Nuclear power? No point, says new report

13 July 2009

A new report from the Green Party (1) makes a powerful case that nuclear power has no rationale in terms of either economics or helping the fight against dangerous climate change.

In Nuclear Power? No Point! the Green Party's spokesperson on trade and industry, Darren Johnson AM, reviews recent developments and argues that:

•Nuclear power provides less than 4% of UK energy - which is far less than could be saved by energy-efficiency measures that would cut people's fuel bills.
•New nuclear stations will not help the fight against climate change because major CO2 reductions are needed in the next ten years. New nuclear power stations could not be built fast enough.
•Massive investment in renewables could deliver the necessary short-term CO2 cuts - but "feeding cash to the nuclear delusion" could help starve the renewables industry of some of the investment and skilled personnel it needs to grow rapidly.
•The nuclear industry's current financial problems cast serious doubt on its ability to deliver new powerstations anyway.
Darren Johnson, who is currently chair of the London Assembly and Green Party candidate for Lewisham Deptford, said today:

"The industry that was going to produce electricity 'too cheap to meter' has landed us with massive costs for handling its dangerous waste. Now the nuclear industry can't even give us a reliable quote for the cost of a power station. The current projects in Finland and France are experiencing safety concerns, long delays and big overspends.

"There's no point expecting nuclear to solve the climate crisis, because new stations couldn't be built fast enough to help achieve the big CO2 reductions we need to make in the next ten years - which mature renewables could deliver.

"There is no point even considering nuclear power, because demand-reduction measures could easily save far more power than nuclear could generate. And the latest studies argue convincingly that green energy sources with a European smart grid could provide all the power we need."

Nuclear "offers nothing for the recession, and too few jobs per megawatt anyway"

In Nuclear Power? No Point! Mr Johnson also draws attention to nuclear power's poor jobs-per-megawatt ratio. He said today:

"We urgently need a Green New Deal to get us out of the recession and start building the sustainable economy of the twenty-first century. We could create hundreds of thousands of jobs in green energy in the next decade.

Nuclear power can play no part in that because it takes far too long to build nuclear power stations compared with windfarms and other green measures. Wind energy sustains something like twelve times as many jobs per unit of power as nuclear does."


http://www.greenparty.org.uk/news/2009-07-13-nuclear-power-no-point-says-new-report.html

Now is the time to explore alternatives to nuclear power

Comment: We do not need Nuke Power, it is too expensive, dangerous and not carbon free because of construction, uranium mining and milling! Nuke plants pollutants the water, air and land. Nuke Plants causes cancers in plant workers and people living around plant! Nuke plants kills fish and makes the water too warm! We want true green power!

Sun Media columnist Lorrie Goldstein makes some accurate statements in his June 30 editorial "Smitherman rolls dice on new reactor deal."

His ultimate assumption that without nuclear energy Ontario risks power shortages is, however, utterly false.

Certainly, if we do nothing at all, eventually shortages will occur. But, there is a vast number of tested alternatives available right now that will secure Ontario's electrical supply for less money, safer, cleaner and with better reliability. I'll outline some of these shortly.

Even before the current recession reared its ugly head, Ontario was in a position of having surplus electrical power.

The recession increased that surplus and will certainly prolong if for years to come as our economy struggles back toward equilibrium.

There is no need for this province to feel pressured to rush headlong into signing a prohibitively costly agreement for nuclear energy - now, or ever.

Goldstein talks as if the only option is to grab the nuclear ring now -- whatever the cost. This foolhardy move will bridle Ontario residents -- perhaps all federal taxpayers, with a debt load of $30 to $50 billion dollars at the same time this province is facing one of the most severe recessions in its history. This huge debt is equal to Finance Minister Jim Flaherty's proposed federal debt for all of Canada. Ontario doesn't need nuclear and can't afford nuclear.

The history of nuclear energy and CANDU reactors indicates that we can expect them to require further major refitting -- probably at similar costs to the purchase price -- every 20 years. I'm aware that the nuclear industry claims reactors have a life span of 40 years, but facts from our history reveal otherwise. CANDU, a heavy water reactor, produces about 100 times the water soluble tritium that is produced in European reactors. Google "tritium" and CANDU to see the concerns.

Goldstein reminds us that Darlington ended up costing 576% above original proposals. Nuclear cost overruns of double to triple the original figure quoted are common in Ontario's history.

There are less expensive alternatives with safe, clean, renewable energy. Conservation of energy is, of course, an important beginning.

Wind power is being used with great success in European countries.

The nuclear lobby tells us that the winds don't always blow. That's true. However, when the winds aren't blowing, we have the option of purchasing surplus hydro electricity from Quebec and Laborador. The peaks and valleys of output from these two systems complement one another.

Hot summer days when homeowners and businesses are running their air conditioners at maximum, place tremendous drain on our electrical generation system. Conveniently, they are also the times when solar electric production is at its highest. When our planned system of feeding back solar energy from homes and other sources into the electrical grid becomes widespread, this problem will resolve itself.

There are more methods of energy production available to us now than there have ever been in history. Due to world demand, research is focusing upon these areas. MIT is applying to patent a new, much more efficient type of solar panel that will be a vast improvement on existing systems, and less costly. Battery technology is infinitely beyond that which powered the successful EV cars of decades ago.

The world is aglow with ever better options. Canadians should be looking ahead at new but proven technologies, not back at the outdated nuclear technology of the 1950s.

The most effective thing the nuclear industry has going for it is a frighteningly powerful lobby group in Toronto and Ottawa.

Unclear about nuclear? We don't need it. We can't afford it.

It's not what we want to leave as a legacy for future generations.

http://www.orilliapacket.com/ArticleDisplay.aspx?e=1641608

Should renewable energy include nuclear?

Greenpeace activists painted a skull surrounded by the symbol of radioactivity on the reactor dome of Unterweser nuclear power plant near Nordenham, Germany on June 22. The protest was aimed to draw attention to the lack of security at the plant in case of a plane crash or an airborne terrorist attack. The banner reads: "Nuclear power damages Germany."
Fred Dott/Greenpeace/Reuters

Comment: Nuke Bunch, nuke power are not renewable,not CO2 free, uranium mining, mills and transportation is full of CO2! Nuclear power is dependent on finite uranium resources!

from the June 29, 2009 edition

The US, China, and dozens of other countries are meeting today in Egypt to chart the course of a new international agency aimed at promoting renewable energy.
By Lily Riahi and Lisa Desai Contributors

Berlin

A new global effort that aims to make renewable energy more accessible to every country in the world will launch on July 1st.

Governments are lining up to join the first agency that will advise them on how to make a renewable energy transition. The International Renewable Energy Agency (IRENA) has attracted 108 countries, including the United States and China, which are both expected to announce their membership this week, in a move that experts say could boost the agency's credibility, since both countries are leaders in renewable energy.

But supporters worry that IRENA could be undermined by countries that are trying to promote nuclear power as a solution to climate change and dwindling oil reserves. Today, members will meet in Sharm El Sheik, Egypt to vote on a director general for the group and decide which country will host the agency's headquarters.

Currently, a leading alliance between France and the United Arab Emirates (UAE) is forming. French ministerial official Helene Pelosse is a nominee for IRENA'S director general and the UAE is lobbying to host its headquarters in Abu Dhabi. IRENA advocates say if the alliance succeeds, the agency would become "nuclear tainted."

France pushes nuclear as 'low-carbon technology'

France generates nearly 80 percent of its electricity from nuclear power. It's also one of the world's largest providers of nuclear technology and expertise. Since 2008, French President Nicolas Sarkozy has signed multibillion-dollar nuclear deals with the UAE, Qatar, Algeria, Libya, and Morocco.

At the same time, France is promoting nuclear as a form of renewable power because it emits low levels of carbon dioxide. When the European Union defined its long-term target for renewable energy production last year, it tried to include nuclear power in the definition of renewable energy, a move that was rejected by EU members.

France is also advocating to power the Mediterranean region using "low-carbon technology."

IRENA supporters worry that under French leadership, the agency will support both renewables and nuclear options together.

Most discussions separate the two because renewable energy is defined as naturally replenishing resources, like solar or wind, which don't produce waste.

Nuclear power is dependent on finite uranium resources, and produces radioactive waste that has to be isolated and stored for thousands of years.

"Advocates of nuclear try to avoid these essential differences by linking these two forms of energy under the umbrella term 'low-carbon technology,'" says Dr. Doerte Fouquet, Director of the European Renewable Energy Federation. "People forget that emitting zero CO2 is only one of the characteristics that defines a renewable source of energy."

Renewables tied to oil

The US, Japan, Britain, and France are actively signing nuclear power cooperation agreements with the UAE and they're expected to back Abu Dhabi's bid to headquarter the agency, analysts say.

"Their support for Abu Dhabi as IRENA's headquarters is linked to these agreements and a secure supply of oil," says IIda Tetsunari, advisor to Japan's Minister of Environment and executive director of the Institute for Sustainable Energy Policies.

IRENA supporters say that would contradict its founding purpose to set the foundations for a renewable energy economy.

"Are the original goals of IRENA being co-opted so that renewables get pushed aside by a nuclear agenda – 'sprinkling some renewables on top of our nuclear power'?" asks Dr. Eric Martinot, an international expert on renewable energy markets and former World Bank energy officer.

The UAE has a 7 percent future target for renewable energy and is planning to build Masdar, a city powered only by renewable resources. The Emirates claim that their vast solar potential is not enough to power the rest of the UAE and are looking to nuclear power to fill the gap.

"Since the 1970s, scientists have shown that renewable energy can satisfy the energy needs of the entire world, but these studies get systematically ignored. IRENA will change this," says Hermann Scheer, a member of the German Parliament, and pioneer of the agency.

The case for Germany

Many supporters say the better picks to host and lead the agency are Bonn, Germany, where the concept of IRENA was born, says Hans Jurgen Koch, member of Denmark's climate and energy ministry.

In both countries building new nuclear plants is illegal.

Instead, they've focused on introducing new policies to encourage renewable energy generation.

Germans can access interest-free loans to buy solar panels and get paid to feed renewable energy to the grid.

The country has 300,000 green jobs, and is hoping to double its share of renewable energy power to 30 percent by 2020, four times more the UAE's target.

Dr. Scheer, who has been fighting to establish the agency since the 1990s, says the founding of IRENA took off when the German government sought support of like-minded countries.

"This was the only way to avoid the veto power of countries with strong nuclear or fossil interests, who have stopped IRENA in the past," he says. "IRENA could be designed as a lame duck or it could promote renewable energy acceleration everywhere. This is the case for decision."

http://www.csmonitor.com/2009/0629/p06s10-woeu.html

German minister rules out new nuclear power stations

Comment: US, pay attention to Germany, they are smart!! Nuke power is not clean, green or CO2 free, the steam from stacks have CO2 plus the uranium mining, milling or transportation, the building of the plant has CO2! Too expensive and dangerous!! I have been to Japan and seen the Reprocessing plant! It is scary to think of the nuke stuff that will be process there and plan to burn some of it and my family lives downwind!

BERLIN, June 19 (AFP) Jun 19, 2009

Germany's economy minister on Friday ruled out building new nuclear power stations but said the life of some reactors might be extended and the development of alternative technologies stepped up.

"We need limited extensions until we are able to work with sensible alternative technologies in an economical and environmentally friendly manner," Karl-Theodor zu Guttenberg told the Sueddeutsche Zeitung daily in an interview.

"That includes the possibility of equipping existing nuclear power stations with state-of-the-art technology in order to make them even safer and more efficient," the conservative minister said.
"But I see no need to build new nuclear reactors."

Asked if he were in favour of reversing the decision to abandon nuclear, zu Guttenberg said: "If we can manage to put in place quickly enough alternatives that make economic sense, no."

Germany decided in 2000 under former premier Gerhard Schroeder's Social Democrats (SPD) and the Greens -- when current Chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives were in opposition -- to mothball its 17 reactors by about 2020.

The CDU/CSU conservative bloc's has been calling for some time for a re-think, but zu Guttenberg is the first conservative minister to rule out building new plants.

His comments are significant because they come less than four months before general elections in September.

At the election Merkel has the very real possibility to be able to dump as coalition partners the fellow architects of the nuclear phase-out, the centre-left SPD.

High oil prices in 2008, worries about the reliability of supplies from the Middle East and Russia and efforts to reduce Germany's greenhouse gas emissions have made a return to nuclear, as Italy is doing, less unpalatable.

German firms like Siemens, EON and RWE have highly active in tapping into the renewed interest in nuclear being seen worldwide, with over 30 reactors currently in construction, according to lobby group Deutsche Atomforum.

But polls show that a majority of Germans still remain opposed to nuclear power and believe the technology remains highly dangerous because of potential accidents and terrorist attacks.

Shipments of nuclear waste from France and other countries to the Gorleben storage site in northern Germany regularly spark angry protests by thousands of people.

http://www.spacedaily.com/2006/090619101723.hjisya7e.html

They drove the nukes off L.I.

Photo courtesy of Peter Parpan Protestors demonstrating against the Shoreham nuclear power plant on June 3, 1979. It was the largest demonstration in Long Island history, and hundreds of people were arrested by the time it was over.

Comment: The following article is a good example of people working and they won! The nuke plant was shut down because safety issues! People of Virginia, mostly Pittsylvania County neighbors, we need to work together to fight the uranium mining and milling company. We need to demand our local leaders to ban uranium mining and milling with an ordinance now!

BY ALISON SNYDER STAFF WRITER

Despite the heavy rain on a June Sunday, they came by the thousands.
They filled the Shoreham beach with their umbrellas and protest signs, as their parked buses and cars jammed the roads. Their message was clear: No nuclear power plant in Shoreham.

Thirty years later, the empty power plant sits silent, casting steep shadows from its teal concrete shell. It's a structure that has cast a long-lasting impact on both Shoreham and greater Long Island community, a building that tells the story of failure and success.

Many say the protest of June 3, 1979, was a turning point for the fate of the power plant.

"The rally helped to fortify people and helped them to believe that this fight was worth taking on," said Nora Bredes, who attended the demonstration and went on to lead the Shoreham Opponents Coalition for 10 years. She later served on the Suffolk County Legislature for six years.

The protest was a catalyst for future events that ultimately led to stopping the power plant from becoming fully operational, she said.

More than 15,000 people turned out for the rally on the nearby Brookhaven Town beach, despite pouring rain, said Ms. Bredes. She marks her involvement against the plant from that day.

A Huntington native and graduate student at Columbia University, Ms. Bredes helped to organize a bus full of people from Huntington to attend the protest.

"There were all kinds of people there," she said. "As we drove out on the Long Island Expressway from Huntington, we passed bus after bus after bus.

"We knew it was going to be much bigger than anyone had anticipated, and it was incredibly exciting to know that that could happen on Long Island, that so many people could be engaged and activated."

In spite of the rain, Ms. Bredes said, people from all different walks of life turned out for the demonstration, including college students, families with little children, older people, homeowners and religious leaders.

"It was uplifting, and very wet," she said, "But people weren't discouraged by [the rain]."

Greenport resident Jill Ward also attended the rally and remembers the excitement of the crowd.

"There was a certain euphoria about the success of that demonstration," she said. Ms. Ward, who at the time was a resident of the West Village in New York renting a summer cottage near Orient Point, was one of the more than 600 protesters arrested for scaling the fence of the Long Island Lighting Company.

She remembers trudging through the rain, the mud and the underbrush to scale the fence and being peacefully arrested, lying down on the ground and having her hands tied behind her back with plastic cuffs, before being loaded onto the bus to be booked by the police.

"When we were driving away on the bus we were loaded on, we were driving past car after car coming away from the demonstration, and it was exhilarating," she said. "There was a sense of camaraderie; we were all in this together."

Both women remember the sense of fear they felt after the accident at the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant in Pennsylvania in March of that year. It was that accident, Ms. Bredes said, that brought the risks of nuclear power to the forefront for many people and helped to fuel momentum for the demonstration.

After the protest, there were a number of meetings held in the community as people looked for the next step in the fight to make sure the plant didn't operate, she said.

The rally marked a turning point in the attitude toward the plant within the local community that made that effort possible.

"This event was a kind of catalyst," said longtime Wading River Civic Association president Sid Bail. "It divided this community." In both Shoreham and Wading River, he said, a bulk of the people supported opening the plant, not only because of the tax benefit, but also because many of the residents were employed at Brookhaven National Lab and Northrop Grumman and were "comfortable" with the concept of nuclear energy. The plant also provided a lot of jobs, Ms. Bredes said, and the influence of the labor unions whose members worked on the plant was strong. Local politicians were also on board.

"Up until then, elected officials were hell-bent on supporting the tax revenues Shoreham was destined to provide to the school district, town and county," said Greg Blass, who was a young lawyer at the time, newly settled in Jamesport, where a second power plant was being considered. They, along with champions of nuclear energy in Washington, D.C., he added, were so focused on the project, they took the community reaction for granted.

Opposition to the plant had existed within the community prior to the protest, Mr. Blass said, but hadn't found the right outlet.

"When given the chance, the public opposition was profound," he said. That year, he ran a protest candidacy against the nuclear plants for the first district in the Suffolk County Legislature and won. He said he was surprised. At the same time in Riverhead, residents voted the Jamesport plant down and ousted the town supervisor, who was in favor of the plant. "The sentiment had few opportunities of expression, unless it was the demonstration or a ballot proposition.

"It was the first time that the rumblings and unease about nuclear power plants came out," he said. "But it was there, and for a good reason."

Gradually, Ms. Bredes recalled, the political attitude on nuclear power began to change.

In his first meeting with the County Legislature, Mr. Blass said he sponsored a bill to get the legislature on the record in opposition to the Shoreham plant. It was the beginning, he said, because up until then they hadn't taken a public position and had been very "kind and accommodating" with LILCO lobbyists.

But once the opposition had been voiced, local politicians began to change their positions, he said, starting down a path that ultimately led to the disapproval of the evacuation plan by the County Legislature in 1983 and, in 1989, the decommissioning of the plant and the formation of the Long Island Power Authority.

But not everyone was on board. Bill Carney, who had served as a county legislator and was elected congressman in 1978, was fully supportive of the Shoreham plant and still is to this day. "I was for the plant opening, if it was safe," he said. And though opponents argued the plant wasn't safe or the evacuation plan wasn't realistic, Mr. Carney said they were.

"I thought it was a bogus argument," he said. "It was part of the technique of frightening people."

The plant's closure had nothing to do with its safety or the evacuation plans, Mr. Carney said, but a political agenda. Because Suffolk County and New York State had put additional safety requirements on the plant as it was being built -- which also led to increased costs -- the plant was the safest in the entire United States, he said.

Mr. Carney was congressman for eight years, and now owns a consulting firm that lobbies for the nuclear energy industry.

He left office, he said, because he wanted the plant to open, and people didn't. "I guess I didn't reflect their views," he said.

"The Shoreham plant should have been opened and it hasn't been," he said. "We lost a lot of money and we lost a good, clean production of energy sorely needed for eastern Long Island." Instead, he said, Long Islanders have been paying the bill for the state's purchase of the plant and creation of LIPA, which he called a "terrible mistake."

Mr. Carney wasn't impressed by the June 3 protest, he said.

"I thought it was a waste, and I think it still is," he said.

asnyder@northshoresun.com
http://www2.timesreview.com/ST/stories/T060509_shoreham_as

Calif. Activists Ask Feds To Reject Nuclear Plants

Comment: The State of Virginia needs to follow the example of Sacramento, Nuke Power Plants make electricity higher, Nuke is not carbon free, uranium mining, and milling produces lots of carbon plus a lot of uranium milling uses coal. NO NUKE PLANTS, NO URANIUM MINING, AND MILLING!!!

Jun 5, 2009 8:05 pm US/Pacific

SACRAMENTO (AP) ―

In 1989, Sacramento voters agreed to shut down their utility's nuclear power plant, rejecting warnings that their electricity bills would skyrocket.

Twenty years later, the area has among the lowest electricity rates in California, even as the Sacramento Municipal Utility District considers a 13 percent increase.

That's a message former state lawmaker Tom Hayden and others involved in the 1989 campaign say the federal government should note.

Hayden held a news conference Friday in the capital to mark the 20th anniversary of the vote and urge the federal government to invest in conservation and renewable energy.

The U.S. Energy Department is evaluating loan guarantees to four companies planning new nuclear plants. The reactors being considered are in Maryland, Georgia, South Carolina and Texas.

http://cbs13.com/local/Calif.Activists.Ask.2.1033859.html

CHAT WITH A FIRE TOWER

Comment: thought was a interesting article and here we 30 something years later still not changing energy needs, oil, nuke plants still leading the way with their greed, come on America, we need True Green Energy, Wind, Solar, Tide, Thermal - NO NUKE POWERS, NO URANIUM MINING!!!

Published on May 17, 2009 in environmental technologies.

The article below appeared in a 1973 issue of “Forest notes,” as well as the Waterville Valley “Wig Wag.” While a quarter century has passed, Hans’ story is as relevant ever. Why didn’t we listen then?…

Some people are given to day-dreaming. I am one of them. My latest daydream had to do with the fire tower on top of Mt. Osceola and a chat I had with that old lady (like ships and railroad engines, a fire tower is a “she”).

You look unhappy, I said to her.

I am, said she. People think I am useless. They don’t need me anymore. And yet I could be useful. Not by watching out for forest fires — airplanes do a better job of that nowadays. They have wings. Now, if I had wings…

Good heavens, I said, you don’t want wings to fly away with?

O no! not that kind of wings, but wings such as windmills have. I could be a WINDMILL.

A windmill? What for? Windmills went out of fashion fifty years ago.

Some fashions have a come-back, she said. 1 could be a modern windmill with big aerodynamic wings. I would drive a generator and produce hundreds of kilowatts of electricity. Clean, too: no fuel to foul up the air. And FREE, almost. No costs except for construction, amortization, and maintenance.

You talk like an engineer, or an economist, or both, I said.

Well, I have lots of time, so I keep busy solving problems: science, technology, ecology, and so on. Take ENERGY, for instance. What you people mainly use for energy is FOSSIL FUEL: oil, coal, natural gas. It’s all getting terribly expensive. Worse: there will be less and less of it as you need more and more, for more and more people. No end in sight.

And the POLLUTION! Strip-mining … oil spills … it’s a nightmare! You can’t keep this small planet of yours livable that way. Besides, fossil fuel is a “nonrenewable resource.” Once it’s gone, it’s gone for good. Using up fossiI fuel means living off your CAPITAL. Very bad practice, my dear. What has become of the famous Yankee thrift?

I know it’s a problem, I said, but do you have a solution?

I do indeed, It’s the WIND.

People consider wind outmoded as an energy source — it’s just good enough for recreation, for small sailing boats. That’s a mistake. Wind is the greatest natural energy source on earth, ready for use, if you will only put your minds to it. It’s INEXHAUSTIBLE, and it doesn’t pollute.

Remember: WIND drove your New England Clipper Ships across the oceans. They could make 18 knots — not bad even compared with modern oil-driven freighters. About the same time — around 1850 — there were thousands of windmills in the U. S., producing almost a billion and a half horsepowers a year. As recently as fifty years ago the windmills on your farms were still pumping water and driving electric generators, untill the· Rural Electrification Program (based mainly on fossil fuel) made them expendable.

Of course you’ll say: wind is unreliable it isn’t always blowing. What then?

Well, the answer is you STORE ENERGY. You store it while the wind blows, so you have it when it doesn’t. So far there have been mainly two ways to store energy: storage batteries like the ones in your car; or storage reservoirs: you pump water into a reservoir while the wind blows, and release the water to drive turbine generators when it stops. Both ways have drawbacks: batteries are not too efficient, water may be scarce, and reservoirs are expensive to build. But there is now another way: modern FLYWHEELS.

Read about Flywheels in the December, 1973, issue of SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN. It’s fabulous what ultra-modern flywheels can do. Traditional flywheels are clumsy and heavy. The modern ones are light they substitute whirling speed for weight. They can store energy several times as economically as batteries, and they can be made to run for weeks, even months, once they have been set whirling by wind of any other power. Unlike water reservoirs you can put them up anywhere, and they don’t take much space. One can make them so small and light one can install them in a compact electric automobile and make it run 200 miles at 60 m.p.h. on ONE charge.

Sounds incredible, doesn’t it?

SCIENTIFIC AMERICAN is a trustworthy publication, and so is SMITHSONIAN magazine which carries a fascinating article on WIND POWER, in its

November, 1973, issue: a committee of experts from N. S. F. (National Science Foundation), and from N. A. S. A. (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) have figured out that with a major WIND POWER PROGRAM the U. S. could produce, within 25 years or so, the installations to generate 1.5 trillion kilowatt-hours of electricity per year equal to the total consumed in the whole country in 1970. The people from N. S. F. and N. A. S. A. should know what they are talking about. After all, they are the ones that sent men to the moon.

They suggest huge wind-driven generators, arranged in widely extended GRIDS, so when some of those “super windmills” are becalmed, the others take up the slack. Such arrangement would take care of most of your nation’s energy needs, stretch your dwindling fossil fuel supplies many times over, protect you against blackmail from oil suppliers abroad, and help preserve your environment. Some of those grids could be built on platforms in the ocean, off the

Atlantic and Pacific coasts, with double advantage: sea winds blow strong most of the time, and you could use some of the energy to produce HYDROGEN from sea-water, by electrolsis. That would mean one more way to store energy: hydrogen can drive combustion engines such as automobile motors, and it is a clean fuel; when you burn it the result is WATER.

And one more word about that storage problem: you can avoid it altogether, in many cases, by feeding the electricity produced by windmills into an existing

power system. Remember the giant windmill on “Grandpa’s Knob,” near Rutland, Vermont, more than thirty years ago? It was the largest windmill ever built, 175 feet across. It could, and did, generate 1250 kilowatt of electric energy (enough to light a town) which was fed into the network of the Central Vermont Public Service Corporation: no storage problem, you see! It was an experimental machine which was dismantled after one blade broke off in March, 1945, and war-time shortages made replacement impossible, but it showed how one could use wind energy on a large scale.

To sum it up: what you need is a CRASH PROGRAM TO HARNESS WIND POWER. I’d be glad to help if I can.

It sounds convincing, I said, but I have three questions: 1) how about ATOMIC ENERGY; 2) in the daily papers one hardly ever reads about WIND as energy source: Why? 3) if wind power is all that promising, why doesn’t our government take the lead and start a CRASH PROGRAM?

The answers aren’t easy, she said, but I’ll try.

1) You already have quite a few nuclear power plants, and many more under construction, but there are serious problems: HEAT POLLUTION; RADIOACTIVE WASTES; URANIUM getting scarce; danger of sabotage. If a fanatic should succeed in blowing up an atomic plant, you’d have a home-made Hiroshima right in the U.S.

2) The silence about WIND POWER puzzles me too I can’t answer that. Perhaps YOU can do something about it: write a letter to your hometown newspaper, talk about it with your friends.

3) Here things get complicated. You have, as Mark Twain put it, “the best government money can buy,” but that isn’t good enough.

You see, there are billions and billions invested in the Oil, Coal, Gas and Atomic business.

It’s extremely profitable, and many corporations in this field are international. That’s important. In business profits come first. The nation’s interest is a poor second, especially with an international outfit.

You may not like this set-up but there it is. And it’s only human that those who reap enormous profit from this set-up will hold on to it with all their might, which is plenty. When they speak, the government listens.

But nobody owns the wind. There’s no money invested in it, so there is no “wind lobby,” and nobody speaks to the government for the wind. Nobody, that is, except scientists, and to them the government hardly listens. Yet the best of your scientists have people’s interest in mind rather than the profits of giant corporations. In· the present crisis you need scientific advice more than ever, but President Nixon has unfortunately abolished the “White House Office of Scientific Advisors.”

And note this: your government’s budget for 1974 foresees $618 mill ion for atomic research: 170 million for research in fossil fuel - mainly coal; 24 million for research in geothermal and solar energy; and aII of 1.25 million for WIND RESEARCH. To put man on the moon cost 25 billion ~ that’s two thousand times as much as the government plans to spend on wind research …

Speaking of MONEY, the oil-producing countries are wading in cash already. Within a few years they’ll have hundreds of billions of dollars to dispose of — more than they can ever use at home. So what will they do with those billions? You yourself showed them: invest in real estate and industry, not in their own countries but abroad. Right here in the United States, for instance. If you don’t watch out they could, before long, turn your proud independent country into one gigantic “Banana Republic.” How would you like that? How can you avoid it? Not by draining your own fossil fuel (and in the process destroying your environment)nor by building hundreds of nuclear reactors, accumulating unmanageable masses of deadly poisonous radio-active wastes - but by turning back to that old, tested, clean standby: the WIND.

I could go on and one, she said, but let me mention just one more point: not all nations ignore the “wind challenge.” The Germans, for instance, are constructing DYNA-SHIPS, as they call them. Big wind-driven freighters of 17,000 tons, with computer-controlled sails, designed to make 20 knots. They’ll have auxiliary motors, of course, but even so, they’ll use only 5% as much fuel as oil-driven freighters of that size. And now I’ll shut up.

She was as good as her word. Maybe she was a bit single-minded — wind is one way, but not the only one, to replace fossil fuels. Nevertheless, her facts and figures were true, and they set me thinking.

There was a fellow once, so they say, who fought against windmills, on horseback, with his lance. We still call a senseless undertaking “a fight against windmills.” It seems to me we’ll have to do the opposite: we’ll have to fight FOR WINDMILLS!

Sidebar notes from the original article:

H. A. Rey, who wrote this “Chat With A Fire Tower,” is an old·timer. Born in Hamburg, Germany, in 1898 and a veteran World War I, he lived for twelve years in Brazil and four years in France before coming to the U. S. in 1940. He is known to millions, here and abroad, as the author-illustrator of the books about a mischievous monkey named CURIOUS GEORGE and of two very popular books on astronomy.

Mr. Rey and his wife Margaret (an author in her own right) live in Cambridge, Massachusetts, in the winter and spend their summers in Waterville Valley. From their front yard they can see an abandoned Fire Tower on the top of Mt. Osceola. In days gone by, before airplanes took over, a guard in the tower used to watch out for forest fires, during dry spells.

The Reys are life members of the Society for the Protection of New Hampshire Forests.

http://reycenter.org/?p=4126

Wellinghoff reiterates that more nuclear energy is not necessary

Comment: Maybe Mr. Wellinghoff should inform the rest of the Federal, South Carolina, North Carolina, & Virginia Gov't to stop Nuke Plans and Uranium Mining in the East & West!

NEI SmartBrief 05/06/2009

Federal Energy Regulatory Commission Chairman Jon Wellinghoff said on Tuesday that utilities do not need to build nuclear power plants to meet the country's power demands.

While Wellinghoff said wind, solar and other renewable energies will suffice, a spokesman for the utility industry disagreed.

"Just to respond to climate-change issues, we are going to need new energy-supply technologies such as nuclear and advanced coal plants with carbon capture and storage," said David Owens, an executive vice president at the Edison Electric Institute. Reuters (05/06)

http://www.smartbrief.com/news/nei/storyDetails.jsp?issueid=EFA2346E-206F-4DBA-A962-C88EF16A8E37&copyid=9D91A9F7-2495-4CDC-85A7-32AD9CE8EEEB

Nuclear Energy Looking Bleak for the US

May 1st, 2009 ·

With this President, more than any other, we will see radical change in many policy areas. But perhaps none will have as significant an impact on the metals industry as energy policy.

We have dedicated so many posts to energy because it covers such a broad range of metals from uranium and lithium to nickel, indium, copper and steel among others.

And though we have spent much time offering up speculative analysis of where specific market segments such as nuclear may go in terms of forging investments, uranium mining, zirconium demand and the general global drive toward nuclear, only in the past ten days do we see a clearer picture of where nuclear will go in terms of the US market.

Yesterday, Senate Republicans asked the Obama administration to explain why it made the decision late last month to not proceed with the development of the Yucca Mountain nuclear waste repository, despite the $7.7b spent studying and researching the feasibility. Opposition, despite unanimous support from all of the National Labs came from one person, Senator Harry Reid of Nevada. Many believe that the storage issue remains the biggest stumbling block to the US expanding its nuclear capabilities.

Unfortunately, the science and research have little to do with why nuclear won’t grow in the US.

It all comes down to politics.

On the one hand, Obama appointed Steven Chu, a well-respected Nobel-Prize scientist who has consistently supported the development of nuclear energy. According to the NTI (Nuclear Threat Institute), “….as recently as August 2008, all ten National Lab directors, including Secretary Chu, signed a letter on the essential role of nuclear energy, which advocated continuing the licensing of a geologic repository at Yucca Mountain,” Chu has also said that he would help accelerate awards of federal loan guarantees for nuclear facility development.

And on the other hand, Obama appointed Jon Wellinghoff, Chairman of the FERC (Federal Energy Regulatory Commission) who has gone on record as saying, “no new nuclear or coal plants may ever be needed in the United States,” according to the New York Times.

According to the article, at a recent US Energy Association Forum he said that he felt renewables (including solar, wind and other biomass) meets minimum energy requirements. He puts a lot of stock into the new smart grid and claims the whole notion of base-load has become antiquated. In other words, with a smart grid in place, the minimum amount of power required for availability for a particular customer base no longer becomes the minimum standard to supply power.

What’s our take?

We suspect that Obama has known for quite some time (pre-election) that the issue of nuclear storage would never get resolved as long as Senator Harry Reid serves as the Senate Majority Leader. Yet the President didn’t want to put the whole kibosh on the nuclear industry before he stepped foot into the Oval Office.

So he appointed a team with competing points of view ….Chu as an extremely well respected scientist who publicly supports the nuclear industry and Jon Wellinghoff, an attorney with experience in, “client matters related to renewable energy, energy efficiency and distributed generation,” according to the FERC website.

Together, they will kill US nuclear industry prospects.(we can only dream, no nuke plants, no uranium mining, Corp Virginia, get with the green plan!!)

We look forward to hearing from Chu the scientific rationale to not move forward with the Yucca Mountain repository.

Maybe this analysis seems too negative but we’re not seeing these developments as positive for nuclear or those companies in the metals/mining industries supporting nuclear.

–Lisa Reisman





http://agmetalminer.com/2009/05/01/nuclear-energy-looking-bleak-for-the-us/

Anti-nuclear group: Comanche Peak expansion could cost $27.6 billion

Comment: once heard a senator say nuke power will bring cheap power to the people, well think again, Nuke Power is not cheap, people who receive their power from Nuke power pays twice the amount kilowat than other forms of energy!!


By JACK Z. SMITH jzsmith@star-telegram

The price tag for adding two new generating units at the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant near Glen Rose could be a staggering $23.8 billion to $27.6 billion, according to the author of a report that raises concerns about the cost of new nuclear facilities and a potential escalation in electric rates.

Clarence Johnson, a former state utility regulatory official, prepared the report for the Texas office of Public Citizen, an organization that opposes new nuclear plants.

The report instead favors energy conservation and efficiency, along with accelerated development of renewable energy alternatives such as wind and solar power, calling them more environmentally friendly and cheaper in the long run.

Luminant, the Dallas-based power generator that operates Comanche Peak, 45 miles southwest of Fort Worth, estimates that it could cost $15 billion to build two 1,700-megawatt units there and that a license might be secured by December 2012. Construction of the additional 3,400 megawatts of capacity could take about four years, the company said.

In a statement Wednesday, Luminant said it is "taking prudent steps in considering this project," including "carefully evaluating cost, capital and market conditions throughout the process."

Luminant plans to partner with Mitsubishi Heavy Industries, designer of the proposed reactors.

In his report, Johnson said a "reasonable estimate" of the cost of adding nuclear capacity in Texas would be $7,000 to $8,130 per kilowatt.

Based on that, Luminant’s proposed addition of 3,400 megawatts of generating capacity at Comanche Peak would cost $23.8 billion to $27.6 billion, Johnson said in a telephone conversation with the Star-Telegram.

A megawatt is 1,000 kilowatts.

Johnson’s report raises the specter of enormous costs not only for expanding Comanche Peak, but also for constructing two additional units that NRG Energy, a New Jersey-based utility, proposes at the South Texas Project near Bay City on the Gulf Coast.

The report made only brief mention of plans by Chicago-based Exelon to build two nuclear units near Victoria in South Texas.

Johnson, in his report, warned that Luminant, already the dominant power generator in North Texas, would have even more power to influence wholesale electricity prices if it expands Comanche Peak. Higher wholesale power prices could result in higher retail electricity prices for homeowners and businesses.

Proponents of added nuclear power in Texas say it would help diversify the state’s power-generation mix and reduce its heavy reliance on natural-gas-fired generation, which is more expensive than coal-fired plants.

Natural gas and coal fueled 80 percent of Texas’ power generation in 2008, with nuclear providing about 10 percent.

Nuclear proponents note that the plants are largely emissions-free.

Coal plants in particular have been criticized by environmental groups for emitting huge amounts of carbon dioxide, the primary "greenhouse gas" that many scientists say contributes to global warming.

Robert Black, a spokesman for Nuclear Energy for Texans, which he said is funded mainly by Luminant and Exelon, took issue with the Public Citizen report.

Black, a former aide to Gov. Rick Perry, questioned why Texans should care about how much new nuclear units cost, since their builders have to absorb the expense in the state’s deregulated electricity market.

But Johnson, in his report, cited various federal subsidies available to builders of new nuclear plants, including loan guarantees, production tax credits, investment tax credits and insurance.

"As the owners of nuclear construction projects experience cost overruns and realize that the projects will produce large financial losses, the firms may become desperate to appeal for greater public subsidies," the report said.

"Loan guarantees probably impose the greatest risk on taxpayers."

Johnson said costs for previously constructed nuclear plants far exceeded initial estimates.

The current two-unit Comanche Peak plant, completed in 1993, cost at least $12.18 billion, Johnson said, citing Federal Energy Regulatory Commission records as his source. It is the most-expensive nuclear plant ever built in the U.S., he said.

The $12.18 billion amount is more than 15 times the original cost estimate of slightly less than $800 million for Comanche Peak. The Star-Telegram has previously estimated the final plant cost at about $11 billion.

Nuclear power proponents stress that the cost of Comanche Peak and other existing plants was hit by unusually high inflation and changing federal regulations that delayed projects after an incident at the Three Mile Island plant in Pennsylvania in 1979.

They note that plant designs have improved, and the licensing process has been streamlined.

JACK Z. SMITH, 817-390-7724



http://www.star-telegram.com/business/story/1348489.html

The Downside Of Nuclear Energy

What Washington Won't Tell You About 100 Nuclear Power Plants

By Jeff Siegel
Tuesday, April 28th, 2009

In an effort to offer their own solution to our energy woes, some in Washington are declaring that if we're really committed to lowering electric bills and having clean air, then the U.S. should build 100 more nuclear power plants rather than spend billions in subsidies for renewable energy. (nuke does not lower electric bills, people in the Richmond area and Carolina, pay more to electric bills because of nuke plants)

Following this announcement, I received a number of e-mails from folks who wanted to know my thoughts on this. After all, I am an advocate of clean energy generation, and many consider nuclear to fall into this category, as nuclear power plants don't carry the same carbon burden as coal-fired power plants.

Nuclear, however, does carry an environmental burden of uranium mining and of course, nuclear waste. So no, nuclear is not clean. But that's not my purpose for writing this today.

If you're a supporter of nuclear energy, my environmental take on this is not going to sway you. And that's fine. But for investors who continue to believe nuclear is the answer - well, they're going to be sorely disappointed. Because no matter how bad the bureaucrats in Washington want it (on both sides of the aisle), 100 new nuclear power plants will never happen in the U.S. Here's why...

Peak Uranium?

First there is the issue of uranium depletion. As my colleague, Chris Nelder, wrote in the book, Investing in Renewable Energy...

"The best ores of uranium have been mined, leaving mainly low-quality ores left to exploit. To the casual observer, this might seem at first like a ridiculous statement. Uranium is a very common element, found in about the same abundance as tin worldwide, in everything from granite to seawater. Almost all - 99.3 percent - of the uranium found on Earth is uranium-238, an isotope of uranium containing 238 protons per atom. The remaining uranium - 0.7 percent - is uranium-235, and that's what is used as fuel for our 'light water' nuclear reactors."

Nelder also hightlighted a 2006 study that was conducted by the Energy Watch Group. This particular report, "Uranium Resources and Nuclear Energy," suggested that under best-case estimates, uranium production could peak before 2050. And that's based on today's rate of use, and doesn't include an additional 100 nuclear power plants.

Even the president and CEO of Cameco Corporation, Gerald Grandey, told reporters at a 2007 press conference that he expects demand to grow at 3 percent annually for the next decade, but doesn't see uranium mining being able to keep pace with demand.

Waste Not, Want Not

There's also the issue of waste disposal.

Certainly by now you've heard about the Yucca Mountain Repository. This is where all of our spent nuclear fuel and waste is supposed to be stored.

Last year, it turned out that the Yucca Mountain repository would cost $96.2 billion (in 2007 dollars), with 80 percent of that cost falling on the ratepayers.

While these bureaucrats sit there and make the claim that we should build all these nuclear power plants instead of spending billions in subsidies for renewable energy, they conveniently forget the $77 billion that ratepayers may already have to shell out just to store 77,000 tons of spent nuclear fuel and high-level radioactive waste, that technically still doesn't have a home. Certainly this is a not a cost that consumers or investors should ignore.

And we haven't even gotten to the construction costs on these things.

A 2008 report from the Congressional Budget Office found that on construction costs, you're looking at $144.6 billion (in 1990 dollars) for 75 nuclear power plants. That's $235.3 billion today. And according to the Federal Energy Regulatory Commission, the estimated cost on a 1,000 megawatt reactor could run as high as $7.5 billion!

The typical budget for a 20 MW geothermal project constructed by geothermal developer, Ormat Technologies (NYSE:ORA), is around $70 million. Or $3.5 billion for 1,000 megawatts.

Of course, with that geothermal power plant, you also have the added benefit of no waste disposal costs, no uranium costs, and no billion-dollar decommissioning costs. And geothermal power plants, by the way, also have a capacity factor around 90 percent - or about the same as a nuclear power plant.

Bottom line: 100 nuclear power plants is nothing more than a political pissing contest. For the sake of long-term, sustainable growth - nuclear offers little more than high-priced energy, a wealth of environmental headaches, and fat campaign contributions in Washington.

And it sure as hell won't help consumers with electricity costs either.

To a new way of life, and a new generation of wealth...

http://www.greenchipstocks.com/articles/nuclear+power-washington-uranium/392

POWER POLITICS: Duke Energy execs lose their cool under pressure from climate watchdogs

Comment: Watch Sunday!

If there was any doubt Duke Energy executives are feeling frustrated by the intensifying pressure they're facing from climate activists, that was dispelled by remarks company spokesman Tom Williams made earlier this month about Southern Alliance for Clean Energy Executive Director Stephen Smith.

"He's a lying son of a witch,(bleep the b word)" Williams told ClimateWire in a story about the political battle being fought in the South over a national standard mandating increased electricity production from renewable sources. Climate watchdogs including SACE are pressing for such a standard to force backward-looking Southern utilities to embrace renewable energy sources.

Williams was responding to a statement from Smith that "[m]ost of the utilities in the Southeast tend to only want to address climate change through nuclear power," which is not a renewable energy source because of the serious environmental problems associated with uranium mining, nuclear power plant emissions and radioactive waste disposal. His quote attacking Smith was pulled after a few hours, but SACE has posted a copy of the original story on its website, where Smith blogged about the incident:

Our nation can't achieve the energy solutions we need without debating issues rationally, and it is disappointing that a utility that millions in the Carolinas rely on for electricity has officially dispensed with civil discourse.

But just five days after Williams' attack on Smith was published in ClimateWire, Duke Energy CEO Jim Rogers spoke at a gathering in Charlotte, N.C. -- and as much as admitted that Smith was right. Noting that proposals to limit carbon emissions will make coal-fired power more expensive, Rogers said his company is concerned about keeping up with a growing demand for electricity, the Charlotte Observer reported:

"The only way we could do it is with nuclear," Rogers said at Monday's Charlotte Energy Summit. "The higher the price (for carbon) goes, the stronger the case for nuclear." (some old, same old from big corp, taxpayers pay for nuke plants and that is why they are stuck in the old mold!)

SACE challenges Duke Energy's claims that the only way the company can meet its customers' demand is through new nuclear plants and the new coal-fired plant it's building at its Cliffside facility west of Charlotte, N.C. Earlier this year, the group released a report showing that while renewable energy resources currently generate enough power to serve only about 5% of retail electric sales in the Southeast, the region could meet a national renewable energy standard of at least 15% by 2015, 20% by 2020, and 25% by 2025.

The pressure on Duke Energy to defend its dirty energy choices will intensify this Sunday, when the CBS News show "60 Minutes" will interview CEO Jim Rogers about his company's continuing reliance on coal-fired power plants. Also appearing in the segment will be NASA's leading climate scientist Jim Hansen, who has called for a moratorium on all new coal-fired power plants in order to prevent catastrophic climate disruption.

In a preview of the segment available on the show's website, correspondent Scott Pelley begins by noting that Duke's 20 coal-burning power plants emit 100 million tons of carbon dioxide pollution each year and says this "makes what comes out of Rogers' mouth so surprising":

[Rogers:] Our goal line is to substantially reduce our carbon footprint, to decarbonize our business, by 2050.

[Pelley:] Four decades? That's a long time.

[Rogers:] Well, it took 100 years to get to where we are. And we can't do this overnight.

The video cuts to Jim Hansen:

2050 is too late. We will have guaranteed disasters for our children, grandchildren and the unborn. ... We are going to have to phase out emissions from coal within the next 20 years if we hope to prevent climate disasters.

Cut back to Rogers, whose demeanor darkens:

I say Mr. Hansen, can't get done, won't get done. We've got to keep our economy going. We've got to make the transition, and I'm going to do everything I can with the greatest sense of urgency to make the transition. But to do what you ask me to do now is just not doable.

Once the darling of the media for his willingness to acknowledge the reality of global warming unlike some other energy company CEOs, Rogers has come under increasing scrutiny in light of Duke's decision to move ahead with building the massive Cliffside plant, which itself would release an estimated 6 million tons of carbon dioxide to the atmosphere each year.

One of the toughest interviews Rogers faced came last month with MSNBC's Rachel Maddow, who discussed Duke Energy's opposition to the Obama administration's cap-and-trade plan for controlling carbon emissions because it wouldn't give free pollution permits to big emitters like Duke. Rogers seemed rattled by some of Maddow's hard questions, like this one:

[Maddow:] Is Duke Energy profitable?

[Rogers:] Yes, we are profitable.

[Maddow:] Then why is it that you wouldn't take the hit in terms of your profit -- even become an unprofitable company for a couple of years -- in order to make good on the fact that you've been getting all this pollution for free, and we've been paying for it with our health, and we've been paying for it in terms of our environmental degradation while you've been making profit off it. Isn't this just a way to redress what's been an economic wrong that's come out really well for you guys and really bad for us?

Rogers responded weakly, saying Duke Energy was a regulated utility whose prices were determined by state regulators. But it's hard to imagine a state utility commission rejecting a company's plan to not pass on to consumers the cost of transitioning to a low-carbon future.

Given the growing pressure Rogers is under, it will be interesting to see how he handles the scrutiny of "60 Minutes."



http://www.southernstudies.org/2009/04/power-politics-duke-energy-execs-lose-their-cool-under-pressure-from-climate-watchdogs.html

THE PEOPLE SPEAK: Taxpayers own nuclear problems

Comment: Nuke plants are too costly, uses uranium, therefore, uranium mining, benefits only the corporations not the people!! No nuke plants, no uranium mining!

Published April 17, 2009 02:45 pm -

Oklahoma Republicans are being very hypocritical in supporting taxpayer guarantees in funding to build massively expensive nuclear plants.

Rate payers get to pay ahead for these dangerous monstrosities that will throw millions down the drain if they cannot be completed — no “free market” here. Taxpayers pay for the insurance.

It is one rip off after another for the citizen.

Who benefits? Will Texas get the electricity or will it be Kansas?

We do not need nuclear plants. Solar thermal (not the same as solar panels) and wind could supply the energy without the dangerous polluting of uranium mining.

Who will pay for the medical expenses for the increased cancer rates around Muskogee if the plant is built here? Who will pay for the decommissioning of these plants when they age?

I think the people will pay and big corporations will benefit.

What about contaminated nuclear groundwater as has happened in France?

We need a town meeting about this important issue before the Republicans rush things through.

Jean McMahon

Fort Gibson

http://www.muskogeephoenix.com/opinion/local_story_107154527.html

Japan angered by fires at biggest nuclear plant

Comment: Do you really think Nuke Power are safe?

TOKYO (AFP) — Japan's government chastised the operator of the world's largest nuclear plant for a string of fires that has hit the facility since it closed after an earthquake almost two years ago.

The Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear power plant is scheduled to restart as early as this month but the nine blazes, the latest of which hit Saturday, have stoked fears about the safety of the seven-reactor plant.

The minister for economy, trade and industry, Toshihiro Nikai, told reporters the latest incident was "very regrettable after we judged in February that there were no safety problems for resuming operations."

He asked "all those concerned to reflect seriously" on the incident.

"Other countries have been paying attention to whether we'll be able to restart our country's biggest nuclear power plant," he said.

The central government has in principle given the green light for the reopening of the plant, which was closed after a strong quake in July 2007 led to the leak of radioactive water from a spent fuel-rod pool.

Local residents have voiced fears over the safety of the plant following a string of fires there as well as concerns raised by some geologists that an off-shore tectonic faultine could trigger stronger earthquakes in future.

The plant's operator, Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), reported another fire Saturday, the ninth since the shutdown.

TEPCO executive vice president Ichiro Takekuro on Tuesday visited the prefectural government office in Tokyo and "apologised for causing anxiety among residents," spokesman Takayuki Akiba said.

"We will do our utmost to prevent another accident from happening and to gain residents' understanding for the resumption of the operation," he said.

Where Is Nuclear Energy in the Markey-Waxman Energy Bill?

Comment: This is from a Pro-Nuke Group, thought it was informative, No Nuke Plants, No Uranium mining!

by Jack Spencer

Congressmen Ed Markey (D-MA) and Henry Waxman (D-CA) released their draft legislation, the American Clean Energy and Security Act of 2009, which puts forth a massive energy agenda that they claim would transform America's economy and create millions of jobs by promoting a new clean energy economy.

The fact that it has virtually no mention of nuclear power calls the entire green initiative into question.

If reducing carbon dioxide and other emissions, creating jobs, and promoting domestic energy sources were truly the objective, then nuclear energy should be central to the legislation.(Nuke Power is not green, is not renewable!!!)

The Markey-Waxman bill focuses too much on the process of energy production rather than on the product itself. For example, it creates so-called renewable energy standards that mandate only certain types of energy production, such as wind and solar.

Note: Click on Title to read rest of Article.

Three Mile Island & Nuke Saftey

AlterNet

April 4, 2009

Startling Revelations about Three Mile Island Disaster Raise Doubts Over Nuke Safety

By Sue Sturgis, Facing South

This story originally appeared on Facing South, online magazine of the Institute for Southern Studies.

It was April Fool's Day, 1979 -- 30 years ago this week -- when Randall Thompson first set foot inside the Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Middletown, Pa. Just four days earlier, in the early morning hours of March 28, a relatively minor problem in the plant's Unit 2 reactor sparked a series of mishaps that led to the meltdown of almost half the uranium fuel and uncontrolled releases of radiation into the air and surrounding Susquehanna River.

It was the single worst disaster ever to befall the U.S. nuclear power industry, and Thompson was hired as a health physics technician to go inside the plant and find out how dangerous the situation was. He spent 28 days monitoring radiation releases.

Today, his story about what he witnessed at Three Mile Island is being brought to the public in detail for the first time -- and his version of what happened during that time, supported by a growing body of other scientific evidence, contradicts the official U.S. government story that the Three Mile Island accident posed no threat to the public.

"What happened at TMI was a whole lot worse than what has been reported," Randall Thompson told Facing South. "Hundreds of times worse."

Thompson and his wife, Joy, a nuclear health physicist who also worked at TMI in the disaster's aftermath, claim that what they witnessed there was a public health tragedy. The Thompsons also warn that the government's failure to acknowledge the full scope of the disaster is leading officials to underestimate the risks posed by a new generation of nuclear power plants.

While new reactor construction ground to a halt after the 1979 incident, state leaders and energy executives today are pushing for a nuclear energy revival that's centered in the South, where 12 of the 17 facilities seeking new reactors are located.

Fundamental to the industry's case for expansion is the claim that history proves nuclear power is clean and safe -- a claim on which the Thompsons and others, bolstered by startling new evidence, are casting doubt.

An unlikely critic

Randall Thompson could never be accused of being a knee-jerk anti-nuclear alarmist. A veteran of the U.S. Navy's nuclear submarine program, he is a self-described "nuclear geek" who after finishing military service jumped at the chance to work for commercial nuclear power companies.

He worked for a time at the Peach Bottom nuclear plant south of Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania' s York County, but quit the industry six months before the TMI disaster over concerns that nuclear companies were cutting corners for higher profits, with potentially dangerous results. Instead, he began publishing a skateboarding magazine with his wife Joy.

But the moment the Thompsons heard about the TMI incident, they wanted to get inside the plant and see what was happening first-hand. That didn't prove difficult: Plant operator Metropolitan Edison's in-house health physics staff fled after the incident began, so responsibility for monitoring radioactive emissions went to a private contractor called Rad Services.

The company immediately hired Randall Thompson to serve as the health physics technician in charge of monitoring radioactive emissions, while Joy Thompson got a job monitoring radiation doses to TMI workers.

"I had other health physicists from around the country calling me saying, 'Don't let it melt without me!" Randall Thompson recalls. "It was exciting. Our attitude was, 'Sure I may get some cancer, but I can find out some cool stuff.'"

What the Thompsons say they found out during their time inside TMI suggests radiation releases from the plant were hundreds if not thousands of times higher than the government and industry have acknowledged -- high enough to cause the acute health effects documented in people living near the plant but that have been dismissed by the industry and the government as impossible given official radiation dose estimates.

The Thompsons tried to draw attention to their findings and provide health information for people living near the plant, but what they say happened next reads like a John Grisham thriller.

They tell of how a stranger approached Randall Thompson in a grocery store parking lot in late April 1979 and warned him his life was at risk, leading the family to flee Pennsylvania. How they ended up in New Mexico working on a book about their experiences with the help of Joy's brother Charles Busey, another nuclear Navy vet and a former worker at the Hatch nuclear power plant in Georgia. How one evening while driving home from the store Busey and Randall Thompson were run off the road, injuring Thompson and killing Busey. How a copy of the book manuscript they were working on was missing from the car's trunk after the accident. These allegations were detailed in several newspaper accounts back in 1981.

Eventually, after a decade of having their lives ruled by TMI, the Thompsons decided to move on. Randall Thompson went to college to study computer science. Joy Thompson returned to publishing and writing.

Today they live quietly in the mountains of North Carolina where, inspired by time spent seeking refuge with a traveling circus, they have forged a new career for themselves as clowns -- or what they like to call "professional fools." As Joy Thompson wrote in the fall 2001 issue of Parabola, a journal of myth, the role of the fool is to help people "perceive the foolishness in even ... the most powerful institutions, " noting the medieval court jester's role of telling the King what others dare not.

That conviction has led the Thompsons to tell their story today.

"They haven't told the truth yet about what happened at Three Mile Island," says Randall Thompson. "A lot of people have died because of this accident. A lot."

Anomalies abound

That a lot of people died because of what happened at Three Mile Island, as the Thompsons claim, is definitely not part of the official story. In fact, the commercial nuclear power industry and the government insist that despite the meltdown of almost half of the uranium fuel at TMI, there were only minimal releases of radiation to the environment that harmed no one.

For example, the Nuclear Energy Institute, the lobbying group for the U.S. nuclear industry, declares on its website that there have been "no public health or safety consequences from the TMI-2 accident." The government's position is the same, reflected in a fact sheet distributed today by the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the federal agency charged with overseeing the U.S. nuclear power industry: TMI, it says, "led to no deaths or injuries to plant workers or members of the nearby community." [The watchdog group Three Mile Island Alert offers their take on the NRC factsheet here.]

Those upbeat claims are based on the findings of the Kemeny Commission, a panel assembled by President Jimmy Carter in April 1979 to investigate the TMI disaster. Using release figures presented by Metropolitan Edison and the NRC, the commission calculated that in the month following the disaster there were releases of up to 13 million curies of so-called "noble gases" -- considered relatively harmless -- but only 13 to 17 curies of iodine-131, a radioactive form of the element that at even moderate exposures causes thyroid cancer. (A curie is a measure of radioactivity, with 1 curie equal to the activity of one gram of radium. For help understanding these and other terms, see the glossary at the end of this piece.)

But the official story that there were no health impacts from the disaster doesn't jibe with the experiences of people living near TMI. On the contrary, their stories suggest that area residents actually suffered exposure to levels of radiation high enough to cause acute effects -- far more than the industry and the government has acknowledged.

Some of their disturbing experiences were collected in the book Three Mile Island: The People's Testament, which is based on interviews with 250 area residents done between 1979 and 1988 by Katagiri Mitsuru and Aileen M. Smith.

It includes the story of Jean Trimmer, a farmer who lived in Lisburn, Pa. about 10 miles west of TMI. On the evening of March 30, 1979, Trimmer stepped outside on her front porch to fetch her cat when she was hit with a blast of heat and rain. Soon after, her skin became red and itchy as if badly sunburned, a condition known as erythema. About three weeks later, her hair turned white and began falling out. Not long after, she reported, her left kidney "just dried up and disappeared" -- an occurrence so strange that her case was presented to a symposium of doctors at the nearby Hershey Medical Center. All of those symptoms are consistent with high-dose radiation exposure.

There was also Bill Peters, an auto-body shop owner and a former justice of the peace who lived just a few miles west of the plant in Etters, Pa. The day after the disaster, he and his son -- who like most area residents were unaware of what was unfolding nearby -- were working in their garage with the doors open when they developed what they first thought was a bad sunburn. They also experienced burning in their throats and tasted what seemed to be metal in the air. That same metallic taste was reported by many local residents and is another symptom of radiation exposure, commonly reported in cancer patients receiving radiation therapy.

Peters soon developed diarrhea and nausea, blisters on his lips and inside his nose, and a burning feeling in his chest. Not long after, he had surgery for a damaged heart valve. When his family evacuated the area a few days later, they left their four-year-old German shepherd in their garage with 200 pounds of dog chow, 50 gallons of water and a mattress. When they returned a week later, they found the dog dead on the mattress, his eyes burnt completely white. His food was untouched, and he had vomited water all over the garage. They also found four of their five cats dead -- their eyes also burnt white -- and one alive but blinded. Peters later found scores of wild bird carcasses scattered over their property.

Similar stories surfaced in The People of Three Mile Island, a book by documentary photographer Robert Del Tredici. He found local farmers whose cattle and goats died, suffered miscarriages and gave birth to deformed young after the incident; whose chickens developed respiratory problems and died; and whose fruit trees abruptly lost all their leaves. Local residents also collected evidence of deformed plants, some of which were examined by James Gunckel, a botanist and radiation expert with Brookhaven National Laboratory and Rutgers University.

"There were a number of anomalies entirely comparable to those induced by ionizing radiation -- stem fasciations, growth stimulation, induction of extra vegetative buds and stem tumors," he swore in a 1984 affidavit.

Scientists say these kinds of anomalies simply aren't explained by official radiation release estimates.

Evidence of harm

The evidence that people, animals and plants near TMI were exposed to high levels of radiation in the 1979 disaster is not merely anecdotal. While government studies of the disaster as well as a number of independent researchers assert the incident caused no harm, other surveys and studies have also documented health effects that point to a high likelihood of significant radiation exposures.

In 1984, for example, psychologist Marjorie Aamodt and her engineer husband, Norman -- owners of an organic dairy farm east of Three Mile Island who got involved in a lawsuit seeking to stop TMI from restarting its Unit 1 reactor -- surveyed residents in three hilltop neighborhoods near the plant. Dozens of neighbors reported a metallic taste, nausea, vomiting and hair loss as well as illnesses including cancers, skin and reproductive problems, and collapsed organs -- all associated with radiation exposure. Among the 450 people surveyed, there were 19 cancer deaths reported between 1980 and 1984 -- more than seven times what would be expected statistically.

That survey came to the attention of the industry-financed TMI Public Health Fund, created in 1981 as part of a settlement for economic losses from the disaster. The fund's scientific advisors verified the Aamodts' calculations and launched a more comprehensive study of TMI-related cancer deaths led by a team of scientists from Columbia University. The researchers found an association between estimated radiation doses received by area residents and instances of non-Hodgkin' s lymphoma, lung cancer, leukemia and all cancers combined. Crucially, however, the researchers decided there wasn't "convincing evidence" that TMI radiation releases were linked to the increase in cancers in the area because of the "low estimates of radiation exposure." The paper did not consider what conclusions could be drawn if those "low estimates" turned out to be wrong.

By the time the Columbia research was published in the early 1990s, a class-action lawsuit was underway involving about 2,000 plaintiffs claiming that the radiation emissions were much larger than admitted by the government and industry. (The federal courts eventually rejected that suit, though hundreds of out-of-court settlements totaling millions of dollars have been reached with victims, including the parents of children born with birth defects.)

Consulting for the plaintiffs' attorneys, the Aamodts contacted Dr. Steven Wing, an epidemiologist at the University of North Carolina School of Public Health in Chapel Hill to provide support for the plaintiffs. Dr. Wing was reluctant to get involved because -- as he wrote in a 2003 paper about his experience -- "allegations of high radiation doses at TMI were considered by mainstream radiation scientists to be a product of radiation phobia or efforts to extort money from a blameless industry." But impressed with the Aamodts' compelling if imperfect evidence, Wing agreed to look at whether there were connections between radiation exposure from TMI and cancer rates.

Wing reanalyzed the Columbia scientists' data, looking at cancer rates before the TMI disaster to control for other possible risk factors in the 10-mile area. His peer-reviewed results, published in 1997, found positive relationships between accident dose estimates and rates of leukemia, lung cancer and all cancers. Where the Columbia study found a 30 percent average increase in lung cancer risk among one group of residents, for example, Wing found an 85 percent increase. And while the Columbia researchers found little or no increase in adult leukemias and a statistically unreliable increase in childhood cases, Wing found that people downwind during the most intense releases were eight to 10 times more likely on average than their neighbors to develop leukemia.

Dr. Wing reflected on his findings at a symposium in Harrisburg marking the 30-year anniversary of the Three Mile Island disaster last week.

"I believe this is very good evidence that releases were thousands of times greater than the story we've been told," he said. "As we think about the current plans to open more nuclear reactors, when we hear -- which we hear often -- that no one was harmed at Three Mile Island, we really should question that."

Documenting discrepancies

Randall and Joy Thompson couldn't agree more. If anything, they think Dr. Wing's findings understate the impact of Three Mile Island because they're based on low-ball estimates of radiation releases.

"Given what he was allowed to know or could figure out, he did a slam-bang job of it," Joyce Thompson says.

In 1995, the Thompsons -- with the help of another health physics expert who was also hired to monitor radiation after the TMI disaster, David Bear (formerly Bloombaum) - prepared a report analyzing the Kemeny Commission findings. Their research, which hasn't been covered by any major media, documents a series of inconsistencies and omissions in the government's account.

For example, the official story is that the TMI incident released only 13 to 17 curies of dangerous iodine into the outside environment, a tiny fraction of the 13 million curies of less dangerous radioactive gases officials say were released, primarily xenon. Such a number would seem small compared with, for example, the 1986 nuclear accident at Chernobyl, which released anywhere from 13 million to 40 million curies of iodine and is linked to 50,000 cases of thyroid cancer, according to World Health Organization estimates.

But the Thompsons and Bear point out that the commission's own Technical Assessment Task Force, in a separate volume, had concluded that iodine accounted for 8 to 12 percent of the total radioactive gases leaked from Three Mile Island. Conservatively assuming the 13 million curie figure was the total amount of radioactive gases released rather than just the xenon portion, and then using the Task Force's own 8 to 12 percent estimate of the proportion that was iodine, they point out that "the actual figure for Iodine release would be over 1 million curies" -- a much more substantial public health threat.

In another instance, the Kemeny Commission claimed that there were 7.5 million curies of iodine present in TMI's primary loop, the contained system that delivers cooling water to the reactor. But a laboratory analysis done on March 30 found a higher concentration of iodine in the reactor water, which would put the total amount of iodine present -- and which could potentially leak into the environment -- at 7.65 million curies.

"Thus, while the apparent difference between 7.5 and 7.65 seems inconsiderable at first glance," the Thompson/Bear report states, "this convenient rounding off served to 'lose' a hundred and fifty thousand curies of radioactive Iodine."

They also offer evidence of atmospheric releases of dangerously long-lived radioactive particles such as cesium and strontium -- releases denied by the Kemeny Commission but indicated in the Thompsons' own post-disaster monitoring and detailed in the report -- and show that there were pathways for the radiation to escape into the environment. They demonstrate that the plant's radiation filtration system was totally inadequate to handle the large amounts of radiation released from the melted fuel and suggest that the commission may have arbitrarily set release estimates at levels low enough to make the filtration appear adequate.

Shockingly, they also report that when readings from the dosimeters used to monitor radiation doses to workers and the public were logged, doses of beta radiation -- one of three basic types along with alpha and gamma -- were simply not recorded, which Joy Thompson knew since she did the recording. But Thompson's monitoring equipment also indicated that beta radiation represented about 90 percent of the radiation to which TMI's neighbors were exposed in April 1979, which means an enormous part of the disaster's public health risk may have been wiped from the record.

Finally, in a separate analysis the Thompsons point to discrepancies in government and industry accounts of the disaster that suggest the TMI Unit 2 suffered a scram failure -- that is, a breakdown of the emergency shutoff system. That would mean the nuclear reaction spiraled out of control and therefore posed a much greater danger than the official story allows.

The Thompsons aren't the only ones who have produced evidence that the radiation releases from TMI were much higher than the official estimates. Arnie Gundersen -- a nuclear engineer and former nuclear industry executive turned whistle-blower -- has done his own analysis, which he shared for the first time at a symposium in Harrisburg last week.

"I think the numbers on the NRC's website are off by a factor of 100 to 1,000," he said.

Exactly how much radiation was released is impossible to say, since onsite monitors immediately went off the scale after the explosion. But Gundersen points to an inside report by an NRC manager who himself estimated the release of about 36 million curies -- almost three times as much as the NRC's official estimate. Gundersen also notes that industry itself has acknowledged there was a total of 10 billion curies of radiation inside the reactor containment. Using the common estimate that a tenth of it escaped, that means as much as a billion curies could have been released to the environment.

Gundersen also offered compelling evidence based on pressure monitoring data from the plant that shortly before 2 p.m. on March 28, 1979 there was a hydrogen explosion inside the TMI containment building that could have released significant amounts of radiation to the environment. The NRC and industry to this day deny there was an explosion, instead referring to what happened as a "hydrogen burn." But Gundersen noted that affidavits from four reactor operators confirm that the plant manager was aware of a dramatic pressure spike after which the internal pressure dropped to outside pressure; he also noted that the control room shook and doors were blown off hinges. In addition, Gundersen reported that while Metropolitan Edison would have known about the pressure spike immediately from monitoring equipment, it didn't notify the NRC about what had happened until two days later.

Gundersen maintains under the NRC's own rules an evacuation should have been ordered on the disaster's first day, when calculated radiation exposures in the town of Goldsboro, Pa. were as high as 10 rems an hour compared to an average cumulative annual background dose of about 0.125 rems. No evacuation order was ever issued, though Gov. Dick Thornburgh did issue an evacuation advisory on March 30 for pregnant women and preschool children within 5 miles of the plant. The government also did not distribute potassium iodide to the public, which would have protected people from the health-damaging effects of radioactive iodine.

Lessons for the future?

When asked by Facing South to respond to these allegations, a spokeswoman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission did not address them directly, instead stating that it continues to stand by the Kemeny Commission report. The NRC further insists that the radiation releases from Three Mile Island had only "negligible effects" on the physical health of humans and the environment, citing other reports from federal agencies [For a PDF of the NRC's response to Facing South, see here.]

But Gundersen and the Thompsons argue such claims don't address new findings at odds with the government's account.

"I believe [the] data shows releases from TMI were significantly greater than reported by the federal government," Gundersen says.

They also say their findings that releases were potentially much larger have important ramifications for current plans to expand the nuclear power industry.

With more than $18 billion in federal subsidies at stake, 17 companies are seeking federal licenses to build a total of 26 nuclear reactors across the country, the first applications since the 1979 disaster. The Atlanta-based Southern Co. plans to begin site work this summer for two new reactors at the Vogtle site in Georgia, where state lawmakers recently approved legislation forcing ratepayers to foot the bill for those facilities up front. Florida and South Carolina residents have also begun paying new utility charges to finance planned reactors, USA Today reports. Plans are in the works as well for new reactors in Virginia, North Carolina, Alabama, Mississippi, Louisiana and Texas.

Harold Denton, a retired NRC official who worked in Three Mile Island during the crisis, recently told Greenwire that changes made after the 1979 disaster "significantly reduced the overall risks of a future serious accident." But the Thompsons and Gundersen point out that the standards the NRC is applying to the new generation of nuclear plants are influenced by assumptions about what happened at Three Mile Island. They say the NRC's low estimates of radiation exposure have resulted in inadequate requirements for safety and containment protocols as well as the size of the evacuation zones around nuclear plants.

Other nuclear watchdogs have also raised concerns that the NRC's standards for protection against severe accidents like TMI remain inadequate. In a December 2007 report titled "Nuclear Power in a Warming World," the Union of Concerned Scientists notes that the worst accident the current generation of reactors was designed to withstand involves only partial melting of the reactor core but no breach of containment. And the NRC requires operators of plants found to be vulnerable to severe accidents to fix the problem "only if a cost-benefit analysis shows that the financial benefit of a safety backfit - determined by assigning a dollar value to the number of projected cancer deaths that would result from a severe accident - outweighs the cost of fixing the problem," the report states.

Given their personal experiences, the Thompsons warn that we may be fooling ourselves into believing nuclear power is safer than evidence and history suggest.

"Once you realize how deep and broad the realignment of facts about TMI has been, it becomes really pretty amazing," Randall Thompson says. "I guess that's what it takes to protect this industry."

(Images from top: Photo of President Jimmy Carter leaving Three Mile Island for Middletown, Pa. on April 1, 1979 from the National Archives and Records Administration; photo of Randall Thompson swallowing fire by William Mosher; map showing increases in cancer rates in the TMI area after the disaster courtesy of Dr. Steve Wing; graph showing dramatic spike in pressure inside the TMI containment on March 28, 1979 courtesy of Arnie Gundersen.)