BOOKS / Ron Jacobs : Smith's 'Nuclear Roulette' Makes the Case for 'No Nukes'

Gar Smith makes the case:
'No Nukes' is still the right call

The collection of facts, figures, and overall documentation of the industry’s lies, foibles, miscalculations, and just plain duplicity should insure the addition of more to the ranks of the anti-nuclear forces.

By Ron Jacobs / The Rag Blog / June 12, 2013

[Nuclear Roulette: The Truth about the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth by Gar Smith (2012: Chelsea Green); Paperback; 320 pp; $19.95.]

Despite spending several days in detention facilities in the late 1970s and early 1980s because of my opposition to nuclear power and its consequent dangers and debris, I honestly never thought nuclear power would be gone by 2013. The setup for the industry was just too sweet of a deal.

However, I did have hope that nuclear power’s reputation would be so tainted that no new plants would ever be considered. Unfortunately, even those hopes were for naught. To make matters even worse, nuclear power -- perhaps the most wasteful and most dangerous form of power generation -- is actually being touted as a “green” source of power.

This support is not just coming from the industry, either. One-time opponents like Whole Earth Catalog editor Stewart Brand and former Greenpeace president Patrick Moore are now on record as supporters of a power source and industry they used to oppose vehemently. When considering these retreats, the phrase “two steps forward, one step back” comes to mind.

Fortunately, a recently published book by journalist Gar Smith provides those who still oppose nuclear power with a valuable text filled with arguments and facts designed to convince any thinking citizen of earth about nuclear energy’s intrinsic manifestation of Thanatos and his kingdom.

Furthermore, the collection of facts, figures, and overall documentation of the industry’s lies, foibles, miscalculations, and just plain duplicity should insure the addition of more to the ranks of the anti-nuclear forces.

If one adds the truths of what has seen regarding the industry (most recently in Fukushima, Japan), the hopes for a revived movement in the streets opposed to nuclear power seem legitimate. Indeed, as I write this, news of a massive protest against the restarting of Japan’s nuclear plants is reaching my newsfeed.

Like other books of its kind, Smith’s book, Nuclear Roulette: The Truth About the Most Dangerous Energy Source on Earth, provides an unrelenting litany of accidents and near catastrophe hidden, falsified, and supported by the agencies supposedly set up to protect the public from nuclear power’s inherent dangers.

What is presented here is the story of these agencies’ longtime collusion with and intentional lying for the industry. The health and environmental reasons to oppose nuclear energy are manifold. Even if some can never be proven, there are enough instances available to make any argument for continuing this folly moot.

Unfortunately, as I noted before, this has not been the case. So, to those who would deny the negative effects to health and environment, it would seem that the cozy and corrupt relationship between the nuclear industry, the war machine, and elected U.S. officials would be reason enough to oppose (or at least critically examine) the reasons this expensive, wasteful, and anti-democratic energy product continues to receive taxpayers' money.

Nuclear Roulette does a great job enumerating this dynamic. The payoffs to politicians in the form of campaign contributions and subsequent legislation creating a liability cap for the industry are but the most obvious ways in which the energy industry has seduced and simultaneously reduced the role of the NRC to one that goes beyond sycophancy and into the realm of subservience.

Even when state governments have demanded the shutdown of plants inside their borders, the federal government has overridden those decisions. If that isn’t a denial of the people’s will, then nothing is. Smith enumerates other instances of the government not doing its job when it comes to overseeing the industry.

As Smith writes when discussing the NRC, “If you don’t look for problems, you won’t find them.” In essence, this is the approach the NRC has taken for decades. Of course, such an approach creates a false sense of security and enhances any potential dangers that might be present.

One of the more interesting aspects of Nuclear Roulette is when the author discusses the costs of nuclear energy in relation to the cost of solar, wind, and other alternative forms. It is Smith’s contention that we are near (if not at) the point where alternative forms are more cost effective, even in the short run.

In other words, even when one leaves out the long-term environmental costs of nuclear energy, the cost to build and maintain non-nuclear alternative forms is equal or less than those required for nuclear. This is good news. The bad news is that the industry opposes the best solution -- decentralized power such as rooftop panels and turbines -- precisely because it is decentralized.

Although the book focuses primarily on the United States, there are plenty of words devoted to Japan and Europe.

If Nuclear Roulette were a fiction book, it would be classified somewhere between crime and horror fiction. Unfortunately, it is all too real. However, the reality it discusses is still both a crime and a horror.

[Rag Blog contributor Ron Jacobs is the author of The Way The Wind Blew: A History of the Weather Underground. He recently released a collection of essays and musings titled Tripping Through the American Night. His novels, All the Sinners Saints, The Co-Conspirator's Tale, and Short Order Frame Up were published by Fomite Press. Ron Jacobs can be reached at ronj1955@gmail.com. Find more articles by Ron Jacobs on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Our Atomic Dominoes Are Falling

Falling dominoes. Image from ANS Nuclear Cafe.

Two reactors down, others teetering:
Our atomic dominoes are falling

This latest stretch of shutdowns does not mean the death of the industry. Both Georgia and Florida are being assaulted with legislation that would allow utilities to build new reactors while ratepayers foot the bill.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 19, 2013

Two more atomic dominoes have hit the deck.

At least a half-dozen more teeter on the brink, which would take the U.S. reactor count under 100.

But can we bury them before the next Fukushima erupts? And will we still laugh when Fox “News” says there’s more sun in Germany than California?

Wisconsin’s fully licensed Kewaunee reactor will now shut because it can’t compete in the marketplace. Florida’s Crystal River will die because its owners poked holes in the containment during a botched repair job.

UBS and other financial experts say Entergy is bleeding cash at Vermont Yankee. After blacking out the Super Bowl, Entergy has no problem stiffing a state that has sued to shut its only reactor. But in the face of being crushed by renewables and gas, the money men may finally pull the plug.

The same could happen to New York’s Fitzpatrick and Ginna reactors, as well as the two at Indian Point, which need water permits and more from an increasingly hostile state. New Jersey’s Oyster Creek, slammed by Hurricane Sandy, and Nebraska’s Ft. Calhoun, recently flooded, are also on the brink.

The list of crippled, non-competitive and near-dead reactors lengthens daily. Few are more critical than San Onofre Units Two and Three, perched on an ocean cliff in the earthquake-tsunami zone between Los Angeles and San Diego.

More than 8 million people live within a 50-mile radius of where San Onofre’s owners botched a $600 million steam generator replacement. As radiation leaked, they may have lied to federal regulators, prompting U.S. Senator Barbara Boxer (D-CA) and Representative Ed Markey (D-MA) to demand an investigation.

After being down more than a year, Unit Three will almost certainly never reopen. Unit Two may well stay shut at least through the summer. If a rising grassroots movement can bury them both, it will mark a huge turning point in a state where renewables are booming with new revenue and jobs.

Which gets us to the Murdochian weather report. A recent “Fox & Friends” was mystified by Germany’s popular (and very profitable) decision to phase out nukes while turning to solar, wind, increased efficiency, and other Solartopian technologies.

Finally, Shibani Joshi figured it out: “They’re a small country, and they’ve got lots of sun. Right? They’ve got a lot more sun than we do.”

The staggering laugh line that cold, dark Germany has more sunlight than a nation stretching from Hawaii to California to Florida could come only from an industry at dangerous odds with the planet on which it malfunctions.

This latest stretch of shutdowns does not mean the death of the industry. Both Georgia and Florida are being assaulted with legislation that would allow utilities to build new reactors while ratepayers foot the bill.

And some activists concerned about global warming still dream of carbon-free reactors they hope might some day alleviate the situation. But they miss the reality that such plants will likely never exist. Every promise this industry has made -- from “too cheap to meter” to “reactors don’t explode” to “radiation is good for you” -- has turned toxic.

They also forget that a fragile pool laden with enough fuel rods to poison countless millions still sways 100 feet in the air at Fukushima. It remains horrifically vulnerable to seismic activity that could send it crashing down to a permanently contaminated earth.

Overall the industry’s back is dangerously to the wall. We know it will squeeze every last cent from these dying reactors with less and less care for safety, especially since the federal government still insures them against the financial consequences of a major catastrophe. Every day they operate heightens the odds on something truly apocalyptic to follow in the wake of Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima.

Meanwhile they continue to spew out huge quantities of heat and waste. They divert precious capital from the proven green technologies that are now revolutionizing our energy economy in the only ways that can possibly save us from climate chaos.

This may yet become the first year in decades that the U.S. has fewer than 100 operating commercial reactors. It will also be the biggest year worldwide for the booming Solartopian industries that are transforming how we get our energy, create our jobs and grow our economy.

Lets just make sure we win that transition before the next reactor disaster does its worst.

[Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org, along with Harvey Wasserman's History of the United States. His Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show is at www.prn.fm. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Nuclear Industry Meltdown in Japan, France

Participants hold a traditional "Koinobori" carp-shaped banner for Children's Day during anti-nuke march in Tokyo Saturday, May 5, 2012. Photo by Itsuo Inouye / AP.
Nuclear industry melts in Japan, France;
opposition heats up in United States

This weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 10, 2012

There are zero commercial reactors operating in Japan today. On March 10, 2011, there were 54 licensed to operate, well over 10% percent of the global fleet. But for the first time in 42 years, a country at the core of global reactor electricity is producing none of its own.

Worldwide, there are fewer than 400 operating reactors for the first time since Chernobyl, a quarter-century ago.

And France has replaced a vehemently pro-nuclear premier with the Socialist Francois Hollande, who will almost certainly build no new reactors. For decades France has been the “poster child” of atomic power. But Hollande is likely to follow the major shift in French national opinion away from nuclear power and toward the kind of green-powered transition now redefining German energy supply.

In the United States, a national grassroots movement to stop federal loan guarantees could end new nuclear construction altogether. New official cost estimates of $9.5 to $12 billion per reactor put the technology off-scale for any meaningful competition with renewables and efficiency.

In India, more than 500 women have joined an ongoing hunger strike against construction of reactors at Koodankulam. And in China, more than 30 reactors hang in the balance of a full assessment of the true toll of the Fukushima disaster.

But it seems to have no end. Three melted cores still smolder. New reports from U.S. Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR), confirm that at least one spent fuel pool suspended 100 feet in the air, bearing tons of hugely toxic rods, could crash to the ground with another strong earthquake -- a virtual certainty by most calculations.

Those uncovered fuel rods contain radioactive cesium and other isotopes far beyond what was released at Chernobyl. A fire could render vast stretches of Japan permanently uninhabitable (if they are not already). The death toll could easily claim millions worldwide, including many of us here, where the cloud would come down within a week.

Japan’s total shutdown cuts to the core of the historic industry. The globe’s primary reactor designers, General Electric and Westinghouse, are now primarily Japanese-owned. Pressure vessels, steam generators, and much more of the industry’s vital hardware have long been manufactured in Japan.

But the archipelago’s antinuclear movement also has deep roots. In 1975-6, large, angry crowds I spoke to were already demanding the end of Fukushima and other reactor projects. They warned that all Japanese reactors were vulnerable to earthquakes and tsunamis, and that disasters on par with what happened at Fukushima were essentially inevitable. Now that it’s happened, the public rage in what has been a traditionally conservative, authoritarian society is almost unfathomable.

Along the way, local governments did win the right (not enjoyed in the United States) to keep shut nearby reactors that were closed for repairs and refueling. On Saturday, May 5, a deep-rooted, highly focused grassroots movement shut the archipelago’s last operating nuke. It’s bound and determined to keep them that way.

As summer air conditioning demand skyrockets, Japan’s Prime Minister will try to prove that atomic power is essential. But an efficiency-oriented public has dealt very well with cutbacks in supply since Fukushima. Each potential restart will have its own dynamic.

Japan’s stunning reality is that its gargantuan capital investment in more than 50 commercial reactors is now dead in the water... and being irradiated by its own deadly fallout. That can only drag the global industry closer to oblivion at a moment when the public’s financial and political commitments to renewables and efficiency are deepening daily.

Likewise the demise of Nikolas Sarkozy. His allies at France’s nuclear-commited utility, EDF, have been Europe’s primary pushers of the “Peaceful Atom.” Now his Socialist rival is running the country, backed by a constituency largely supportive of a green conversion to parallel the one in neighboring Germany.

America’s green activists also want atomic power ended. In Vermont, New Jersey, New York, Florida, Ohio, Texas, and elsewhere, escalating grassroots campaigns have put the future of 104 licensed reactors in doubt.

The confrontation may be most immediate at San Onofre, on the Pacific shore between Los Angeles and San Diego. Faulty steam generator tubes have forced two reactors shut. As in Japan, the industry loudly warns of shortages when summer hits. It wants at least one reactor back by June. But experts warn that San Onofre’s design deficiencies threaten the public safety, as does its uninsured vulnerability to earthquakes and tsunamis.

The battle parallels the one over new construction. Already plagued with faulty concrete and design-deficient rebar steel, two reactors at Georgia’s Vogtle still await final agreement on federal loan guarantees granted by President Obama last year.

But Progress Energy’s guess that its own double-reactor proposal for Florida’s Levy County could cost a staggering $24 billion casts a long shadow over Vogtle, where tax/ratepayers are already being stuck with huge bills for a project that could be vastly underfunded. A national petition drive has been fired up to stop the guarantees from going through.

And while India’s growing nonviolent army of nuclear opponents vow to fast to the death, the global reactor industry awaits word from China on how many new reactors it thinks it will build. The world will then watch with bated breath as the Middle Kingdom’s own nascent anti-nuclear movement gathers strength in the inevitable race to shut the local reactor before it melts.

But for now, this weekend’s message from Japan and France could not be more clear: at nuclear power’s historic core, the collapse has come. Humankind is running ever-faster toward a green-powered Earth, desperate to win before the next Fukushima strikes.

[Harvey Wassermansoc edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. The Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show airs at www.progressiveradionetwork.com. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Two New U.S. Nukes in Big Trouble

Georgia's Vogtle nuclear plant faces big challenges. Image from io9.
America's two new nukes
are on the brink of death

The financial pitfalls of what may be America's last two proposed reactor projects may write the final epitaph for an industry whose fiscal failures are in the multi-billions.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / April 9, 2012

The only two U.S. reactor projects now technically under construction are on the brink of death for financial reasons.

If they go under, there will almost certainly be no new reactors built here.

The much mythologized "nuclear renaissance" will be officially buried, and the U.S. can take a definitive leap toward a green-powered future that will actually work and that won't threaten the continent with radioactive contamination.

As this drama unfolds, the collapse of global nuclear power continues, as two reactors proposed for Bulgaria have been cancelled, and just one of Japan's 54 licensed reactors is operating. That one may well close next month, leaving Japan without a single operating commercial nuke.

Georgia's double-reactor Vogtle project has been sold on the basis of federal loan guarantees. Last year President Obama promised the Southern Company, parent to Georgia Power, $8.33 billion in financing from an $18.5 billion fund that had been established at the Department of Energy by George W. Bush.

Until last week most industry observers had assumed the guarantees were a done deal. But the Nuclear Energy Institute, an industry trade group, has publicly complained that the Office of Management and Budget may be requiring terms that are unacceptable to the builders.

Southern and its supporters remain ostensibly optimistic that the deal will be done. But the climate for loan guarantees has changed since this one was promised. The $535 million collapse of Solyndra prompted a rash of angry Congressional hearings and cast a long shadow over the whole range of loan guarantees for energy projects. Though the Vogtle deal comes from a separate fund, skepticism over stalled negotiations is rising.

So is resistance among Georgia ratepayers. To fund the new Vogtle reactors, Southern is forcing "construction work in progress" rate hikes that require consumers to pay for the new nukes as they're being built. Southern is free of liability, even if the reactors are not completed. Thus it behooves the company to build them essentially forever, collecting payment whether they open or not.

All that would collapse should the loan guarantee package fail.

A similar fate may be awaiting the Summer Project. South Carolina Electric & Gas has pledged to build the two new reactors there without federal subsidies or guarantees. But it does require ratepayer funding up front. That includes an apparent need for substantial financial participation from Duke Power and/or Progress Energy customers in North Carolina who have been targeted to receive some of the electricity projected to come from Summer.

But resistance in the Tar Heel State is fierce. NCWarn and other consumer/anti-nuclear organizations are geared up to fight the necessary rate hikes tooth and nail. Should they win -- and in a troubled economy there is much going for them -- nuclear opponents could well take Summer down before it gets seriously off the ground.

Progress already has its hands full with a double-reactor project proposed for Levy County, Florida. Massive rate hikes granted for CWIP by the Florida legislature have ignited tremendous public anger. Unlike Vogtle and Summer, Levy County has yet to get NRC approval.

Progress is also over its head at Crystal River. Upwards of $2 billion has been poured into botched repairs at this north Florida reactor. Odds are strong it will never reopen.

The same may be true at California's San Onofre, now shut due to problems with its steam generator tubing, a generic flaw that could affect up to about half the currently licensed 104 U.S. reactors. Nukes at Vermont Yankee, New York's Indian Point, and Pilgrim, in Massachusetts, among others, are also under fierce attack.

These elderly reactors have been routinely issued extended operating licenses by the NRC.

But as their physical deterioration accelerates, official licenses may now be beside the point for these old reactors... and for new nukes as well. The major financial trade publications such as Bloomberg, Fortune et al, now regularly concede that increased efficiency and renewable projects are cheaper, faster to build and more profitable than new reactors.

The Tennessee Valley Authority, a federal agency, could conceivably pick up the corpse and try to build new reactors, as it did at the dawn of the nuclear age, when no private utilities would touch the untested but clearly dubious promise of the "Peaceful Atom."

In the decades since, the promise of electricity "too cheap to meter" has proven to be a tragic myth.

And all these years later, the financial pitfalls of what may be America's last two proposed reactor projects may write the final epitaph for an industry whose fiscal failures are in the multi-billions.

At the end of the road, it will still take citizen activism to finally bury this industry. But we may be very close to making it happen, and now is a critical time to push extra hard.

[Harvey Wasserman edits www.nukefree.org. His Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. The Solartopia Green Power and Wellness Show airs at www.progressiveradionetwork.com. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Michael Grabell : How the Stimulus Revived the Electric Car

Rodney Smith cleans a new Think electric car at the Magnum Drive plant in Elkhart, Ind. Photo by J. Tyler Klassen / The Elkhart Truth / AP / Pro Publica.
How the stimulus revived the electric car

Although electric cars would not make up for the generation-long loss of manufacturing jobs, at least not yet, it was novel to see companies creating jobs in the Rust Belt instead of outsourcing them.

By Michael Grabell / ProPublica / January 31, 2012

A common criticism of President Obama's $800 billion stimulus package has been that it failed to produce anything -- that while the New Deal built bridges and dams, all the stimulus did was fill some potholes and create temporary jobs.

Don't tell that to Annette Herrera. She was 50 when the auto supplier she worked for in Westland, Michigan, closed its factory and moved the work to Mexico. Then, after being unemployed for two and a half years, she got a job in October 2010 with A123 Systems, which had received $250 million in stimulus money to help open a new lithium-ion battery plant in nearby Romulus, Michigan.

"The first thing I did was call my husband and tell him, 'You're never going to guess! I got a job!'" Herrera recalled. "And then it was like celebration time."

One success the Obama administration can duly claim is the rebirth of the electric-car industry in the United States. Automakers have unveiled a number of mass-market electric cars, which have seen small but rising sales. Battery and parts manufacturers are building 30 factories, creating thousands of new jobs. A123 has hired 700 workers at Herrera's plant and a second one in nearby Livonia, and plans to hire a couple thousand more people over the next few years.

If it wasn't for the stimulus, the companies say, they would have built these plants overseas.

It was all part of an effort to promote "green" manufacturing and put a million electric cars on the road by 2015.

The question is: Will it last?

Elkhart, Indiana, once believed it would. It saw electric vehicles as its salvation after watching its unemployment rate hit 20 percent. Eager to seed a new industry, the county witnessed electric-vehicle ventures sprout out of nowhere as the stimulus took off in 2009.

But by late summer 2011, what had sprouted were weeds. The parking lot of the Think electric-car plant was full of them, some more than a foot high growing from the cracks. Out front were two pickups and a motorcycle.

Hundreds of laid-off factory workers were supposed to have found jobs churning out the Norwegian company's bug-like, plastic-bodied cars, which ran solely on electricity.

Today the Elkhart factory employs two. Its parent company filed for bankruptcy in June. Its largest shareholder and battery maker, Ener1, which received $118 million in stimulus money, did the same last week.


A second life

Electric cars began appearing on California roads in the mid-1990s after state regulators mandated that a certain percentage of automakers' fleets include zero-emissions vehicles.

But within a few years, they were deemed a failure by car companies, which stopped making them and took back those they had leased.

Much had changed in the eight years leading up to the stimulus package. The lead-acid and nickel-metal hydride batteries that weighed as much as 1,200 pounds were replaced with lithium-ion batteries that weighed as little as 400 pounds.

In the early 2000s, gas hadn't even passed $2 a gallon. Less than a decade later, it was twice that. Toyota had proven the demand with its long waiting list for the Prius hybrid.

Government policy had changed, too, with a 2007 energy bill that increased fuel-efficiency standards and provided $25 billion in loans for automakers to upgrade their plants.

But until the economic stimulus package was passed in 2009, the manufacture of electric cars and their batteries in the United States was nearly nonexistent.

The United States had only two factories manufacturing less than 2 percent of the world's advanced batteries. Most were made in Korea and Japan. In America, only Tesla manufactured an electric car -- which sold for a cool $100,000. Across the entire country, there were a mere 500 electric charging stations.

But as the stimulus kicked in, there was suddenly no better environment for the electric car to thrive.

With more than $2 billion in federal grants, matched by another $2 billion in private investment, the Obama administration was supporting electric cars from the mine to the garage.

Chemetall Foote Corp., which operates the only U.S. lithium mine, received $28 million to boost production at its plants in Nevada and North Carolina. Honeywell received $27 million to become the first domestic supplier of a conductive salt for lithium batteries. More than $1 billion was spent to open and expand battery factories, many of them in hard-luck towns across Michigan. Through a separate federal program, automakers received loans to retool their assembly lines.

Customers could receive a $7,500 tax credit for buying an electric car. The stimulus provided funding for 20,000 electric charging stations by 2013. In many cities, drivers could get a home charger for free.

Although electric cars would not make up for the generation-long loss of manufacturing jobs, at least not yet, it was novel to see companies creating jobs in the Rust Belt instead of outsourcing them.

In July, Johnson Controls opened the first U.S. factory to produce complete lithium-ion battery cells for electric vehicles. Compact Power is building a $300 million factory in Holland, Michigan, to produce batteries for the Chevy Volt and the electric Ford Focus. A123 now supplies the luxury electric carmaker Fisker Automotive and the manufacturers of electric delivery trucks used by FedEx and Frito-Lay. "Quite simply, if we didn't get that grant, we wouldn't have built [the factory] in the U.S.," A123 spokesman Dan Borgasano said.

The battery grants have created and saved more than 1,800 jobs for assembly workers, toolmakers, and engineers, according to a ProPublica analysis of stimulus project reports filed by the companies. That number doesn't include the workers who constructed the plants or those hired by the matching private investment the companies had to make to get the grants.


Killed again?

The problem: Consumers have been slow to embrace the electric car.

The price of the battery is still too high, and the price of gas is still too low, the Government Accountability Office warned in June 2009 before the grants were awarded. The starting price for the all-electric Nissan Leaf is $33,000, while the hybrid Volt sells for about $40,000 before tax credits -- far more than many middle-class families can afford.

About 40 percent of drivers didn't have access to an outlet where they park their vehicles, the GAO noted.

"Although a mile driven on electricity is cheaper than one driven on gasoline," the National Research Council reported, "it will likely take several decades before the upfront costs decline enough to be offset by lifetime fuel savings."

Perhaps the biggest obstacle, though, was what the automobile represents in the American psyche: the freedom of the open road. While most people drive less than 40 miles per day, consumers want cars that they can also take on summer vacations -- and they don't want to have to constantly worry about looking for a charging station.

The Leaf's range is just 73 miles, according to the official government rating, well below the much-advertised 100 miles.

By the end of 2011, fewer than 18,000 Leafs and Volts had been sold in the United States.

A report by congressional researchers last year concluded that the cost of batteries, anxiety over mileage range, and more efficient internal combustion engines could make it difficult to achieve Obama's goal of a million electric vehicles by 2015. Even many in the industry say the target is unreachable.

While the $2.4 billion in stimulus money has increased battery manufacturing, the congressional report noted that the United States might not be able to keep up in the long run. South Korea and China have announced plans to invest more than five times that amount over the next decade. Even A123 had to lay off 125 workers in November -- though Borgasano says the company plans to rehire them all by June -- because Fisker reduced orders.

Dick Moore, the mayor of Elkhart, had hoped the area known for its recreational-vehicle factories would one day be not just the "RV Capital of the World" but the "EV Capital of the World" as well.

Navistar International had received $39 million in stimulus money to build 400 electric delivery trucks in the first year. But by early 2011, it had hired about 40 employees and assembled only 78 vehicles.

Think had rallied into 2011 with plans to start production in Elkhart earlier than expected. But in April, assembly work suddenly stopped as the plant awaited parts from Europe.

In June, Think's parent company filed for bankruptcy. The decision left the Elkhart plant slouching toward extinction until the American subsidiary was purchased by a Russian entrepreneur who promised to restart production in early 2012.

But on Thursday, its battery maker, Ener1, also filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy, reporting that the demand for electric vehicles "did not develop as quickly as anticipated."

Elkhart's dream of becoming the EV capital?

Moore put it this way: "The fact that this hasn't moved very quickly, that doesn't bode well for that idea."


The future

The fate of the electric car depends greatly on whether sales take off soon.

There are other factors, such as the price of gas and whether Congress approves proposed standards requiring automakers to raise the average fuel economy of their vehicles to 55 miles per gallon by 2025.

The electric car has always struggled with a chicken-and-egg dilemma: Automakers have been reluctant to build electric cars without consumer demand. But consumers won't buy them until automakers develop cheaper, longer-range batteries.

One of the goals of the ongoing stimulus spending is to solve this problem. By 2015, the 30 battery and component factories will be able to produce 40 percent of the world's batteries, according to the administration.

The investments would help manufacturers increase the batteries' life from four years to 14 and cut their cost from $33,000 to $10,000, the administration said in a report on innovation. That would make the electric car more competitive.

Herrera noted that many people at the A123 factory believe they will never be able to afford the cars powered by the batteries they make. But, she says, "you never know."

"When the flat-screen TVs first came out, they were way expensive, and now they're reasonably priced," she said. "I think that's going to be the same thing with electric automobiles. This is a new product. It's going to take time."

[Michael Grabell has been a reporter at ProPublica since 2008, producing stories for USA Today, Salon, NPR, MSNBC.com, and the CBS Evening News. Before joining ProPublica, he was a reporter at The Dallas Morning News. He has twice been a finalist for the Livingston Award for Young Journalists. This story was published at and distributed by ProPublica It was adapted from Money Well Spent?: The Truth Behind the Trillion-Dollar Stimulus, the Biggest Economic Recovery Plan in History which will be published Tuesday, February 6, by PublicAffairs.]

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Paul Robbins : Switching on the Sunshine

Flipping the switch at solar farm near Austin, Texas. Rag Blog photo.
Let the sunshine in:
On being young and crazy in Austin

They say that victory has 1,000 parents, but defeat is an orphan.

By Paul Robbins / The Rag Blog / January 11, 2012

AUSTIN -- On Friday, Jan. 6, Austin officially commissioned its new 30-megawatt solar plant. It is one of the largest solar installations in the U.S. Austin and the environmental community in particular should be proud of this accomplishment.

Located near the small town of Webberville at the eastern edge of Travis County, the "solar farm" consists of 127,780 photovoltaic panels mounted on tracking axes covering a site of 380 acres. It will provide electricity equal to that used in 5,500 average Austin homes. Ironically the site, owned by Austin Energy, the City's municipal public utility, was originally purchased in 1984 for a coal plant that was never built.

They say that victory has 1,000 parents, but defeat is an orphan. Many people will claim credit for this achievement. Many of them deserve it. However, the people left out of the celebration were the ones who had the original idea: the anti-nuclear activists of the 1970s.

Solar array at massive new solar farm in Webberville, Texas. Rag Blog photo.
We were mostly 20- and 30-somethings with the sun in our eyes, activists who wanted an alternative to a future of dangerous nuclear and coal plants. To the power structure of that generation, we were "crazy." We were sometimes ignored, other times ridiculed, occasionally even blacklisted or persecuted.

Our attempts to keep Austin out of the South Texas Nuclear Project -- ultimately unsuccessful when the City power structure stabbed student voters in the back -- were both epic struggles and advanced courses in political organizing.

And last Friday we won. Of about 200 people there, including all manner of press, I was the only member of the "original cast." It was a sunny winter day and people seemed festive. There were various props, including a yellow ribbon to cut and an official "light switch" to turn on, powering a (compact fluorescent) bulb.

The utility even had a special ride for attendees, who could don hardhats and safety harnesses to get an aerial view of the field from the bucket of a "cherry picker" electric line maintenance truck. We had to sign a release form.

Austin environmentalist and Rag Blog contributor Paul Robbins, shown with Shannon Halley, aide to Austin City Councilmember Kathy Tovo. Rag Blog photo.
I am including a few photos, like the one [above] of me in a hardhat next to Council aide Shannon Halley, who accompanied me in the bucket.

On the bus ride back, I thought about all the people I worked with in that era, the people who had the original vision, the people who went unrecognized. This was their victory too.

[Paul Robbins is an environmental activist and consumer advocate based in Austin, Texas. Read more articles by Paul Robbins on The Rag Blog.]

Links to news stories, with video:

http://www.kxan.com/dpp/news/local/austin/380-acre-solar-farm-goes-online
http://www.kvue.com/news/local/Officials-flip-switch-at-Webberville-Solar-Project-136845053.html
http://austin.ynn.com/content/top_stories/282332/new-massive-solar-farm-to-feed-power-to-austin-homes

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Richard D. Jehn : Moving Through the End of Growth

Transformation time. Image from Fluxed Up World.
Moving through the end of growth
and the collapse of the U.S. as we know it

Welcome to the New World.

By Richard D. Jehn / The Rag Blog / January 10, 2012

Although my headline implies catastrophe, and I firmly believe that there are now factors beyond our control that strongly suggest we are in for an unprecedented hard time, this article is actually one of hope and a call to action for those who are inclined.

First I will discuss briefly those things I think are conspiring to bring on the collapse of U.S. society. I will conclude the article with things that I believe every one of us should become involved in to make the end of growth easier and the transition to a steady-state economy less painful.

It is now five years since Richard Heinberg published The Party's Over (2nd edition), a chronicle of peak oil and why there are few strategies that will help us come up with the shortage in energy as oil production truly begins to fall. He just published a more encompassing undertaking titled The End of Growth that provides some concrete evidence for things I have begun saying in the past two years.

I believe there are four prime factors which may bring us to economic and social collapse: (1) peak oil (which has just begun to have its effects; gasoline prices will never fall again); (2) climate change (which I now suspect cannot be reversed even if every nation world-wide adopted the equivalent of the Kyoto Protocol to the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change tomorrow); (3) the financial crisis (which is far from over; signs are that the U.S. is even closer to bankruptcy than previously believed); and (4) the crisis of industrial agriculture (which is slowly killing us off, despite its best intentions).

There are related factors which are of equal importance that I won't discuss, such as "peak water" and "peak food" (see The End of Growth).

I am not an expert on petroleum extraction or any of its related activities. Nonetheless, it is apparent from even casual reading that we have passed the point known as peak oil (where world oil production begins to decline), probably about five years ago. Alternative meaningful sources of energy have not seen the level of development that will be necessary to make a smooth transition from oil to something else (although China is pouring significant resources into the development of renewable energy).

No matter what we do in the next 20 years, peak oil will have a profound impact on everything about our present-day lives. Remember that a typical grocery store will empty within three days with no truck deliveries, 80% of our electricity is supplied by generation plants that use some form of hydrocarbons, the source of all plastic goods is oil, and a myriad of other things too numerous to list.

Global warming is now a fait accompli in the eyes of most climate scientists world-wide. The polar ice caps are melting, California, Texas, Arizona, and New Mexico are burning, storms are becoming more intense with each passing season, and we have really just begun to see the first impacts of this new climate regime.

I believe that each passing season we will witness more intense storms and greater climate chaos across the globe. I also believe that there is exactly one solution available to us: adaptation. We are no longer capable of reversing the effects of what has begun in earnest, and the impact, particularly on agriculture, will be devastating.

The financial crisis of 2008 was precipitated by a corrupt capitalist system in the U.S. driven by greed, but it was dramatically accelerated by a largely unsupervised financial sector's activities that emulated gambling. The Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission report provides a large number of reasons for what happened, but what they fail to do adequately is summarize the structural issues that remain and will likely lead to the financial collapse that I believe is imminent.

There are now numerous publications (see Reinventing Collapse, The Myth of Endless Growth: Exposing Capitalism's Insustainability, Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed) suggesting that capitalism is really at fault.

Do you remember the advertising from the 1950s where some fellow with a deep, resonant voice reminds us that we will achieve "Better Living Through Chemistry"? Industrial agriculture is one of the results of that perspective, as are our toxic bodies and surroundings, numerous poisons used in war, and an endless reliance on unhealthy, unnatural solutions to our problems.

Industrial agriculture is frequently touted as the solution to the imminent food shortages world-wide, but in Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé argues that industrial agriculture may not be necessary to feed a hungry world. Regardless, the use of poisonous substances on our food supply to control pests, weeds, and diseases is counterintuitive at best, sheer stupidity at worst.

In more recent years, growth hormones and antibiotics used in raising our meat have yielded horrible results -- antibiotic-resistant bacteria, MRSA in hospitals, and the proliferation of truly dangerous diseases that require ever-stronger drugs to combat.

All these negatives do not have to give us a catastrophic outcome; however, we really cannot waste time and we must personally start with concrete positive actions. What I believe has happened is that we have completely disconnected from a large number of the things that actually matter, such as ensuring we have a healthy food supply, expressing compassion for each other, cooperating to achieve common goals.

The first obvious step we all should be taking is to grow our own gardens including preserving the food produced to last the winter. We should all make every effort to reject industrial agriculture completely, refusing to purchase processed foods, rejecting fruits and vegetables that are treated with chemical herbicides and pesticides (that are mostly based on chemicals left over from previous military research efforts into nasty things like nerve gas) and fertilizers that are based on petroleum products, and also rejecting meats that contain antibiotics and other drug or chemical treatments.

Failing to do so could have quite negative impacts personally -- cancer or other diseases such as asthma related to poisons in our immediate environment, or less obvious illnesses such as chronic allergies.

The second clear step is to reduce energy usage to the greatest extent possible. This is really not a trivial proposition, since it entails eliminating car travel from your life if you mean it. There is no realistic way that North America is going to keep up its oil/car habit at present levels for very long.

The likelihood is that pricing will drive some to stop driving, but for others, it will take more to change their priorities. If you want to be realistic about what is coming, the time to do it is now -- get cars out of your life to the extent possible.

Other energy conservation steps would be to install solar panels, or a wind or water power generator for your home, eliminating the purchase of plastics, and taking daily concrete steps to eliminate your reliance on hydrocarbons.

Another necessary step is to recycle everything. In today's world, there is not much excuse for failing to recycle as much as humanly possible, and laziness does not qualify as a good reason. Especially non-renewable natural resources such as mined metals and minerals, and hydrocarbons should be maximally recycled.

Finally, get involved in the Transition movement. Taken from the Transition Whatcom website, "The goal of [...] all Transition Initiatives is to create a long term Energy Descent Action Pathway, a blueprint -- by the community, for the community -- of how to significantly reduce energy use and yet provide for our basic needs in times of energy scarcity."

There are other similar organizations that are moving toward a different world, for example Business Alliance for Local Living Economies and all its myriad local organization members such as Bellingham, Washington's Sustainable Connections. Get involved as it is very likely that you have a local organization that is doing remarkably good works to turn this planet around.

There are myriad examples of remarkable things happening around the country and around the world. For example, a New England town recently enacted "food sovereignty" legislation that rejects federal and state overview of the production and distribution of local food. In Diet for a Hot Planet, Anna Lappé relates cases of replacing industrial agriculture with sustainable organic farming with comparable yields and much higher quality produce.

We must reject the status quo capitalist approach and build a new society. Welcome to the New World.

[Richard Jehn, who lives in Bellingham, Washington, was the founder and first editor of The Rag Blog in May 2006. His work and education have been in horticulture, linguistics, and computer technologies.]

References:

Diamond, Jared. 2005, 2011. Collapse: How Societies Choose to Fail or Succeed. Penguin.
Flannery, Tim. 2010. Here on Earth: A Natural History of the Planet. Atlantic Monthly Press.
Heinberg, Richard. 2005. The Party's Over: Oil, War and the Fate of Industrial Societies, 2nd edition. New Society Publishers.
Heinberg, Richard. 2011. The End of Growth: Adapting to Our New Economic Reality. New Society Publishers.
Lappé, Anna. 2010. Diet for a Hot Planet: The climate crisis at the end of your fork and what you can do about it. Bloomsbury.
Orlov, Dmitry. 2008. Reinventing Collapse: The Soviet Example and American Prospects. New Society Publishers.
Strauss, William. 2010. The Myth of Endless Growth: Exposing Capitalism's Insustainability. Lulu Press.

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Harvey Wasserman : Occupy Nukes!

Occupy Wall Street image from eleven degrees north.
Merge and win:
Occupy Wall Street and
the 'No Nukes' movement

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 25, 2011

The global upheaval that is the Occupy Movement is hopefully in the process of changing -- and saving -- the world. Through the astonishing power of creative nonviolence, it has the magic and moxie to defeat the failing forces of corporate greed.

A long-term agenda seems to be emerging: social justice, racial and gender equality, ecological survival, true democracy, an end to war, and so much more. "When the power of love overcomes the love of power," said Jimi Hendrix, "the world will know peace."

Such a moment must come now in the nick of time, as the corporate ways of greed and violence pitch us to the precipice of self-extinction. At that edge sits a sinister technology, a poisoned cancerous power that continues to harm us all even as three of its cores melt and spew at Fukushima. Atomic energy, the so-called "Peaceful Atom," has failed on all fronts.

Once sold as "too cheap to meter," it's now the world's most expensive electric generator. Once embraced as a corporate bonanza, it cannot obtain private liability insurance. Once hyped as the world's energy savior, it cannot attract private investment.

Once worshiped as a technology of genius, it cannot clean up its own radioactive messes. Once described as the "magic bullet" that could power the Earth, it's now the lethal technology threatening to destroy it.

The nonviolent campaign against this agent of the apocalypse has helped raise the use of peaceful mass action to an entirely new level.

In the wake of the movements for labor unions, nuclear disarmament, civil rights -- including minorities, women, and gays -- peace in Southeast Asia, and more, the messages of Eugene V. Debs, Dorothy Day, Martin Luther King, and so many great apostles of nonviolence have become part of an emerging new culture.

For decades, the No Nukes campaign has conducted hundreds of demonstrations involving thousands of arrests in dozens of countries. Violence has been renounced and almost entirely avoided. Injuries have been present but minimal. There's been at least one murder, that of the anti-nuclear activist Karen Silkwood. But overall, given the magnitude of the movement over more than 40 years of confrontation, individual casualties have been slight.

And the accomplishments have been historic. Whereas Richard Nixon once promised 1,000 U.S. reactors by the year 2000, there are now 104. These dangerous relics are now under attack, especially at Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, New York.

Worldwide we have seen Germany renounce atomic energy and commit to renewables. Siemens, once a corporate nuclear flagship, has turned instead toward Solartopian technologies. Like Japan, now horribly contaminated by Fukushima, Switzerland, Italy, Spain, and others are following suit.

But the final fight remains to be won. While pouring billions into cornering the global solar market, China is still poised to build some 30 reactors. India, Britain, Korea, and a few others are also toying with more. But especially in the wake of Fukushima, they are not a done deal.

In the United States, the key is to deny the nuclear industry the federal funding without which it can't build new reactors.

And here is where the Occupy and No Nukes movements intersect. Wall Street has actually retreated, and will not finance new commercial reactors.

So the industry has gone straight to the White House and Congress to force taxpayers to underwrite new construction loans. In the past decade reactor backers have spent more than $60 million per year lobbying Congress and the White House to get this money. With no such budget, the national No Nukes movement has been defeating these give-aways.

Now comes the turning point. In 2011, for the first time, solar and wind are being recognized by mainstream economists as cheaper than new nukes. And renewables overall in the United States generate more usable power than operating reactors.

If we can hold off these loan guarantees for another year or two, and shut some older reactors like Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, the dam will break, and the corporate impetus to build new reactors may finally go away.

Atomic energy is, after all, a means of centralizing power in corporate hands. But there is only so far the one-percenters can ride a dead horse, especially if it's radioactive.

Our struggle then comes with fighting to keep the Solartopian conversion in the people's hands. We will love defeating fossil and nuclear fuels. But we want to guarantee our energy supply -- even if it's driven by the wind and sun -- is controlled by the community, not the corporations.

And here is where Occupy/No Nukes can jump the power of democracy to a whole new level.

Human society is on the brink of its most significant technological conversion ever. Green power will be a multi-trillion-dollar industry, outstripping even computers and the internet.

But who will own the sun? Will the corporations again monopolize a nascent revolution? Or can the Occupy and No Nukes movements keep this technology decentralized, with the power Mother Earth gives us resting in the hands of the people?

In this struggle, longevity is the key. The grassroots No Nukes campaign is some four decades young and going strong. Every few years the corporate media runs features about how it has died and gone away, and they have always been wrong. We will not disappear until the nukes do.

The same must be the case for Occupy. Any day now the Foxists will proclaim the movement dead and failed. It will be nonsense. But in the long term, it's up to us to prove them wrong. All the bright futures above come true only if we stay with it as long as it takes.

At the intersection of No Nukes and Occupy, we know that true democracy can only come when our energy supply is owned by the people. A grassroots-based energy supply is at the core of a sustainable Solartopian future.

In the 1970s a grassroots movement led by the Clamshell Alliance nonviolently occupied a reactor site at Seabrook, New Hampshire, and sparked a global green powered revolution whose completion may be in sight.

This year the Occupy movement took to Wall Street, and has exploded into a global democratic revolution with unbound potential.

There are innumerable hurdles along the way.

But as these two movements flow together like a mighty stream, let them wash away forever the corporate plague of atomic energy, and free at last the path to a democratized, green-powered Earth.

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.harveywasserman.com. His “Solartopia! Green-Power Hour” is podcast from www.talktainmentradio.com. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Let's Join Japan in Junking New Nukes

Workers cycle past a nuclear power plant on a tricycle cart in Changchun, in northeast China's Jilin province, Dec. 17, 2010. Japan and Germany are limiting or phasing out reliance on nuclear power after the Fukushima accident. Photo from AP.
We're at a turning point:
Let's join Japan
and junk new nukes

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 11, 2011

Japan will build no new nuclear reactors. It's a huge body blow to the global industry, and could mark a major turning point in the future of energy.

Says Prime Minister Naoto Kan: "We need to start from scratch... and do more to promote renewables."

Wind power alone could -- and now probably will -- replace 40 nukes in Japan.

The United States must join them. Axing the $36 billion currently stuck in the 2012 federal budget for loan guarantees to build new reactors could do the trick.

Wind potential alone between the Mississippi and the Rockies could produce 300% of the nation's electricity. That doesn't include solar, geothermal, ocean thermal, sustainable biofuels, and the many more renewable sources poised to reshape the American energy future once the prospect of new nukes is discarded.

Japan was set to build 14 new nukes before Fukushima. Six of Japan's total of 55 reactors were shut by the earthquake and tsunami. Three at Kashiwazaki remain shut from the seven that were hit by an earthquake less than five years ago. Kan wants three more closed at Hamaoka, also in an earthquake/tsunami zone.

Japan's reactor fleet remains the world's third-largest, behind the U.S. and France. The General Electric and Westinghouse nuclear divisions, builders of nearly all the commercial reactors in the U.S., are at least partly controlled by Japanese companies. Reactor Pressure Vessels and other major components are built there.

Four California reactors also sit in earthquake zones vulnerable to tsunamis. San Onofre, between Los Angeles and San Diego, has 7.5 million people living within a 50-mile radius. Its two operating reactors and one dead reactor sit less than a mile from the high tide line.

Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, sits near a series of earthquake faults, including one newly discovered less than two miles from the two reactor cores there.

Numerous other U.S. reactors are perilously close to earthquake faults, including two operating at Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan. The Perry reactor, on Lake Erie east of Cleveland, was damaged by an earthquake in January, 1986.

Massive quantities of heat have poured into the global ecosystem from the multiple explosions, partial meltdowns and spent fuel fires at Fukushima, contributing significantly to global warming.

Highly radioactive fallout has been found miles from the site. Millions of gallons of extremely contaminated water have poured into the ocean.

Radioactive fallout has also been detected in rainwater, milk, and on vegetables throughout the United States, threatening the health of millions of Americans, especially small children and embryos in utero.

Now Fukushima Unit Four appears to be on the brink of physical collapse. Fission may be continuing in at least one spent fuel pool, and possibly in one or more cores. Radiation levels are high enough at the site to guarantee certain near-term death to workers, many of whom have come to consider work at Fukushima to be a virtual suicide mission. A definitive end to the disaster could be years away.

Kan's decision to shut Hamaoka and then to cancel future nukes came as a shock. Widely criticized for weakness in the wake of Fukushima, he has now redefined Japan's energy future.

Though dependent on imported fossil fuels, major Japanese corporations have substantial investments in wind, solar, and other Solartopian technologies. This will push them to the forefront of Japan's energy future.

Likewise Germany. In the wake of huge public demonstrations and a major electoral defeat, Prime Minister Angela Merkel has shut seven old reactors and says 10 more will go down by 2020, making Germany nuke-free. For decades Germany has been pushing wind, solar, and other green technologies harder than any other industrial nation, with enormously profitable results.

In the U.S., renewables are also booming, while the reactor industry has been taking hard hits. Just this week a major French-operated component factory proposed for Virginia has been pushed back two years -- which means likely cancellation. A $5 billion taxpayer-funded facility in South Carolina to produce plutonium-based Mixed Oxide reactor fuel faces a lack of customers, and growing doubts about the project's viability or real purpose.

Overall, Fukushima has complicated an already dark financial picture. A Texas project meant for Japanese financing is now all but dead. So is one proposed for Maryland by the French.

While the Obama Administration continues to push for those $36 billion in loan guarantees, it's unclear what reactor projects are in credible shape to accept them.

Meanwhile ferocious battles to shut old reactors in Vermont, New York, New Jerse, and elsewhere are heating up. With roughly two dozen of similar design to Fukushima Unit One now operating in the U.S., the public demand for more shutdowns continues to escalate.

We need to finish the job and get to a green-powered Earth.

Nuclear power makes global warming worse, and spells economic as well as ecological doom.

The industry can't get private financing, can't get meaningful liability insurance, can't deal with its wastes, can't compete in the marketplace, can't guarantee us we won't suffer a Fukushima of our own, can't provide a reliable energy supply into the future.

What lies before us once we kill these loan guarantees is a Solartopian reality powered by the sun, wind, tides, waves, earth's heat, and more.

Those countries like Germany, Denmark, and now Japan that head definitively toward a nuke-free future are in the process of turning toward survivability and prosperity.

Let's kill that loan guarantee package, shut the dying nukes like Vermont Yankee and Indian Point, and join them in truly green-powered future.

[Harvey Wasserman's most recent book is Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. He edits the NukeFree.org website, where this article was also published. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Louis Bergeron : A Practical Vision for Global Sustainable Energy

L.A. Cicero Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of civil and environmental engineering At Stanford University. Photo from L.A. Cicero.
It will take concerted effort:
A practical vision for alternative energy

By Louis Bergeron / Stanford Report / April 7, 2011

A new study -- co-authored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson and UC-Davis researcher Mark A. Delucchi -- analyzing what is needed to convert the world's energy supplies to clean and sustainable sources says that it can be done with today's technology at costs roughly comparable to conventional energy.

If someone told you there was a way you could save 2.5 million to 3 million lives a year and simultaneously halt global warming, reduce air and water pollution and develop secure, reliable energy sources -- nearly all with existing technology and at costs comparable with what we spend on energy today -- why wouldn't you do it?

According to a new study coauthored by Stanford researcher Mark Z. Jacobson, we could accomplish all that by converting the world to clean, renewable energy sources and forgoing fossil fuels.

"Based on our findings, there are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering. "It is a question of whether we have the societal and political will."

He and Mark Delucchi, of the University of California-Davis, have written a two-part paper in Energy Policy in which they assess the costs, technology, and material requirements of converting the planet, using a plan they developed.

The world they envision would run largely on electricity. Their plan calls for using wind, water and solar energy to generate power, with wind and solar power contributing 90 percent of the needed energy.

Geothermal and hydroelectric sources would each contribute about 4 percent in their plan (70 percent of the hydroelectric is already in place), with the remaining 2 percent from wave and tidal power.

Vehicles, ships and trains would be powered by electricity and hydrogen fuel cells. Aircraft would run on liquid hydrogen. Homes would be cooled and warmed with electric heaters -- no more natural gas or coal -- and water would be preheated by the sun.

Commercial processes would be powered by electricity and hydrogen. In all cases, the hydrogen would be produced from electricity. Thus, wind, water, and sun would power the world.

The researchers approached the conversion with the goal that by 2030, all new energy generation would come from wind, water, and solar, and by 2050, all preexisting energy production would be converted as well.

"There are no technological or economic barriers to converting the entire world to clean, renewable energy sources," said Mark Jacobson, a professor of civil and environmental engineering.

"We wanted to quantify what is necessary in order to replace all the current energy infrastructure -- for all purposes -- with a really clean and sustainable energy infrastructure within 20 to 40 years," said Jacobson.

One of the benefits of the plan is that it results in a 30 percent reduction in world energy demand since it involves converting combustion processes to electrical or hydrogen fuel cell processes. Electricity is much more efficient than combustion.

That reduction in the amount of power needed, along with the millions of lives saved by the reduction in air pollution from elimination of fossil fuels, would help keep the costs of the conversion down.

"When you actually account for all the costs to society -- including medical costs – of the current fuel structure, the costs of our plan are relatively similar to what we have today," Jacobson said.

One of the biggest hurdles with wind and solar energy is that both can be highly variable, which has raised doubts about whether either source is reliable enough to provide "base load" energy, the minimum amount of energy that must be available to customers at any given hour of the day.

Jacobson said that the variability can be overcome.

"The most important thing is to combine renewable energy sources into a bundle," he said. "If you combine them as one commodity and use hydroelectric to fill in gaps, it is a lot easier to match demand."

Wind and solar are complementary, Jacobson said, as wind often peaks at night and sunlight peaks during the day. Using hydroelectric power to fill in the gaps, as it does in our current infrastructure, allows demand to be precisely met by supply in most cases. Other renewable sources such as geothermal and tidal power can also be used to supplement the power from wind and solar sources.

"One of the most promising methods of insuring that supply matches demand is using long-distance transmission to connect widely dispersed sites," said Delucchi. Even if conditions are poor for wind or solar energy generation in one area on a given day, a few hundred miles away the winds could be blowing steadily and the sun shining.

"With a system that is 100 percent wind, water and solar, you can't use normal methods for matching supply and demand. You have to have what people call a supergrid, with long-distance transmission and really good management," he said.

Another method of meeting demand could entail building a bigger renewable-energy infrastructure to match peak hourly demand and use the off-hours excess electricity to produce hydrogen for the industrial and transportation sectors.

Using pricing to control peak demands, a tool that is used today, would also help.

Jacobson and Delucchi assessed whether their plan might run into problems with the amounts of material needed to build all the turbines, solar collectors and other devices.

They found that even materials such as platinum and the rare earth metals, the most obvious potential supply bottlenecks, are available in sufficient amounts. And recycling could effectively extend the supply.

"For solar cells there are different materials, but there are so many choices that if one becomes short, you can switch," Jacobson said. "Major materials for wind energy are concrete and steel and there is no shortage of those."

Jacobson and Delucchi calculated the number of wind turbines needed to implement their plan, as well as the number of solar plants, rooftop photovoltaic cells, geothermal, hydroelectric, tidal. and wave-energy installations.

They found that to power 100 percent of the world for all purposes from wind, water, and solar resources, the footprint needed is about 0.4 percent of the world's land (mostly solar footprint) and the spacing between installations is another 0.6 percent of the world's land (mostly wind-turbine spacing), Jacobson said.

One of the criticisms of wind power is that wind farms require large amounts of land, due to the spacing required between the windmills to prevent interference of turbulence from one turbine on another.

"Most of the land between wind turbines is available for other uses, such as pasture or farming," Jacobson said. "The actual footprint required by wind turbines to power half the world's energy is less than the area of Manhattan." If half the wind farms were located offshore, a single Manhattan would suffice.

Jacobson said that about 1 percent of the wind turbines required are already in place, and a lesser percentage for solar power.

"This really involves a large scale transformation," he said. "It would require an effort comparable to the Apollo moon project or constructing the interstate highway system."

"But it is possible, without even having to go to new technologies," Jacobson said. "We really need to just decide collectively that this is the direction we want to head as a society."

[Mark Z. Jacobson is the director of Stanford's Atmosphere/Energy Program and a senior fellow at Stanford's Woods Institute for the Environment and the Precourt Institute for Energy. This article was originally published by the Stanford University News on January 26, 2011.]

Professor Mark Z. Jacobson:
Global clean energy is within reach:



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Ted McLaughlin : The Japan Quake and Nuclear Power

Explosion at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi No 1 plant following Japan's earthquake and tsunami. Image from Reuters.
After the Japan quake:
We must rethink nuclear power

By Ted McLaughlin / The Rag Blog / March 13, 2011

By now everyone knows about the disastrous earthquake that has hit Japan. At a magnitude of 8.9 it is one of the largest earthquakes to hit any country, and it has been a catastrophe to the heavily populated nation.

As I write this the official death toll is around 700 people, but many thousands are still missing and there's little doubt that the death toll will climb much higher. My thoughts and best wishes go out to the people of Japan in their time of need, and I hope this country will offer Japan all the aid it is possible to give.

But in this post I want to concentrate on one aspect of the disaster -- nuclear power. Japan has invested heavily in nuclear power and currently receives a large portion of its electrical power from this source. But they may now be paying the price for that. At least two nuclear power plants at Fukushima have been heavily damaged and are currently in danger of a "meltdown," which could cause a large explosion that would release heavy doses of very radioactive material into their environment.

They are trying to cool the nuclear cores down by flooding them with seawater and boron, but that is a desperate measure that will take days and no one knows if the cores can be cooled in time to prevent a meltdown. The authorities have said that little radioactivity has been released so far, but they are evacuating people from within a 12-mile radius of both plants and are issuing iodine tablets to the population living in those areas (iodine is supposed to inhibit the body's intake of radioactivity).

And that is just what is happening at those two plants. Other plants were also damaged and are currently being evaluated. More may be heading for the same kind of trouble. The earthquake and resulting tsunami were bad enough for the Japanese people -- the damaged nuclear plants are just adding to their difficulties.

Here in the United States we are currently having a debate over energy. Currently the country relies heavily on fossil fuels (oil, gas, coal) but those fuels are causing problems. Much of the oil we use comes from foreign countries -- countries where the supply is always in danger (as we can see from the current problems in the Middle East).

Many on the right seem to think that this problem can be solved by just drilling more and more. But the fact is that there just aren't enough American reserves of oil (even if we tap into our protected wilderness areas) to satisfy the addiction this country has to oil. And many experts (including our own military) believe the world is reaching (or has already reached) the point of "peak oil" -- the point at which production begins to fall no matter how much drilling is done.

Coal is not a much better alternative. Although it is plentiful right now and could last for many years, it is also one of the dirtiest of the energy-producing fuels. Even with the new technologies (which industry is fighting tooth-and-nail) it continues to destroy our environment.

Using more coal will simply speed up global climate change (which is a looming environmental and economic disaster regardless of what the right-wing climate-deniers claim). Some are talking about the development of a "clean coal" technology, but this is just a myth being advanced by the coal industry. There is no such thing as clean coal, and I doubt that there ever will be.

But even if the fossil fuels weren't damaging our environment, they will run out in the future. Coal and natural gas may be more plentiful than oil, but there is not an endless supply of any fossil-based fuel. And someday they will all disappear.

The fact is that new sources of energy must be found or developed. The ideal thing is to find renewable and clean sources of energy (like wind, solar, wave, or geothermal). So far, these sources have not been developed to the point where they could completely replace fossil fuels. That is why many in America (and elsewhere) are advocating a return to nuclear power.

After the disasters at Three Mile Island and Chernobyl, nuclear energy was put on the back burner in this country. But now the idea of nuclear power is making a comeback. Many believe it could fill the gap left by renewable sources and help to wean the country off fossil fuels. And they are quick to tell us that the technology has advanced to the point where accidents like Three Mile Island and Chernobyl couldn't happen again.

I don't doubt that the technology has advanced. I'm sure it has. I'm also sure that the Japanese were using the best technology available (since they are one of the most technologically-advanced countries in the world). But that 8.9 magnitude earthquake didn't care about the technology, and the best technology in the world couldn't have prevented the damage to the Japanese nuclear plants.

This should give Americans pause. Should we go back to building nuclear power plants -- knowing the dangers they could pose? And lest we forget, we still haven't come up with a solution for disposal of nuclear waste from these plants (which is highly radioactive and will remain so for a very long time).

I have to say that I really don't know what to do about nuclear energy. I like the idea that it doesn't pollute the environment while producing energy, but I have to wonder if it's only delaying that pollution since we haven't solved the disposal problem. I would feel a lot better if we could figure out how to safely dispose of the nuclear waste (for many centuries). And the Japanese experience is showing us, at the very least, that great care must be taken about where any new nuclear power plants are located.

It is time to rethink the usefulness of nuclear power. Maybe it is a viable alternative, but we should carefully consider all the dangers before proceeding with building any new plants.

[Rag Blog contributor Ted McLaughlin also posts at jobsanger.]

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Bruce Melton : I Want a Sequestration Machine for Christmas!

Photo by Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog.
Climate intrigue and a change in prosperity:
I want a sequestration machine for Christmas

By Bruce Melton / The Rag Blog / December 23, 2010

Climate change is not just another dangerous dead-end road for humanity. There is really no doom and gloom just around the corner. The situation is not as dire as the catastrophists would have you believe. Yet, the news from climate science land has gone from bad to worse.

The impacts are happening faster with greater strength. The feedbacks appear stronger. The thresholds are proving to be nearer and threaten greater consequences. Ecosystems are rapidly deteriorating right now, or in some cases like caribou and coral reefs, they are simply collapsing.

So how can I be convinced that the solutions to the climate change challenge are things that can easily be accomplished? That the cost will at first seem burdensome, but will quickly be realized to be the intelligent investment that it is?

In the thousands of scientific papers on climate change that I have reviewed, most of the results talk about how lab tests sequestered far more carbon than imagined; about how the new techniques have been “scaled up” to mass production capacity and shown to be valid. The cost analyses show what at first would seem like ghastly expensive expenditures, but upon deeper thought, are revealed to be no different than other challenges we as society have already conquered.

Lord Nicholas Stern was former Prime Minister Tony Blair’s head of economic services in the United Kingdom. In 2006, Stern authored a definitive review of the economic impacts of climate change. His work was 700 pages of evaluation that included most of the current knowledge on climate science.

What Lord Stern found was that it would take approximately 1 percent of world gross domestic product to address climate change every year. But in 2008 Stern came forward with a revision to his report. He said that in the two years since his book was completed, new discoveries about climate change and about how we as a society were reacting would raise the cost of mitigating climate change to about 2 percent of gross domestic product.

So, one or two percent of world gross domestic product (GDP) is what it will take to avert a climate catastrophe; is that a lot of money? How much money is this exactly, compared to something that we can relate to? The Moon shot maybe


To see the value of anything, first we must understand how that value is important to our society. Preventing “dangerous climate change," or as the scientists call it “dangerous anthropogenic interference," is what the scholarly climate change literature tells us is our goal. The climate scientists say that just 2 degrees C of change (about 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit) will result in dangerous climate change.

Or at least this is what they said five or six years ago. Today the answer is more like 1.5 degrees C (2.7 degrees F) and this is additional warming above pre-industrial levels. We have already warmed 0.7 degrees C (1.3 degrees C). So just 1.3 to 2.3 degrees F of warming is what remains between dangerous anthropogenic interference and us.

Considering that most of the warming that has already occurred has happened since 1970, It appears as if we cannot help but pass this dangerous threshold. But, you may ask, what is so dangerous about a couple of degrees of warming?

Most folks think climate change is no big deal. The polls these days show that nearly one-half to two-thirds of Americans think that climate change is either not real, not going to impact them in their lifetimes or is exaggerated.

All of this while the latest mega review of climate science literature shows that 97 to 98 percent of climate scientists agree on the tenents of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change.

In the climate scientists’ world, the one where I interpret the peer reviewed literature so you don’t have to, the beginnings of dangerous climate change are here now.

Right now, primary productivity in our oceans has declined 40 percent from levels in the 1950s because of warming. Billions of trees are dead in the North American Rockies in a sixty-one million acre attack. A native pine bark beetle is responsible and this event is 10 to 20 times bigger than anything ever recorded. It is still growing and is expected to impact virtually every pine forest in North America. Only extreme cold can kill the pine beetle, cold like we have not seen in nearly two decades.

Eighty percent of complex reefs in the Caribbean Sea have collapsed because of warming between 1969 and 2008 and the worst coral bleaching year ever recorded is likely to have just occurred in 2010. Greenland’s ice melt and discharge have quadrupled in 20 years. Antarctica is discharging now as much ice as Greenland, but Antarctica, in the 2001 IPCC report, was not supposed to start losing any ice for another 100 years or more.

These things are happening now, but as of yet they do not really rate as extreme enough to be called dangerous climate change. To get the idea across, I like to use an analogy comparing the weather to climate. We have all heard time and again that we cannot compare the weather to climate. We know that the weather is what happens tomorrow, or last spring, or even for the last decade and that climate is measured in decades, generations, and even centuries of average weather.

Climate happens on such a large scale though that it is difficult to grasp, even for me. So I have developed analogies to aid my own comprehension. My current favorite analogy compares the Dust Bowl to something that climate scientists call a mega drought.

We have these mega droughts in North America once every millennia or so, or at least we have had two or three of them in the last 1,500 to 2,000 years. These things are completely natural, they last for 100 to 300 years (the Dust Bowl lasted nine to 11 years) and they have only half of the rainfall annually when compared to the Dust Bowl.


As big as the Dust Bowl was, it was a simple weather aberration. Mega droughts however, at 10 to 30 times longer and twice as dry, are classified as something that would rate as a dangerous climate change. This is the scale of things that we have to contend with if we warm the planet just another 1.3 to 2.3 degrees F.

A mega drought would obliterate a continental agricultural region. There is only so much water underground that could be used for irrigation. Once groundwater is gone, all that would remain is shifting sand; for generations or centuries.

Another dangerous climate change would be 10 feet of sea level rise in a hundred years or maybe even as little as 500 years. It has already happened on a planet as warm as Earth is today, or within about one degree C of as warm as we are today.

The event occurred 121,000 years ago, in the interglacial warm period between the last 100,000 year-long ice age and the previous 100,000 year-long ice age (there have been about 10 100,000 year-long ice ages in the last million years.)

This globally catastrophic sea level jump happened naturally because of a collapse of the West Antarctic Ice Sheet due to natural warming between ice ages. It is just this kind of collapse that the ice scientists have seen signs of starting in the last several years.

Ten feet of sea level rise would displace 700 to 800 million people. Once the West Antarctic Ice Sheet collapsed, it would likely unleash a rush of dammed up ice from the Antarctic Continent into the ocean. This ice would continue to raise sea level at rates up to 10 feet per century or more for centuries on end.

Today we are changing the CO2 concentration of our atmosphere 14,000 times faster than normal for any time in the last 55 to 65 million years. If we as a society continue ignoring climate science as we have been for the last couple of decades, we will see 3 to 5 degrees C of warming (5.4 to 9 degrees F). This means by mid-century, maybe even just another 20 years, we will cross the 1.3 to 2.3 degree F threshold to dangerous climate change.

Our future lives may never be the same, but they may never be better either. We can prevent globally crippling mega drought that would starve hundreds of millions. We can keep the West Antarctic ice sheet from collapsing, or any number of other calamities that could basically end life as we know it.

All we have to do is bring CO2 levels in the atmosphere down to 350 ppm or less. Considering that the Kyoto Protocol would have had our society reducing our emissions to somewhere slightly below 1990 levels by 2012, and that emissions levels have only continued to climb since 1990, it is no wonder that doom and gloom is closely associated with climate change.


But the technologies are out there. The research has been done, the technologies proven in the lab, and some scale models have been built that prove successful. We could even use current CO2 extraction technology, commonly used in industry, to do the job. All it takes is a will to do so, money, and manpower.

For example, Klaus Lackner, at Columbia University, has shown how a polyester-like plastic sheet can absorb CO2 and the CO2 can be rinsed out with water. They built a full scale model and the technology worked well. The cost of the model was also in the feasible range.

Lackner’s full-scale test model was about the size of a train car. Thousands of these rail car-sized sequestration machines could easily be built. We could build enough to remove half of mankind’s CO2 emissions every year. The completed machine would be about the size of the Great Wall of China.

Lackner added up how much his machine cost and made some generalizations about full-scale implementation. When the numbers are looked at in more detail, a full scale model of their sequestration machine costed out so that it would take as much money as the U.S. spent on World War II, about $5 trillion adjusted for inflation, to pay for the machine.

That’s a lot of money of course. But Lackner was careful to explain that his cost was calculated on their own “actual costs” to build the one railcar-sized machine. Reduction in costs due to scale would likely be trillions of dollars.

This would still make the ultimate cost of the machine be trillions of dollars, but we just spent 3 trillion dollars on the economic conundrum bailout stimulus mess. And remember, this is just spending by the United States. Around the world, spending on World War II as well as spending this latest economic brain donation, was significantly more than just that spent by the U.S. alone.

Now comes the good part. These technologies are literally littered across the scientific landscape. We have all heard about how impossible clean coal is. But clean coal is only impossible on Earth as we know it. If our society finds the courage to address the true risks of climate change, clean coal suddenly becomes entirely feasible.


We are at the same point in our new clean energy economy today as we were just before the Interstate Highway system was built, or just before the Manhattan project ended World War II, or before John Kennedy said that we would go to the moon in 10 years because “it was hard.”

Wind energy is taking off like a bird. From 1996, wind energy installations doubled in capacity every three years. Installed solar capacity has increased 40 percent per year since 1990. Some parts of the U.S., Europe, and Japan have already reached parity -- where solar costs the same as coal-fired power. Worldwide, solar should reach parity with coal in two to five years. In a decade or less, we will see “naked parity” where solar costs the same as coal without subsidies.

All of this clean energy will change our lives for the better. A new economic engine will take over our planet. We will no longer be slaves to fossil carbon. Our skies will clear, our health will improve, our lives will be better, and economies will prosper. It happened when we changed our base energy unit from wood to coal and again when we changed from coal to oil. It will do the same when we change from oil to wind and solar.

Our society has an innate capacity to accomplish vast challenges. The Great Wall of China and the pyramids are two low-tech accomplishments, built by hand, that can be seen from space. The Apollo project put a man on the moon. The winning of World War II saved our society from global dictatorship (or worse.)

Like the pyramids, the Great Wall, the Moon Shot, and World War II, fixing our climate will not be easy. And like those other things, it will not be cheap. It will take one to two percent of global Gross Domestic Product (GDP), which is $70 trillion today.

Remember Lackner’s sequestration machine the size of the Great Wall of China that you can see from the moon? One to two percent of GDP is a couple of trillion dollars.

So how much money is a trillion dollars? Let’s compare it to World War II and GDP. The $5 trillion that the U.S. spent on World War II was 25 times the U.S. GDP at the time, which was about $200 billion. Today’s U.S. GDP is $14 trillion. So 25 times today’s GDP would be about the same as what we spent on WW II, scaled for GDP. That’s $125 trillion dollars.


Scaled up to the actual size of the U.S. economy then (this is what GDP is), we spent $125 trillion dollars on World War II! So why is the measly $3 trillion that we spent on the economic conundrum perceived to be so much money? It’s all relative to perceived risk.

When the bailouts happened, Wall Street was being attacked by bad economic policy, not bad imperialists or Nazi’s bent on world domination. The perceived risk that the public has about climate change is just not comparable to world domination. It does not matter that the real risks of climate change are frightening beyond imagining; it is the perceived risk that counts.

Without public opinion, without the votes, without a global catastrophe threatening our very way of life, our leaders will not act. If the climate change threat were recognized for what it is, something worse than world domination, we would easily spend 25 times current GDP on prevention.

And the money is really there. Our capacity to create deficit spending 40 times greater than what we just spent on this little recession is real. It has happened before. We spent all that money during WW II because we saw the need. We understood the risks. We had the courage.

Please, in this time of thought about things bigger than ourselves, about the past and the future, and about our children, have courage. Go to meetings. Write your Senator. Tell your councilperson. Write a letter to the editor. Start a group. Attend a rally.

World War II was won by a revolution. The climate crisis is no less profound. It will need a revolution too. This new economic alternative energy revolution, this great societal challenge that we face, is not really without parallels. Repairing our deteriorating climate is a task that is within our grasp. There is no need for despair. We did not despair when we were attacked at Pearl Harbor. We rose to the challenge.

[Bruce Melton is a registered professional engineer, environmental researcher, trained outreach specialist, and environmental filmmaker. He has been translating and interpreting scholarly science publications for two decades. His main mission is filming and reporting on the impacts of climate changes happening now, unknown to the greater portion of society. Austin, Texas is his home. His writing and films are on his website.]

• See previous articles by Bruce Melton on The Rag Blog.
• Listen to Thorne Dreyer's Dec. 3, 2010 interview with Bruce Melton about climate science and global warming on Rag Radio.

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