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Today's Top News
Obama and Our Disney Nukes
Barack Obama is about to address a nation whose greatest potential liability is its Disneyesque illusion of atomic power.
Despite the nation's huge debts and fears of foreign terror, America's 104 licensed reactors are the most dangerous threat to our future. After a half-century of operations, the industry still cannot get more than $11 billion in private insurance against possible accidents whose human and property damage could easily run from mere trillions to the simply incalculable.
In the face of terror or error, earthquake or tidal wave and more, every tick of the atomic clock marks a moment in which a single glitch at a single reactor could forever bankrupt the nation.
Escalating decay at clunkers like Vermont Yankee, New York's Indian Point and so many others define our worst untold crisis.
Yet Obama may ask Congress to bilk taxpayers to build still more.
In the 1950s a cartoon called "Our Friend the Atom" portrayed atomic energy as a "too cheap to meter" savior with no apparent problems. Our very houses would be built with uranium whose glow would provide heat and light on the spot. Atomic airplanes would soar through the sky. Hiroshima-sized "devices" would dig our canals and divert our rivers.
Radioactive waste, lethal emissions, ecological dysfunction, soaring costs, human error, the threat of terror---none had a role in the carefully sanitized Hollywood myth of nukespeak non-realities.
Today the fantasy has been deepened. Nuke waste is "stored energy." Three Mile Island was a "success story" where "nobody died." Chernobyl "killed 31 people." Reactors are an economic disaster because of "over-regulation."
The industry's apparently endless cash still pays for such happy-faced illusions of a technology that has spawned some 450 potential Chernobyls worldwide. Hyped to the hilt, showcase projects in Finland, France and elsewhere are melting amidst interminable delays and astronomical cost overruns. Proposed new US reactors have doubled and tripled in projected price well before the first shovel is turned.
Meanwhile, an energy industry that has disputed climate science for decades now sells its atomic product as the "ultimate cure."
Its backers have demanded---and got---exemption from liability for the full destruction that could be done by future melt-downs or explosions.
And they now want untold billions in loan guarantees. Since 2007 a highly effective grassroots movement has kept the fund at $18.5 billion. With estimates for a single reactor now soaring to $10 billion and more, the industry demands $50 billion, $100 billion, whatever.
Rub the genie's bottle and you might get a firm number. Wish upon a star and you might hear what just one melt-down could actually cost.
In 2010 Obama granted the first $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for a two-reactor project in Georgia. Its price is already soaring. Electric rates there and in any other state that goes nuclear are destined for the twilight zone.
Obama needs to tell it straight---only a total commitment to renewables and efficiency will get this country back on track. The Disneyesque illusion of a "safe, clean, cheap" nuclear industry is a veritable herd of oxymorons.
A powerful, effective national grassroots movement has kept more billions from being dumped into this bottomless pit of bound-to-lose guarantees. We can write Obama asking him to keep the atomic error out of Tuesday's speech. But whatever Obama says, we must win again in 2011. Disneyesque illusions aside, atomic power is about to be transcended by green technologies that are cleaner, cheaper, safer and essential to our real survival.
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26 Comments so far
Show AllMr. Wasserman,
You can't really believe that "Obama needs to tell it straight" will EVER happen. He has lied or flip-flopped on more than 90% of his campaign promises. Please quit extending any illusion that Mr. Obama is a progressive at heart.
Was there ever a time in Obama's career as a politician that he did not support corporate welfare for the nuclear industry?
With its ever growing clout in DC the nuclear energy industry has been expanding its successful PR campaign for most of the past decade to the point that most Americans believe that the lights will go out unless more nuclear power plants are built.
One example of theis PR success is Constellation Energy's ad (I know they don't call them ads on NPR) that has been aired on NPR's Marketplace Show for the past year. The ad barely mentions the sponsor's name but highlights nuclear, wind and solar all being "clean energy". The uncontested repetition of this message is one of the most effective propaganda methods ever devised.
For your personal enjoyment. Fodder for a good a laugh:
"In the interview, the president described his agenda as the best way to move forward in a turbulent world.
“It’s naïve for us to think that we can grow our nuclear stockpiles, the Russians continue to grow their nuclear stockpiles, and our allies grow their nuclear stockpiles, and that in that environment we’re going to be able to pressure countries like Iran and North Korea not to pursue nuclear weapons themselves.”
Realist or dreamer, Mr. Obama has an interest in global denuclearization that arises from what can best be described as a lost chapter of his life. Though he has written two memoirs, he has volunteered few details about his two years at Columbia."
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/world/05nuclear.html?th&emc=th
Obama is the quintessence of Uncle Tom. He has adopted the persona that the Amerinds, decimated by 'western expansion', accused of speaking with 'forked tongue'.
Obama's playing nice with the auto, coal, and nuclear special interests can only create more unintended consequences. That said, electric cars more than trains are likely to rise in demand so don't expect the demand in coal or uranium to drop.
Cap and trade was designed to curb global warming in any way. The coal goons didn't even bother to fight it knowing very well that they'd do great with or without it.
Correction, meant to say wasn't, not was, in the first sentence.
Harvey Wasserman, an advisor to the wonderful activists of Greenpeace, is giving us a timely political warning. Nuclear meltdown risk and nuclear power plant waste disposal are a huge part of the hidden ecomic costs of subsidizing Our Friend the Atom rather than genuinely green, renewable non-fossil fuel alternative energy source technologies.
This would also be an appropriate time for me to mention the recent death of a wonderful woman whose life epitomized how low key, progressive grassroots activism can produce positive, long lasting results.
Mrs. Mary Sinclair of Midland, Michigan did her homework, and tenaciously spoke truth to power.
In the late 1970's, two of the biggest corporate players in her neighborhood - Dow Chemical/Dow Corning and Consumers Power Company - teamed up to build a new, state-of-the art nuclear "cogeneration" plant in Midland that was billed as a great win-win proposition for all us locals. Dow would get steam to run its mammoth industrial processes (which, by the way, included napalm production during the Vietnam War). Consumers Power would get a source for its existing electrical grid to service homes and ordinary businesses. And the construction contract for the Midland nuke plant project went to none other than Bechtel Corporation, a Jolly Non-Green Corporate Giant of truly global scale.
Mary Sinclair, whose husband John was a prominent respected attorney in the Dow company town of Midland, opposed construction of the nuclear plant despite the huge immediate boon it would create in terms of local jobs. If completed, the reactor would be in the Great Lakes watershed on a riverbank near Saginaw Bay on Lake Huron. The technology was unproven. The best laid plans of the brilliant corporate team had no coherent plan for waste disposal. As the building that would house the containment vessel went up, it was discovered that the foundation of the building was settling. Year after year, the projected completion date was revised while the costs of the gargantuan project skyrocketed.
Mary Sinclair did her homework, watch dogged, spoke up at all the public hearings, and sent dozens of letters to the editors of the papers in Midland, Bay City, Saginaw, and Detroit challenging the project on safety, environmental, and purely economic grounds. She and her husband virtually became social pariahs in staid, moderate Republican Midland. They received death threats. Their household mailbox once was bombed. Mary Sinclair steadfastly stayed the course.
Public opposition to completion of the Midland nuke plant grew. I remember attending one large demonstration calling for an end to the project in which a man with a bullhorn exhorted the crowd of demonstrators at one point to drop trou and moon the Dow security people who were buzzing overhead in the company's plant helicopter. This was about 1980. The ring leader of the mooning tactic was an obscure editor of a small alternative newspaper called the Flint Voice. His name was Michael Moore. This escapade was years before Roger & Me, Bowling for Columbine, Farenheit 911, Capitalism: A Love Story and so forth caused his more high profile career to take off.
Eventually, the Midland nuclear cogeneration plant project collapsed, degenerating into a nasty piece of circular firing squad ligitation featuring Bechtel versus Dow versus Consumers versus a bunch of banks versus various insurance company behemoths and their underwriters. The Attorney General of Michigan adamantly insisted from the sidelines that no part of the utility's looming losses in this boondoggle could be passed on later to customers through the Public Service Commission rate structure. In strictly technical legal terms, it was a real cluster fuck when the deal came completely unraveled. Thus, the Midland nuke plant finally died, both with a bang and with a whimper.
More than any other single person, through diligent research and enormous persistence Mrs. Mary Sinclear succeeded in keeping an environmentally hazardous nuclear reactor from going on line immediately adjacent to the largest source of fresh water in this country. In that painful and painstaking process, her tireless advocacy for the public interest ultimately beat Bechtel, Dow, Consumers, and all the horses those Big Boys rode into town on.
Mary's Sinclair's passed away quietly earlier this month, having relocated to leave out east with one of her grandchildren. Regionally, Mrs. Sinclair was memorialized generously in a local press that earlier had often villified her. She will always be remembered for her activism, grace, and quiet courage.
Mary Sinclair, Greenpeace, and most of the folks who frequent this website, shared a common dream.
Bill from Saginaw
BILL: Thank you for the moving tribute. What a gal!
In Georgia, Georgia Power has begun charging its customers for years IN ADVANCE for the cost of constructing a new nuclear power plant.
If nuclear were as cheap as you claim it to be, there wouldn't be overcharging ahead of time in the first place. I'll take large scale solar over the nukes any day.
The disadvantage you mention on solar could be an advantage on pushing for energy conservation and efficiency. Wind, tides, waves, biomass, or geothermal sources could also work for supplemental electricity where solar falls short. Coal and nuclear are off my list.
I did not include natural gas in the discussion but now that you brought it up, it's off my list too sort of but I support converting algae into natural gas since algae is a renewable source of energy.
http://www.physorg.com/news160839462.html
"In the face of terror or error, earthquake or tidal wave and more, every tick of the atomic clock marks a moment in which a single glitch at a single reactor could forever bankrupt the nation."
Sorry to say, it's already happened. The country is bankrupt and it had nothing to do with its nuclear reactors. Although it did have much to do with its nukes.
"Yet Obama may ask Congress to bilk taxpayers to build still more."
I guess the author hasn't yet heard about the new nuclear plant being built in Georgia. One of the first pronouncements of the Obama administration.
Bill
I strongly urge you to read Jay Gould's books; "Deadly Deceit" and "The Enemy Within;The High Cost of Living Near a Nuclear Reactor" about the statistical analysis of the death rates following all our major accidents; Millstone, Savannah River (a reactor for producing bomb plutonium) and 3MI, plus Chernobyl. Following all of them there were spikes in infant mortality as well as deaths across the board. Interestingly one of the age groups most affected was the group I am in, those of us who were infants during the above ground bomb testing. These are facts that can not be refuted and so they are ignored. The production of massive amounts of plutonium is insane, plain and simple. Thank you Bill for discussing this in such a friendly civil way, I appreciate it.