What If Your President's Just Not That Into You? + Nuclear Power

From: earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net [mailto:earthactionnetwork@earthlink.net]
Sent: Sunday, April 17, 2011 4:44 PM

http://readersupportednews.org/opinion2/271-38/5636-what-if-your- presidents-just-not-that-into-you

 

What If Your President's Just Not That Into You?

 

By Bill McKibben,

Reader Supported News: 16 April 11

 

Tomorrow in Washington, at the sprawling and wonderful Powershift conference, a few of us are on a panel titled "What If Your President's Just Not That Into You?" Funny title, serious question.

 

The first thing: those of us in the environmental movement aren't high school sophomores feeling jilted by their first crush. Most of us liked Obama a lot: I was among the first green leaders to join up on "Environmentalists for Obama," back when he seemed a longshot. It wasn't because I thought he would solve every problem; it's because I thought he'd make climate change one of the top two priorities of his presidency. And he thought so, too: on the day in June of 2008 when he finally clinched the nomination he said that people would someday look back and say, "this was the moment when the rise of the oceans began to slow and our planet began to heal."

 

And it's not that we don't appreciate what he has done. He's been far better than George Bush (even if that is a little like saying, "I drink more beer than my ten-year-old niece.") We have higher gas mileage standards; the stimulus package funded plenty of green projects; at least some of the most egregious mountaintop removal mining practices are being regulated. All good.

 

But when the political going got a little tough, Obama didn't. By all accounts he watched from the sidelines as the cap-and-trade law went down to defeat last summer. He famously allowed vast new leases for offshore oil drilling weeks before the BP explosion. In the last couple of weeks, the administration has ably defended the Clean Air Act against ham-handed Congressional assault. But they've also done two things really beyond the pale:

 

•Opened 750 million tons of coal beneath federal land in Wyoming to mining. It makes one wonder if the president has really understood his climate science briefings: any hope of warding off global warming depends on keeping that carbon in the ground. Had this happened under Bush, it would have caused real outrage - when burned, that coal will give off as much CO2 as opening 300 new coal-fired power plants and running them for a year.

 

 

•Walked away from the global climate talks. His chief negotiator, Todd Stern, gave a little-noticed interview to Bloomberg News earlier this month. He said a global climate pact was "not doable" and "unworkable." He added that "legally binding international obligations to cut emissions are not necessary," because individual nations could make their own pledges. This was pretty much the Bush administration formula, and it is amazing to hear it coming from Obama's officials. If they stick to it (and other countries follow their lead), there is no hope of dealing with global warming in time; it really will be the death knell of effective action.

 

And it underscores the reason that many of us are left wondering how to deal with the president. Climate change, above all issues, requires a transformative and not an incremental vision. We have fundamental change to make, and a very short window to make it in - Obama's typical (and often quite savvy) little-bit-at-a-time approach doesn't square with the physics and chemistry that govern this debate.

 

It's that physics and chemistry that really trouble me. I understand political reality, and I'm glad I don't have Obama's job; it's tough. But I know that reality reality trumps political reality - I know that unless he shows some powerful leadership soon we're going to lose this fight. At which point the question of who's president will be less important.

 

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http://www.grist.org/nuclear/2011-04-13-three-ways-to-make-nuclear-power- compete-on-the-free-market

 

Three ways to make nuclear power compete on the free market

  by Robert Costanza

 

13 Apr 2011

 

This post is coauthored by Cutler Cleveland, Bruce Cooperstein, and Ida Kubiszewski. It's a condensed version of an article in the April issue of the Solutions journal, based at the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University.

 

As the Japanese nuclear disaster shows, the cleanup costs after a nuclear meltdown are borne in large part by governments and taxpayers rather than the industry.

 

Paying for cleanup is just one of many hidden costs of nuclear energy that make it difficult to judge the value of nuclear power. Many countries, including the United States, are rushing to build a new generation of nuclear power plants to reduce carbon emissions. But the disaster in Japan should force us to take into account the full costs of nuclear power, including climate impacts, the risk of accidents, and the safe disposal of waste.

 

The industry argues that nuclear power has a good safety record and that new plant designs, so-called Generation III reactors, have enhanced safety features compared to the 1970s-era Generation II designs like those at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi facility. The number of people killed or injured globally from the nuclear energy system is far smaller than the number killed or injured, for example, producing energy from coal or even hydropower. France generates about 75 percent of its electricity from nuclear power and has been running nuclear power plants for decades with no major incidents.

 

But the Japan plant disaster demonstrates that even with all the precautions taken and multiple redundancies to guard against disaster, unforeseen problems can occur that have long-term economic and ecological consequences. For example, the Chernobyl nuclear power plant is now encased in a huge sarcophagus that must be maintained for hundreds of years to prevent radiation leakage. A 1,000-square-mile area around the plant will remain off-limits for a similar amount of time.

 

In addition, the long-term waste disposal problem has yet to be solved for nuclear power. The proposed storage facility at Yucca Mountain in Nevada was rejected by President Obama, partly on the grounds that it could only guarantee radioactive material wouldn't leak after 10,000 years of storage, far short of the Environmental Protection Agency's minimum safety requirement of 1 million years.

 

Here are three recommendations to help society make more informed cost- benefit decisions:

 

1.Eliminate government subsidies for nuclear power, which reduce the private cost of capital for new reactors while shifting the long-term costs -- and risks -- from investors to the public.

 

2.Require nuclear plant owners to buy full-coverage insurance. That would mean repealing the Price-Anderson Act, which limits liability for nuclear accidents to $12.6 billion. That's not nearly enough -- consider that the damage and cleanup estimates of the 2010 Gulf of Mexico oil spill are $34 billion to $670 billion, and the Fukushima disaster could far exceed those costs.

 

3.Require plant owners to also maintain an assurance bond adequate to cover decommissioning and waste disposal costs. This approach is often used for mining operations to ensure that the mines are properly reclaimed.. In most countries, there are some funds set aside for nuclear plant decommissioning and waste disposal, but it typically isn't nearly enough to cover the real costs.

 

How much these steps would increase the price of electricity generated from nuclear plants would depend on the design of the plant, its location, how it is operated, how old it is, and other factors. But it would give society a better picture of the true costs of nuclear power and would make for a more accurate comparison of nuclear energy with other energy sources.

 

 Robert Costanza is University Professor of Sustainability and director of the Institute for Sustainable Solutions at Portland State University. He is also cofounder and former president of the International Society for Ecological Economics.

 

 

 

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http://www.grist.org/nuclear/2011-04-14-fukushima-nuclear-disaster-keeps- getting-messier-scarier

 

The Fukushima nuclear disaster just keeps getting messier and scarier  

  by Tom Engelhardt

 

14 Apr 2011

 

This post was originally published on TomDispatch and is republished here with Tom's kind permission.

 

Last Monday, Yukio Edano, chief cabinet secretary, defended the Japanese government's response to the nuclear disaster at Fukushima, insisting that the plant complex is in "a stable situation, relatively speaking." That's somewhat like the official description of 11,500 tons of water purposely dumped into the ocean waters off Fukushima as "low-level radioactive" or "lightly radioactive." It is, of course, only "lightly" so in comparison to the even more radioactive water being stored at the plant in its place. But that's the thing with descriptive words: they can leave so much to the eye of the beholder -- and the Japanese government hasn't been significantly more eager than the Tokyo Electric Power Company (Tepco), which runs the complex, to behold all that much when it comes to Fukushima.

 

On Tuesday, the government finally raised the Fukushima alert level on the International Nuclear Event scale from 5 to 7 -- "a major accident" -- the highest category possible, only previously used for the 1986 Chernobyl nuclear disaster (which resulted in a 15,000-square-mile "dead zone" in the Ukraine). Though government officials rushed to play down the Chernobyl comparison, a Tepco official offered this ominously bet-hedging comment: "Our concern is that the amount of leakage could eventually reach that of Chernobyl or exceed it."

 

In fact, on our punch-drunk planet, we've never seen anything like what's underway at Fukushima -- not one but four adjacent nuclear reactors, three of which seem to have suffered partial meltdowns, and several containment pools for "spent" fuel (which, in terms of radioactivity, is anything but spent) in various states of distress. Meanwhile, talk about the weeks needed to bring the situation under control has faded into perilous months, years, decades, even a century of cleanup and recovery. There is speculation that some of the core of at least one reactor has already "leaked from its steel pressure vessel into the bottom of [its] containment structure" -- and every action to bring the complex under some kind of control only seems to create, or threatens to create, other unexpected problems (like that "lightly radioactive" water).

 

Meanwhile, amid further giant aftershocks from the 9.0 earthquake of March 11 (with possibly years more of them to come), the Japanese government has been slowly widening the 12-mile "evacuation zone" (recently described by a visitor as an eerie "death zone ... like an episode of Rod Serling's Twilight Zone crossed with The Day After -- an apocalyptic vision of life in the nuclear age") around the complex. Just this week, it began warning pregnant women and children to stay out of certain areas up to 18 miles away from the plant. That's not surprising, considering that in a small number of soil tests taken outside that 18-mile zone -- in one case 25 miles from Fukushima -- cesium-137 (half-life 30 years) has been found at levels that exceed those which, at Chernobyl, forced residents to move away. Many of the hundreds of thousands of Japanese who once lived in these areas (and if things get worse, beyond them) may never go home.

 

Whatever happens at Fukushima, could there be a more striking warning that we humans have been overreaching and that our planet has a way of offering penalties for such hubris? And keep in mind, the Japanese are hardly in this alone. After all, in the United States, at least five nuclear reactors are situated in "in earthquake-prone seismic zones," according to a recent report, which doesn't even include the Indian Point nuclear reactor built on an earthquake fault only 30 miles from downtown New York City, my hometown.

 

Perhaps it's time to recalibrate when it comes to the way we're treating planet Earth -- before it's too late.

 

 Tom Engelhardt, cofounder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. His latest book is The American Way of War: How Bush’s Wars Became Obama’s.

 

 

 

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"We are dealing with a far more ominous threat than sickness and death.  We are dealing with the dark side of humanity -- selfishness, avarice, aggression.  All this has already polluted our skies, emptied our oceans, destroyed our forests and extinguished thousands of beautiful animals.  Are our children next? …  It is no longer enough to vaccinate them or give them food and water and only cure the symptoms of man’s tendency to destroy everything we hold dear.   Whether it be famine in Ethiopia, excruciating poverty in Guatemala and Honduras, civil strife in El Salvador or ethnic massacre in the Sudan, I saw but one glaring truth; these are not natural disaster but man-made tragedies for which there is only one man-made solution – Peace.” 

 

~Audrey Hepburn, April 1989, in a speech given while serving as goodwill ambassador for Unicef