Category: Energy & Sustainability

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Ethics in Government

Here’s the latest installment in the Associated Press’s very disturbing report on nuclear power plant safety.

Adding to the previous reports’ deep concerns about neglected maintenance and regulators who scale back requirements rather than enforce them, the newest installment demonstrates that regulators have basically ignored massive population growth in many areas around  nuclear power plant sites.

Part of the “safety planning” (such as it was) for nuclear plant siting was to place the plants in relatively remote areas (still far too close to major population centers, but usually 20-50 miles away). But suburban/exurban infill has changed the picture dramatically. Evacuation plans designed to move out a rural population have in most cases never been upgraded to deal with the new realities.

As one of many examples cited in the study, a 10-mile radius around Florida’s two-reactor Saint Lucie complex had only 43,332 residents in 1980; now, the population is 202,010 (more than 4-1/2 times as large).

Following the Fukushima accidents, the US government recommended that its citizens living closer than 50 miles evacuate. If there were a 50-mile evacuation at Indian Point, 24 miles north of New York City, 17 million people in three different states would be affected. Ever try to get out of NYC at rush hour? This would be far worse. Even the 268,906 who live within 10 miles of the plant would be quite challenging to evacuate.

HOW have we allowed this madness to continue?

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , ,

Here is the smoking gun—the clear, hard evidence that the nuclear industry AND its regulators care nothing about our safety.

The Associated Press spent a year investigating nuclear power plant safety. And found something really scary: when regulators encounter problems, instead of shutting the plants to make repairs, the regulators relax their standards. Double-plus ungood, as George Orwell would say.

In a long bylined story by investigative reporter Jeff Donn, the respected journalism group lays out a harrowing picture of deferred maintenance, aging parts, reactor licenses renewed without any semblance of adequate investigation, and a “regulatory” agency whose response to problems is to say, oh, we didn’t mean to be so tough, sorry, go right on risking the public safety:

Time after time, officials at the U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission have decided that original regulations were too strict, arguing that safety margins could be eased…

The result? Rising fears that these accommodations by the NRC are significantly undermining safety…

Examples abound. When valves leaked, more leakage was allowed — up to 20 times the original limit. When rampant cracking caused radioactive leaks from steam generator tubing, an easier test of the tubes was devised…

Failed cables. Busted seals. Broken nozzles, clogged screens, cracked concrete, dented containers, corroded metals and rusty underground pipes…could escalate dangers in the event of an accident.

To name one of many examples cited in the article: valves that were allowed to leak up to 11.5 cubic feet per hour each (there are four, so total permissible leakage was 46 cubic feet per hour per plant) could not meet that standard, so the NRC bumped the limit all the way up to 200 cubic feet per hour for the set of four—that’s more than 500% over the original standard. Even this was not enough, however; one Georgia plant admitted releases of 576 cubic feet per hour.

In short, not only have we experienced a whole lot of radiation releases as these parts age, but the risk of catastrophic accident is far higher than most of us would have imagined. Especially since the plants were only designed with a 40-year lifespan in mind, and yet the NRC is granting 20-year license renewals in a way that seems almost like a pro forma rubber stamp.

And speaking of radiation releases, Donn posted a new article June 21, documenting that…

Radioactive tritium has leaked from three-quarters of U.S. commercial nuclear power sites, often into groundwater from corroded, buried piping

Under the best of circumstances, nuclear power is an extremely risky, energy-intensive operation where human error and mechanical failure can combine to create massive catastrophe. And this is far from the best of circumstances; this is playing Russian roulette not with a single individual but with the lives of thousands or even millions, all around the country.

This is a game with no winners.

It is time to demand from Washington the leadership it should have shown all along. It is time to shut down every operating nuclear power plant and take steps to stabilize the infrastructure so serious accidents won’t happen even after the plants are no longer generating power. The stakes are unacceptably high.

Read those two stories all the way through—and let’s think together about action!

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability, Green Marketing Tagged with , , ,

One of the most exciting things about the green movement lately is the way it’s become so mainstream. After some 40 years in this movement, I am deeply gratified that every company I can think of is taking steps toward sustainability. Some, like Marks & Spencer in the UK and believe it or not, Walmart in the US (and worldwide)—a company not exactly swarming with treehuggers—have practically made it into a religion.

In my talks and interviews, I almost always mention Walmart, because that company is heavily driven by the profit motive—and has found it extremely profitable to lower expenses by paying attention to sustainability, and at the same time create new profit centers. For instance, Walmart is selling truckloads of organic food to people who would never set foot in a Whole Foods. While I still have many other issues with the company, ranging from labor practices and supplier policies to siting and closed-store-reuse, on sustainabiity, I have only praise.

And if  bottom-line-driven, NON-treehugger company like Walmart can build a green path to prosperity, what holds the rest of us back?

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By Posted on Posted in Abundance and Prosperity, Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Green Business, Peace and War, Politics, poverty Tagged with , , , , ,

While the GOP lines up to see who can be more crazy and out-of-touch and unintelligent than their competitors, the Left is strangely quiet. Haven’t even heard rumblings of candidacy from Congressman Dennis Kucinich, who has set the bar for leftist challenges in the past two presidential elections.

And this is odd, because Obama has failed the Left, despite being elected on a platform—dare I say a mantra—of “change.”

Yes, he can claim a number of significant accomplishments—one blogger found Obama’s legislative accomplishment rate was an astonishing 96 percent—but on most of the issues that really matter, his record does not inspire:

WAR:

We’re still in Iraq, where five US soldiers lost their lives this week. And we’re way deeper in Afghanistan than we were, with about 100,000 troops on the ground. And we’ve deployed in Pakistan and Libya. The only real move toward peace was Obama’s recent speech on the Israel-Palestine conflict

HEALTHCARE:

All that energy into the pathetic and complicated Obamacare compromise! Not only was single-payer not “on the table,” but even the wimpy public option was taken off the table. What was left?  A gift to the insurance industry and not much else. I want a candidate who will propose a one-sentence health reform bill: “All US citizens and legal residents are eligible for Medicare from birth.” If we need to phase it in, start by moving eligibility to age 55, then 40, then 20, then zero over a period of years.

ENERGY/ECONOMY/ENVIRONMENT

I lump these three together because the solution integrates across the disciplines: A massive, Marshall-plan-style initiative to get OFF fossil and nuclear energy sources in ten to twenty years, replacing them with sources that are both clean and renewable (with special attention to deep conservation that reduces the need for energy by 50 percent or more). We’d use government loans to jumpstart the effort, bring the price of conversions down, and front the money for homeowners, tenants, farmers,  and business owners to get systems in place—with the loans repaid out of the energy savings. This would boost the economy, create hundreds of thousands, maybe even millions of jobs, get people out of poverty, put them back to work, remove our biggest reason for starting wars—and drastically reduce our carbon footprint, all at once!

The candidate who can articulate this vision, who can claim the unfinished mandate that Obama promised and didn’t deliver, has a pretty good shot at galvanizing the American people—if they can be convinced that these changes are actually possible.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Uncategorized Tagged with , , , , ,

This is really exciting: Germany, already a leader in the safe energy space—in fact, my solar inverter, installed back in 2004, was built in Germany—has rejected nuclear power. Germany has pledged to permanently close the seven plants taken off-line following Fukushima, and shut all of its 17 n-plants by 2022.

Remember: Germany is a cloudy northern European country. If solar can work there, it can work just about anywhere—and Germany’s clean energy industry already employs an impressive 370,000 people.

Germany was also the birthplace of the modern safe-energy/anti-nuclear movement, back around 1975, and had a huge influence on the creation of Clamshell Alliance and the US safe energy movement in the next few years after that. And citizen action clearly played a role. As the AP story noted:

Tens of thousands of people took to the streets after Fukushima to urge the government to shut all reactors quickly.

Meanwhile, Switzerland’s cabinet is recommending to Parliament that the country phase out all its reactors by 2034. And Vermont, which is both defending itself against a lawsuit by Vermont Yankee nuclear plant owner Energy attacking its right to regulate the plant and suing the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission over an improper license extension, submitted legal documents pointing out that Entergy knew perfectly well in 2001 when it bought Vermont Yankee that the plant was scheduled to close in 2012, waited to the last minute to challenge it, and therefore has no right to a preliminary injunction forbidding the state from closing the plant at the end of the license period.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, General Commentary, Politics, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,

Even though I’ve been in favor of legalizing marijuana since the 1970s and have been in the environmental movement  just as long, it never occurred to me that the continuing prohibition on pot actually has negative consequences for the environment.

But this fascinating article shows a number of negative environmental effects from the prohibition, ranging from highly toxic pesticides used both by growers and by law enforcement authorities on down to greater energy usage because the plants are often grown indoors and therefore need artificial light. If I counted right, the article offers six environmental benefits of legalizing pot. Who would’ve thunk it?

What are the other arguments that convinced me decades ago that pot should be legal? Here are two different choices that list a few of the main reasons to legalize marijuana, in some depth (the first, and I think better-argued one, is from High Times, the second is from the advocacy group Norml. And here’s a brief list of 101 reasons to legalize pot, some a bit tongue-in-cheek.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Publishing, Shel's Personal Life Tagged with , , , , ,

Where have I been all week? Researching and writing a new introduction for a book I originally wrote in 1979 (and which in turn was based on a book published by my co-authors in 1969.

Following the disaster at the Fukushima nuclear reactors in Japan, the Japanese publisher decided to bring my ancient book on why nuclear power makes no sense back into print. And the publisher contracted last Friday (one week ago) for a new introduction. My deadline wasn’t until the end of the month, but next week, I’m at a book-industry trade show.

So I shoved a lot of other stuff aside and got it done. It’s a piece of writing I can be proud of, that shows why nuclear makes even less sense today than it did back then (because alternative technologies have improved so much). It makes a strong case against nuclear not only on health and safety grounds, not only about the inability to safely store highly toxic waste for many millennia, but also on economic grounds (a case we hear far too little about).

The publisher gave me a maximum word length of 3500 words; I turned in 3499, not counting the 26 footnotes, many of which came from pro-nuclear sources.

I love coming in early with clean copy that meets the specifications, and I love that I was able to negotiate a much better arrangement than what was originally proposed. And I love letting the supporters of this inane technology demonstrate for me why it should be abandoned.

I’ll try to post an entry or two in the next couple of days before I go away again, and then be back on track the week of May 30.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Corporate Social Responsibility, Energy & Sustainability Tagged with

Does BP actually HAVE a working PR department? The latest bonehead self-inflicted assault on the company image was to prevent five Gulf residents, holding legitimate proxies, from entering the annual shareholder meeting they’d traveled all the way to London to attend.

This on top of the news that the company is suing the other companies involved in construction of the exploded rig for a combined $40 billion; BP has paid out about $4 billion in claims.

Boy am I glad I don’t have the job of making them look good to an increasingly skeptical public.

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By Posted on Posted in Business Ethics, Energy & Sustainability, propaganda Tagged with , , , ,

David Vossbrink, APR, a PR guy who happens to be the president of PRSA’s Silicon Valley chapter, wrote in regarding my recent article on a PR site, “Seeing Past the “Spin”: Debunking Five Dangerous Myths About Nuclear Power.”

Vossbrink called my attention to a speech by the late safe energy activist David Comey, of Friends of the Earth. Comey, addressing the nuclear industry’s own Atomic Industrial Forum, told them they have a major credibility problem, and that he wasn’t afraid to tell them about it because he knew they would never follow his advice to tell the truth, and therefore remain easy targets.

Comey referenced a British spymaster, Richard Crossman, who was in charge of “alien psychological warfare” during World War II. He outlined 7 key principles that Crossman put forth in a 1953 lecture:

  1. The Basis for All Successful Propaganda is the Truth
  2. The Key to Successful Propaganda Is Accurate Information
  3. The Most Successful Propagandist Is the Person Who Cares About Education
  4. To Do Propaganda Well, One Must Not Fall in Love with It
  5. A Successful Propagandist Cannot Afford to Make Mistakes
  6. The Propaganda Must Be Credible to the Other Side, Not Your Own [empahsis mine]
  7. Understatement Succeeds Best [the Brits used understatement to make the Nazis think they were only bringing a portion of what they could, and that they could inflict far more damage on their enemy]

An aside: Interestingly, while trying to find his speech online (which was critiqued in a journal published February 1975, and thus must be no later than mid-1974), I came across Comey’s description of the fire at the Browns Ferry, Alabama nuke in 1975 (which could have been utterly catastrophic, but once again, we were lucky). The Browns Ferry reactors, among 23 US nuclear plants using essentially the same design as the failed Dai’ichi reactors in Japan, had to be shut down this week because of tornados. At least they didn’t wait until the tornado created a disaster, as the tsunami did in Japan.

Unfortunatley, Comey was right: the nuclear industry still can’t seem to tell the truth. And fortunately, I believe that Comey was also right about what that means;  it should be easy to undermine the nuclear industry’s credibility and overcome the juggernaut, to make it clear that we as a society will not tolerate the construction of a single new n-plant or license extension of an existing one, and that we need to take active steps to decommission the ones already in use.

Let’s prove Comey right—get out there and organize!

Note: I will be glad to send the PDF of Comey’s full speech–write me at shel (at) principledprofit.com, subject line Send David Come Nuke Speech. I was not able to locate it online.

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By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability Tagged with , , , , , , ,

The world has got to get off coal and oil and gas and biofuels and nuclear, and onto forms of energy that are truly sustainable: they renew themselves, they don’t pollute, they don’t emit greenhouse gases, and they certainly don’t leave a legacy of poison. And the good news is we already have the know-how to do this; now we just need to find the will.

This is a crucial crossroads moment with huge implications for future generations. More specifically, for whether we actually still have a planet to pass on to future generations. We could tip toward sustainability…or continue on the path to desolation.

In just 50 years, carbon levels in the atmosphere have gone from 315.59 parts per million (PPM) in December 1959 to 387.27 as of December 2009 and 392.94 PPM just five months later—passing the danger threshold of 350 PPM in 1988, heading for 410 or higher by 2020, and perhaps as bad as 770 PPM by the end of the century. Much of that increase is directly attributable to human activity. And 2000-2009 was the warmest decade on record.

What does that mean? For starters, polar melting will raise sea levels up to 1.9 meters (6 feet, three inches) by2100, causing widespread inundation of coastal cities around the world. Some entire countries, especially those on islands, will simply disappear under the waves.

Increased heat in the tropics will increase desertification and have a severe impact on food production, leading to famines, which in turn will make wars and ethnic violence a whole lot more likely.

Polar melting will also change the salt ratio of the oceans, because the ice caps are freshwater. This in turn could interfere with the Gulf Stream, making Europe a lot less habitable.

I’m old enough to remember the early 1960s: There was a lot less plastic. Most households had a maximum of one car, one television, and one telephone. There was a whole lot less traffic, and therefore a lot fewer cars spewing greenhouse cases while idling in that traffic. Air conditioning was rare. Suburban sprawl was a relatively new phenomenon, and vast acreage remained as forest or farmland that has since turned into housing and shopping and office parks. Individuals did not own computers. An 800-square-foot apartment or a 1200-square-foot house could comfortably fit a family of four or five. With all these major lifestyle shifts, it’s not surprising that humans have an impact on our planet. And I’m not suggesting that we roll back the clock on “progress.” But I am suggesting that if we want this lifestyle, we need to consume fewer resources to maintain it.

Have you perhaps noticed that major earthquakes, hurricanes, tsunamis, and even winter storms (allowed to move out of the polar regions because global warming breaks down the natural barriers that kept them polar before) have been much more severe in the last decade or so? Our Planet Earth is apparently beginning its rebellion.

We have to move forward, and we have to do it quickly.

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