Tag: nuclear power plants

By Posted on Posted in Democracy, Energy & Sustainability, Environment, Greenwashing, propaganda, Protests and Crackdowns, Shel's Personal Life, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , ,
If you missed Part 1, read it here, and then follow the links to Parts 2, 3, and 4.

Chernobyl and Fukushima

Chernobyl rendered a big swath of Ukraine uninhabitable. While a few more travelers are gaining permission to enter the dead zone, nobody lives there, and nothing you’d want to eat grows there.

After that disaster, the nuclear industry experienced a long series of accidents that could have been very serious, but were contained.

Then came Fukushima.

While it wasn’t nearly as destructive as Chernobyl, it still contaminated a 11,500-square-mile area and required the permanent evacuation of 230 square miles (evicting—and causing massive economic loss to—159,128 people). Much agricultural land had to be abandoned. Japan shut of most of its nukes for several years, causing great economic stress and forcing more intensive use of carbon fuels to replace the lost energy in a hurry.

And the world discovered that nuclear power plants, which are usually located next to water for cooling purposes, are not designed to withstand a significant flood.

I had written my first book about why nuclear power makes no sense, published all the way back in 1980. Following Fukushima, a Japanese publisher tracked me down and asked about bringing it back into print. I researched and wrote ten-page update that convinced me that nuclear power is still an absolutely terrible technology. If you’d like a copy, please download at https://greenandprofitable.com/why-nuclear-still-makes-no-sense/

 

Zombie Nukes are Back from the Dead

The safe energy movement made nuclear energy too expensive economically and politically for many years. But all of a sudden, the zombie power plants are back from the dead.

The two-reactor Watts-Bar plant in Tennessee was permitted back in 1973, but even more than most nukes, it was plagued by delays. Unit 1 took 23 years, going on-grid in 1996. Unit 2 took another 20 years, going online in late 2016. No US nuclear plants went online between those two dates. And meanwhile, these plants use obsolete, unsafe, 1970s design—a frightening specter.

A newer design, the Westinghouse AP1000, was selected for the two double reactors permitted during the George W. Bush years in Georgia and South Carolina. The idea was to prefabricate much of the reactor and thus shave time and costs. Instead, however, the plants have faced delays of many years, massive cost overruns, safety crises, and the resulting bankruptcy of Westinghouse (and near-collapse of parent company Toshiba).

The crazy thing is this: never mind the safety issues, the citizen opposition, or all the other stuff—why would anyone want to tie up billions of dollars for a decade or more constructing an n-plant that will never be economically competitive, uses unproven technology, and generates enormous opposition? There are very good market-based reasons why the US nuclear industry shriveled up after Three Mile Island. It’s hard to imagine any sane company or investors going there.

 

The Carbon-Friendly Magic Bullet Myth

The last several years, some environmentalists have embraced nuclear because they think it’s a big step forward on the path to a low-carbon planetary diet.

But they’re wearing blinders:

  1. Why do we want to reduce our carbon footprint? To protect the earth! Ask people who used to live near Chernobyl or Fukushima and were forced to evacuate if they think nuclear protects the earth.
  2. It takes over a decade to get a nuclear plant built and generating power—and that’s when everything goes smoothly (which is almost never, as we’ve seen). Climate change is an emergency and we can’t wait decades to solve it.
  3. We can lower that carbon a lot faster by investing in true green solutions. Rocky Mountain Institute’s Amory Lovins notes that dollars invested in conservation and renewables will reduce carbon up to 10 times as effectively and 40 times faster than dollars invested in nuclear. I quote his figures in some depth on Page 10 of the Fukushima update.
  4. Nuclear has quite a bit more carbon impact than most people realize. Every step in the process other than actually running the fuel through the reactor—and there at least eight other steps—adds to the carbon footprint (and consumes fuel, too): mining, milling, transportation, processing, building the reactor and the massive concrete containment vessel, removing the spent fuel, storing it for 250,000 years, etc. (It’s still less than fossil fuel, but it’s far from zero.)

 

The “Gen 4 Will Be Safe” Myth

The thorium and pebble-bed technologies do look better than the old boiling-water or pressurized-water designs, from my non-scientist/informed layperson’s perspective. BUT they are untested. And they will also take at best more than 20 years to come online, if all goes well (and history indicates that I probably won’t).

We know this: the Generation II nukes were supposed to be much safer than the Generation I plants, even though they were rated to generate up to 10 times as much electricity, and thus were built much more massively, with more things to go wrong. Gen II plants failed at Fukushima. A Gen II plant came close to failing several times at Vermont Yankee. Even when that plant was new, its safety report to the federal government was extremely disturbing, going on to document incidents for many pages within the first year.

Cooling tower failure, Vermont Yankee
Vermont Yankee cooling tower fails, 2008. Photo by ISC ALC, Creative Commons license

The European Commission claimed at the time I wrote the update that Generation IV are the first nukes to be built with public safety integrated from the beginning. That creates yet another reason to shut down all the Gen I, II, and III plants (which are aging, going brittle, and increasing the danger to us)—and second, makes me wonder if in 20 years, after some of these plants have gone online and experienced catastrophic failures, if some scientists won’t be spouting similar rhetoric about Generation VI or VIII plants being the first to really be safe. The needle keeps moving on nuclear safety, as each previous reactor technology starts to fail.

Interestingly, the link I used in my post-Fukushima update now redirects to a page that does not make this claim, and in May, 2017, I couldn’t find anything about safety being built in to the new reactor designs anywhere on the organization’s website.

 

Lessons for Today’s Movements

We’d need a whole book to cover all the lessons today’s activists can bring back from the Clamshell experience. Here are a few of my favorites:

  • Don’t just be against things; propose and organize for positive alternatives—and incorporate this in the framing you offer the media, the public, and to your opponents
  • Remember not just your short-term goals but also the ultimate goals. Clam had a short-term goal of stopping the plant and a medium-term goal of stopping nuclear power nationally and globally. But Clamshell also had positive long-term goals. On energy, the goal was not simply to build a non-nuclear power plant but to power society through a variety of clean and renewable technologies—and on process, to move the whole society in a more democratic inclusive direction
  • Organizing works best when you find ways of bringing the issues to the unconvinced—while not neglecting the deeply committed
  • You can find allies where you weren’t expecting to
  • When organizing people through active nonviolence, it will be much easier to win people over to your side; if you switch to violence, you’ll lose much of your natural constituency and your work will be harder
  • Enforcing a rule that participants must be trained for actions with personal risk (such as arrests or physical harm) is a very good idea
  • Agree on a governance structure, and stick to it (unless you get the whole group’s agreement to change it)
  • Perhaps most important of all—understand that whether most of your movement believe you can win or believe you will fail, you’re probably right. Come in with the attitude that you WILL succeed, and the chances of succeeding become much higher. Stress this in all your outreach. Phrase things positively but realistically; don’t promise overnight results you can’t achieve. Emphasize that your fight is a long-term struggle, and publicly celebrate every small victory along the way.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, Greenwashing, propaganda, Technology Tagged with , , , , , , ,

Some exciting news from north of the border (and driving distance from me): Quebec shut down its only nuclear power plant, the 675-megawatt Gentilly 2, yesterday. Quebec now joins Germany and Italy, among other places that have abandoned nuclear power.

I’m not familiar with this particular plant, but according to the article, it’s had a history of troubles.

What’s especially interesting is that this plant’s license was very recently renewed.

As someone who’s been using what influence I have to help shut down Vermont Yankee, whose license was renewed by the federal government in violation of both Vermont state law and the earlier promises of plant owner Entergy, this gives me hope. Vermont Yankee has been operating illegally since March 2012, and immorally and unsafely since Vermont Yankee first opened in the 1970s.

Sooner or later, as a society, we will figure out that not only don’t we need nuclear, but relying on nuclear power poses huge risks—not just the catastrophic failures like Three Mile Island, Chernobyl, and Fukushima, but in routine operation. There are risks to our health, from radiation releases…risks to our freedom, because of the security apparatus necessary to protect not just the plants themselves but the entire infrastructure at every step along the very complex path to splitting atoms—starting with mining the uranium and continuing through the milling, processing into fuel rods, transportation across great distances, use in the reactor, and then storing the waste for tens of thousands of years—and risks of putting so much trust in a few large generating stations and being unprepared to cover their absence when they suddenly go off-line. And don’t even get me started on the economic consequences of nuclear power.

Oh, and if you believe the nuclear power industry’s propaganda that nuclear is a “green” technology because the actual moment of splitting atoms doesn’t produce greenhouse gases—think about the carbon footprint AND the energy cost of all those other steps in the process.

The good news: we already have all the know-how to get rid of nuclear and phase out fossil fuels. Clean and renewable energy alternatives exist, and their technology is improving all the time. By designing intelligently to lower demand, and switching to sources like solar, wind, hydro, geothermal, even magnetic and tidal energy, we could maintain and improve our quality of life, reduce greenhouse gases, have more money in our pockets, etc., etc. A good place to start exploring is the Rocky Mountain Institute’s Reinventing Fire page, which shows how countries like Denmark have boldly embraced a safe energy future, and how we could too. Yeah it’s a bit technical—if you want something easier, try this infographic about the potential for renewable energy in the US (note that this chart includes biofuels, some of which are not necessarily clean).

My own view:

  • The greatest potential for energy is in designing and retrofitting for conservation and in changing our use paterns; in the US, we could easily slash energy consumption 50 percent, and with a deeper effort, 80 percent or more. After all, northern European countries like Germany and Denmark use half the US’s per capita energy and achieve comparable lifestyle quality.
  • The clean renewables like solar, wind, and geothermal supply far more energy than we use; we just have to capture it efficiently.
  • It makes the most sense to capture that energy in small systems close to where the power will be used, rather than building huge centralized, environmentally risky solar and wind farms and then wasting a huge percentage of the energy in transmission losses.
  • We have the technology. We just need the will. Let’s do it.
Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

By Posted on Posted in Energy & Sustainability, People Helping People, Protests and Crackdowns, Social and Economic Justice Tagged with , , , ,

Nuclear Information and Resource Service reports in a recent newsletter that Congress received 15,000 letters and countless phone calls opposing the inclusion of $8 billion in bailouts (a/k/a “loan guarantees”) for new nuclear plant construction—and that the final interim funding bill to keep the government running did NOT include this boondoggle. The item is not on the NIRS website but you can find the entire newsletter reprinted here.

In other words, the power of an organized populace resulted in a victory, something that’s getting less frequent all the time but is still very much possible. Let’s hope for many more in the coming year.

Do not let anyone try to tell you that nuclear fission is in any way green. It’s an environmental disaster under the best of circumstances, and at its worst, it could make the Deepwater Horizon disaster in the Gulf of Mexico look like a spilled cup of coffee. Here’s a post I wrote some time back that gives some among many reasons to oppose nuclear power (scroll past the feed from this blog).

Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail

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

You’d think, by 2010, with some 50 years of bad experience, that the question of nuclear power’s suitability would have been settled long ago. You’d think that anyone with a lick of sense would have figured out that nuclear power brings with it enormous risks to…

  • Health
  • Safety
  • Environmental contamination
  • Vulnerability to terrorism (and in order to protect against that, major threats to our civil liberties
  • Unreliability
  • Economic disaster (including significant danger of default by utilities on our US government investment)
  • Vast power losses in the course of mining, milling, fuel rod production, transmission, and waste processing (including transportation)–turning the industry, by some accounts, into a net consumer of energy

    Yet President Barack Obama announced $8.33 billion in loan guarantees to build two new nuclear power plants in Georgia, and projects another $36 billion in the 2011 budget, or enough for seven to 10 reactors.

    Nuclear power is something I know something about. I did a major research project on it in college, and several years later, wrote first a monthly column, and then my first book on it. Yes, the new plants would be a new and better design—but not better enough!

    You cannot convince me that the waste products can be safely isolated from the environment for a quarter of a million years (think—pretty much the oldest human artifacts in existence are only 1/10 as old)…that centralizing so much energy, and the powerful, highly toxic fuels that power these plants, does not present unacceptable risk at the hands of our enemies, who could create a disaster that made 9/11 look like a fender bender…that driving these toxic stews around the country doesn’t present grave risks just from normal everyday road behavior…that these plants with their terrible reliability record, frequent outages, gross safety violations, and multiple complexities of power generation, plumbing, electricity, and computer systems can be expected to solve our energy problem…that the nuclear power system as a whole, with its dirty mining and milling, its very imperfect waste processing, its reliance on transportation of dangerous substances over very long distances is going to significantly lower either our carbon footprint, our emissions, or our power needs.

    Nuclear power is not necessary. It is not sensible. It opens great risks for small returns that can be much more easily achieved in other ways. It is a gift to the terrorists, a robbery from the taxpayers, a diversion of resources away from better and far more proven technologies that could meet all of our energy needs safely, and a serious threat to the well-being of future generations.

    This “plan” must be stopped.

    • Facebooktwitterpinterestlinkedinmail