Last night, we drove up to Brattleboro, Vermont, to testify before the Vermont Public Service Board, which is taking input on whether Entergy, the Louisiana-based owner of the severely troubled Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

We didn’t get to testify; I was something like #78 on the list, across about eleven sites around the state, all televised live. But perhaps that’s just as well, because I’ve spent much of the day going into a lot more detail than I would have had in a two-minute live statement.

I’m going to share the testimony with you. If you’re inspired to give your input to the PSB, you can do so by e-mailing psb.clerk AT state.vt.us, or writing to Vermont Public Service Board, 112 State Street—Drawer 20, Montpelier, VT 05620-2701. You will want to include the docket number. I suggest you use this subject line:

Comment on PSB Docket No. 7862 (Entergy application for Certificate of Public Good)

This is what I submitted. Yes, I know it’s long. But this is one of the most important struggles of our time. If you’re not already familiar with the issues around nuclear power, this will give you some of the basics, as slanted toward an audience of government officials in the US who already know, for example, about the insurance exemption for nuclear power under the Price-Anderson Act that basically means if there’s a problem, the plant owner is not liable.

 

Dear members of the Vermont Public Service Board,

My name is Shel Horowitz. I am the author of one book on nuclear power and two award-winning books on business ethics and the environment. Like the majority of people who have come before you to testify, I ask that you deny the Certificate of Public Good for Entergy for the continued operation of the Vermont Yankee nuclear power plant.

Dictionary.com provides two definitions for “public good”:

  • 1) a good or service that is provided without profit for society collectively
  • 2) the well-being of the general public

 

According to both definitions, Vermont Yankee and Entergy fail the test.

Definition #1 has three components:

a. a good or service is provided

b. without profit

c. for society as a whole.

Yes, Vermont Yankee provides electricity and jobs (though, as we will see later, less efficiently than its alternatives). But it fails utterly on the other two components. Entergy’s whole reason for existence is to provide profits for its shareholders and executives (as opposed to the whole society), and the callous way the company has disregarded both public safety and the truth is directly related to valuing short-term profit instead of the public good.

As to the second definition—I submit that Vermont Yankee not only does not support the well-being of the general public, it puts that well-being at severe risk. Vermont Yankee’s continued operation actively threatens the well-being of residents of three states.

I will elaborate several ways in which Entergy fails to achieve these standards. While I recognize that the federal government has preempted the safety discussion, I submit that you, the board members of the PSB, have an obligation to look at the economic consequences of the safety issues, as they apply to the question of whether Entergy is in fact providing a public good. For that reason, some (not all) of my arguments do include safety concerns, because every safety issue has an economic consequence.

Specific points:

  1. Vermont Yankee has a troubling history of severe problems. As far back as 1973 (the last year that full reporting was required), when the plant was only a year old, Vermont Yankee reported 39 Abnormal Occurrences to the Atomic Energy Commission (predecessor to the NRC). A single page of the printout lists six incidents, four of which are potentially significant threats: component failures in both Emergency Core Cooling System and radiation monitoring, and two explosions in the off-gas system within six days of each other. I am enclosing a copy of that printout, along with the descriptive text noting the 39 incidents at Vermont Yankee and 850 AOs nationally when the fleet was only 30 reactors (source: Gyorgy, Anna et al.: No Nukes: Everyone’s Guide to Nuclear Power. Boston: South End Press, 1979). [Click twice on the picture to read the printout (it’s the right-hand side of the graphic)]
  2. one page of the multiple page printout of 39 safety problems at Vermont Yankee in one year
    one page of the multiple page printout of 39 safety problems at Vermont Yankee in one year

    Other well-documented problems include the collapse of the cooling tower on August 22, 2007, and the more recent discovery that not only was Vermont Yankee polluting the Connecticut River with radioactive tritium, but Entergy lied about the very existence of the pipes conveying the tritium. All of these problems are expensive to fix, impacting ratepayers and residents.

  3. Embrittlement and corrosion are severe problems for the nuclear energy generally. Years and years of bombardment by high doses of radiation, the ongoing trauma of New England’s severe winters, and exposure to corrosive chemicals weaken the structural integrity of metal and concrete—aging of the materials was cited as the cause of the cooling tower collapse, in fact. Should these issues start to affect the containment vessel or other key structural components, the results could be catastrophic to the local economy. And the likelihood of deep stress within the plant is high, because this plant was only designed to last 40 years and is now past its life expectancy. It is the height of irresponsibility to continue operating under these circumstances, and PSB’s mandate is to maintain the public good by denying the certificate.
  4. While Vermont Yankee’s supporters cite the “public good” of Vermont Yankee in supplying jobs and baseload energy while not generating greenhouse gasses, none of these claims hold up to scrutiny. Clean, renewable energy provides far more jobs per megawatt. Vermont Yankee’s power is currently spread out over the grid and not part of the Vermont baseload, and in any case is frequently unavailable due to both planed and unplanned shutdowns and power reductions.
    To accurately examine the issue of greenhouse gases, and, for that matter, net power generation, we have to remember that nuclear plants themselves are only one small part of the nuclear fuel cycle. The fuel cycle includes mining, milling, processing, assembly into fuel rods, transportation of the fuel, loading them into the reactor, running the reactor, sending electricity along the grid to remote locations (with severe transmission losses in the process), removing the spent fuel, storing it temporarily, and storing longer-term (though, as noted above, reliable permanent storage does not yet exist). Most of these processes are large-scale consumers of energy and emitters of greenhouse gases.
    Like fossil fuels, uranium is a finite substance, and it requires extensive work to create usable fuel. Nuclear expert John J. Berger estimated that once the best quality uranium had been mined (by the 1970s), the remainder is of such low yield that a ton of rock yields only 44 ten-thousandths of an ounce of fissionable U-235. Berger also noted that as of 1977, the nuclear industry had consumed five times as much energy as it produced (source: Berger, John J. The Unviable Option. New York: Dell, 1977, pp. 115-116 and 150-151, as cited in Curtis, Richard, Elizabeth Hogan, and Shel Horowitz. Nuclear Lessons. Harrisburg: Stackpole Books, 1980, p. 222 and p. 90).
  5. Routine operation of Vermont Yankee creates harmful radioactive waste that puts its workers and neighbors at risk of health problems (which in turn have a negative economic impact), and that must be isolated from the environment for 250,000 years. Humans have no track record in preserving anything for more than about 30,000 years; we have a few arrowheads and pottery shards from that era. Entergy employs enormous hubris to suggest that when we have no computer data even 100 years old, no languages even 5000 years old, and no artifacts even 50,000 years old, that we will somehow be able to instruct people 10,000 generations into the future on how to maintain the safe and complete isolation of these poisons, even though we don’t yet have any idea how to do this. Obviously, even assuming the language and communication issues can be surmounted, going back in every 50 or 100 years to inspect and rebuild the barriers between these toxic poisons and the environment will be a massively expensive financial burden to future generations of Vermonters—but not to Entergy, which will in all probability not last as long as the problem it is creating.
  6. Vermont Yankee shares its reactor design (GE Mark I) with the discredited design of Fukushima-Daiichi. Fukushima has already contaminated a large swath of Japan, resulting in destruction of crops and livestock and severe losses to farmers and residents—and the potential still exists for a secondary accident that could cause far worse damage (see “Estimating the Potential Impact of Failure of the Fukushima Daiichi Unit 4 Spent Fuel Pool” by Dr. Paul Gailey, produced more than a year after the accident <https://www.washingtonsblog.com/2012/06/estimating-the-potential-impact-of-failure-of-the-fukushima-daiichi-unit-4-spent-fuel-pool.html>—as well as this New York Times report in the immediate aftermath: < https://www.nytimes.com/2011/03/18/world/asia/18spent.html?pagewanted=all>
  7. Like Fukushima, Vermont Yankee is at risk of catastrophe during severe weather events. Hurricane Irene proved that southern Vermont is not immune to weather catastrophe; last year’s tornado devastated Hampden County, Massachusetts, only about an hour away. And of course, just last month, Superstorm Sandy caused major damage not very far away. These damaging weather events will only increase (see, for instance, NASA climatologist James Hansen, writing in the Washington Post: “This is the world we have changed, and now we have to live in it — the world that caused the 2003 heat wave in Europe that killed more than 50,000 people and the 2011 drought in Texas that caused more than $5 billion in damage. Such events, our data show, will become even more frequent and more severe.” <https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/climate-change-is-here–and-worse-than-we-thought/2012/08/03/6ae604c2-dd90-11e1-8e43-4a3c4375504a_story.html>, emphasis added).
  8. Items #5 and #6 point to the grave threat in the event of accident (or sabotage). More than 25 years after the Chernobyl accident, large areas in the Ukraine are still uninhabitable, and their land removed from agricultural production. This kind of ecological devastation should be unacceptable anywhere; in an area as dependent on agriculture and tourism as Vermont, it is especially troublesome; it would cause billions of dollars in damage and basically eliminate the local economy.
    Once again, the definition of pubic good requires benefits “for society collectively, and not for profit.” However, should there be a major accident at Vermont Yankee, what gets shared collectively is not the benefit, but the risk. As you know, nuclear power plant owners and operators are protected from the financial consequences of accidents by the Price-Anderson Act—a threat to every American’s economic well-being. Entergy takes the profits—but the citizens of Vermont and neighboring states take the risk. And this risks are real; as I wrote in the 2011 post-Fukushima update to my book Nuclear Lessons (published in Japan by Kinokuniya), there have been at least 101 accidents causing loss of life or at least $50,000 in property damage, including not only the 2011 Fukushima accident but also a lesser-known accident there in 2010.
  9. It is hard to make a claim that a company as consistently disingenuous as Entergy can in any way be a partner in the public good. Two among many examples: Entergy accepted a set of conditions giving the State of Vermont power to decide whether the plant should be allowed to continue operating past the original March 2012 expiration date. However, when the state legislature chose not to allow a renewal, Entergy has refused to obey the law and continues to operate while suing the state. Then there were the lies about the tritium leaks. As an expert in business ethics, I see that these two instances demonstrate that this company does not follow accepted standards of business ethics, and should not be trusted to responsibly operate this highly dangerous apparatus.
  10. My final point addresses whether nuclear power is the best way to achieve (public good definition #2) “the well-being of the general public.” Nuclear power is, inevitably, a high-risk proposition involving concentrating centralized resources, combining numerous complex processes, and wasting much of both the natural resources and energy required to produce this power. I suggest that first of all, as a society, we can easily slash our energy use by 50 to 80 percent, using deep conservation and better design. Germany uses about half as much energy per capita as the United States, to achieve a comparable quality of life. Here in the U.S., we have the technology to do even better. We can design buildings that are so in tune with their environment, they don’t need furnaces or air conditioning. We can follow the example of the Empire State Building, which is saving more than $4 million per year following a deep energy retrofit. We can use small-scale solar and wind, in-stream (non-dammed) hydro, geothermal, and other truly clean and renewable technologies to generate the energy we need right where it will be used, eliminating the colossal waste of energy lost in transmission. This is the way to a sustainable future for our children and future generations. This is the REAL public good.

Respectfully submitted,

Shel Horowitz

Hadley, MA

Author, Guerrilla Marketing Goes Green, Nuclear Lessons, and six other books.

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$5 trillion net savings, support a 158% bigger U.S. economy by 2050, using no energy from coal, oil or nuclear.

This is the capsule version of the Rocky Mountain Institute’s energy plan. RMI is a green “think-and-do tank” founded by my favorite practical visionary, Amory Lovins. By thinking holistically, Amory and his colleagues achieve “impossible” results like a house in the California desert that doesn’t need air conditioning, and one in the Colorado snowbelt that doesn’t need a furnace.

Here are the last two claims on their blueprint:

9) U.S. industry can produce about 84% more output with 9–13% less energy—without mandates or breakthroughs in innovation.

10) We can capture and integrate the renewable energy needed to meet 80% or more of our electricity needs by 2050.

Go read the other eight.

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Some smart people in Belgium figured out that the top of an exposed-to-the-sky rail tunnel is the perfect place to put a massive solar array. This one installation generates 3300 megawatt-hours of electricity per year, enough to power almost 1,000 homes while eliminating 2,400 tons per year of  CO2 emissions.

Other people are being similarly creative with highways, such as this solar-powered highway in Oregon.

As I’ve said for years, we have the technology we need to solve our energy/carbon problems. All we need is the political will.

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American Airlines recently did a great pilot program (no pun intended) to drastically improve the green profile of its 737. I found out about this because the company was proud enough that it put a link in the article in its e-blast to all American Airlines frequent-flyer program members.

In the article, you can read about seven different major initiatives for greener commercial airplanes incorporated into its “ecoDemonstrator” customized plane, six of which demonstrate clear cost savings through increased airplane fuel economy as well or lower maintenance costs. The seventh, switching to vegetable fuel from cooking oil, has major benefits in carbon footprint, waste reduction, and reducing the need for offshore oil drilling and other often-destructive extractive technologies.

The plane had a special paint job, so passengers were aware. And American Airlines acknowledges that both the company and airplane builder Boeing face pressure from consumers and other stakeholders to be more eco-friendly.

And the tests were a huge success. Which makes the closing statement in the article deeply puzzling (note: this is a direct quote, grammar errors and all, except that for SEO purposes, I changed “American” to “American Airlines”):

Prior to deliver to [American Airlines] for regular use, all test equipment was removed and the plane was returns to our normal configuration. And although it will look like an ordinary plane on the outside and inside, we’ll always know that we were the first commercial airline to help test these technologies.

Why? If the program is such a success, saving American Airlines money while increasing its “enviromarketability quotient”—making itself much more attractive to customers trying to chose a commercial airline—why on earth (or in the sky!) would they pull all the cool stuff out? I just don’t understand.

Tomorrow, when the work week starts, American Airlines will receive a Twitter invitation to comment on this blog, and explain their reasons. (I’ve already scheduled the Tweet).

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Heard of Carrotmobs yet? Consumers have used our buying power to avoid companies with the wrong values for decades. Now there’s a positive flip: actively making the effort to buy from companies that support your values. I only heard the term “Carrotmob”—so called because consumers use the carrot of positive business rather than the stick of withdrawing business to achieve social good.

I think I only heard the term a month or two ago; since then, I’ve run across it several times. This concept seems to be entering the language faster than anything I can remember since “Ms.” was invented as a gender-neutral alternative to Miss and Mrs., back in the1970s.

Here’s a particularly cool one with the odd twist that it was initiated by the company—and since I write about out-of-the-box people-centered marketing of green products and services, worth flagging here. I imagine this marketing strategy could get old fast if too many people do it, but the idea of having your customers pre-fund your sustainability venture is a good one. Think abou Kickstarter campaigns; this isn’t so different, after all.

A coffee company has decided that organic/fair trade coffee is not enough; the coffee should be transported on cargo ships powered by renewable energy. Specifically, using wind power.

Thanksgiving Coffee, a California-based artisan roaster, will arrange for wind-powered shipping if people buy $150,000 worth of coffee on Carrotmob. The goal is to prove demand for wind-transported coffee and research ways to make wind-powered shipping a reality in our own time.

It’s worth remembering that all cargo shipping from the dawn of history into the 19th century was either wind-powered or human-powered (by rowers). So there’s no need to prove that cargo shipping can be wind-powered. However, a transatlantic voyage by wind took many weeks, sometimes went way off course, was more susceptible to storms, etc. Steam and then diesel made shipping fast and reliable enough to create the modern global economy. So the real challenge is not to prove that they can use wind-powered ships, but that they can compete effectively using a modern wind-powered shipping fleet.

This of course could have a huge impact on the entire cargo shipping industry, if it can be done effectively and inexpensively enough to transport many different types of items. And certainly, it will inspire the shipping industry to add more sustainable practices even if using conventional diesel-powered cargo ships.

Meanwhile, if you’re a coffee drinker, you can help Thanksgiving Coffee test the waters for sustainable shipping. Go read the article on Ecopreneurist, or skip directly to the Thanksgiving Coffee Carrotmob page and buy a pound or two.

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I’ve been saying for years that we have the technology to fix many of the worlds environmental problems; we lack only the will. And new, exciting technologies to go deeper in the quest for solutions are being released all the time.

I just read about a great example: an ultrabsorbent “nanosponge” that drinks up spilled oil, but doesn’t absorb water. It’s even reusable! What a wonderful world!

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An AP story on the Republican Convention in today’s paper puts it this way:

Mitt Romney conceded Sunday that fresh controversy over rape and abortion is harming his party and he accused Democrats of trying to exploit it for political gain.

“It really is sad, isn’t it, with all the issues that America faces, for the Obama campaign to continue to stoop to such a low level,” said Romney, struggling to sharpen the presidential election focus instead on a weak economy and 8.3 percent national unemployment.

Let me see if I get this straight:

  1. Mitt Romney has spent the entire campaign trying to distance himself from the moderate stances on social issues he embraced as recently as 2008, embracing a hard-right radical ideology that would attack women and gays, increase economic disparity, and stack the Supreme Court with more radical-right ideologues.
  2. Mitt Romney chose as his running mate Paul Ryan, whose budget proposals are akin to a hit-man attack on the poor, and whose environmental record makes me worry a great deal about the future of the planet (Paul Ryan gets a miserable 3% rating from the League of Conservation Voters)—and who co-authored extreme anti-choice legislation with none other than the notorious Missouri Congressman Todd Akin, yes, the same one who made the ridiculous remark about pregnancy being nearly impossible in cases of “legitimate rape.”
  3. Mitt Romney is content to stand behind a Republican party platform that contains a full-blown assault on women’s reproductive rights.
  4. As an example of taking the high road, I suppose, Romney made a joke that essentially endorsed the discredited birther movement that claims Obama was not born in the US, just last week. Talk about focusing on the important issues!

And please, finally, let’s not forget that the Republicans have no legitimate claim to run on economic issues. Not only did George W. Bush turn the largest surplus in history—that he inherited from Bill Clinton, who built a remarkable ecnomic recovery after the disaster of the Reagan-Bush years—into a raging deficit, not only did the economy crumple under years of deregulation and defanging the watchdogs, but the Republicans have sabotaged Obama’s recovery efforts over and over again, with the expressly stated goal of making him a one-term president. Even so, housing starts are up, private-sector jobs are up, and the stock market is waaaay up.

And let’s not forget Romney has made it quite clear he will be the president of the 1%. Those of us in the 99% will not find a friend in Romney-Ryanomics.

Joseph Welch asked Senator Joe McCarthy, “Have you no sense of decency, sir?” He’s often misquoted as asking “have you no shame, sir?” That second question is the one I pose today to Mitt Romney.

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Los Angeles Unified School District, a massive consumer of single-use plastic, has banned Styrofoam under student activist pressure—the first district in the nation to do so. And the school district superintendent, John Deasy, will put the topic on the agenda of a district superintendent’s conference.

This is great news—but I have to question why the district switched to compostable disposable trays. It’s certainly more ecological, and probably cheaper, to buy a commercial dishwasher and switch to not only reusable trays, but reusable dishes as well. I would think the materials savings would cover the costs of the machine and the employees to run it, as well as create some needed employment.

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Too much goes into the landfill. Good article on Sustainable Brands about how manufacturers can and should be recapturing the materials, and how the US lags behind many other countries on this.

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This article in the New York Times feeds a lot of people’s ideas about what it means to live a green lifestyle: a guy all by himself in the desert, living off the grid in a dwelling he pieced together out of old shipping containers.

That scares a lot of people. Heck, it scares me! But it’s important to note that John Wells, the occupant of said desert paradise, is happy. He’s got a few hundred thou in the bank and he’s there because he wants to be.

I know people like that. My friend Juanita’s no-plumbing, no-electricity hilltop cabin that she and her late husband built by hand is as frugal a dwelling as I know, and culturally about as far from the New York City that both Mr. Wells and I chose to leave behind as it’s possible to get.

But the point I want to make is this: you can still live a green lifestyle and enjoy all the creature comforts and social conveniences of modern life. Consider Amory Lovins, energy futurist extraordinaire, whose spacious and gadget-filled 4,000-square-foot home was sustainability state-of-the-art when it was constructed in 1983. In the cold, snowy Colorado Rockies (just outside Aspen), he doesn’t need a furnace, or an air conditioner—and his monthly electric bill could be made back by skipping a couple of lattes per month at a fancy coffee shop..

Frugal, green lifestyles can be about comfort, ease, lower maintenance costs, and even luxury. They don’t have to be about deprivation—unless, like John Wells, you don’t think of being a hermit in the desert as deprivation, but as liberation. It’s his choice, and I say, go for it.

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