Harvey Wasserman : The Demand for a Global Takeover at Fukushima

Fukushima Daiichi nuclear power plant's reactor building number 4 seen in aerial view on July 5, 2012. Photo by Kyodo / Reuters.

The demand for a global takeover
at Fukushima has hit critical mass

Since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the six-reactor Daichi site has plunged into lethal chaos.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / October 2, 2013

More than 48,000 global citizens have now signed a petition at NukeFree.org asking the United Nations and the world community to take charge of the stricken Fukushima nuclear plant. Another 35,000 have signed at RootsAction. An independent advisory group of scientists and engineers is also in formation.

The signatures are pouring in from all over the world. By November, they will be delivered to the United Nations.

The corporate media has blacked out meaningful coverage of the most critical threat to global health and safety in decades.

The much-hyped “nuclear renaissance” has turned into a global rout. In the face of massive grassroots opposition and the falling price of renewable energy and natural gas, operating reactors are shutting and proposed new ones are being cancelled.

This lessens the radioactive burden on the planet. But it makes the aging reactor fleet ever more dangerous. A crumbling industry with diminished resources and a disappearing workforce cannot safely caretake the decrepit, deteriorating 400-odd commercial reactors still licensed to operate worldwide.

All of which pales before the crisis at Fukushima. Since the March 11, 2011, earthquake and tsunami, the six-reactor Daichi site has plunged into lethal chaos.

For decades the atomic industry claimed vehemently that a commercial reactor could not explode. When Chernobyl blew, it blamed “inferior” Soviet technology.

But Fukushima’s designs are from General Electric (some two dozen similar reactors are licensed in the U.S.). At least four explosions have rocked the site. One might have involved nuclear fission. Three cores have melted into the ground. Massive quantities of water have been poured where the owner, Tokyo Electric (Tepco), and the Japanese government think they might be, but nobody knows for sure.

As The Free Press has reported, steam emissions indicate one or more may still be hot. Contaminated water is leaking from hastily-constructed tanks. Room for more is running out. The inevitable next earthquake could rupture them all and send untold quantities of poisons pouring into the ocean.

The worst immediate threat at Fukushima lies in the spent fuel pool at Unit Four. That reactor had been shut for routine maintenance when the earthquake and tsunami hit. The 400-ton core, with more than 1,300 fuel rods, sat in its pool 100 feet in the air.

Spent fuel rods are the most lethal items our species has ever created. A human standing within a few feet of one would die in a matter of minutes. With more than 11,000 scattered around the Daichi site, radiation levels could rise high enough to force the evacuation of all workers and immobilize much vital electronic equipment.

Spent fuel rods must be kept cool at all times. If exposed to air, their zirconium alloy cladding will ignite, the rods will burn, and huge quantities of radiation will be emitted. Should the rods touch each other, or should they crumble into a big enough pile, an explosion is possible. By some estimates there’s enough radioactivity embodied in the rods to create a fallout cloud 15,000 times greater than the one from the Hiroshima bombing.

The rods perched in the Unit 4 pool are in an extremely dangerous position. The building is tipping and sinking into the sodden ground. The fuel pool itself may have deteriorated. The rods are embrittled and prone to crumbling. Just 50 meters from the base is a common spent fuel pool containing some 6,000 fuel rods that could be seriously compromised should it lose coolant. Overall there are some 11,000 spent rods scattered around the Fukushima Daichi site.

As dangerous as the process might be, the rods in the Unit Four fuel pool must come down in an orderly fashion. Another earthquake could easily cause the building to crumble and collapse. Should those rods crash to the ground and be left uncooled, the consequences would be catastrophic.

Tepco has said it will begin trying to remove the rods from that pool in November. The petitions circulating through NukeFree.org and MoveOn.org, as well as at Roots Action and Avaaz.org, ask that the United Nations take over. They ask the world scientific and engineering communities to step in. The Roots Action petition also asks that $8.3 billion slated in loan guarantees for a new U.S. nuke be shifted instead to dealing with the Fukushima site.

It’s a call with mixed blessings. The UN’s International Atomic Energy Agency is notoriously pro-nuclear, charged with promoting atomic power as well as regulating it. Critics have found the IAEA to be secretive and unresponsive.

But Tepco is a private utility with limited resources. The Japanese government has an obvious stake in downplaying Fukushima’s dangers. These were the two entities that approved and built these reactors.

While the IAEA is imperfect, its resources are more substantial and its stake at Fukushima somewhat less direct. An ad hoc global network of scientists and engineers would be intellectually ideal, but would lack the resources for direct intervention.

Ultimately the petitions call for a combination of the two.

It’s also hoped the petitions will arouse the global media. The moving of the fuel rods from Unit Four must be televised. We need to see what’s happening as it happens. Only this kind of coverage can allow global experts to analyze and advise as needed.

Let’s all hope that this operation proves successful, that the site is neutralized and the massive leaks of radioactive water and gasses be somehow stopped.

As former Ambassador Mitsuhei Murata has put it: full-scale releases from Fukushima “would destroy the world environment and our civilization. This is not rocket science, nor does it connect to the pugilistic debate over nuclear power plants. This is an issue of human survival.”

[Harvey Wasserman is senior editor of the Columbus Free Press and The Free Press. He edits NukeFree.org, where all factual material in this article can be linked. He hosts the Solartopia Green Power & Wellness radio show at the Progressive Radio Network, and is author of Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Fukushima Continues to Spew its Darkness

House in Fukushima. Image from ABC News.

Still on the brink:
Fukushima continues to spew its darkness

A pool containing many tons of highly radioactive used fuel is suspended 100 feet in the air... Should an earthquake or other trauma knock the pool to the ground, there’s a high likelihood the fuel rods could catch fire.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 25, 2013

Radiation leaks, steam releases, disease and death continue to spew from Fukushima and a disaster which is far from over. Its most profound threat to the global ecology -- a spent fuel fire -- is still very much with us.

The latest steam leak has raised fears around the planet. A worst-case scenario of an on-going out-of-control fission reaction was dismissed by the owners, Tokyo Electric, because they didn’t find xenon in the plume. The company says the steam likely came from rain water being vaporized by residual heat in one of  the plant’s stricken reactors.

But independent experts tend to disbelieve anything Tepco says, for good reason. Reactor Units One, Two and Three have exploded at Fukushima despite decades of official assurances that commercial atomic power plants could not explode at all. The company has been unable to clear out enough radioactive debris to allow it to put a cover over the site that might contain further airborne emissions.

Tepco has also been forced to admit that it has been leaking radioactive water into the ocean ever since the disaster began on March 11, 2011. In one instance it admitted to a 90-fold increase of Cesium in a nearby test well over a period of just three days.

Earlier this year a rat ate through electrical cables, shorting out a critical cooling system. When Tepco workers were dispatched to install metal guards to protect the cabling, they managed to short out the system yet again.

Early this month Fukushima’s former chief operator, Masao Yoshida, died of esophogeal cancer at the age of 58. Masao became a hero during the worst of the disaster by standing firm at his on-site command post as multiple explosions rocked the reactor complex. Tepco claimed his ensuing cancer and death were “unlikely” to have been caused by Fukushima’s radiation.

The impact of work in and near the reactors has become a rising concern. Critics have warned that there are not enough skilled technicians willing to sacrifice themselves at the plant. Tepco has worsened the situation by applying to open a number of its shut reactors elsewhere in Japan, straining its already depleted skilled workforce even further.

Meanwhile, a staggering 40 percent rise in thyroid irregularities among young children in the area has caused a deepening concern about widespread health impacts from Fukushima’s fallout within the general public. Because these numbers have come in just two years after the disaster, the percentage of affected children is expected to continue to rise.

And the worst fear of all remains unabated. At Unit Four, which apparently did not actually explode, the building’s structural integrity has been seriously undermined. Debate continues to rage over exactly how this happened.

But there’s no doubt that a pool containing many tons of highly radioactive used fuel is suspended 100 feet in the air, with little left to support the structure. Should an earthquake or other trauma knock the pool to the ground, there’s a high likelihood the fuel rods could catch fire.

In such an event, the radioactive emissions could be catastrophic. Intensely lethal emissions could spew for a very long time, eventually circling the globe many times, wrecking untold havoc.

The Japanese have removed two apparently unused rods from the fuel pool so far. But intense international pressure to clear out the rest of them has thus far been unsuccessful.

So while a depleted, discredited, and disorganized nuclear utility moves to restart its other reactors, its stricken units at Fukushima continue to hold the rest of us at the brink of apocalyptic terror.

This article, first published at www.progressivemagazine.com, was cross-posted to The Rag Blog.

[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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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 : DOE and the Southern Company's Nuclear Sweetheart Deal

Two new nuclear reactors are being constructed at Plant Vogtle near Augusta. Image from EcoWatch.
The Southern Company's
nuclear sweetheart deal

Why should nuke guarantees cost less than home or student loans?

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / July 3, 3012

The Department of Energy wants to give the Southern Company a nuclear power loan guarantee at better interest rates than you can get on a student loan. And unlike a home mortgage, there may be no down payment.

Why?

The terms DOE is offering the builders of the Vogtle atomic reactors have only become partially public through a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by the Southern Alliance for Clean Energy.

We still may not know all the details.

SACE has challenged the $8.33 billion loan guarantee package announced by President Obama in 2010.

The documents show the DOE has intended to charge the Southern a credit subsidy fee of one to 1.5%, far below the rates you would be required to pay for buying a house or financing an education.

On a package 15 times bigger than what the federal government gave the failed solar company Solyndra, Southern would be required to pay somewhere between $17 million and $52 million. Advocates argue the fee is so low that it fails to adequately take into account the financial risks of the project. Numerous financial experts have estimated the likely fail rate for new nuclear construction to be at 50% or greater.

Furthermore, since a primary lender would be the Federal Financing Bank, the taxpayer is directly on the hook. Guaranteed borrowings are not supposed to exceed 70% of the project's projected costs, but it's unclear what those costs will actually turn out to be, as the public has been given no firm price tag on the project.

There is apparently no cash down payment being required of Southern as it seems the loan is designed to be secured with the value of the reactors themselves, whatever that turns out to be. In the unlikely event they are finished, liability from any catastrophe will revert to the public once a small private fund is exhausted.

Southern wanted the terms of the DOE offer kept secret, and we still don't know everything about it. But in March, a federal circuit court judge ordered that the public had a right to know at least some of the details.

Apparently no final documents have actually been signed between Southern and the DOE. The Office of Management & Budget has reportedly balked at offering the nuke builder such generous terms. Southern has reportedly balked at paying even a tiny credit fee.

Construction at the Vogtle site has already brought on delays focused on the use of sub-standard concrete and rebar steel. The projected price tag -- whatever it may be -- has risen as much as $900 million in less than a year.

Southern and its Vogtle partners are in dispute with Westinghouse and the Shaw Company, two of the reactors' primary contractors. Georgia ratepayers have already been stuck with $1.4 billion in advance payments being charged to their electric bills. Far more overruns are on their way.

The Vogtle project is running somewhat parallel with two reactors being built at V.C. Summer in South Carolina, where $1.4 billion was already spent by the end of 2011. Delays are mounting and cost overruns are also apparently in the hundreds of millions.

Southern and Summer's builders both claim they can finance these projects without federal guarantees. But exactly how they would do that remains unclear.

Two older reactors now licensed at the Vogtle site were originally promised to cost $150 million each, but came in at $8.9 billion for the pair. The project's environmental permits are being challenged in court over claims the Nuclear Regulatory Commission failed to account for safety lessons from the Fukushima disaster.

The terms of the guarantees are now apparently being scrutinized by the Office of Management & Budget, which reports to a White House that may be gun-shy over new construction guarantees due to bad publicity from the Solyndra fiasco.

Numerous petitions are circulating in opposition to this package.

The Nuclear Information & Resource Service has already facilitated more than 10,500 e-mails sent directly to DOE Secretary Chu.

You might ask: why should the builders of nuclear power reactors get better terms than students struggling to pay for college or working families trying to buy a home?

At least the home buyers can get private liability insurance, which the nuke builders can't.

If mounting grassroots opposition can stop this package, it's possible no new reactors will ever be built in the U.S.

So send the OMB and DOE a copy of your mortgage or student loan statement.

Demand that before they finance any more nukes, they drop your own payment to 1%, just like they're offering the reactor pushers. Also demand the right to buy a home without a down payment.

See how far you get, and then make sure Vogtle goes no farther.

[Harvey Wasserman's Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth is at www.solartopia.org. He edits the www.nukefree.org website. 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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Harvey Wasserman : We May Yet Lose Tokyo

Cleanup at Fukushima. U.S. experts said they were not getting accurate details of the scope of the Fukushima disaster after reactors melted down last year. Photo from AP / Daily Mail.
(Not to mention Alaska and Georgia)
We may yet lose Tokyo

With bitter debate raging over the killing power of Fukushima's emissions, the certification of a new U.S. reactor design may someday be remembered as a bizarre epitaph for the 20th century's most expensive failed technology.

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / February 11, 2012

As the Nuclear Regulatory Commission approves a construction/operating license for two new reactors in Georgia, alarming reports from Japan indicate the Fukushima catastrophe is far from over.

Thousands of tons of intensely radioactive spent fuel are still in serious jeopardy. Radioactive trash and water are spewing into the environment. And nuclear engineer Arnie Gundersen reports that during the string of disasters following March 11, 2011's earthquake and tsunami, Fukushima 1's containment cap may actually have lifted off its base, releasing dangerously radioactive gasses and opening a gap for an ensuing hydrogen explosion.

There are some two dozen of these Mark I-style containments currently in place in the U.S.

Newly released secret email from the NRC also shows its commissioners were in the dark about much of what was happening during the early hours of the Fukushima disaster. They worried that Tokyo might have to be evacuated, and that airborne radiation spewing across the Pacific could seriously contaminate Alaska.

Reactor pushers have welcomed the NRC's approval of the new Westinghouse AP-1000 design for Georgia's Vogtle. Two reactors operate there now, and the two newly approved ones are being funded with $8.3 billion in federally guaranteed loans and state-based rate hikes levied in advance of the reactors' being completed.

NRC Chair Gregory Jazcko made the sole no vote on the Vogtle license, warning that the proposed time frame would not allow lessons from Fukushima to be incorporated into the reactors' design.

The four Commissioners voting to approve have attacked Jaszco in front of Congress for his "management style," but this vote indicates the problem is certainly more rooted in attitudes toward reactor safety.

The approval is the first for a new construction project since 1978. The debate leading up to it stretched out for years. Among other things, the Commission raised questions about whether the AP1000 can withstand earthquakes and other natural disasters. Even now the final plans are not entirely complete.

Only two other U.S. reactors -- in neighboring South Carolina- -- are even in the pre-construction phase. As in Georgia, South Carolina consumers are being forced to pay for the reactors as they are being built. Should they not be completed, or suffer disaster once they are, the state's ratepayers will be on the hook.

The industry is heralding the Vogtle approval as a major boon to the "Nuclear Renaissance." But it comes alongside the announcement that all 17 reactors owned by the Tokyo Electric Company are shut, as are all but two of Japan's 50-plus nukes.

Germany has decided to shut all its nukes by 2022. New reactor financing in Great Britain is under legal attack, as it is in Florida. India has announced that in 2011 it led the world in new green energy projects. China has yet to make its future nuclear commitments clear in the wake of the Fukushima disaster. And no American utility is readily available to follow in Vogtle's path, with operating reactors in Vermont and New York's Indian Point under fierce governmental attack.

Florida's Crystal River is beset by huge bills for faulty repair work, and may be headed for permanent shutdown. Both currently licensed reactors at California's San Onofre are closed following radioactive leaks, and a disturbing pattern of tube holes in newly installed steam generators has surfaced at a number of reactors across the U.S.

Tama University Professor Hiroshi Tasaka warned that Fukushima is "far from over." Photo from The Japan Times.
But the biggest shock waves this week were caused by Tama University Professor Hiroshi Tasaka, a key advisor to Prime Minister Naoto Kan during the Fukushima disaster.

Warning that Fukushima is "far from over," Tasaka said official assurances of the complex's alleged safety were based on "groundless optimism." Tasaka cited more than 1,500 fuel rods dangerously exposed to the open atmosphere at Unit Four alone. The waste problem has gone nationwide, he said in a newly published book, as "the storage capacities of the spent fuel pools at the nation's nuclear power plants are reaching their limits,"

Tasaka's statements came as a new temperature spike unexpectedly struck Fukushina Unit Two. For reasons not yet clear, heat releases in excess of 158 degrees Fahrenheit spewed from the core, prompting Tokyo Electric to pump in more water and boric acid meant to damp down an apparently on-going chain reaction. Prof. Tasaka and others warn that this in turn will contribute to spreading still more radiation into the water table and oceans.

With bitter debate raging in Japan, the US., and elsewhere over the killing power of Fukushima's emissions, the certification of a new U.S. reactor design may someday be remembered as a bizarre epitaph for the 20th century's most expensive failed technology.

Without state ratepayers and federal taxpayers being forced to foot the bill, new reactor construction in the U.S. is going nowhere.

And without a final resolution to the ongoing horrors at Fukushima, the entire planet, from Tokyo to Alaska to Georgia and beyond, remains at serious radioactive risk.

[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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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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David MacBryde : In Germany, Power (Grid) to the People!

The German daily Die Tageszeitung humorously splashed on their front page a decades old archive photo of environmental pioneers. The headline: "This is what winners look like."
Power (grid) to the people!
Germany's 'great transformation'

By David MacBryde / The Rag Blog / August 3, 2011

BERLIN -- In Germany the decision has just been made to shut down ALL nuclear power plants by 2022. This is broadly seen here as a major step in the "great transformation" away from economic activity that endangers and depletes future opportunities and towards activities that achieve sustainable energy and value creation.

During the debate in the German Parliament about energy, Renate Kunast (of the German Green Party) began her presentation by thanking a number of persons by name for their pioneer work decades ago.

Before writing about developments in Germany, I too want to express thanks – for decades of hard work -- to Rag Blog contributor Ray Reece, author of The Sun Betrayed, Gail Vittori and Pliny Fisk at the Center for Maximum Potential, Scott Pittman, founder of the Permaculture Institute, recently interviewed by Thorne Dreyer on Rag Radio, and of course many, many others.

The decision just made in Germany will have an effect on physics, economic activity, politics, philosophy, and more.

The main breakthrough here that I want to focus on – and this gets to my headline of "Power to the People" -- is what is called the "Einspeisungsgesetzgebung.” That is a (typically German) very long word which refers to the legislative achievement by Jurgen Trittin (of the German Greens) when he was Minister for the Environment and got -- in coalition with the SPD (the Social Democratic Party) -- majority approval for an energy policy that enables decentrally-produced energy to be fed into the (at the time not-yet-so-smart) grid.

There are several points here:

1. Physical: The legislation enables the transformation of power lines away from one-way transmission and into being a genuine interactive network.
2. Economic: This opens opportunities for decentralized power production. And it is a significant step in the very large scale transformation from using up depletable energy to using sustainable, renewable, energy.
3. The politics of power and power politics: In Germany four energy corporations effectively had (note the past tense) oligopolistic power, both in controlling energy and politically controlling energy policy.
4. Philosophy: (I will focus on this in this article) "Ontology" is a technical philosophical term for the study of what "is" is -- thus raising the question, "What is reality?"

It can be helpful to distinguish between an "impoverished ontology" that only handles a single kind of reality and an "enriched ontology" that can handle a variety of kinds of reality.

In this context we can more specifically ask, What "is" economic growth?

And we can enrich our understanding if we ask, "What kinds of economic growth are helpful, what kinds are harmful? And for whom? And who gets to participate in decisions about that?

The recent decisions made in Germany are part of what here is called the "great transformation" away from "growth" that actually depletes future opportunities to growth that enhances future opportunities.

Mrs. Elanor Ostrom, recent recipient of the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economics, was honored for her work looking at how economic decisions are made. She received a great ovation at her recent talk at the Technical University in Berlin.

Nobel laureate Elinor Ostrom. Photo by Ric Cradick / Indiana Public Media.
Elanor Ostrom is a rather jovial economist. Her main point is that even if the economy is very dismal, it does not have to be so.

Her scientific work focuses less on developing abstract mathematical models of the economy than it does on actually looking at how and by whom decisions are made.

Her main breakthrough -- for which she received the Nobel Prize -- was to point out that what had, in the history of economics, been called "the tragedy of the commons" -- did not have to be tragic.

You can get Ostrom's insight by first imagining a number of people fishing in a river or ocean. If each fisher maximized his or her catch it might well be possible to over-fish and maybe even exterminate the species. That might destroy future opportunities for future generations.

Ostrom does NOT argue that disasters cannot happen. There are plenty of historical examples of unsustainable overuse. She does argue that such disasters are not always "necessary" or absolutely unavoidable. In her research she finds plenty of examples where a number of different people do succeed in getting their acts together for sustainable fishing.

The classical definition of "tragedy" in old Greek plays involves the audience seeing a disaster necessarily, unavoidably, coming. This is contrasted to "comedy,” which refers to a play with a happy, successful, resolution.

Ostrom herself, perhaps wisely, does not in every case presume that a happy ending can be achieved -- she prefers the term "Drama of the Commons.” Situations in which a number of different people do achieve a common solution can involve potential for disaster and considerable drama.

At the present time in the USA there certainly seems to be considerable drama about decision-making.

In Germany decisions on energy policy certainly have involved lots of drama. But the result is a "comedy" in the classical sense of achieving a positive solution. Though it was initiated by the German Greens, in coalition with the SPD (Social Democratic Party), the decision was also supported by a majority of the conservative party (CDU, Christian Democratic Party).

The drama here was intense, especially because of the huge crisis in the capital markets.

There had been lots of hard work over decades (see again the above picture of pioneers) with considerable success, including the breakthrough "Einspeisungsgesetzgebung" for decentralized energy production. Then the man-made capital market crisis hit.

I was very worried, as were many others here, that the reaction to the capital market crisis would derail developments.

Around the September 2008 emergency actions -- such as Paulson's panicky punt with his three-page policy paper -- there were emergency efforts around the world, from Berlin to Brazil and Beijing.

The question was would we get an I V U W or L, or get to an E. (These are shapes of economic "growth" curves. I will write an update to my earlier Rag Blog post on this subject.)

Briefly here: In the capital market crisis Germany did take actions and did not collapse straight down (an "I") and is now booming, relatively speaking -- not improving as rapidly as Latin America or some countries in Africa and Asia, but rather well.

There was considerable worry that Germany might get stuck in an "L" -- a downturn and a long lack of "recovery.”

Now it does look like Germany, especially with the decisions on energy policy, is back on the track to its "great transition" -- to get to an "E."

The core reality of the success here is that a very broad majority of the people and their parliamentarians now see clearly that the large transformation away from environmental depletion and towards environmental viability is crucial to reducing harmful kinds of economic "growth" and to achieving helpful kinds of economic growth.

And it is now broadly clear here, including within the large German Protestant and Catholic churches, that "social fairness" is not hot air but a significant moral compass and, particularly at this time, a prerequisite for domestic economic development. A range of modest but real wage increases have already been achieved and are helping to stabilize and improve domestic demand.

We will see whether these particular decisions succeed in avoiding tragedy and achieving some comedy. In any case it is dramatic. I will try to write more about what I see happening here.

[Rag Blog Berlin correspondent David MacBryde worked with Austin's Sixties underground newspaper, The Rag. See more articles by David MacBryde on The Rag Blog.]

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Harvey Wasserman : Nukes 'Don't Need No Stinking Fire Protection'

Indian Point nuclear power plant on the Hudson River in New York.

Nukes to America:
'We don't need no stinking fire protection'

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / June 13, 2011

At the end of John Huston's 1948 classic Treasure of Sierra Madre, armed bandits tell Humphrey Bogart they are federal agents.

Bogie demands to see their badges.

"Badges?" says their leader. "We ain't got no badges. We don't need any badges. I don't have to show you no stinking badges."

Now nuclear fleet operator Entergy has, in effect, told New York the same thing.

Fire protection? We ain't got no fire protection. We don't need any fire protection. We don't have to show you no stinking fire protection.

Investigations by the New York News and others show Indian Point's fire detection and suppression systems to be woefully inadequate. "Indian Point's ongoing failure to comply with federal fire safety requirements is both reckless and unacceptable," says Eric Schneiderman, New York's Attorney General.

The ill will comes as Japan confirms that three reactors at Fukushima did melt, and that radiation emissions have been far higher than originally believed.

Japan has raised "acceptable" doses for school children and workers. Radiation levels within Unit One have risen, along with a call for elderly citizens to fill dangerous slots at the reactor.

In the U.S., California's Alliance for Nuclear Responsibility has won a decision by the NRC's Atomic Safety and Licensing Board, postponing by 52 months a decision on relicensing reactors at Diablo Canyon.

The rare triumph has not applied to Indian Point, which the NRC has allowed to operate with a wide range of fire protection exemptions.

In 2006 it told Entergy to justify why it should keep operating without meeting fire protection standards.

Three years later Entergy submitted a plan which is still pending. Meanwhile Entergy seeks a 20-year extension of operating licenses due to expire in 2013 and 2015.

Schneiderman says "for years the NRC has looked the other way as Indian Point ignores the most basic safety stands... With nearly 20 million people living and working within 50 miles... that's a risk we simply cannot afford."

Fred Dacimo, vice president of operations at Indian Point, says much of the facility is open space, made of concrete and steel that can't burn, or is near zones with fire suppression equipment.

But "it's hard to explain that to John Q. Public," Dacimo complains.

Or: We don't have to show you no stinking fire protection.

"The Nuclear Regulatory Commission has been unable to take ANY meaningful enforcement action against this industry on repeated violations of fire protection law," says Paul Gunter of Beyond Nuclear. "They tried. They can't -- or WON'T -- do it."

After six years of staff meetings with industry violators, the NRC in 1998 issued 17 fire protection orders for 24 reactors. Overall, says Gunger, 89 of America's 104 licensed reactors have Thermo-Lag, a "fire protection" material that's flammable and in tests has failed to protect electrical circuits vital to shutting down and cooling the reactors in the event of serious fire, as claimed.

But the nuclear industry simply "thumbed their nose at the agency, and submitted unauthorized and unanalyzed programs that in fact allow these critical electrical circuits to burn up." For many reactors the plan in case of fire, says Gunter, is now to "send some guy running through the plant to manually operate shutdown equipment that the NRC had ordered to protect circuit integrity and to assure control room operation."

Since the workers will likely encounter smoke, fire, or intense radiation, he adds, the plan is "potentially a suicide mission."

Rather than meet fire code, the industry staged "a mass civil disobedience." The NRC, says Gunter, did a "complete retreat" and gave industry "enforcement discretion... There has been no meaningful regulatory control of critical fire protection issues." Things are "as bad as they were in 1992."

So U.S. reactors are now riddled at thousands of key junctures with "fire protection" materials that burn while leaving a dangerous char that hampers fire fighters. Since federal law restricts their liability, reactor owners would pay a bare fraction of the damages from such a fire's catastrophic fallout. A new NRC inspection has added possible earthquake dangers to the mix.

To prolong the misery, reactor owners want $36 billion in federal loan guarantees, now being opposed by a major grassroots movement you can help. Treasure of Sierra Madre ends with Bogie murdered by those fake "federales" who never did show him their "stinking badges."

America's toothless regulators have given reactor owners no reason to shore up their "stinking fire protection."

So if an American Fukushima bankrupts our nation and destroys your family, reactor owners like Entergy could ride off as scot-free as those badgeless bandidos that killed Bogie.

[Harvey Wasserman edits the NukeFree.org website. His most recent book is Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. 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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Harvey Wasserman : After Fukushima: A Nuclear Industry Meltdown?

A home in Glen Rose, Texas, with the Comanche Peak nuclear power plant hovering behind. Photo from the Fort Worth Star-Telegram.
After the Fukushima nightmare:
Will the nuclear power industry melt down?

By Harvey Wasserman / The Rag Blog / May 2, 2011

"There's never been a death because of radiation... in a civilian nuclear power plant... In Texas, if there's any kind of a serious earthquake or natural disaster, I want to be in the control room at Comanche Peak [Nuclear Power Plant] because that is the absolute safest place to be." -- Texas Congressman Joe Barton, April 6, 2011

In the wake of the apocalyptic nightmare at Fukushima, the multi-trillion-dollar global nuclear power industry is looking over the abyss at a long-overdue extinction.

But the issue is far from decided. Japan's horrifying catastrophe has sent the industry's spin machine into overdrive. We've been shown the script of what reactor-backers -- hell-bent on minimizing the dangers of this unprecedented disaster -- are willing to say and do to save themselves.

It is not a pretty picture. It focuses on the assertion that there are safe doses of radiation, and that atomic energy has harmed few, if any. Three Mile Island "hurt no one." There were few casualties at Chernobyl. And Fukushima's long-term damage will be minimal.

Atomic apologists argue that only nuclear power can fill our long-term "base load," that renewables are of no real consequence, and our choice is between more nukes and more coal.

Yet the nuclear industry faces significant hurdles in cost and construction lead time, two inescapable factors that are on the brink of killing atomic electricity-generation.

The end is not guaranteed. New reactor construction cannot proceed in the United States without huge federal handouts. There are no private sources willing to fund additional U.S. projects. Wall Street has only been keen on atomic energy when subsidies and ironclad guarantees have been available.

No reactor ordered in this country since 1974 has been completed. In that year, Richard Nixon promised 1,000 atomic reactors licensed to operate by the year 2000. Today there are 104.

There are many reasons those 896 reactors went missing. Number one is the fact that the No Nukes movement stopped the industry from gouging from the government the trillion or more dollars it would have taken to build that fleet.

Local and national public opposition slowed and canceled many projects and created a political atmosphere in which it is impossible for the industry to do what was done in France. There the industry established a radioactive form of national socialism. It is amusing to watch American "free-market advocates" go rhapsodic about the French nuclear industry, when in fact it is owned, insured, operated, monitored, and regulated by the government.

Here the government doesn't own the reactors, but it does own their liabilities. When atomic power was introduced, utilities refused to invest unless Congress would insulate them from the damage caused by an accident. So the Price-Anderson Act of 1957 required reactor owners to establish a pay-out pool of $540 million: the industry's liability for an accident whose potential was estimated to be capable of destroying a land mass the size of Pennsylvania.

The protection has been periodically renewed by Congress. Today the pool has grown to $12.6 billion. As Fukushima has demonstrated, that's a fraction of the potential damage from a disaster at one or more American reactors. Preliminary estimates of the cost for radioactive cleanup at Fukushima mean little, in part because they're intertwined with destruction from quake and tsunami.

And the accident is far from over. Radioactive emissions seem to be worsening, and five weeks after the earthquake the level of radioactive iodine 131 was 6,500 times the legal limit in the Pacific waters near the plant. Should such fallout occur from a U.S. reactor, beyond the $12.6 billion pool, liability would rest with the victims and the taxpayers.

Without government cash to build reactors that would produce electricity once billed as "too cheap to meter," the industry has stalled. In recent months, even before Fukushima, local voters have begun to force the shutdown of operating reactors.

In Vermont, Governor Peter Shumlin was elected on a pledge to shut the Yankee reactor. A deal cut by its owner, Entergy, and the state legislature requires official approval for operations beyond March 2012. In New York, newly elected Governor Andrew Cuomo is focused on shutting down Indian Point, 35 miles north of Manhattan.

But as fans of monster movies know, there comes a moment when the beast has been slain, all are celebrating... and then... BAM! It comes back to life.

That resurrection has come to be known as the "nuclear renaissance," which again rests on federal handouts. The Bush administration provided $18.5 billion in loan guarantees to underwrite the beginning of a new generation of reactors. In 2007, with former Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM), the "senator from nuclear power," the industry attempted to get $50 billion in additional loan guarantees.

But a grassroots movement arose with help from a NukeFree.org effort, led by singers Bonnie Raitt, Jackson Browne, and Graham Nash. With a website, a YouTube video, a petition drive that gathered 120,000 signatures, and a lobby day in October 2007, Domenici's $50 billion proposal was defeated.

In 2008, 2009, 2010 and thus far in 2011, similar efforts by the industry to grab federal money have been denied, which is remarkable because, as reported by an investigative team at American University, proponents of reactors have spent some $645 million in the last decade lobbying Congress for more subsidies. For an underfunded grassroots movement to beat a campaign that spent on average $65 million a year (excluding what was spent on media) is miraculous.

Two major factors have contributed.

One is the soaring cost of the reactors. Three years ago, cost projections for a new reactor were as low as $2 billion to $3 billion. Today, with barely a shovel having been turned, they are in the range of $10 billion to $11 billion, and moving relentlessly and rapidly higher. Design and safety considerations coming out of Fukushima are sure to send that figure up even more. A Texas project that was to be bankrolled by the Japanese almost certainly won't happen now.

The scientific staff at the Nuclear Regulatory Agency -- a captive regulatory agency whose budget is provided by the industry -- has raised concerns about new designs undergoing constant and often confusing changes proposed by the utilities building the plants, which also increases costs.

The other major factor that helped defeat the loan guarantees is the plunging cost of renewables. When the No Nukes movement began, reactor opponents were forced to argue that "sometime in the future" such green technologies as wind, solar, tidal, geothermal, ocean thermal, and biofuels would be cost competitive.

That time has come. The solartopian vision of a green-powered Earth has, in the last few years, become economically viable within a free-market model. With photovoltaic cells leading the way, and wind power following close behind, the projected price for green-generated electricity has fallen into the range of nuclear power and has drawn closer to coal.

A constant stream of technological breakthroughs in renewables and energy efficiency shows every sign of continuing to accelerate past the tipping point, where what has until now been known as "alternative" technology takes over the mainstream.

With that has come a green industry with political clout of its own, in both lobbying power and job creation. For every month that passes without new reactors coming on line, the renewable-energy lobby gains an increasing ability to flex its muscles in Congress and the marketplace.

Will these factors be sufficient to prevent a renaissance capable of reviving the nuclear industry?

The nuclear renaissance got its most recent big break in 2010, when Barack Obama put up $8.33 billion in loan guarantees for two reactors in Georgia -- the first money from the $18.5 billion set aside by Bush to actually go to a reactor project. (Another plant is in the works in South Carolina.)

Serious legal and technical issues have been raised about the loan guarantees. That did not stop Obama from staging a news event to announce the first new reactor projects to break ground in decades. State regulators are forcing ratepayers to fund construction. If the reactors never generate a kilowatt of electricity, the public will still foot the bill.


Waste not

The public always foots the bill. After half a century and more than $10 billion, the Yucca Mountain Nuclear Waste Repository in Nevada has failed, for technical and political reasons. Consequently, more than 60,000 tons of high-level radioactive waste is stored at reactor sites across the U.S. None of the world's reactor operators have a safe solution for storage of the most lethal substance ever created by human beings. Almost all of it sits onsite, alongside more than 430 reactors worldwide.

But Fukushima has belied the industry line that in the absence of permanent sites waste can be safely stored onsite. Onsite storage of high-level waste in spent-fuel pools at each of six stricken Fukushima reactors, plus a seventh common pool, has created a fiery nightmare.

Spent rods were exposed to air, allowing zirconium alloy cladding to ignite, releasing huge quantities of radiation while endangering the complex cooling systems on which the entire facility depends.

When the quake destroyed critical pump and piping networks, water from the tsunami created short circuits and ruined electrical systems.

Hydrogen explosions at two or more of the reactors may have compromised containment domes, while a crack in at least one reactor pressure vessel indicates a dangerous level of damage to the structures meant to keep the cores intact.

Meanwhile, some of the spent fuel rods sit five stories in the air. They were put there largely to make it easier to move used rods out of the core and directly into the elevated pools. But given the damage done by the quake, tsunami and mechanical failures inside the plants, getting cooling water to them has proven extremely difficult. Some of the rods might have fallen into melting reactor cores. The disaster defies description and won't be fully understood for decades.

Yet the industry continues to blame its waste problem on opponents they claim have prevented a viable disposal site from being established, not only in the U.S., but in every country where reactors operate.

Fukushima has also raised the specter of an airborne stream of radiation killing people all over the world. This includes the United States, where fallout was detected on the West Coast within days of the disaster in Japan, followed by reports of iodine 131 in milk and water from Maine to Florida. Cesium has been found on vegetables in Vermont, though it's unclear whether it came from Fukushima or the nearby Yankee reactor, a Fukushima clone that opponents in Vermont are desperately trying to shut.

On April 12, the Japanese government reclassified the Fukushima crisis to Level 7, in a general category with the 1986 Chernobyl disaster, while reassuring the public that most of the airborne radiation has been blown "out to sea."

There was no sea at Chernobyl, where the heaviest radioactive contamination quickly settled on areas in Ukraine, Belarus, and Russia. The public debate continues regarding the number of Chernobyl fatalities. Last year, three Russian scientists published a book based on a broad literature survey. They reported that by the early years of this century, 985,000 Chernobyl downwinders died as a result of the accident -- a number far higher than any previous estimates.


The peaceful atom

Commentator and author Ann Coulter might tell a national TV audience that radiation can actually be good for you, and that small doses can actually improve your health and that of your children. But scientists such as Dr. Karl Z. Morgan and Dr. John Gofman, highly regarded pioneers in the study of radiation health physics, long ago established that there is no identifiable safe dose of radiation. That there is no established threshold below which exposure to x-rays, gamma rays, and alpha or beta emissions is "safe" has been accepted in the radiation health physics field since its inception.

In an effort to deny this reality, the industry and its apologists have discounted health impacts from of the Fukushima fallout in the United States. Typical was Matthew Herper in a Forbes blog, who assured readers that there would be minimal health danger from Fukushima "even if things go horribly wrong." The line that no dangerous doses of radiation have reached the U.S. has become an article of faith among major media from CNN to NPR.

Yet difficult to ignore is the presence of four California reactors that sit near major earthquake faults, in tsunami zones. The two reactors on the beach at San Onofre are far closer to San Diego and Los Angeles than Fukushima is to Tokyo. Two more at Diablo Canyon, near San Luis Obispo, are within a mile of a newly discovered fault line, and considerably less than that from the shore. Had the Fukushima quake hit either of those sites, southern and central California would be in evacuation mode, and our nation would be blanketed in lethal fallout.

With reactors like Indian Point and San Onofre hauntingly close to major population centers, with some two dozen U.S. plants identical in design to Fukushima, and with still more on or near earthquake faults, industry backers are working to convince the public that however dangerous their nukes might be, coal is worse. Global warming, they say, favors nuclear because it's "carbon free."

Both technologies are doomed by cost, supply, and their impact on the environment and human health.

Our survival ultimately depends on burying fossil fuels -- and more immediately, the "Peaceful Atom" that has given us Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, Fukushima, and other accidents that will inevitably follow.

Thus far, Barack Obama has been the industry's best ally. Early into the Fukushima accident -- long before it was clear what would happen -- he assured the public that there was nothing to worry about here, and that he would continue to push for more reactors. The administration also has failed to establish a national monitoring network that could inform the public about where the radiation is and what individuals might do to protect themselves and their families.

Obama's non-response may date back to his early days as a state senator, when he allied himself with the Illinois-based Exelon, America's biggest private nuke owner. The president's career is rooted in the 11 reactors that ring Chicago. The consulting firm founded by his chief campaign strategist David Axelrod, who would later become a senior White House advisor, represented Exelon.

Obama's former White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel (now mayor-elect of Chicago) put together investment packages for Exelon's Illinois plants when he worked as an investment banker. And Exelon CEO John Rowe has been a longtime financial backer of the president.

A critical moment is coming soon, when Obama goes to Congress to request an additional $36 billion in loan guarantees for new nukes in his 2012 budget.

With them, America's atomic industry has a chance to build a few more reactors. Without them, a green-powered Earth is within our grasp.

(As we go to press Entergy has filed a complaint in U.S. District Court in Vermont attempting to prevent the state from forcing the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant to cease operation on March 21, 2012.)

[Harvey Wasserman edits the NukeFree.org website. His most recent book is Solartopia! Our Green-Powered Earth. This article was also published at the Washington Spectator. Read more of Harvey Wasserman's writing on The Rag Blog.]

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