Subscribe to Common Dreams News Updates
Most Popular This Week
Popular content
Today's Top News
The Triple Curse of the Corporate Climate Bill
Legend says curses come in threes. Let's pray that doesn't happen with the unholy trinity of the Corporate Climate Bill.
It demands drilling for oil, digging for coal and big money for new nukes. How such a devil's brew could help save the Earth conjures a corporate cynicism beyond the scope of the human mind and soul.
It all now bears a special curse. It was meant for Earth Day. Then it slipped to the April 26 Chernobyl anniversary. But co-sponsor Lindsay Graham (R-SC) pitched a fit over immigration and pulled his support.
As did Earth herself. Just prior, more than two dozen hill country miners were killed in a veritable Three Mile Island of black carbon. This entirely avoidable accident was built on years of sloppy denial by King Coal and the tacit assent of pliant regulators. With mountains of offal being pitched into rivers and streams, and underground hell holes filled with gas and soot, coal has been slaughtering people and eco-systems here for more than a century. Now, as at TMI, the death has become visible.
Meanwhile, the undersea gusher destroying the Gulf of Mexico may soon pour up the east coast. Like Chernobyl, it defies comprehension.
As the Soviets denied it, Chernobyl gushed radiation that killed some 985,000 people. Based on more than 5,000 studies, a definitive assessment has been authored by three Russian scientists, issued by the New York Academy of Sciences, that should serve as the ultimate warning against atomic energy.
But the third leg of the Climate Bill trifecta has---thankfully---yet to kick in. Like coal and oil, America's 104 licensed nuclear plants are a catastrophe in progress. They all leak lethal radiation on a regular basis. Their wastes are unmanageable. They emit greenhouses gases in their vital fuel cycle. They pump untold quantities of heat into the air and water. They are sitting ducks for terror and error.
Our aging fleet of rickety reactors continually flirts with disaster. Many are on or near active earthquake faults. Turkey Point, in south Florida, was directly hit by Hurricane Andrew. Ohio's Davis-Besse came within a fraction of an inch of a breach of its inner containment. A new inspection has shown more than 2 dozen potentially critical new flaws there. New York's Indian Point and New Jersey's Oyster Creek, along with their radioactive siblings, are super-heating the rivers, lakes, bays and oceans on which they sit. Embrittlement, decaying hardware and an overall aging process have this country riding the radioactive brink every moment.
On September 11, 2001, terrorists flew directly over the Indian Point reactors on their way to the World Trade Center.
America's reactors constitute less than a quarter of those operating worldwide. Despite their inability to get private financing or liability insurance, the Obama Climate Bill is larded with billions in handouts for new reactor construction. Yet the first reactor design proposed (for Georgia) has been strongly criticized by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and a key financing scheme has been voided by the courts.
Only one Climate Bill can solve our energy crisis---a Solartopian program for converting the entire economy to renewables, conservation and efficiency. It would fly in the face of the corporate destroyers who are behind the current Climate Bill. But these are technologies that actually work, that pay, that create jobs and prosperity, and that will preserve rather than destroy our sacred Earth.
The atomic shoe could be dropping as you read this. It is a catastrophe we cannot afford---ecologically, financially, economically, spiritually.
These old reactors must shut before they irradiate the apocalyptic footsteps of their fossil fueled brethren.
The Curse of the Climate Bill is upon us. Let's transform it to something truly green before it kills again.
25 Comments so far
Show AllThe threat level is Code Green.
This means that every inventor with every worthwhile green, sustainable, economical invention should be at least listened to, not pushed off into a corner if they aren't fabulously wealthy. What if the inventor has something wildly useful?
*Comment deleted by site administrators for violating our Comment Policy*
see: http://www.commondreams.org/comment-policy
How many deaths have occurred as a result of accidents at commercial US-style (LWR) nuclear power plants in the last 30 years, Harvey?
The answer is zero.
Please do not associate the terrible design of RBMKs and bad decisions that went into the complete disaster that occurred at Chernobyl with US reactors. It's flatly dishonest. You can't even have an Chernobyl-type meltdown in an LWR plant.
You know what would have happened if the 9/11 terrorists went after Indian Point instead? New York would have been out of power, an energy company would have lost a shit load of money, and the staff of the nuclear power plant would have died in the resultant fire - but the radiation would be safely contained within the plant's walls.
That's what they're designed for on this side of the world.
Meanwhile, I don't know why you're surprised by the NRC's criticisms of the planned Georgia plant: their job is to act as pre-planning support. Not one nuclear power plant has glided through the NRC's doors without a flurry of changes and safety concerns - and good on that: it's a serious business, nuclear power. That's why there have been no deaths at civilian nuclear reactors: they actually get refined before building.
Nuclear power plants are safe in this country - and much of it isn't even due to fail-safes, but to smarter design: if the coolant boils off in an LWR, so does the moderator, and reactivity goes down as a result. You get too hot, the throttle dials itself back. In Chernobyl, if the coolant boiled off, reactivity stayed the same - eventually the moderators caught fire and the internal pressure was enough to blow the place up.
That can not happen in US reactors. So drop Chernobyl as your pariah; it marks you as a liar.
Meanwhile, the question of proliferation is /answered/ by nuclear power, not exacerbated. If you want to prevent people from building nuclear weapons, the way to do it is to make breedable and fissile isotopes significantly more valuable as a source of energy than as weapons. Further, if you can arrange for every country to have an abundant supply of the fuels in question, you remove, essentially, the economic motivation for countries to go to war in the first place.
For this, we need research into breeder technologies, and for the sake of peaceful nuclear power, weapon-resistant breeders based on Thorium-232.
Now, I understand the motivation of government to step in. While it's pretty clear that nuclear is the only technology available with sufficient load following and base power generation to replace coal and natural gas plants, the government is not subject to boycotts by people who, as demonstrated by protest of investment in nuclear, can't - or won't - do math. As such, they're in the only position available to invest in what is required. Damned be the politics; nuclear power is the only way to avoid a climate disaster, and breeder reactors are the only way to prevent food riots 50 years down the line.
Run the numbers, if you've the stomach. Solar and Wind are, flatly, not enough. Even if we were to get solar power to 100% efficiency, not enough. Even if we were to cover the entirety of the united states with wind farms, not enough. At the maximum, the resources we currently know about - oil, gas, wind, hydro, coal, and LWR nuke - will last us 80 years at our current consumption rates. Our choices, then, are to either (a) decrease consumption, or (b) build breeders. (a) is not really an option; the third world is racing hard to meet EU consumption levels, which will effectively double worldwide consumption to 30TW (or 260 trillion kWh / year) by 2050.
We need nuclear breeders. Convert Thorium 232 to Uranium 233 and burn it. Take weapons material and burn it to breed Thorium 232. Take Plutonium 239 and use it in a sealed TWR (ask Bill Gates what that is) to burn Uranium 238.
The reason LWRs can't save us is that the Uranium-235 they burn makes up only a fraction of natural Uranium. At our present worldwide 15TW of energy consumption, there is only 6 years of the stuff available. By contrast, if bred to Plutonium 239, there is 500 years worth of Uranium 238 and if bred to Uranium 233, over 2000 years of Thorium 232.
I'm not saying conservation is not a good idea; it's just economically sound at a personal level to be as energy efficient as possible. I'm saying that at a societal level, we have a problem that is bigger than climate change, and that the solution for that will fix climate change as well.
Actually, I would go with the independent evaluation of Three Mile Island cancer deaths. The U.S. has taken an estimated 50,000 extra casualties in that one disaster.
In areas of Middletown, PA where every house on a particular street had a cancer death, the survivors all signed legal papers for nonadmission of guilt that sealed their mouths up tight, in exchange for a generous (ok, stingy as anything when they could get away with it) out-of-court settlement. That's how American corporate justice works these days. By sealing up the obvious cases, the culprits have avoided a class action wrongful death suit so far. It's all about the money.
There's no enormous pot of money for the tenured faculty to get involved. Forensic studies estimate, but they don't prove anything new, which is what scientists need for tenure. So, this was an exercise in journalism. Go Google it.
And your semantics are cheapo.
The killing type of cancer caused from exposure to the working conditions within any nuclear power plant is not identified by a "finger print" nor is it fast ...as with all cancers from low amounts of radiation... but only by satistical information collected years later after the deaths have occured. Like the daily increases in deaths in Russia right now from an accident that happened decades ago! Now if the nuclear fuel ingedients were mined, fabricated and then after used or reprocessed, stored for thousands of years right at the plant's site then the number of deaths would increase right there at the plant. Even if the plant is a "Blue Ribbon" one ...no accidents or design flaws. The amount of low level radiation allowed inside a power plant is a figure that alows the plants to operate with the odds that workers will retire by the time their cancers start to appear. Again you like the others who dismiss solar and wind based on some kind of "over night" conversion from the amount of fossil fuels being used right is bogus logic. The conversion is happening...its happening now... and it will start slow and build as advances in wind and solar increase and fossil/nuclear cost soar! BTW solar and wind ARE economically sound now on both a personal and a social level or there wouldn't be ANY wind or solar plants...home or commercial! 2-5 billion dollar nuclear power plants will never make enough electric for sale at a reasonable price to pay for the cost of construction and then their decommisioning. THATS why none have been built here in America for so long. Only with government backed billions will a utility even consider one!
Here’s a number you need to keep in mind: 3 Terawatts. That’s about how much power we’re using in the country right now. If that were used for 100W incandescent bulbs you’d need 30 billion bulbs. There’s no way renewable energy is going to come close to that. That would require over 2 billion square meters of 100% efficient solar panels, that’s about the same area as all the land in Rhode Island (real solar panels are about 20% efficient and then there's about 5% conversion loss from DC to AC so you’d need to pave Connecticut's land as well). And of course solar panels don’t do too well at night, so you’d need to more than double that area, that brings us to the land area of Maryland, plus you’d need a way to store around 40 TWh’s which simply doesn’t exist. And all that ignores factors such as clouds, dirt, animals, etc.
So what about wind? The most powerful wind turbine today is ~7 MW, so we’d need around 500,000 of them. They have a rotor diameter of 126m, so they’d have to be at least 65m apart. That means they’d take up 6 billion square meters, about the same as all of Delaware. I can’t imagine it would be good for anything flying. Now this is the peak power, so we’d have to factor in all the time that the wind isn’t blowing hard enough, or when it’s blowing too hard. Again we need a storage system for mind-boggling amounts of energy. Also, has anyone looked at the climatological effects of taking 3TW of convective energy out of the atmosphere?
Both solar and wind suffer from a fatal flaw: They can’t be controlled. Grid operators can’t dial supply up (we can somewhat do down) to meet demand, and when you’re talking about the electric grid either you balance it or it balances itself…usually in some exciting manner.
Hydro’s pretty much tapped out in the country, not to mention ecomentalists go crazy whenever someone mentions building dams. Same thing with geothermal, unless we want to start drilling in Yellowstone.
Nuclear could do it, but whenever you mention it the ecomentalists set a record in going from zero to stupid.
That leaves fossil fuels. There’s nothing else. Especially when it comes to moving stuff. We have nothing that comes close to the power density of hydrocarbons when it comes to mobile applications, and hydrocarbons are the only energy source that’s suitable for mobile applications. Everything else (e.g. hydrogen and ethanol) are just ways to make electricity mobile.
What's left? Waste heat recovery, wave power, serious conservation...who knows what we don't yet know? MIT is working on a home fuel cell that stores solar power.
Fossil fuels will become more and more expensive and transportation costs will eventually bring down the global economy. That will raise the profiles of foot power and bicycle power and unleash a new wave of tinkerers and inventors. And so it goes...
mac sandberg...here's what you need to keep in mind...America uses AND waste too much electric power, no matter what power source is used... so I will not use our current level of consumption as the base line that alternative energies are to meet ...as you discribed...what over night?? The older oil, coal and nuclear plants can be shut down in a controled way based on their age and number of problems in their operation...replaced by wind and solar at the same pace that fossil fuel retires...or wait til they go "BP" on us! Taxpayers have run out of money for corporate bailouts for corporate mistakes! I also see no logic in trying to maintain or grow larger the wasteful culture that cheap fossil fuels and cheap technologies of the 1940-1960's created. Those times of cheap energies are over! I don't want more oil, coal or nuclear power plants built anywhere ...its a waste of money and the planet in that order when there are cleaner and healthier alternatives!
Your mention of using incadescent bulbs tells me plenty how you see energy use ...20th century style!
Harvey, you and I know that "TMI" is "Three Mile Island" -- the nuke meltdown in the late 70's, but younger people will be thinking you don't know how to use "TMI" in a sentence because, as "everyone" knows, "TMI" means "Too Much Information"
Or perhaps, I'm providing TMI?
Then forget Three Mile Island and talk about Fermi I south of Detroit. It melted down in 1966 and the power company and the government did a pretty good job overall of covering it up. For reference read, The Day We Almost Lost Detroit.
Harvey, you must be doing something right. The trolls are stalking you again.
The local news reported as quickly and as calmly as they could that 1500 gallons of radioactive water was spilled at Browns Ferry a few weeks ago. It seems that anything negative about nuclear fission is under-reported, suppressed, or glossed over in the MSM.
To the naysayers. Humanity uses less that 1/20,000th of the energy that strikes the earth from the sun everyday yet we as a so called intelligent species aren't smart enough to harness 1/20000 of the sun's energy for our own use. Gimme a break!
There is no other long term choice than renewable power for electricity, and still have a viable ecosystem. This is the age of global environmental catastrophes.
The global economy is crapping out with fossil fuel dependence, income inequality and population are at near maximum, and our ecosystem is dying. The political system is only concerned with preserving its own status quo, by mostly foul means, and is unable to meet, let alone acknowledge, the challenges brought about by its direct means to power and wealth.
The political system is only concerned with how to kill off, or push off, all people who are defined as "others".
If we keep on going as we are now, before we use up the remaining Coal , Oil and gas reserves we will have already sealed our climate doom. We are now clear over the limits of global safety for atmosphere green house gases.
The good news is that the scale of our problems will be reduced finally by a terrifying period of global food and water shortages, civil breakdown, and deaths. A technological solution to fix the destabilised climate, will be unlikely. We will be too busy screaming and will not have the co-operation and resources required for increasingly severe problems. Something will have to kill us all off, because we are unable to control our own population and regulate our resource appetites.
Eventually there will not be enough human beings around at a high enough technological level of carbon pollution to continue our human contribution to its exonerable rise. We may live to see our contribution to greenhouse gases outclassed by natural positive feedbacks. After the inevitible overshoot, and silence, and a long period of time, if the biosphere is still viable, a large amount of vegetation regrowth will occur. That and other carbon sinks may eventually overcome positive feedbacks of ocean, methane and soil.
A new phase of evolutionary speciation may occur. If the human race survives, it may have had to learn to behave nicely by then, and may have a much more detailed understanding of global climate physiology. By then the computer climate models, may be as good as they can get, in the far future, with lots of new kinds of data sets, if our descendents can live through it.
"They are sitting ducks for terror and error."
Regarding the nuke reactors, that's actually an understatement. The intent behind nuke energy and the intent behind renewable energy are polar opposites: war vs peace.
Regardless of how many honestly view nuke energy as peaceful, they cannot nullify the hawks' embrace of the nukes as "strategeric" to their imperial designs.
That is, the nuke reactors keep more USans skilled in the nukular arts, a supplemental imperial resource. In contrast, renewable energy projects keep more Usans skilled in the arts of energy conservation and peace.
And so as a supplemental imperial resource, the nuke reactors are more than sitting ducks. They are inviting targets in defense against the USan imperial onslaught.
I have no doubt that efficiency and conservation are the key to being able to switch to renewable energy. My wife and I have gone off grid with a system costing under $10,000* that is generating 100% of our electrical power with ease.
Though we use way fewer kwh’s than most people, we are not really depriving ourselves. We have a normal refrigerator. microwave, two computers (my work is managing websites), an external large screen monitor for complex work or for movies and tv (via a usb tuner), lights, water pump, stereo, cordless phone, misc power tools (including a table saw).
But our total consumption is only about 2-3 kwh per day, which I’ve been told is 10% of what “average” Americans use (and probably only 1% of what a typical McMansion consumes when nobody is home (can you say “extraneous lighting out the whazoo”?).
It really wasn’t that hard to scale down by an order of magnitude. We simply don’t leave lights (or anything) on when we aren’t using them (we even have a convenient wall switch to turn the microwave outlet on/off rather than fumbling with a plug). Our computers are laptops, and the large screen monitor uses fairly low power (even lower power monitors are now available). We try to run power tools or pump water to our gravity feed storage tanks on sunny days when our panels are making more power than we can store, but we have plenty of battery storage capacity to be able to use tools anytime.
And I haven’t even gotten around to super-insulating the fridge, or building power supplies to run the laptops directly from 24V DC (so the inverter will not need to run), or tracking down suitable LED lighting…
My point is that individually and as a society we waste enormous amounts of energy. that if we directed the resources we currently waste on war and fossil fuel into eliminating waste and inefficiency then renewable energy source could easily meet all our needs within a generation.
----
* $9800 includes four 220 watt solar panels, an MPPT charge controller, 3500 watt high efficiency sine wave inverter and control panel, combiner box and dc breaker box with misc circuit breakers, battery monitor meter, 8 T-105 batteries (24 vdc at 450 ah) and misc hookup wire, battery cables, underground wire and panel mounts.
I read your letter with interest. But you claim that you still use 2-3 kwh per day. This is 7200 Kilojoules of energy or enough to heat 7.93 tons of air by 1.8 Degree F. This is because all energy gets converted to heat and ends up heating the atmosphere.
You also use solar to produce electricity. The low efficiency means the solar panels get very hot and heat the surrounding air at 4 times the energy they produce. So if you produced all your power from photovoltaic panels you would be heating about 40 tons of air by 1.8 degree F. each and every day.
The world has bought into the global warming issue that it is caused by the mere presence of CO2 in the atmosphere. This is because most scientists can't do or understand chemistry.
If they had they would have realised that it is the energy released from burning hydrocarbons that is the problem. The fact is the energy use is what heats the atmosphere. There should be more concern about how to mitigate the heating effects.
This is because no one wants to stop using energy for all the wonderful things it does for us.
A few more clouds to reflect more sunlight might do the trick. Remember Mt. Pinatubo. It cooled the planet for a few years.
The Us has plenty of ICBMs. Use them to send anhydrous ammonia into the upper atmosphere where it will cause cloud formation.
At the present rate of energy use we are heating the atmosphere by 18 degrees F. every century.
This will be bad news for the world by the end of this one.
You and I may not suffer, but your grandchildren surley will.
Science Rules More people should understand it.
BillyY4
People like you... I don't understand. There IS no way that you can make something so dangerous for so long, safe. How do you dismatle all these future plants, so that in years to come, our descendants aren't cursing us for ever bringing such an energy source into existance. I could care less how you think that even in a terrorist attack, all the radiation would be kept inside the plant. So, if some terrorist come salong with their own nuclear bomb or something close and they use it on the plant, I guess that won't blow the thing to smitherines... Aaahhhh!!!
There are probably plenty of othere scenerios that could also do the damage to this. How about something in which the coolant water gets released?
What about the mining of uranium in the Congo right now that is being done by slaves...
I guess everyone is done on this thread but I had to get on and say my piece...