethnic/gender target for their blame and/or ridicule and/or “humor” really don’t have many other safe choices.”
You can add Jews and Christians to the old, white and male then.
FV,
The top of the fuel in a cooling pool is approximately 30 feet below the surface. A jet fuel fire from an aircraft crash is not going to penetrate to that depth. It may destroy the building but not the pool.
To rephrase my earlier post, if the 9/11 hijackers had crashed anywhere on the Indian Point reactor site there would have been far fewer casualties than actually occurred.
Bill
OBTW, I have met Skip Bowman. He is many things but he is not a socialist.
Gene T,
The Price-Anderson protection is a tertiary level of insurance.
The individual utilities have liability insurance (yes-the insurance industry will write it). Under Price-Anderson, if the individual utility insurance is exhausted, there is an industry pool. This pool is specifically permitted by Price-Anderson. If P-A did not permit it, this would constitute an anti-trust violation. (The current administration is very weak on anti-trust but this is not always the case.)
Only if the industry pool is exhausted would the government financially participate in an accident. During the cleanup from the TMI-2 accident, the utility’s insurance was, in fact, exhausted. The industry pool covered the remaining costs of the cleanup. No federal funds were used.
Bill
Nope ~Billy~, he’s a nuke lover who thinks it’s perfectly alright to subsidize nuclear power. Therefore, he really should also believe, it would be perfectly alright to subsidize green, clean and safe alternatives for electrical generation with the same amount of freebee cash. Perhaps he wouldn’t think that, ____ do you?
Hi there ~Jakenewton~ , did you see what happened to the April 7th, 9-11 thread? The posts for the last three days have been ‘obliterated’ about 150 of them and all of Namast’s pictures. Gosh I love that ‘obliterate’ word, thank you Hillary. It was another one I had to look up to see what it meant.
Well what’s the deal with describing the men who attended the meeting ~Jake~? It didn’t bother me, and who cares if they’re Irish, French, Oriental, South Africans or jews? We’re all the same you know. It just happens they were older white guys, dressed in ‘Socks’ Fifth Avenue style gray suits. No gals? Maybe they were all gay guys, or female cross dressers?
The point is, after counting GWB, being elected to the presidency, nuclear power is the stupidest thing humanity ever did.
Hi KEM,
Yes, I am fairly comfortable with the truly renewable energy sources receiving subsidies. Subsidies have done a fairly good job of creating the wind generation industry in this country. Wind is currently the second fastest growing electrical generation source in the US (natural gas is first).
I do have a general problem with subsidies. The government entity that doles out the subsidies picks the winners. I would prefer a stiff carbon tax and let the utility industry then pick the winners, but, lacking a carbon tax, subsidies work. When the government picks the winners, politics can prevail over good science and economics.
Regards,
Bill
Tell me anyone, after you have buried your young child who was killed due to a nuclear accident, or from bone or brain cancer caused from radioactive poison released from a nuclear power plant, how much insurance money would you like to collect?
Just how much are your childen worth to you in dollars? Anyone who’s kids aren’t worthless have a figure? How about a hundred thou, or maybe one fifty? Hmmmmm. Are boys worth more than girls? Not to me, after I’d learned how to unsnap a four clasp bra in the dark without having a nervous fit.
Insurance we’re talking about naturally, but the real issue is safely storing nuclear waste and the dangers of a serious nuclear accident. It’s not a question of IF, the question is, where and when? It’s gonna happen someday and when it does we’ll have a massive effort to have clean and green energy.
Why wait for the disaster? ___ Do it now. The British Royal Family owns most of the world’s best uranium mines. ___ Screw the Queen and go green.
Ms. Farsetta of PR Watch is apparently another political activist journalist who approaches nuclear power from a completely political perspective, in which nukes are a priori an evil thing to be opposed, and in which anyone with a different point of view is either an enemy or a sellout. Thus the only thing one needs to know about Patrick Moore and Christie Whitman is that someone is “signing their paychecks,” which means one needn’t bother listening to their views, facts or arguments. One needn’t ask why Moore and Cravens changed their minds, or why Whitman, a corporate conservative but also a genuine environmentalist, believes that nuclear power is needed.
And also, one needn’t learn anything more about nuclear power itself, the actual technology, the actual risks, the pros and cons and reasons we might need nuclear power, or might not, or might not be able to afford to use it, or might not be able to afford not to. No, one need only note that the nuclear industry hires PR firms, and that is enough to demonstrate that they are up to no good.
It is obvious that a generation of leftists, rooted in the environmental movement of the 1970s and 1980s with its anti-nuke assumptions, has become completely irrelevant to the issue today, having nothing new to say about it, and being unable to take a fresh look in the light of technological progress, the end of the Cold War and the deepening energy and global climate crises.
For immediate release: Monday, April 14, 2008
Southern Ohio Neighbors Group (SONG)
SONG is an association of residents and communities from across southern Ohio, including northern Kentucky and northwest West Virgina. SONG has formed in opposition to the plan to import, store and reprocess commercial spent nuclear fuel at the Department of Energy reservation in Pike County. SONG seeks the restoration of cleanup funding for the site, the formation of an inclusive stakeholders group to decide on the site’s future, and redevelopment of the site for archaeological and environmental restoration and environmentally responsible industries.
www.OhioNeighbors.org
Piketon Revelations: Continuing Lack of Citizen Oversight and Reasons Why
Dear Friends of SONG,
It’s been a period of rather startling news:
1. In early February, the Bush Administration released its proposed 2009 budget, which included radical CUTS in the cleanup budget for the Piketon site. (There is confusion on this point — DOE claims the budget is increased, but when funding for the long overdue DUF6 deconversion plant — a part of cleanup — is subtracted, the rest of site cleanup is severely stripped of funds, hurting near-term jobs at the site.) Senator Sherrod Brown issued a press release protesting the cuts at Senator Sherrod Brown | Senator for Ohio: Press Releases - Brown Lambastes Administration For Cutting Critical Funds For Pike..
2. On February 7, a subcontractor for the National Institute of Occupational Safety and Health issued a report on worker dosimetry issues at Piketon. http://www.cdc.gov/niosh/ocas/pdfs/abrwh/scarpts/sprportsm.pdf
This report includes the first-time revelation that numerous “slow cookers” — deposits of uranium inside the machinery that approach nuclear criticality — have occurred at Piketon “since start up [in 1954].” The section that begins on page 76 details evidence for the systematic falsification of worker dose records at Piketon, continuing through the current operating contractor, USEC. No explanation for why this evidence was withheld from the public until 2008 is given.
3. In mid-February, DOE released its Five-Year Review of efforts to remediate the landfills at Piketon, where huge quantities of TCE, PCBs, nickel carbonyl and classified wastes were dumped over decades. SONG has obtained a hard copy of the document, which runs to a few hundred pages and reveals that most remediation efforts were effectively terminated in the 1990s.
4.. Last week, an article in Weapons Complex Monitor detailed DOE plans for D&D (Decontamination and Decommissioning) of the old gaseous diffusion at Piketon, including a plan to demolish all process buildings and dispose of the rubble in on-site waste pits. DOE had assured Senator Brown that no such decisions would be made until a Citizens Advisory Board is in place.
5. On Friday, February 22, Senator Brown issued a press release protesting the move by DOE in the absence of a CAB. Senator Sherrod Brown | Senator for Ohio: Press Releases - Brown Blasts Energy Department About Piketon Cleanup Announcement ..
6. Also on Friday, the Portsmouth Daily Times published a story based on an interview with Governor Ted Strickland, in which Strickland acknowledges that the USEC centrifuge project at Piketon is failing, and calls for USEC to be removed from the site, in favor of an enrichment plant to be built by AREVA, the nuclear company of France. (More on this in a follow-up e-mail.)
7. On Sunday, February 24, the Pike County News Watchman printed a letter from our neighbors at the Bristol Village retirement community in Waverly, laying out the case for a CAB at Piketon, and for the exclusion of SODI — one of the GNEP contractors — from that effort.
8. Yesterday, February 27, seven U.S. Senators including four Republicans and three Democrats, led by Sherrod Brown and Energy Committee Chair Jeff Bingamin, sent a letter to the Senate Budget Committee demanding that funds for Environmental Management at DOE sites be restored to last year’s levels.
9. Also yesterday, the Chillicothe Gazette reported that the projected price for the project formerly known as the “American Centrifuge Plant” (Strickland wants to make it the French Centrifuge Plant) has more than doubled, to $3.5 billion. The ever-receding feasibility of this project is merely an indicator that USEC had intended to go into the waste storage business, and never really intended to deploy the centrifuges it claimed to have but is two years behind schedule in demonstrating.
10. After canceling promised public meetings in January and February, the Department of Energy has announced a “tentative date” of March 18 for an environmental review meeting in Piketon. A Citizens Advisory Board is, theoretically, on the agenda for this meeting. Mark your calendar, but don’t hold your breath. We will keep you informed.
————————
Of all the major DOE sites across the nation that are under order for an environmental cleanup of toxic hazards, Piketon (Portsmouth Gaseous Diffusion Plant) is the only site that has never had a Citizens Advisory Board (CAB). Finally, this issue is being addressed, however DOE is pressuring the Piketon community to abandon its right to an official Federal Advisory Committee Act (FACA)-chartered CAB, and to accept instead an informal Stakeholders Advisory Committee.
At least two environmental laws applicable at the site mandate that there be a citizens advisory committee in place at Piketon[1][1]. However, the DOE has ignored or maneuvered around these two laws and now nearly 19 years after a cleanup was ordered by the EPA and nearly 7 years after the shut-down of the uranium enrichment plant, Piketon is still without a Citizens Advisory Board. While it is true that Citizens Advisory Boards do not have to be chartered under the FACA law, it is clear that in the case of Piketon, it will only be with the protections of FACA that the community will have so much as a fighting chance to get an authentic cleanup of the radiological and chemical contaminants and to have some say-so over what happens next at the site. And even under FACA, it will be a battle that the community may never win, but at least there could be a fighting chance.
——————–
SENATOR SHERROD BROWN LAMBASTES ADMINISTRATION FOR CUTTING CRITICAL FUNDS FOR PIKETON CLEANUP
Washington, DC - The Bush Administration’s Fiscal Year 2009 budget, released yesterday, calls for deep cuts in the funding needed to cleanup the Portsmouth, Ohio, Paducah, Kentucky, and Oak Ridge, Tennessee Gaseous Diffusion Plants. The budget proposal cuts funding by $147 million, from $627 million last year to $480 million this year. U.S. Senator Sherrod Brown (D-OH) today blasted the administration’s decision, calling the practice of cutting vital cleanup funds indefensible. The Decontamination and Decommissioning (D&D) account funds projects to decontaminate, decommission, and remediate the facilities at U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) sites.
“The people of southern Ohio have been neglected for too long,” Brown said. “This cut is just another blow to DOE legacy communities like Piketon. It’s proof positive that we need to reauthorize the D&D fund. This administration cannot simply sweep nuclear waste under a rug. These waste sites need to be cleaned up. It’s a matter of public health, public safety, and government accountability.”
In 1992, Congress created the D&D fund. The program was to clean up the old gaseous diffusion enrichment plants in Tennessee, Kentucky, and Ohio. The fund was designed as a partnership between the nuclear industry and the federal government. The commercial nuclear power industry has long benefited from its partnership with the federal government. The government transferred domestic nuclear technology it had invented to private companies for domestic electricity production. As part of this partnership, the nuclear industry has and continues to purchase enriched uranium from the old enrichment plants.
The administration’s cuts come at a particularly crucial time for the Piketon site that will soon transition from cold storage to full D & D activities.
In October, Brown introduced the D&D Reauthorization Bill (S.2203), which would extend the fund for ten years and raise the cap on the maximum amount of money the fund can collect in a year. Brown’s legislation would also require DOE to study the best way to handle the remaining depleted uranium currently located at the Piketon and Paducah sites. The Senate Energy Committee held a hearing on Brown’s legislation in November. Estimates for cleanup of the sites currently range from $12 billion to $24 billion.
PATRICK MOORE:
Possibly Patrick Moore is paid to promote nuclear energy, logging of rain forests and GM crops.
For more Google “top-ten …. told by patrick moore”
CHILDREN:
Children living near nuclear facilities face an increased risk of cancer. Check out New Scientist article tiled “Reasonable Doubt”.
CHINA:
“China is poised to pass world solar and wind manufacturing leaders in Europe, Japan, and North America in the next three years, and it already dominates the markets for solar hot water and small hydropower.” From-
Check out - Powering China’s Development: The Role of Renewable Energy
GERMANY
Germany has committed itself to 100% renewable energy and is closing down coal mines and phasing out nuclear facilities. Google “Germany to close its coal mines”
* April 14th does not refer to the compilation of press releases above. It refers to press release below.
—————————————
Southern Ohio Neighbors Group (SONG)
SONG is an association of residents and communities from across southern Ohio, including northern Kentucky and northwest West Virgina. SONG has formed in opposition to the plan to import, store and reprocess commercial spent nuclear fuel at the Department of Energy reservation in Pike County. SONG seeks the restoration of cleanup funding for the site, the formation of an inclusive stakeholders group to decide on the site’s future, and redevelopment of the site for archaeological and environmental restoration and environmentally responsible industries.
www.OhioNeighbors.org
—————————————-
For immediate release: Monday, April 14, 2008
Hobson Honored in DC, Lambasted at Home
With only nine months to go before retirement, David Hobson, Republican of Springfield, is drawing decidedly mixed reviews for his congressional work on nuclear issues. The Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, based in New Mexico, is honoring Hobson, along with five others, at a reception on Capitol Hill on Tuesday, April 15. Meanwhile, back home, SONG, the Southern Ohio Neighbors Group, is lambasting Hobson for his signal role in trying to turn the federal reservation at Piketon, Ohio, into the world’s largest nuclear waste dump.
Between 2003 and 2007, Hobson served as chairman of the powerful Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee, which has budgetary authority over the Department of Energy. In 2004, Hobson used his chairmanship to radically cut funding for new nuclear weapons programs requested by the Bush Administration, earning accolades from anti-nuclear activists in Washington. The cut programs would have brought few jobs or contracts to Ohio.
Meanwhile, under his chairmanship, the Piketon site, where production stopped in 2001, became a chief target for nuclear waste shipments from around the world. Hundreds of cylinders of uranium hexafluoride waste were shipped from Oak Ridge, Tennessee, to Piketon. Waste from the Fernald, Ohio, site was moved to Piketon to speed Fernald cleanup, and other waste shipments from Paducah, Kentucky, and Hanford, Washington, were moved to Piketon for storage, over opposition from the Pike County Development Office. When Libya disclosed its uranium enrichment program in 2004, the surrendered uranium was brought to Piketon.
The objective behind these shipments became clear in 2006, when a private consortium called the Southern Ohio Nuclear Integration Cooperative (SONIC) submitted two proposals to the Department of Energy — one for the creation of a centralized storage center for spent nuclear fuel at Piketon, and another for a “siting study” under the Global Nuclear Energy Partnership program.* The “siting study,” completed in May 2007 and available at www.safesonic.net, does not specify what is being sited.
Following Bush’s State of the Union Speech in 2006, at which GNEP was announced as part of the “Advanced Energy Initiative,” Congressman Hobson and Congresswoman Jean Schmidt, whose OH-02 district includes Piketon, were available together to tell reporters that Piketon would be the “ideal site” for a facility they did not specify. SONIC then submitted its proposals. Aides from Hobson’s office participated in closed meetings arranged by SONIC to rally political support for the waste plan.** Bob Clark, of Hobson’s staff, appeared at the March 8, 2007, public scoping hearing at Piketon, at which over 300 angry residents expressed opposition to the plan, never detailed for the public.
A Programmatic Environmental Impact Statement for the project, slated for the summer of 2007, has still not been released. Piketon remains on the “candidate list” for GNEP facilities, though Congress has radically slashed GNEP funding and postponed any production facility siting indefinitely. It is widely expected that GNEP will die with the Bush Administration.
SONIC’s partners have tried to conceal the plan by claiming the “storage” offered was intended to accompany a reprocessing plant at Piketon, rather than a centralized “interim” facility to park waste while long-term solutions are developed. But in a hearing of the Energy and Water Appropriations Subcommittee on March 28, 2007***, it was Congressman Hobson who clarified the difference: In a question to GNEP head Dennis Spurgeon, Hobson asked: “How many sites volunteer to provide interim storage [of spent nuclear fuel] in excess of just process storage, and what was the amount of storage offered?”
Unsure of how much to reveal, Spurgeon claimed not to know if the number was public information, but made reference to “Ohio State” as consulting on the issue. Nuclear engineers from Ohio State University” have supported the Piketon waste plan.
Seeking more funding for SONIC, Hobson then asked: “I want to understand how DOE treated the offers it received to provide interim storage, but when the various GNEP proposals were evaluated, did the site offering additional interim storage receive any extra credit compared to sites that did not offer interim storage?”
Spurgeon gave no clear answer. By asking the question and referring to a single site, Hobson revealed that of the eleven original GNEP “candidate sites,” only one consortium had offered centralized interim spent fuel storage, and that one was his own pet project at Piketon. The plan has gone no place, because over 5,000 Ohio residents have signed the SONG petition in protest.
Hobson was reelected handily in 2006, outspending his Democratic opponent by more than a hundred to one. But with loss of the Republican majority, Hobson lost his chairmanship. In the first term of the 110th Congress, Hobson rated only a 20% voting record on environmental issues according to the non-partisan League of Conservation Voters. That places him in a three-way tie for twelfth place among twenty ranked members of the Ohio congressional delegation, which overall has one of the lowest scores of any state delegation. For comparison, Ohio scores range from 0% for Congressman John Boehner, to 87% for Senator Sherrod Brown. Jean Schmidt ranks between Hobson and Boehner at 10%.
The wastes moved to Piketon under Hobson’s tenure as chairman now must all be removed, adding to the multi-billion dollar price tag of Piketon cleanup.
“The decision to honor Hobson on Capitol Hill was made without consultation of the man’s constituents,” said Kathleen Boutis of Yellow Springs, a resident in Hobson’s 7th Congressional District and president of Southern Ohio Neighbors Group. “This was a major screw-up. Hobson is no hero for southern Ohio communities. DC groups ought to check with the grassroots before bestowing honors on public officials who have betrayed their home communities.”
Perhaps it’s no coincidence that all four US communities that shipped their waste to Piketon — Oak Ridge, Paducah, Fernald and Hanford — have been represented in the Alliance for Nuclear Accountability, the organization honoring David Hobson.
Bill:
RADIOACTIVE DECAY
The USA has about 1.1 BILLION POUNDS of waste NOW, TODAY , THIS MINUTE
You very neatly skimmed over the time it takes for radioactive substance to decay as it is called before it is safe to handle. OK the USA is about 300 years old, right? Now some of the high level waste takes hundreds of thousands of years before it becomes safe to handle. So say 500,000 or 1666.6 times longer than the USA have even been a country.
NOW DU, depleted Urainium is more like 4.5 BILLION with a “B” years before it decays or about as old and the PLANET EARTH. Now in that time we have had plate tectonics move whole continets around the planet. In other words the whole planet would not even look like it does today so how the heck can anyone even hint this crap is safe for storage???????
This is not even touching the radioative AIR, LIQUID the other 2 wastes products besides solid the NUKE industry produces
KEM:
Just pointing you needed a few more zeros after you 500 year posting.
Andrew T,
Yes, Patrick Moore is paid to promote nuclear energy. He works for CASE which is funded primarily through Nuclear Energy Institute. NEI is both a technical association and a lobby group.
Dougnwagner,
Your posts are a clear demonstration of the lack of committment by the current administration to the environment. George Bush will never get a treehugger award.
I do think your claim that USEC does not intend to build the American Centrifuge Plant is incorrect. The costs of ACP has been struck by inflation (as well as perhaps some corporate incompetence). When USEC decided to abandon more advanced laser based isotopic separation techniques, it would have been wiser to build a small URENCO centrifuge facility under liscense prior to trying to build the more efficient but more technically challenging ACP. Their current technology path is fraught with financial risk.
USEC is facing some serious competition domestically. The New Mexico enrichment plant, based on URENCO centrifuges, is due to come on line shortly. AREVA has just announced that they are building a centrifuge plant in Idaho. The AREVA plant will be based on URENCO centrifuges. GE is building a pilot enrichment plant in Wilmington NC based on the SILEX laser process.
Bill
Yep ~Hollow Point~ Quite a few more 0s. I said far longer than 500 years, which was a figure Billy has used. Perhaps we should say from now thru perpetutity.
Someday something really bad is going to happen and then the nuke supporters will know how crazy nuclear power is, especially when a safe alternative is shining right there in our sky. That’s just one alternative.
The fact that we have spread deadly DU all over the planet where it is absolutely impossible to ever clean it up and we continue to spread that poison daily and no one will stop it is what is so damned incredible to me. 29 countries use DU in ammunition and bombs. ___ Insane.
Hey ~DANIEL DAVID~, it looks as if you don’t care that nuclear power is far too dangerous to even seriously consider by sane people, or that storing deadly nuclear waste safely is impossible. That’s been well proven.
How come you don’t care Daniel? Maybe you can tell us that the hundreds of incidents of nuclear waste accidents, spills, contamination of ground water, etc, are not true. Could you do that?
Hey Kem,
Who you going off on? There is no poster (pro or anti) by the name of Daniel David on this string.
Bill
Hollow point,
I don’t consider depleted uranium to be a particularly dangerous material. It needs to be in a stable chemical configuration for storage and/or disposal. Most of it now is stored as UF6 which is not a good long term form.
It needs to be sequestered away because it is a heavy metal toxin. There is a need to protect water systems such as aquifers because it can sometimes be mobilized by water.
I am speaking of bulk uranium. If it is used in munitions and burned it could be considerably more hazardous as an airborne dust.
Other than uranium, the contents of used nuclear fuel can be made to be nonradioactive within 500 years. This is not done now because we do not have the political will to do so. There are no technological barriers.
Bill
Oops, a senior moment Billy. It was Mark Abrams. I get them confused sometimes. Pick a pair.
Bill:
What the country and world needs is a EPA with nuts and not on the take to clean up the whole show. Nuke etc need to come clean so to speak, and force the Gov to go green clean energy. When Spain for example can at peak wind times produce 40% of their needs there is another answer to our energy needs.
Kem
More 0’s than we have time on this earth to worry about it.
Billy thinks nucler power is Okay. Other than that flaw, he’s a nice guy. He’s smart too, so someday he may figure it out right.
The federal government should not be in the energy business. Allowing the federal government, giant corporations, or any other type of centralized control center to meddle in industry is absolute lunacy. The capitalists dispense services always with strings attached, very heavy strings, bars, prison bars. Reject totally any new large central power plant proposals. All new power plants should be small, locally owned and operated facilities without grid connections. They should all be designed, built and maintained with local expertise. They should all be renewable, sustainable energy sources. The goal should not be unlimited energy, unlimited economic growth. The goal should be a responsible amount of energy production and economic activity. The result will be a free and independent and responsible population, instead of an enslaved, dependent and irresponsible population. The correct approach is obvious.
Good discussion guys.
I think the Generation 4 nukes are coming to a river, lake or bay near you. In about 30-40 years. They might be the replacements for the nukes now getting licenses extended. We might someday see angry posts about how DOE and the utilities are dragging their feet on the new plants that run on DU and recycle their own waste, because the lobbyists for uranium mining and enrichment industries don’t want “free” energy sources.
Another good reason to stop using DU to put holes in things is its potential fuel.
“Well what’s the deal with describing the men who attended the meeting ~Jake~? It didn’t bother me, and who cares if they’re Irish, French, Oriental, South Africans or jews?”
Do you think it would be OK to make a point of the Arab male Muslims at an OPEC meeting? In this PC world, you have to be careful what groups you might smear, except old white men who are Jews or Christians.
About that other thread, they may have some automatic metrics to kill threads with “excess” data.
Hollow point,
I would agree with you that an EPA with an environmental committment would be a refreshing change. An adequate budget would help if it had a committment.
Bill
Hollow point,
Spain is an interesting example to look at:
In 2005 Spain increased it’s electrical generation by fossil fuel by 26 Billion KWH. In the same year it increased its electrical generation by wind by 6 Billion KWH. Fossil generation grew more than 4 times wind generation.
That is more CO2, not less. Is this a track that should be emulated?
2005 is the latest year for the UN statistical database.
Bill
Nope ~Jake~ you can post on it again now, it had been cut off for posting. Three days later about 150 or so posts were deleted.
Bill
source of your info please.
HP,
The Spanish growth data that I cited comes from 2 UN data series, one for fossil power generation and one for wind. To develop the increase numbers I subtracted 2004 values from 2005. The links are below:
thermal http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=spain+datamart%5bEDATA%5d&d=EDATA&f=cmID%3aET%3bcrID%3a724
and
wind http://data.un.org/Data.aspx?q=spain+datamart%5bEDATA%5d&d=EDATA&f=cmID%3aEW%3bcrID%3a724
Bill
Phase out nukes and reduce coal, 100% renewable energy is the only answer.
10 years ago the biotechnology industry were arguing that the world would starve without GM crops, now GM crops are often blamed for increasing starvation, and 400 agrcultural experts have pointed out that we need to use natural farming methods, crop rotation and organic fertilizer to help feed the world.
Only a blind person cannot see it is early days for renewables, and as technology advances, they will quickly replace nukes and coal, the debate must move to how do we do this.
Only people who have a vested interest in nuclear energy can justify killing children with radiation from nuke power stations and leaving future generations a legacy of radio active waste.
Even if there are one or two hick-ups New Zealand is going 90% renewables in 20 years time and Germany is heading 100% renewables. Germany is closing coal mines and phasing out nuclear plants.
The pro-nuke bleaters remind of the pro-GM crop bleaters. Bad losers.
Andrew,
It is true. You have found me out. I’m a fool and tool for the nuclear ghoul and may one day have to eat my nuclear gruel.
Actually I have red skin and horns, do incantations and read the bible backwards. I eat boiled babies for breakfast. The high pitched bleating I make is actually my sonar as I grope blindly like a bat to find more children for my cauldron.
Regards,
Bill
Ah-ha. I knew it all along.
No Nukes. No need to recycle radioactive waste.
Philipino governemnt plans to increase Renewable Energy based capacity by 100 percent by 2013. See
http://www.doe.gov.ph/ER/Renenergy.htm
Renewables Becoming Cost-Competitive With Fossil Fuels in the U.S-
“If the U.S. is to join the world leaders in renewable energy—among them Germany, Spain, and Japan—it will need world-class energy policies based on a sustained and consistent policy framework at the local, state, and national levels.”
From: http://www.worldwatch.org/node/4526
Do you eat the whole baby Billy? Guts too?
Perhaps the following can help clarify what Ms. Farsetta was hearing when the “recycling of nuclear waste” was being talked about at the conference she was attending. If one wants to better understand a very important concept for our present energy predicament, I recommend you find the December 2005 issue of Scientific American, and read “Smarter Use of Nuclear Waste” by George S. Stanford, Gerald E. Marsh, and William H. Hannum, scientists (now retired) that worked on the EBR-2 demo reactor at Argonne West labs of the DOE in the late 1980’s and early 1990’s until their fruitful, breakthrough research was short circuited in the Clinton budget cuts of 1994 (a great mistake in my view). If you are a patient reader, you can google on the terms “IFR” or “Integral+Fast+Reactor” and look at some of the articles. I especially recommend links to the Frontline interview with Charles E. Till at: www.pbs.org/wgbh//pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interviews/till.html
Also recommend Till’s article “Plentiful Energy and the IFR Story” at: www.sustainablenuclear.org/PADs/pad0509till.html
The IFR breakthoughs were not well understood when the project was canceled, but the implications for our future are much clearer in our current energy crunch and is now getting a fresh look as the most hopeful way of realizing the promise of nuclear energy for electricity (to produce hydrogen and run better mass transit), while at the same time using up the long lived waste now languishing at conventional nuclear plants with water cooled reactors. Also suggest you read: www.world-nuclear.org/info/inf98.html on Fast Neutron Reactors, the USA segment on the EBR-2.