November, 29 2020, 11:00pm EDT
For Immediate Release
Contact:
Pat Marida, patmarida@outlook.com, (614) 286-4851
Connie Kline, klineisfine@aol.com, (440) 946-9012
Terry Lodge, tjlodge50@yahoo.com, (419) 205-7084
Lee Blackburn, leeblackburn@live.com, (614) 216-0010
Kevin Kamps, kevin@beyondnuclear.org, (240) 462-3216
Ohio Nuclear Power Plant Legislation Assailed by Safe Energy and Environmental Groups
Dirty, dangerous, and expensive hb 104 contains not only statewide, but also regional and national risks.
WASHINGTON
On November 29, 2020, 56 local, regional and national environmental, public health and safe energy organizations blasted proposed House Bill 104, the "Advanced Nuclear Technology Helping Energize Mankind Act" ("ANTHEM Act") pending in the Ohio General Assembly. Calling the proposal a "radioactive taxpayer giveaway," the groups, representing hundreds of thousands of people, filed written testimony for a December 1 Senate Energy and Public Utilities Committee hearing along with a one-page overview with 10 reasons to oppose HB 104. The activists warn that building state-sponsored small modular nuclear power reactors (SMRs) "will break the bank and destroy Ohio's chances for a clean and safe energy future" especially given COVID-related budgetary constraints and that ANTHEM could cause nuclear weapons proliferation, threats to public health and safety, radioactive contamination, and require huge, undetailed governmental subsidies.
House Bill ("HB") 104 is being pushed by eGeneration Foundation, a Cleveland company that envisions thorium and molten-salt nuclear power reactors, which have never gotten beyond small-scale experiments and show few prospects of commercial success. The company will not say where it would build several full-scale SMRs. There are no provisions for community or public involvement in the creation of an Ohio Nuclear Development Authority (NDA) to issue taxpayer-backed bonds for reactor construction. The NDA would be governed by a board of nuclear industry insiders within the Ohio Department of Commerce. In the House committee hearings Rep. Dick Stein, HB 104's sponsor, could not answer the question of who the Authority would be responsible to.
HB 104 has passed the Ohio House and may be discharged from the Senate committee on Tuesday for a floor vote in December, as the legislature resumes its "lame duck" session. Location of the agency within the Ohio Department of Commerce would mean that nuclear promotion, not regulation of health and safety, would be the priority, and that Ohio taxpayers would be liable for cleanup and dismantling when reactors close - or worse, after spills and accidents. The bill also allows for eminent domain.
Only New York State has ever set up a state nuclear development agency, which resulted in construction of a disastrous nuclear waste reprocessing plant at West Valley, New York in the 1960's. The venture has so far cost $600 million in cleanup and partial remediation, and tens of billions of dollars more will be needed for future cleanup costs to keep radioactive contamination from spreading.
"Enacting this self-inflicted fiscal nightmare in the midst of a pandemic will surely crimp provision of existing services by the government," said Pat Marida, chair of the Ohio Sierra Club's Nuclear Free Committee. "This untried technology will swallow up major financing that must instead be made immediately available to build genuine safe energy options to reduce the worst effects of climate chaos."
"eGeneration won't admit the potential for deadly accidents from operating test reactors and from the dirty, radioactive-waste-producing processes to extract enriched uranium and plutonium (one of the most toxic substances on earth) from radioactive waste," said Connie Kline, past Chair of the Ohio Sierra Club Nuclear Committee. "This bill creates national security concerns about the spread of nuclear weapons. The fuel required by these reactors are literally thermonuclear bomb ingredients that will command hefty prices on global black markets."
"Hasn't the General Assembly learned any lessons from the corruption around HB 6, the coal and nuclear bailout?" asked Lee Blackburn of the Sierra Club's Nuclear Free Committee.
"ANTHEM is a classic corporate welfare response for ideas too risky and half-baked to work in the so-called 'free market," offered Terry Lodge, Toledo attorney. "Why should billions more public dollars be risked on experiments that haven't perfected these dangerous processes in the last 55 years?"
"Reprocessing is environmentally ruinous," said Kevin Kamps, radioactive waste specialist at Beyond Nuclear. "As shown in France, the U.K., upstate New York, and other places, plutonium and uranium extraction from high-level radioactive waste inevitably results in large-scale releases of hazardous, long-lasting ionizing radiation into the air and surface waters, such as the Great Lakes or Ohio River, that threaten people downwind, downstream, up the food chain, and down the generations."
Beyond Nuclear aims to educate and activate the public about the connections between nuclear power and nuclear weapons and the need to abandon both to safeguard our future. Beyond Nuclear advocates for an energy future that is sustainable, benign and democratic.
(301) 270-2209LATEST NEWS
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A grieving family and a team of medical providers in Rafah, Gaza were desperate this week for a miracle, hoping that newborn Sabreen al-Rouh Jouda would survive after being delivered prematurely moments after her mother died of injuries sustained in an Israeli airstrike.
On Friday, it became clear that the family's hopes would not be realized as doctors announced Sabreen's death.
Dr. Muhammad Salama, head of the emergency neonatal department at Emirati Hospital, where Sabreen was born last week via a Caesarean section that was caught on film and widely reported as outlets searched for any bit of hopeful news out of Gaza, said the baby's lungs were not able to fully absorb oxygen because she was born at just 30 weeks' gestation.
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Sabreen is now one of 16 children killed in two airstrikes last weekend at a housing complex in Rafah, where Israeli officials have said they plan to move forward with a planned ground invasion.
Sabreen's parents and their three-year-old daughter, Malak, were also killed.
Her mother, Sabreen al-Sakani, was rushed to the hospital on Saturday night with extensive injuries that she succumbed to just before doctors performed the emergency Caesarean section.
Sabreen weighed just 3.1 pounds at birth and was in severe respiratory distress, but doctors were able to temporarily stabilize her condition.
Her grandmother was filmed speaking to her as she lay in an incubator earlier this week.
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Filed in a federal court in New York, the lawsuit comes over a month after the ACLU submitted a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request seeking details on the kinds of AI tools the NSA is using and whether it is taking any steps to prevent large-scale privacy abuses of the kind the agency is notorious for.
The ACLU said in its new complaint that the NSA and other federal agencies have yet to release "any responsive records, notwithstanding the FOIA's requirement that agencies respond to requests within twenty working days."
"Timely disclosure of the requested records [is] vitally necessary to an informed debate about the NSA's rapid deployment of novel AI systems in its surveillance activities and the safeguards for privacy, civil rights, and civil liberties that should apply," the complaint states, asking the court for an injunction requiring the NSA to immediately process the ACLU's FOIA request.
In a blog post on Thursday, the ACLU's Shaiba Rather and Patrick Toomey noted that AI "has transformed many of the NSA's daily operations" in recent years, with the agency utilizing AI tools to "help gather information on foreign governments, augment human language processing, comb through networks for cybersecurity threats, and even monitor its own analysts as they do their jobs."
"Unfortunately, that's about all we know," the pair wrote. "As the NSA integrates AI into some of its most profound decisions, it's left us in the dark about how it uses AI and what safeguards, if any, are in place to protect everyday Americans and others around the globe whose privacy hangs in the balance."
"That's why we're suing to find out what the NSA is hiding," they added.
BREAKING: We just filed a FOIA lawsuit to find out how the NSA — one of America's biggest spy agencies — is using artificial intelligence.
These are dangerous, powerful tools and the public deserves to know how the government is using them.
— ACLU (@ACLU) April 25, 2024
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With their newly broadened authority, the NSA and other intelligence agencies will have the power to enlist a wide range of businesses and individuals to participate in their warrantless spying operations—a potential catastrophe for privacy rights.
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The Wall Street Journalreported Thursday that former Trump administration officials and other supporters of the ex-president "have in recent months discussed a range of proposals, from incremental policy changes to a long-shot assertion that the president himself should play a role in setting interest rates."
"A small group of the president's allies—whose work is so secretive that even some prominent former Trump economic aides weren't aware of it—has produced a roughly 10-page document outlining a policy vision for the central bank," the Journal reported. "The group of Trump allies argues that he should be consulted on interest-rate decisions, and the draft document recommends subjecting Fed regulations to White House review and more forcefully using the Treasury Department as a check on the central bank. The group also contends that Trump, if he returns to the White House, would have the authority to oust Jerome Powell as Fed chair before his four-year term ends in 2026."
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"I have the right to do that," Trump said in 2019 of ousting Powell. "I'm not happy with his actions, I don't think he's done a good job."
The Fed, still under Powell's leadership, has since jacked up interest rates to their highest level in decades in an attempt to combat inflation—an approach that progressive lawmakers and economists have criticized as misguided, arguing that prices were elevated primarily by pandemic-related supply chain disruptions and corporate profiteering and that hiking rates would harm workers. (Progressives have historically pushed for Fed reforms that would make the powerful central bank more accountable to the public.)
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"Under such an approach, the chair would regularly seek Trump's views on interest-rate policy and then negotiate with the committee to steer policy on the president's behalf," the newspaper continued. "Some of the former president's advisers have discussed requiring that candidates for Fed chair privately agree to consult informally with Trump on the central bank's decisions... Others have made the case that Trump himself could sit on the Fed's board of governors on an acting basis, an option that several people close to the former president described as far-fetched."
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