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Published on Tuesday, April 26, 2011 by CommonDreams.org
Nuclear Disasters Should Be Met with Scientific Inquiry, Not Silence
Remarks on the 25th anniversary of the Nuclear Meltdown at Chernobyl, Ukraine.
The disaster at Chernobyl’s reactor on April 26, 1986 continues to expose humans, flora and fauna to radioactive lethality especially in, but not restricted to, Ukraine and Belarus. Western countries continue to reflect an under-estimation of casualties by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA).
IAEA’s figures top off at 4000 fatalities since 1986 that is highly questionable given IAEA’s conflict of interest between its role of promoting nuclear power and monitoring its safety. An agreement between the IAEA and the World Health Organization (WHO) provides for WHO’s deference to IAEA’s casualty figures which has compromised WHO’s priority of advancing health in the world. The United Nations naturally adopts the IAEA figures and the West’s nuclear regulatory agencies, similarly committed to promotional functions, ditto these under-estimations.
The position that the level of mortality and morbidity from Chernobyl over the past quarter century is much larger comes from a compendious of 5000 scientific studies, mostly in the Slavic languages edited by Alexey Yablokov, Vassily Nesterenko and Alexey Nesterenko titled Chernobyl: Consequences of the Catastrophe for People and the Environment. (Read it online here) Dr. Yablokov, a biologist, is a member of the prestigious Russian Academy of Sciences. The translated edition was published under the auspices of the New York Academy of Sciences.
At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on March 25, 2011, attended by C-SPAN, CNN and independent media, but not the mainstream media, Dr. Yablokov summarized these studies and estimated the death toll over nearly twenty five years at about one million and mounting.
Because of the mainstream media, including the major newspapers, blackout on the Yablokov report since its translated edition came out in 2009, I asked Dr. Yablokov this question at the news conference:
“Dr. Yablokov, you are a distinguished scientist in your country, as reflected in your membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, what has been the response to your report by corporate scientists, regulatory agency scientists and academic scientists in the West? Did they openly agree in whole or in part or did they disagree in whole or in part or were they just silent?”
Academician Yablokov replied that the compilation of these many reports has been met with silence. He added that science means critical engagement with the data and implied that silence was not an appropriate response from the scientific community.
Silence, of course, is not without its purpose. For to engage, whether to rebut, doubt or affirm, would give visibility to this compendium of scientific studies that upsets the fantasy modeling by the nuclear industry and its apologists regarding the worse case scenario damage of a level 7 or worse meltdown. It would require, for example, more epidemiological studies ranging into Western Europe, such as the current review of 330 hill farms in Wales. It would insistently invite more studies of the current health and casualty data involving the 800,000 liquidators—workers passing through since 1986 who have been exposed in and around the continuing emergency efforts at the very hot disabled Chernobyl reactor. And much more.
Public silence has not excluded a sub silentio oral campaign to delegitimize the Yablokov compendium. A quiet grapevine of general dismissals—unavailable for public comment or rebuttal—has cooled members of the press and other potential disseminators of its contents, including the National Academy of Sciences, the science advisers to the President and any other thinking scientists who decide that there isn’t enough time or invulnerability to justify getting into a contentious interaction over the Yablokov report.
The ability of corporate science and its regulatory apologists to inflict sanctions on dissenters is legion. There is a long history of censorship leading to self-censorship by those who otherwise might have applied Alfred North Whitehead’s characterization of science as “keeping open options for revision” to the ideology of atomic power.
I call for an open rigorous public scientific-medical debate on the findings and casualty estimates of the Yablokov report, to determine its usefulness for necessary programs of compensation, quarantine, accelerated protective entombment of the still dangerous reactor, and expanded studies of the past and continuing ravages issuing from this catastrophe and its recycling of radioactivity through the soil, air, water and food of the exposed regions. Such a public review is what the science adviser to the President and the National Academy of Sciences should have done already and should do now. The continuing expansion of the Fukishima disaster in Japan provides additional urgency for this open scientific review.
At a press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on March 25, 2011, attended by C-SPAN, CNN and independent media, but not the mainstream media, Dr. Yablokov summarized these studies and estimated the death toll over nearly twenty five years at about one million and mounting.
Because of the mainstream media, including the major newspapers, blackout on the Yablokov report since its translated edition came out in 2009, I asked Dr. Yablokov this question at the news conference:
“Dr. Yablokov, you are a distinguished scientist in your country, as reflected in your membership in the Russian Academy of Sciences, what has been the response to your report by corporate scientists, regulatory agency scientists and academic scientists in the West? Did they openly agree in whole or in part or did they disagree in whole or in part or were they just silent?”
Academician Yablokov replied that the compilation of these many reports has been met with silence. He added that science means critical engagement with the data and implied that silence was not an appropriate response from the scientific community.
Silence, of course, is not without its purpose. For to engage, whether to rebut, doubt or affirm, would give visibility to this compendium of scientific studies that upsets the fantasy modeling by the nuclear industry and its apologists regarding the worse case scenario damage of a level 7 or worse meltdown. It would require, for example, more epidemiological studies ranging into Western Europe, such as the current review of 330 hill farms in Wales. It would insistently invite more studies of the current health and casualty data involving the 800,000 liquidators—workers passing through since 1986 who have been exposed in and around the continuing emergency efforts at the very hot disabled Chernobyl reactor. And much more.
Public silence has not excluded a sub silentio oral campaign to delegitimize the Yablokov compendium. A quiet grapevine of general dismissals—unavailable for public comment or rebuttal—has cooled members of the press and other potential disseminators of its contents, including the National Academy of Sciences, the science advisers to the President and any other thinking scientists who decide that there isn’t enough time or invulnerability to justify getting into a contentious interaction over the Yablokov report.
The ability of corporate science and its regulatory apologists to inflict sanctions on dissenters is legion. There is a long history of censorship leading to self-censorship by those who otherwise might have applied Alfred North Whitehead’s characterization of science as “keeping open options for revision” to the ideology of atomic power.
I call for an open rigorous public scientific-medical debate on the findings and casualty estimates of the Yablokov report, to determine its usefulness for necessary programs of compensation, quarantine, accelerated protective entombment of the still dangerous reactor, and expanded studies of the past and continuing ravages issuing from this catastrophe and its recycling of radioactivity through the soil, air, water and food of the exposed regions. Such a public review is what the science adviser to the President and the National Academy of Sciences should have done already and should do now. The continuing expansion of the Fukishima disaster in Japan provides additional urgency for this open scientific review.
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40 Comments so far
Show AllCould it be more pernicious that the president is selling us more reactors?
12,000 generations will pay dearly for this.
We should live so long.
There is no safe energy with enough oomph to power western civilization, at least not for much longer. For the last couple months I've been watching environmental documentaries on TV. People who claim watching TV makes you stupid are wrong; being stupid makes you watch the stupid stuff on TV. There is actual information out there if you pick and choose and avoid dramas, comedies, so-called reality shows, and infomercials.
I cannot guarantee the factual accuracy of any of this, because it does come from TV, a suspect source (but so is reading, actually). I put this up before but all it takes is cutting and pasting. Fact checking would be wonderful. I don't want any of this to be true.
Political struggles -- the conflicts between tribes, classes, ethnicities, the conflicts about power and money and territory, all of which are life and death, kill or die matters to those immersed in them -- are dangerously trivial when viewed from a global and environmental perspective.
It is a global problem. Even if this country did everything energy smart that there is to do, all the other developed and developing countries would have to do the same to have any appreciable effect.
The most complicated and largest machines on earth are the electric grids which pretty much power everything (electricity is even needed to change oil into gasoline). The grid is aging and the whole thing needs to be upgraded or it will break down in a massive blackout. Replacing it -- even over the fifty years that's said to be needed (time we may not have, not even close) -- would be a technological feat that would dwarf the space program, and one that would need to keep producing power while improvements are underway.
There is not enough available oil to fuel transportation, manufacture all the petrochemicals that agriculture and much of the rest of civilization have come to depend on (including the ubiquitous plastic), and power the grid -- even if messy Canadian shale is factored in.
The problems inherent in nuclear power have now been displayed again for the world to see. Other polluting big energy production processes are poisonous over time, but nuclear can go deadly in an instant and create a need for rapid widespread evacuations while still seeding cancers that may not appear for years. There is still no solution to what to do with spent fuel rods.
The amount of manufacturing capacity and raw materials needed to produce enough wind and solar devices to run the civilized world probably exceeds availability.
Carbon capture from coal powered energy production is not yet technically feasible on a usably large enough scale. It would take a facility bigger than the source plant to filter out even a percentage the carbon. A third of the juice that's produced would be needed to power the process. The captured CO2 would have to be buried at enormous cost, and it's possible that it could turn out to be as dangerous as nuclear waste -- scientists can't say whether or not it's safe. They don't know yet.
"Natural" gas -- scented methane, actually -- is plentiful if we "frack" the underground earth to get it which compromises potable water safety, occasionally producing flammable tap water. Twice as many gas plants would be needed as there are coal plants now to produce the same amount of power. There are other ways methane can be made using bacteria and fungi, but making enough would mean building a whole lot of new facilities full of microorganisms.
Geothermal is promising, but it would take time and resources to build production facilities custom designed for each volcanic occurrence, but once built they would be cost effective. But getting full effective use would require nation states to share their volcanic output.
Biodiesel is also promising but to produce enough to fuel the country would take a major reorganization of the food production system so that every drop of cooking fat is captured and reused. A healthy lower fat diet might scuttle the whole project.
Cutting back on home energy use by everyone will happen whether we like it or not, but doing so in a coordinated equitable way that minimizes suffering would need the dynamic public leadership that we don't now have, plus an agreed upon plan.
A World War II combined with Marshall Plan national and international mobilization is necessary to address any of this, but present day political leaders are afraid to publicly proclaim that these are serious problems needing immediate attention. Being the bearer of terrible tidings doesn't win many elections.
If Ralph Nader wants to run for president again and has a plan to deal with this, I'll vote for him.
Mostly agree.
Nuclear power is the reason that most of Europe, Japan and the U.S. have the largest, most diverse economies.
China and India are to-days largest buyers of nuclear generating stations.
We could not support the same population and standard of living we have today without nuclear power.
Mr. ectoplasm1
Instead of being a shill for the nuclear power industry why not instead engage in a little critical thinking by reading Nader's essay and what he had to say about the dangers of nuclear energy.
while I believe nuclear is theoretically" do-able", and safe, it'll likely be given over to "BP"-types for its' development, production, operation, and maintenance, thus negating all advantages. I think the power of the creative human mind is so great that there are a dozen or more pathways forward to abundant generation of energy for the continuance of modern civilization. I've read for decades about the suppression of inventions. They are out there. The will & vision is lacking. That is changing rapidly. It WILL take a U.N./Marshall Plan/Manhattan Project-level of global cooperation to make the shift. It will be the first great, global under-taking that does NOT revolve around war. WE always come up with TRILLIONS for WAR, why not for this. For LIFE.
(because the owner/operators of global EMPIRE prefer war. They'll soon be gone)
Yeah. I cant think of a single other way to boil water than with nuclear fission. BTW. China is way ahead of the world in its development of green energy. And the rest of the world is eagerly buying up its products. Get a clue dude.
Isn't it also true that China is now constructiong 25 more nuclear power plants?
It is not at all clear that there is not enough potential safe energy to power Western civilization. There is likely not enough to allow it to act the fool like it has for the last couple centuries, but that is quite a different question.
It becomes more obvious every day that the West will undergo a catastrophic loss of power fairly soon. But the catastrophe in that will measure the general foolishness in plunging along without conserving and without investing in technology to mitigate the otherwise inevitable.
Unfortunately, that foolishness seems endemic. It will take some energy to revamp technologies and infrastructures at all quickly and efficiently. That retooling should have a priority call on available resources. The technology exists and would improve were it to be put in place in a large way.
Meanwhile, governments and businesses around the world are rushing to win the last of the hydrocarbon booty--the US to approach and consolidate a near-monopoly, the others to participate in its largesse or to set aside their own. That of course means elites providing for themselves, the better to lever shortages to coerce others to their bidding.
We can't all "return to the soil," but those who can take care of themselves outside of the general economy have better odds of fighting for autonomy as the "globalized" economy lurches repeatedly towards either a halt or some greatly reduced state.
Turn off your TV, it is making you stupid.
Didn't your read the Nader article? Corporations control all of US academia - no one can speak out!
So, you think one little TV show you watch can't be controlled & spun?
Stop avoiding TV; it's making you ignorant. What is it you're afraid you'll see?
LOL
Dear Ralph,
If voting made a difference, I'd once again pull the lever (push that button) for you. Since it doesn't, can I count on you to really get fired up and radical? Please don't hesitate to really tell it like it is. At this juncture you're vilified and perceived as a spoiler by both parties, what the heck, you might as well let your passions flow into your prose and aim for the jugular.
This debate is really not about voting, or how one votes, as it pretends to be. Rather it is a debate about what we should be advocating. Advocating that voting can change the power structure advances the interests of those in power.
Voting, or voting this or that way is one thing. Promoting the idea that voting is the path to social and political change is another thing entirely.
You have four choices when you vote:
1. Vote Democratic - and maintain 40 years of conservative policy;
2. Vote Independent - this decreases Democratic votes and helps elect Republicans;
3. Don't vote - this decreases voter turnout and helps elect Republicans;
4. Vote Republican - and maintain 40 years of conservative policy.
No wonder only 4 in ten Americans bother to vote.
About the only effect you can have is to vote Republican and show the Democrats that, not only will you not vote for them, but will vote for their opponent (giving you twice the effect). You still are going to end up with conservative policy - Democrat or Republican.
The lever in the voting booth is not a mechamism by which we control those in power, rather it is a mechanism by which those in power control us.
Informed voting could make a difference. The problem is that too many misinformed cast a ballot. They should be encouraged to stay in bed on election day.
Meantime I will continue to vote for NADER as I have for more than 30 years.
Cheers for Ralph Nadar's article.
For a strategy that can accelerate cheap renewable energy, see Green Light at www.aesopinstitute.org
Cold Fusion on the same site provides an alternative to Uranium nuclear plants. It describes a breakthrough based on small amounts of Nickel and Hydrogen as fuel. Production is under way. Power is predicted at 1c/kwh and would be a bargain at several times that figure. No nuclear waste is produced. One scientist has predicted there will soon be a "stampede" toward this surprising system.
This needed to be said. Nuclear electricity generation is a wildly unsafe product. It kills huge numbers of people. Alternative electricity generation, such as wind power with pumped hydroelectric storage, is somewhat more expensive if you don't count any dead bodies but cheaper if you do count. We just need to count up the total life cycle costs of each energy source.
Hello to the nuclear industry's paid boiler-room bloggers.
Paul,
Unless I misread Nader's article, the main thing he is calling for is a rigorous high visibility review of the NYAS report by qualified scientists. As an unpaid pronuclear poster, I could not agree more.
For a critique of the NYAS book by a member of the NYAS, see the following. The author, Ted Rockwell, is a highly respected nuclear scientist. I found his letter on a nuclear energy blog: http://atomicinsights.com/2011/04/why-is-the-new-york-academy-of-sciences-allowing-its-name-to-be-used-in-an-anti-science-fud-campaign.html
Bill
Did my ears deceive me or did I hear that Obama wants to take away Big Oil's depletion allowance and use the money to fund green alternative energy? I hope he doesn't still think nukes are green, but maybe Big Oil's cutting off his campaign bribes could have something to do with it.
Obama will give "green talk" every once in a while to create the illusion of change but don't be a doofus and fall for it. He's not gonna touch the oil and nuke interests especially if he needs them to get him reelected and we the American people are hooked to an oil dependent economy.
Obama says nukes and "clean coal" are part of his alternative energy strategy to Win The Future. WTF? Green ain't nuthin' but a word.
I can't be too surprised given that IL is a huge coal producing state. Obama's support of nuclear is something I can never understand other than his taking advantage of some of the environmentalists falling for the nuke propaganda that going nuclear reduces carbon, something Cheney would always say as one of his ways of defending his oily buddies.
The real costs are the last things capitalists wants us to know
and, under unfettered capitalism alone,
they will be.
Thank you, Mr. Nader, for all you have done and all you have tried to do
for us.
And now, a report from the Pacific, outside the Media Iron Curtain of the USSA:
There are actually two nuclear plant disasters that we know of going on right now: Fukushima One PLANT (Dai-ichi) and Fukushima Two PLANT (Da-ni) (seven miles to the south).
First the one you've heard of, Fukushima One PLANT: (which houses six reactors)
Announced last night on NHK World that not only are the first three reactors so radioactive that nobody can get within miles of them, Fukushima Unit Number Four Spent Fuel Pond (SFP) temperature is rising out of control. Since it has been bone dry due to probably a crack caused by one of the many earthquakes and hydrogen explosions and fires, it stands to reason that the biggest cache of fuel rod assemblies (over 1000) are now all melting down since reactions with air mean no cooling. Once they get over 5000 degrees C, this is a forgone conclusion, unless I don't understand something. Already, the french firm Areva? reported that core temps had climbed over 5000 degrees C in units one through three. It's important to understand that units one through three were at full power while units four five and six were hot, but down for maintenance.
This means we have THREE MELTDOWNS underway at 70 percent, 30 percent, and 25 percent of the core. Number four is a strange meltdown with the core sitting up in the air outside the containment vessel with 1000 dangerous fuel rods for company. Worst case accident planing for the industry was a ONE percent core meltdown. What we have here is, according to industry insiders, all told, is radiation one thousand times the release of the Hiroshima bomb.
Oh, and by the way, Tepco mentioned last night, that back on April 5th, they forgot to admit that reactor number one exploded putting more radiation into the air than Chernobyl. (Now they didn't say it this way, but their explanation for high radiation in SFP number four was fallout from reactor number one. But former Three Mile Island VP Arnie Gundersen calculated, that using their own numbers this put the radiation way over the Chernobyl release.
Fukushima TWO PLANT: (which houses four reactors) seven miles to the South:
An unreported crisis occurred when 14 meter waves took out all essential supply cooling pumps.
From wiki:
Officials made preparations for release of pressure from the plant (Fukushima II PLANT, Daiichi - TJ) on March 12.[19][20] As of March 20, however, no pressure release had been reported.[12][21]
An evacuation order was issued to people living within 3 kilometres (1.9 mi) of the plant,[22] subsequently expanded to 10 km (6.2 mi).[23] [24]
Air traffic was restricted in a 10 km (6.2 mi) radius around the plant, according to a NOTAM.[25] These zone were superseded by the 20 km evacuation and 30 km no-fly zones around Fukushima I on March 12 and 15, respectively.[citation needed].
They evacuated the public around this separate nuclear plant. No heat sink cooling with the ocean is happening at any of these ten total Nuclear Reactors! Pissing on the outside with firetrucks and letting the highly radioactive runoff seep into the groundwater and ooze into the Pacific is what's being called "cooling" by the nuclear industry which is going to force a hundred new nuke plants on the citizens of the world despite the suicidal realities.
Of course, the Nuke Industry's twisted web of lies never makes the US media. All that is ever reported in the US is that "radiation is safe": A barefaced lie regurgitated from the nuclear industry straight to your TV speakers.
The head of the International Nuke agency said, off the record, we are witnessing the biggest disaster that has every faced mankind. And it's not even worthy of Rupert Murdock's and Ted Turner's prime time coverage! (Faux and CNN have barely covered this, at least out here in the Pacific.)
It's time to recall this administration and the entire congress before they get us all killed. It's time to break up the banks, media giants, oil companies and other mafias like big pharma and big Ag who are literally poisoning us at will, with no meaningful government oversight whatsoever.
It's time to get pissed.
That's what I think.
TJ
p.s. Much of my info is from NHK World Japan, Wikipedia and www.fairewinds.com
Call your senators and representative and demand, as Harvey Wasserman has suggested, a nation-wide radiation detection network to measure the Fukushima fallout on the US.
Also, request that they kill the $36 billion Obama wants to give to the nuclear power industry next year - it will help balance the budget and we don't want nuclear power becoming socialist.
Neutron beams have been measured kilometers from Fukushima one. Helen Caldicott says this means that fission is occurring outside the containment vessel.
Tom,
I don't know what your sources are but none of the fuel at Fukushima-1 is at 5,000C. This is just not realistic.
Fukushima-2 is in cold shut down at all 4 reactors. It was not flooded by a tsunami. There is an evacuation zone (which was recently reduced because it overlapped with Fukushima-1) around this nuclear plant, not because of radiation release but because the coolant pumps are running on emergency power and the extent of damage from the EQ has not been fully assessed. This is considered by the Japanese government to constitute a hazardous condition and the evacuation is precautionary.
If you have a reference for the statement by the IAEA chief, I would like to see it. Thanks in advance.
Bill
And you still think nuclear is safe? Oh Jesus effing Christ !
Max,
My post spoke to what I believe are specific factual errors and inaccuracies in the previous post. The prior post was not merely an opinion, he was presenting flawed information. How does this make me a boogie man?
No activity is 'safe'. Driving to work has risk. Cooking dinner has risk. Petting my dog or talking to my kids has risk. Nuclear power is not absolutely safe. I do believe that rigorously regulated nuclear power is safer for humanity than fossil fuels or hydroelectric for power generation. (As an aside, I believe that, other than hydroelectric and geothermal, renewables are too diffuse a power source to provide the baseload electricity necessary for a functional first world society.)
Bill
"No activity is 'safe'. Driving to work has risk. Cooking dinner has risk. Petting my dog or talking to my kids has risk. Nuclear power is not absolutely safe."
That is an insult to any honest, and rational minded person.
drolltroll,
Thanks for your corrections, maybe the ess pumps were still physically there in the south, but their grid supply was gone and other gens failed, so they were inoperative in some units for something like 24 hours. Their feedwater exceeded 100 degrees in all four as I recall. Far from a normal cold shutdown. It rated a number three on the international phuck-up scale. The evacuation was in fact for radiation not precautionary as you opined. The guess was that the radiation was from Fuku One Plant ten miles to the north. But your other comment about the north complex has me in stitches!
Of course none of the fuel is at 5,000 degrees anymore! That's because it detonated/melted and destroyed all the sensing equipment. But rumored leaked industry communications had calculations (assumptions) by outside consultants putting cores one through three momentarily over 5000 degrees Celsius prior to the explosions/meltdowns, if my understanding is correct. I'll concede that the fires on SFP number four might have been lower. But the explosion on SFP 3 probably went critical and must have momentarily exceeded 5000:
http://fairewinds.com/content/gundersen-postulates-unit-3-explosion-may-have-been-prompt-criticality-fuel-pool?
Reactor three SFP (spent fuel pond) looks like it became volatile (aerosol-ized into fine powder) all across the Northern Hemisphere in a huge mushroom cloud. Other fuel assemblies melted down and probably breached the main containment on at least reactor number one. These are estimates by outside experts. Since no one can get in there but robots, we'll probably never know since the crooked CEO will, no doubt, destroy any incriminating footage.
I gave you my sources. Maybe you didn't have time to watch all the videos which detail what I just paraphrased? Speculation was that temps in cores one through three of the North Complex exceeded 5000 degrees C. After the NRC and French report was leaked to the public, admission was made on NHK World by Tepco this week, that THREE meltdowns in fact occurred, however, Tepco now says they made mistakes calculating the extent of the meltdowns. Tepco, just like they always do when outed, says they were in fact smaller. But originally, they were 70 percent, 25 percent and 30 percent IIRC.
But even Tepco, now, does not deny Three Meltdowns have already occurred. (they denied this for weeks but the massive radiation ratted them out.)
First Tepco reports to industry a radiation excursion 7,500,000 times max allowed for human health off intake number two, then, once it's on Japan TV, it changes to 200,000 the next week. I imagine it's a simple affair to change the robot's sensor log.
Domo itigoto,
Mr Roboto,
So Sorry!
The bottom line is that Tepco is a dishonest operator, just like your typical Nuke CEO in the states. I have lost all confidence in man's ability to handle something so complicated and dangerous as nuclear power.
All my post are all just my opinions only, and I could be wrong about everything.
TJ
What entity is the largest single user of energy in the US? It's the military. Set a five-year plan to roll back the military, stop our wars, close our bases, build a genuine self-defense and public-service force, and cut military energy use by 90%.
Frivolous "consumer" and pointless industrial use can be slashed as well, AND we can transition from fossil fuels to renewable forms of energy. With a long-term strategy to replace the current central-station grid with a distributed energy grid, while instituting building and design codes that vastly reduce waste, efficiency would go up year after year for decades. Not to mention transit infrastructure to replace ridiculous individual automobiles, and improved storage methods for wind and solar to address uneven generation. Oh and roll back industrial commodity export ag and invest in labor-intensive complex and diverse regional ag systems.
With leadership and a cohesive social approach, we could ramp down fossil fuels and nukes, ramp down war and over-consumption, ramp up renewables like wind and solar and geothermal and appropriate-scale biofuels, and realistically set goals of ten years reduce current US use of fossil fuels by half, twenty years by 90%, and in thirty years be fossil-fuel free.
And we'd have an excellent "standard of living."
Nay-sayers who talk about infrastructure demands and mineral bottle-necks making this impossible are wrong, we are building infrastructure all the time, we need to shift our investment and focus our resource use.
However, it's a pipe-dream because our culture is so sick. Not an ice cube's chance in hell of such a scenario playing out, NOT because it is technically or humanly impossible, but because our civilization is deeply insane. Along with a political revolution, we need a revolution of values and a revolution of consciousness.
Plus time is critically short. In fact, in all likelihood the ecological and climatological tipping points we have already passed will disrupt our economy and society so deeply that we are facing massive die-back in the near term anyway. But what else are we going to do? Are we going to give our best realistic effort? Or are we going to roll over and die, or keep playing along because we can't imagine ourselves actually putting our lives on the line, can't acknowledge our own understanding of the serious reality of our situation?
Anyone taking odds? Are we gonna come together, have teach-ins, build resistance, build our own capacity to work together across all lines, take down this death machine and put our "energy" into life? Who's in? The starting point is everywhere, right now, all the time.
Come together, have teach-ins, build resistance, build our own capacity to work together, and start where you are - yes. However, I would suggest that it is not the case that the working class is oppressed and the environment is being destroyed because the culture is sick, or insane, rather I would say that the culture is sick, or insane because the working class is oppressed and the environment is being destroyed.
U.S. Energy Secretary Chu's recent interview with Wolf Blitzer on CNN, far from reassuring the public about U.S. Nuclear plant safety, scared the hell out of me. Nobel Laureate Chu’s dismissal of the risk of catastrophic accidents at U.S. nuclear plants is disingenuous, at best, fundamentally dishonest at worst. His statement concerning "... a breakdown in the safety system we design so that it's unlikely to occur once in maybe 10,000 years," seems like it must have been extracted (piecemeal) from studies like WASH 1400, done in 1975, which estimated the probability of a core meltdown at 1 in 10,000 plant/years.
PLANT years.
With 100 plants in the U.S. today, that's one meltdown every 100 years.
Chu can do the math.
Calculating for the 1000 nuclear plants the U.S. industry wants to build, that's one meltdown every 10 years. Based on experience with U.S., Soviet and Japanese (G.E.) reactors, that figure seems to be holding true. And that is not cause for confidence.
Dr. Chu should be ashamed of himself for such obfuscation.
If he's not scared, he should be.
Citizens deserve the truth about the dangers we face.
As I stated in testimony at the White House in 1980 (before we knew about Climate Change) alternatives like wind, solar and other renewables, not nuclear, are the path to U.S. jobs and energy independence.
Take a drive down Indiana’s I-65 from Gary to Indianapolis and see what wind power is doing, today. Rising out of the corn fields, hundreds of 1.5 megawatt wind generators are almost always turning over at a nice rate, even in gentle breeezes. The sound they make is music to my ears, and those of the farmers who get a percentage of the income from every KWH they produce--buning no fuel at all: ca-ching, ca-ching, ca-ching.
Wind, solar and other renewable are our energy future, not nuclear.
No Nukes!
-Mike Olszanski,
Former Environmental Chair (1977-1982), United Steelworkers of America District 31, Chicago-Gary
Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World
http://www.breakthroughpower.net/Home.html
http://peswiki.com/index.php/Review:Breakthrough_Power_by_Jeane_Manning_and_Joel_Garbon
http://www.amazon.com/Breakthrough-Power-Quantum-leap-Inventions-Transform/dp/0981054307/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1303939983&sr=1-1
The best site I have been able to find re. Fukushima, and radiation levels drifting to and raining on the US is at enenews.com. Google it, spend an hour there and be afraid, be very afraid.
If you google "radiation levels Pacific Northwest", all info stopped toward the end of March. When the radiation started making landfall in the US, they told us there are "glitches in the monitors" and "anomolies in the readings". Then they quit making the info public. This is more diabolical than the BP disinformation simply because the Global stakes are much higher.